1/13/25: Krystal And Saagar DEBATE Climate Change DEI Amid LA Fires, Hasan Interviews Inmate Firefighters

Summary

Podcast Summary: Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar
Episode: 1/13/25: Krystal And Saagar DEBATE Climate Change DEI Amid LA Fires, Hasan Interviews Inmate Firefighters
Release Date: January 13, 2025
Hosts: Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti
Platform: iHeartPodcasts

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Introduction and Overview

In the premiere episode of Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar, hosts Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti delve into pressing issues surrounding the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles, the ongoing debate over climate change and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), and the controversial use of inmate firefighters. The episode combines in-depth analysis, spirited debate, and exclusive interviews, offering listeners a comprehensive look at the intersection of environmental disasters, political agendas, and social policies.

LA Fires and Fire Department Funding

Update on Wildfires:
Krystal Ball opens the discussion by providing a detailed update on the recent wildfires engulfing Los Angeles. She describes the current state of the fires, highlighting the heroic efforts of over 14,000 personnel from California and neighboring regions battling the blazes. However, concerns remain high due to forecasted high winds that could reignite the fires.

Fire Department Challenges:
She shares alarming statistics, stating, "More than 10,000 structures have been damaged or destroyed" ([04:24]). Krystal emphasizes the unprecedented nature of these fires, attributing their severity to prolonged drought conditions and extreme temperatures.

Funding Cuts and Understaffing:
Saagar Enjeti addresses the financial struggles of the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD). "We believe the budget was cut by some $17 million," he asserts ([07:23]), highlighting chronic underinvestment in public infrastructure. Krystal supports this by citing testimonies from LAFD officials, including Fire Chief Kristen Crowley, who explicitly states, "The $17 million budget cut... has severely impacted our ability to repair our apparatus" ([10:26]).

Notable Quotes:

• Krystal Ball ([04:24]): "These are just being evacuated from the area with these fires blazing right there."
• Saagar Enjeti ([07:23]): "Los Angeles has chronically under-invested in its public infrastructure."
• Fire Chief Kristen Crowley ([10:26]): "We do not have enough firefighters... we are stretched incredibly thin."

Climate Change Debate

Sagar's Perspective on Climate Change:
Saagar passionately argues that climate change is the primary driver behind the increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires. He emphasizes the need for significant investment in mitigation efforts, stating, "If this is going to be a problem, we should probably invest more in it" ([17:01]).

Krystal's Counterpoints on DEI:
Krystal counters by highlighting the intertwined nature of climate change and DEI issues. She argues that focusing solely on climate neglects the systemic underfunding of essential services like firefighting. "There is no doubt that the fire department is underfunded," she asserts ([09:01]).

Debate Highlights:
The hosts engage in a spirited debate over the roles of climate change and DEI in the current disaster. Krystal argues that while climate factors are undeniable, DEI initiatives have also diverted attention and resources from critical areas. Saagar maintains that DEI efforts compromise competence, insisting, "DEI itself is something that is generally the enemy of competence" ([28:04]).

Notable Quotes:

• Saagar Enjeti ([17:01]): "The LA Fire Department is underfunded in an era of climate catastrophe."
• Krystal Ball ([09:01]): "The department was decidedly underfunded, had lost a number of positions..."
• Saagar Enjeti ([28:04]): "DEI itself is something that is generally the enemy of competence."

Policy and Political Responses

Gavin Newsom's Interview:
A segment features an interview with California Governor Gavin Newsom, where he addresses misinformation spread by former President Donald Trump regarding the state's disaster management. Newsom criticizes Trump's claims linking the Delta smelt to wildfire challenges, labeling them as "delusional" and "made up" ([21:11]).

Political Debates:
The conversation shifts to the broader political implications of disaster response. Saagar questions the efficacy of current governmental actions, while Krystal emphasizes the necessity of federal and collective responses to climate-induced disasters.

Notable Quotes:

• Gavin Newsom ([21:33]): "These words... are made up, it's delusional."
• Saagar Enjeti ([24:38]): "Climate catastrophe language implies significant electoral implications."

Inmate Firefighters Interview

Hassan Piker's Exclusive Interview:
Hassan Piker conducts an interview with incarcerated firefighters participating in California's long-standing program. Approximately 1,000 inmates are trained in fire prevention and firefighting, earning minimal wages in exchange for reduced sentences.

Impact of the Program:
The interviewed inmates express a sense of purpose and improved treatment compared to their time in prison. One inmate shares, "We get better treatment, we get a job," highlighting the program's role in reducing recidivism rates from 42% to 10% among participants ([59:27]).

Challenges and Criticisms:
However, concerns are raised about the exploitation of inmate labor for dangerous work at meager pay rates. The program is criticized for providing insufficient reintegration support, despite its potential benefits.

Notable Quotes:

• Inmate Firefighter ([59:33]): "We talk to us like humans. We have a job."
• Inmate Firefighter ([60:09]): "It’s life-changing and we get opportunities at careers."

Housing and Insurance Issues Post-Fire

Price Gouging and Rental Market:
Krystal discusses the severe impact of the fires on the housing market in Los Angeles. Rental properties are experiencing unprecedented demand, leading to exorbitant price increases. For example, a furnished home in Bel Air saw its rent jump from $15,900 to $29,500 per month after the fires ([65:07]).

Impact on Homeowners:
Elderly homeowners with property tax protections under Prop 13 are facing financial strain as their homes’ market values soar. Rebuilding costs and potential reassessments threaten their financial stability, especially if they rely heavily on fixed incomes like Social Security.

Insurance Challenges:
Insurance companies, such as State Farm, are canceling thousands of policies in high-risk areas like Pacific Palisades, exacerbating the housing crisis. The shrinking insurance market leaves many homeowners without adequate coverage, increasing their vulnerability to future disasters ([75:14]).

Notable Quotes:

• Krystal Ball ([65:05]): "Rent on LA's west side grows further out of reach with the fires."
• Saagar Enjeti ([75:54]): "California is one of the richest states... it's ludicrous to say they cannot get a federal bailout."

Future Outlook and Solutions

Technological Innovations:
Saagar advocates for leveraging free-market solutions and technological advancements to address climate challenges. He points to the transformative impact of innovations like fracking and nuclear energy as potential game-changers ([40:34], [42:22]).

Collective Action vs. Individualism:
Krystal emphasizes the necessity of collective, large-scale government-led initiatives to effectively mitigate climate disasters. She critiques the current individualistic mindset, arguing that without unified action, efforts remain fragmented and insufficient ([34:45]).

Calls for Policy Reform:
Both hosts agree on the need for substantial investment in infrastructure and emergency services. Krystal highlights Governor Newsom’s efforts to streamline rebuilding regulations, while Saagar remains skeptical about the political feasibility of such measures ([76:03]).

Notable Quotes:

• Saagar Enjeti ([42:22]): "Build 1,500 nuclear reactors across the United States."
• Krystal Ball ([34:47]): "Renewable energy technology has improved dramatically... requires collective, large-scale federal government-led action."

Conclusion

The episode culminates with a nuanced debate on the interplay between climate change, DEI, and public policy amidst the backdrop of the LA wildfires. Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti provide contrasting viewpoints, underscoring the complexity of addressing environmental disasters in a politically and socially polarized landscape. The discussion underscores the urgent need for comprehensive strategies that encompass both technological innovation and equitable resource allocation to effectively manage and mitigate future climate-related crises.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• Krystal Ball ([04:24]): "These are just being evacuated from the area with these fires blazing right there."
• Saagar Enjeti ([07:23]): "Los Angeles has chronically under-invested in its public infrastructure."
• Fire Chief Kristen Crowley ([10:26]): "We do not have enough firefighters... we are stretched incredibly thin."
• Saagar Enjeti ([17:01]): "The LA Fire Department is underfunded in an era of climate catastrophe."
• Krystal Ball ([09:01]): "The department was decidedly underfunded, had lost a number of positions..."
• Saagar Enjeti ([28:04]): "DEI itself is something that is generally the enemy of competence."
• Gavin Newsom ([21:33]): "These words... are made up, it's delusional."
• Krystal Ball ([65:05]): "Rent on LA's west side grows further out of reach with the fires."
• Saagar Enjeti ([75:54]): "California is one of the richest states... it's ludicrous to say they cannot get a federal bailout."
• Saagar Enjeti ([42:22]): "Build 1,500 nuclear reactors across the United States."
• Krystal Ball ([34:47]): "Renewable energy technology has improved dramatically... requires collective, large-scale federal government-led action."

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This comprehensive summary encapsulates the critical discussions, debates, and insights presented in the episode, providing a clear and engaging overview for those who have not tuned in.

Transcript

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[Sagar Enjeti]

Guys, Sagar and Crystal here.

[Crystal Ball]

Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show.

[Sagar Enjeti]

This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else.

[Crystal Ball]

So if that is something that's important to you, Please go to BreakingPoints.com, become a member today and you'll get access to our full shows unedited ad free and all put together for you every morning in your inbox.

[Sagar Enjeti]

We need your help to build the future of independent news media and we hope to see [e-mail] Good morning everybody. Happy Monday. Have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have? Crystal?

[Crystal Ball]

Indeed we do. We're going to lead off the show with the very latest on of those LA fires. The firefighters have made some progress, but there is concerns that high winds will be kicking back up. So we'll show you the latest devastating images coming out of that great city. We're also going to take a look at Mark Zuckerberg going on with Joe Rogan making some claims. Matt Stoller is going to be here.

[Sagar Enjeti]

He's had a change of heart. It's it has nothing to do with anything else. Purely out of the goodness of his heart, he's realized the error of his decades of his way.

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah. And just happens to also take great issue with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Just like Marc Andreessen when he went on Joe Rogan show. So anyway, Matt Soler will be here to break that down. Very interesting situation. TikTok is set to be banned. Supreme Court heard oral arguments last week about, you know, making the case in either direction and they seem to be pretty divided. So very unclear the future of TikTok. So we'll break that down for you as well. Have an incredible clip from msnbc. Mika Brzezinski still thinks Joe Biden could have won, and Joe Biden agrees. Sager. So we've got some comments from, from the big man himself. I don't even know what you say about that at this point. I'm taking a look at the way that oligarchy contributed to these fires and many other ills in our country and the world. And, and we're going to have Derek Thompson here from Atlantic magazine. He just wrote a big piece on how this has become what he's describing as the antisocial century trends that have been in place in American life that have led to, you know, community breakdown and people really withdrawing into their homes have been accelerated both by the pandemic, but I think more in particular by our phones. And he's taking a look at what the consequences of that could be in terms of our society. Really fascinating piece. A lot of different aspects of this one. So I'm looking forward to talking to him.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, this is like all of the big social trends of the last decade, even really like two decades, I would say. And Covid accelerated it. But it is a big crisis we talk about here, loneliness, young men, et cetera. But it really is just all of us. It's not about young people. It's older people as well. And the pandemic and phones technology have fundamentally reset the way Americans spend almost all of their time. And we don't really think about it. It's not an intentional decision. And I think that he really dives into what that is and about maybe some of the things that we can do to fight back against it. Thank you very much to everybody who's been supporting the show. We appreciate you. But let's get to Los Angeles.

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah, absolutely. So you can go ahead and put these latest images up on the screen and I'll just give you some updates here. What you're looking at. This is incredible. This is an aerial water drop. I've seen a number of these videos and the way that these guys and gals are able to drop the water in like the perfect location is really quite incredible. This was one of the latest fires that broke out, the Brentwood Fire, this one. Fortunately, the firefighters have been able to get under control, so the risk there has been eliminated. These are daredevil morons. I don't know what's wrong with them, but they're riding through the Palisades. You can see the embers flying everywhere, just trying to get a thrill. And the fire is still raging. A number of these because this wasn't just one fire. This is a number of different fires in the region store stoked by drought conditions. Very high winds, high temperatures as compared to history. And, you know, multiple blazes still going. Here you have firefighters who are doing their best to get these flames under control. I read there's been more than 14,000 personnel from California, nine other states, Canada and Mexico that have been mobilized to LA to battle these wildfires. We're also going to show you some footage later of some of the incarcerated inmates who have been part of the firefighting crew. Roughly 1,000 state prisoners who have been part of the response year. These are goats that are being evacuated and brought to safety. And it's just a wild image to see them, you know, trying to be evacuated from the area with these fires blazing right there. Just to show you some of the impact on wildlife as well. You know, the very latest state of affairs is they have gotten. They have made some progress against these blazes, which is really great to see. Some of the danger has been reduced. However, number one, you already have at least 16 deaths. And first responders are quite worried that they will uncover quite a lot more. You know, right now they're just focusing on trying to get the blazes under control. And once they go into search and recovery, there are people who are still reported missing. So a lot of concerns that that number is going to increase. More than 10,000 structures damaged or destroyed. The worst two fires here, the Eaton fire and the Palisades fire, are the worst and the second worst fires in the history of LA County. They also are some of the worst in California history as well in terms of the level of devastation. So it just is absolutely apocalyptic. And the real concern, Sagar, is they're looking at the weather forecast and they're expecting gusts from Santa Ana, winds on the order of 50 to 65 miles per hour. That's expected to start today. The strongest winds are expected to arrive before dawn on Tuesday, peaking through Wednesday. And we know the way that those winds fueled these blazes to begin with. So a lot of concern about what those winds could potentially bring here as we move into the week.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, I was just reading this morning from the National Weather Service is not only that Tuesday exceeding 50 miles per hour combined with apparently a very, very dry air on top of the current conditions. So it's really tragic and it doesn't look like it will end anytime soon. As heroic as the firefighters and many others have been in trying to contain the dis. And beyond that has been some of the bigger questions we talked about in our last show here about water reservoir, about water management and about the Los Angeles Fire Department. And there were some big questions here at the show and including afterwards, did the budget actually get cut? And we believe that we have. What is it? We believe we have arrived at the definitive statement it was cut by some $17 million. How it got there is a little bit complicated. I'll let you explain that. But I did wanna settle that for everybody before we played this clip of the LA Fire Chief because there were criticisms, people saying they're trying to allay their own concerns. But it does seem that there is a shortfall of actual firefighters themselves, that this budget immediate budget crisis didn't necessarily contribute to them not being that it is instead indicative of the fact that Los Angeles has chronically under invested in its public infrastructure and others. Water management fired a disaster. And the big glaring question mark is how does State Farm Insurance eight months ago look at 70% of its coverage in Pacific Palisades and be like, yeah, this ain't gonna work, this is way too risky. We need to pull every single one of these policies. But the city itself is unable to see the exact same conditions and know that a conflagration is immediately possible in that area.

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah, I mean there's only so much they could do, right? I mean the big picture here is climate fueled catastrophes and no state, no city is going to be able to avoid them. I mean this is the era that we live in. But within the context of that, there's no doubt that the fire department is underfunded. Now, the budgeting piece is complicated. That's why you'll see competing narratives and a lot of certainty online in both directions. I think what is undeniable is that the department was decidedly underfunded, had lost a number of positions, they were short staffed even on, you know, non firefighting positions. Like the people that you need to repair the fire truck so that they are operable. Just really completely stretched thin. Their personnel numbers have dropped even as the number of service calls have gone up by some marked percentage. So I'll get to some of those details. Our friends Ryan and co over at dropsite are actually the ones who called. The controllers said, what the hell is going on here? What are the actual numbers? What are the realities? So I'll dig into that. At the same time, the LA Fire Chief, Kristen Crowley, is mincing no words in her frustration about the lack of funding and the lack of resources and the constraints that they have had to operate under. And specifically expressing frustration with LA Mayor Karen Bass. Here she is on cnn sounding off on her view of the situation.

[Kristen Crowley]

Let me be clear. The $17 million budget cut and the elimination of our civilian positions like our mechanics did and has and will continue to severely impact our ability to repair our apparatus. So with that, we have over 100 fire apparatus out of service. And having these apparatus in the proper amount of mechanics would have helped. And so it did absolutely negatively impact. I want to also be clear that I have over the last three years been clear that the Fire Department needs help. We can no longer sustain where we are. We do not have enough firefighters. With that, I have also requested multiple budgets, interim budgets, to show how understaffed, under resourced and underfunded the LAFD is.

[Crystal Ball]

So there you have the Fire Department chief herself saying, yes, the budget was cut by $17 million. We can put this drop site tear sheet up on the screen that did. I recommend you read through it because, you know, it really goes beyond just this question of, did they cut it $17 million? The reality is that they are facing unprecedented challenges and they are decidedly lacking insufficient resources to even come close to dealing with it. And again, I do want to keep the focus on, like, there is no city, there is no mayor, there is no governor that could deal with the larger forces that made this conflagration so absolutely devastating. However, in this era, you have to be focused on what are our best chances of mitigating the impact from these climate catastrophes. So let me just read you a little bit of this article from Jessica Burbank, who did all the legwork on the reporting here. She says the LA Fire Department knew it was severely underfunded long before this fire. We don't have enough firefighters and medics. We don't have enough fire engines. We don't have enough trucks and ambulances in the field. That was an LAFD captain during a city, during city Testimony at a budget hearing back last May 1, 2024. And we don't have the equipment and staffing we need respond to half a million emergency calls for service every year explained that demand for fire and rescue has doubled while resources have dwindled. The LAFD has fewer firefighters and medics today than we had 15 years ago. But our emergency calls for service has increased by more than 50% during that same time. Just as one more example of how this underfunding, you know, is. It's actually a long time problem predates Karen Bass but made worse by this most recent budget. You know, in the most recent budget it wasn't just firefighting that got cut. A lot of social services got cut. The Public works department got cut. Homelessness services got cut. The police department got a big huge increase in their budget. Multimillion dollar increase in their budget. I'll go through some of those numbers in my monologue today. But they say 86 emergency vehicles at that may date were out of commission because they did not have the funds to hire sheet metal workers and mechanics to fix them. That included 40 fire engines, 36ambulances, 10 fire trucks. And Captain Shang Ho testified during a budget hearing. It just makes no sense to have million dollar fire trucks and engines taken out of service and sideline because we don't have enough mechanics to keep them running. And finally, just to put about this question about the 17 million, blah blah blah, the city controller who oversees the budget, who also complained about how they're short staffed and don't have accountants to handle payroll as well and are stretched incredibly thin. They also confirmed to drop site news, yes, their operating budget did get reduced by 17.6 million. Sagar as best I can figure out, the reason there's confusion is because budgeting is really complicated. So part of what happens with these departments is they'll get a certain operating budget and then it's just not sufficient for them to do the very basics of what they're obligated to do. They will go over budget, then additional funds will be shifted around to try to make them whole. So how do you count that? How do you count some of these one time expenditures? Okay, well if you spent that amount last cycle and then you're not planning on this one time expenditure this cycle, does that cut count as a funding cut? So it is a little bit of a complicated picture. So I think getting away from the $17 million, the bottom line is this department is underfunded and in an era of climate catastrophe, you know, these are the sorts of things that really deserve our attention, Resources, tax dollars, et cetera.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Well, part of why it's so absurd, at least to me, is this is one of the richest cities in. It's like if you look at even these areas, Pacific Palisades and others, we're talking about multi billions and just neighborhood level of the amount of tax revenue. I mean, some of these people who are losing their homes are multimillionaires and they pay literally the highest tax rate in the United States. So how exactly can you still have budget problems? I think it's a big question and it's one of the big areas in which you really do have failed governance in some of a lot of these main cities is you have this tremendous amount of wealth and it's like, well, how exactly does this work? What are you guys doing with this money? So I think that's one question, but like two is just like you said, look, you know, we can talk climate or whatever. I don't think it's indisputable that things have been getting bad lately with Florida, with California, et cetera, we can debate exactly the extent to what. But in the era of which we at least know with some predictability that we have disasters, it doesn't seem unreasonable that we should probably be chronically investing in quote unquote firefighters and all of the, you know, disaster mitigation technology and all of these other things. And I just keep coming back to the fact that it is clear to me that the home insurance companies, et cetera, and others have been able to predict with decent enough regularity impressions some of the existential problems that they face. Sure, cities don't have the luxury of being able to pull coverage, but they do have the luxury of knowing that they will have to respond to that. And so clearly like what the work that needed to be done going into this for management of a large city clearly was just were not done. I also, you know, I was looking in the past fire has been a long time problem in the city of Los Angeles, apparently going all the way back to its founding just because of the dry and the arid conditions. The Santa Anna winds long all the way back to the 1800s. The stories of like horrible fires that rip through the city. So this is not like something that is unpredictable per se, even in a normal environment. Now the extent to which it has now come is really bad. Yeah, and you know, we were looking at some of the ways it seems to have been started. Initial analysis, it seems it was a reigniting of a fire that had been put out on New Year's Eve. This is a fire.

[Crystal Ball]

We talk about the Palisades one, specifically.

[Sagar Enjeti]

The original Palisades fire. That fire seems to have started after it was reignited, was put out on New Year's Eve. Seems to have been caused, according to local residents, by people lighting off fireworks, even though they weren't supposed to. That was put out, but the embers apparently were there. And then when the winds picked up some eight days later, it was able to reignite. Seems to have happened in the exact same place that it did whenever they were put it out some eight days ago. So a little bit of a lesson there. I come from Texas too, where we have orders, you know, whenever there are dry conditions, like don't do any fireworks, people always do it. And this is part of the problem with that.

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah. So obviously the Santa Ana winds and this area being wildfire prone, that's nothing new. What has supercharged the situation and why researchers feel confident? You know, attributing the level of devastation to climate change is because of the nearly unprecedented drought conditions combined with increased temperatures. And then you also have, you know, more human beings living closer to these wildland areas so that when they're lighting off fireworks or, you know, whatever, and also just their houses are closer to the danger zone where when there is a wildfire, they are immediately impacted, which obviously contributes to the devastation here.

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[Crystal Ball]

I was worried we'd bring back the same team.

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[Crystal Ball]

Gavin Newsom, who's been, you know, taking a lot of incoming from Trump and a lot of other people, Governor of California, of course, joined the Pod Save guys to talk a little bit about what Trump has been saying and his criticism of the response. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that.

[Unknown]

It seems like you're trying to walk a very fine line here, extending an open hand to Trump as you signed your letter.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

But also calling him out for spreading disinformation. Is that because you have concerns that he might withhold disaster assistance when he becomes president?

[Gavin Newsom]

Pretty straightforward about that. He's tried to do it in the past. He's not just done it here in California. He's done it in states all across the country.

[Unknown]

What's the disinformation you were referring to in the letter, and what is the correct information?

[Gavin Newsom]

Well, I mean, look, what the President elect was saying about state water project and the delta smelt somehow being culpable of, you know, somehow leading to some of the challenges that we face down here was. Was it's words. It's a salad. It's a form and substance of fog. It's made up, it's delusional. And it's a consistent mantra from Trump going back years and years and years. And it's reinforced over and over and over within the right wing. And so it's become gospel, and it's so profoundly ignorant, and yet he absolutely believes it. It's not an ignorance on his part. It's such. It's sort of an indelible misinformation that he sort of manifested.

[Crystal Ball]

He's referring, I think, specifically to. Trump has long talked about this, like, you know, forest management situation, which there isn't a lot of evidence that that is what Contrera, you were just laying out. Like, the fireworks situation in the Palisades doesn't have to do with the forest management. In addition, Newsom has actually increased by millions of dollars the amount of resources going to exactly this kind of forest management and the number of acres that are under management. So he has done the thing that Trump wanted him to do. But that, of course, won't stop Trump from saying whatever Trump is going to say and people believing whatever they want to hear. There were also some. There was also some of the questions about the water management. You know, I think some of those questions remain, you know, why the fire hydrants were running dry, but it appears that it's simply because they were, you know, battling these blazes that are truly unprecedented. And the strain was exacerbated by the fact that the winds were so high that the aerial drops, for a while there, they couldn't operate the aerial drops, so they're relying solely on the fire hydrants. There was a loss of pressure, but from what I was reading, the reservoirs were actually, you know, filled to capacity. And so there has been a lot of, you know, lies being spread about the water.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Well, they were filled and then they got drained. Yeah. Look, in general, what I usually see with this is, no offense, but every single time any weather event happens, we all hear about climate change, even climate catastrophe, et cetera. Language which is clear in terms of what the implication is, I would say, electorally, that clearly is not a popular view, at least from what I can see. Most people still prioritize management or whatever. They don't want to curtail their standard of living or, you know, like, whatever join the Paris Climate Accord. So that has now moved to a place where everything has to be in terms of city. I think it can be a little bit of both. In general, there's usually like, a cry for people to say, like, oh, we have to figure out exactly why this is happening. I try to take the pragmatic view of. It's clear to me that if this is going to be a problem, we should probably invest more in it. It does seem as pretty chronically underfunded, but in general, like, that's kind of how I see the battle lines here being drawn, is that you Know, from the left, it's just climate, climate, climate, climate.

[Crystal Ball]

It's almost, if there's, I mean that's.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, but there's something that can be done about that.

[Crystal Ball]

Sure.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Which is, you know, we live in a place where we could have more water.

[Crystal Ball]

A lot of people on the left are the ones who were raising the problems with the fire department being underfunded and the budget being cut. But, but again, no city is going to be able to handle, no state is going to be able to handle this on its own. In fact, I mean, California's probably done more to try to mitigate climate change. And even as a large economy, like it has to be a collective response. And so, you know, I don't, I don't really agree with your assessment of the polling in terms of people's desire to take action in this regard. But you also have to remember that there's been like a, you know, 50 year cover up of the, you know, the reality of climate change is ongoing. That cover up is ongoing and there are a lot of very wealthy people who are quite interested in maintaining a status quo that benefits them and are just hoping they can hire a private firefighter. Firefighter.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Mitigate the damage anymore. I mean, the truth is no. No. People know the truth is no. Because the proposition is what? Oh, we need an all electric future. We need to get rid of fossil fuels. This is bullshit. It's just not going to happen.

[Crystal Ball]

It's not bullshit.

[Sagar Enjeti]

No, people are not going to. People, first of all, don't want to do that. People are not going to do that. It's not reality in terms of the way it would happen.

[Crystal Ball]

But here's the thing, the only way.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It would is some sort of Manhattan Project, which again is not going to happen.

[Crystal Ball]

That's the reason why people on the right, rather than acknowledging that the climate change has fueled these extreme catastrophes which could help to mount a public campaign to collectively try to address that's the problem as we also do because we've already arrived. You know, last year was the hottest year on record. The last decade have been the hottest 10 years on record. We're already past 1.5 degrees Celsius increase from pre industrial times. So we've already arrived here. So you're right, there needs to be massive investment in mitigation. But rather than doing that, the focus is on these, you know, what happened with the fire hydrants or. Oh, it's dei, look, they've got a woman fire chief. That's really the problem here. And so there is A massive distraction campaign to keep people from actually grappling with the underlying causes here that are leading not just to this particular situation, but also, you know, help fuel the devastating hurricanes that flooded and, you know, are total disaster for western North Carolina and other regions that have made Florida effectively uninsurable. Like, all of these things fit together, but instead it's, oh, it's dei, it's wokeism, it's the, you know, the fire department getting cut, whatever, when the bigger picture here is likely.

[Sagar Enjeti]

But here's the problem is that by denying the fact that there's these articles from the LA Times, like the LAFD is too white seems like a bit of an issue. It seems like a pure competence problem for me. I don't care what color or what color.

[Crystal Ball]

That lady seemed pretty competent of me.

[Sagar Enjeti]

What's up?

[Crystal Ball]

That lady who's running the fire department seems pretty competent.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I'm not talking about her specifically. I'm talking about the fact that at a time in 2021, there literally were articles about DEI in the LA Fire Department. I think that's a problem. I think competency itself is the core for what all functions of life saving organizations should be. I mean, I'm not gonna get into specifically parsing like, why are all these lesbians in the fire department? Which appears to be like a vogue thing online. Instead, I would say, look, I don't care who you are. Can you do the job? Are we making sure the standards are there? And so that is, in my opinion, the problem is, is that nothing has ever comes to mitigation and nothing against.

[Crystal Ball]

What evidence do you have that any of them are not competent?

[Sagar Enjeti]

Oh, I have. I'm not talking about that. I'm saying a culture around ensuring that we have more black or lesbian firefighters does not seem to me to comport with a culture of competency itself.

[Crystal Ball]

You have no evidence.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Well, what am I supposed to. Systematic study. Yeah, I mean, I can.

[Crystal Ball]

Yes, I expect there to be evidence if you make a claim.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Okay, then what evidence do you have that pure white fire department can't do the best job? I mean, that's what I'm saying. DEI itself is a nonsensical thing that prioritizes equity for the sake of itself.

[Crystal Ball]

Why is this a distraction, though? Like, why is it a distraction? Okay, yeah. You think that if you had had a man in charge of the fire department, they could have stopped the fires? Like, you have no evidence for that. You just assume that because it's a woman. No, I didn't see, she's not good at the job or cause she's a lesbian, she's not good at the job.

[Sagar Enjeti]

What I'm saying is that there has.

[Crystal Ball]

Been a priority that's a distraction from the core problem here, which is that you have a 1200 year drought. You have the temperature. Average temperature in Calver is 5 degrees hotter. The Santa Ana winds are nothing new. The reason it is so devastating are because of those two factors. And that has nothing to do whether there's a black person or a lesbian or a white lady or a white dude, the head of the fire department. Nothing to do with that.

[Unknown]

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[Sagar Enjeti]

What I am saying is that it is clear there was a culture in the state of California and in the LA Fire department specifically to look at, quote, unquote, equity over the last three to four year period. Do I think on average across all organizations, corporate, fire department, police, military, that that culture competes with competency? Absolutely, yes, I do. I am not personally indicting any of the people who are at the top of this or looking at their appearance and immediately making a judgment. I am saying through both experience, through observation, that DEI itself is something that is generally the enemy of competence. It is on the people who are going to racially discriminate against others to prove that racial discrimination or sexual discrimination is better for competence.

[Crystal Ball]

What do you think is the more important problem here?

[Sagar Enjeti]

That's not what I'm talking about though. But I'm saying.

[Crystal Ball]

But why focus on it then if it's not that important?

[Sagar Enjeti]

Because it obviously is important.

[Crystal Ball]

What is the number one factor here causing these fires in Europe?

[Sagar Enjeti]

What is the number one factor that.

[Crystal Ball]

Led to the devastation?

[Sagar Enjeti]

Drought conditions and wind, of course.

[Crystal Ball]

Okay, so let's talk about it, huh? Then you just did a whole thing about it, Dodge. Oh, you know, climate change, whatever. Why are these lefties so obsessed with climate change?

[Sagar Enjeti]

Well, because they're the number one thing.

[Crystal Ball]

Driving this devastation that has been elected North Carolina devastation. That is not true. No, it is just simply not true. Go look at how popular the Paris climate accords were.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Well, when Trump pulled out of it.

[Crystal Ball]

I remember investments in green. Go look at how popular investments in green energy are. But the thing is, Sager too, that you act like public opinion is just this static thing that just sits there and is what it is versus something that is malleable and shapeable and that people change their mind based on, I don't know, their home being destroyed by climate fueled catastrophe, whether they're here or in western North Carolina. So yeah, I, as someone who analyzes these situations, of course I'm gonna focus on the number one factor that is causing these absolute cataclysms here and around the world and really gonna contribute to destabilizing the entire globe.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So the reason why I talk about it is I think that the way it codes, and this is what many people who talk about it are not able to do, is they are unable to communicate this in a manner which does not tell American citizens that their lives are not going to be significantly curtailed. Which I think the true reality of most of this discussion is, is, oh, we have to get rid of cars that have too much emissions. We have to significantly curtail the way that we consume goods. We have to reduce our quote, unquote carbon footprint. Which means what? Which means that the price of all this stuff is going to go up, consumption itself is going down. I don't even necessarily think that's a bad thing per se. It's gonna be tough in a hyper individualistic consumer capitalist society which is the United States. Most of the way that this stuff is communicated is usually you're the problem. Our whole society is the issue. Or some imaginary like, you know, wealth tax of 50% is going to change. It's just not.

[Crystal Ball]

The bulk of the emissions are from the giant corporations and the wealthy. And by the way, what is going to increasingly fuel carbon emissions is this race for AI development which is incredibly resource intensive, which we're having no conversation and debate about. But the reality is we have the technology to be able to do this. It just requires collective. Yes, large scale federal government led collective action.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. But significantly changing the American way of life, which I think most people don't.

[Crystal Ball]

Want to do, but I don't even think that's true.

[Sagar Enjeti]

But there are studies, for example, in Louisiana where they have major. There was the oil. I forget exactly the facilities that were there. There's a good book about it and I'm removing the name. The people there who are the most affected by the oil industry and others are the most Republican because they are like, listen, at the end of the day, even though they're literally being poisoned by some of the things that they're.

[Crystal Ball]

Saying, that their livelihoods are tied to extraction.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. But their point was, is that it's clear to me that the left, the Green New Deal, et cetera, wants to do away with my job. And I don't trust that they're going.

[Crystal Ball]

To do because who told them that? It wasn't the left that told them that. It was the right that told them that.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So you think that they're massive? So I think they're so I think.

[Crystal Ball]

That they've looked, I think they're right. I think they've looked at the, at the failures of the government in the past and things like NAFTA to be able to deliver quality of life. But I mean, again, I'm not saying it's an easy problem, but how is the American quality. How's the American way of life going in LA right now? How's the American way of life going in Asheville, North Carolina right now? How's the American way of life going in huge parts of the Gulf coast that have been devastated by hurricanes and are going to be. How's the American way of life going in Miami, where when it rains, it just like, you know, floods the whole city. So yeah, there's. Yes, there would be a cost, there would be a transition period. But the consequences of not acting like you ignore the consequences of not acting.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Oh, I'm not ignoring.

[Crystal Ball]

And those are absolutely grave and dire. And instead wanna talk about like, oh, there's a lesbian in charge of the fire department. Isn't that the real problem?

[Sagar Enjeti]

No, it's not the real problem for the fact that we're talking about DEI itself, which has been pervaded through the California government. But beyond that, which is bringing it to a democratic question. People have been bombarded with propaganda since I was probably born that everything is horrible, the sea levels are going to rise. Many of these predictions don't end up being true, which then igno. No, but it's not because people said, oh, X amount of coastline was going to disappear by, what is it, 2025 didn't happen. The same catastrophic language is being used over and over again. People don't feel or see the fact that things are changing all that much beyond hurricanes and or fires. I think we should speak pragmatically. We can both accept that there will be more fire, more hurricane, et cetera, and say, okay, so what are we gonna do about that? Well, we have to invest a lot more money in this and this. We don't necessarily need to say, oh, all electric cars are gonna be driven in the state of California by 2030. Ridiculous, absurd, never going to happen in the first place. At the end of the day, it's about a consumptive mindset, which fundamentally you're talking there about transition that requires a lot of trust from people that their lives and their jobs and all this quote unquote, just transition language was going to happen. I don't think there is any reason after the failures of COVID or after the last five years to say that would be competently managed or it would be one in which we should should as a vision buy into. We have probably one of the most atomized individualistic times in modern American history. I think there's a lot of reasons for that and immigration being number one. But in all of that, in all of that, you will not get to a point where everyone's just going to buy into this kumbaya like, oh, I'm going to give up 30% of my consumption for quote unquote.

[Crystal Ball]

You're just like making that up.

[Sagar Enjeti]

No, I'm not. Because Donald Trump just fool the population who is against electric vehicle matters?

[Crystal Ball]

Sorry, but what I'm saying is against the 30, you're gonna have to reduce your consumption 30%, blah, blah, blah. I think maybe if you're like one of the. An Elon Musk of the world, maybe that might require some sacrifice. But, I mean, what you're basically saying is we can't solve any big collective problems.

[Sagar Enjeti]

No, I'm not saying together, just give up.

[Crystal Ball]

We cannot solve any big collective problem. We're too atomized, we're too individual. So forget about it. Just let her rip and hope that you're one of the people who can afford the private firefighters when it comes for your house. Because that's the track that we're on right now is just basically like every man for themselves. If you're rich, you can rebuild. If you're poor, like, sorry, you can't get home insurance, you're screwed. And the fire department is being cut because billionaires don't want to pay taxes. So you just basically have to pray that you and your loved ones are gonna make it.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Probably. Look, I'm not defending billionaire tax levels, but don't they pay the most tax than anybody else in the state of California? I mean, that's what I'm talking about. This is a fun. This is a state.

[Crystal Ball]

With what percent of their income do they pay in taxes?

[Sagar Enjeti]

Probably 5 to 7.

[Crystal Ball]

Next to nothing, by the way. I'm not defending pays next to nothing in tax.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I am not defending billionaire tax rates. What I'm saying is California is a G7 nation in and of itself. I think it would be G5 if it were its own independent country. So the idea it's not wealthy enough to handle this seems ridiculous to me. There are plenty of developed nations all across the world that seem to have a much better and more competent fire and hurricane disaster relief, Japan being one of them. My point is, is that it's clear within the context of mitigation itself, a lot more can be done democratically. If you want to continue to make the case for lack of consumption, et cetera, you can. I don't think it's gonna work. I mean. I mean, I think the most honest discussion of climate change we ever had was who was the person who made the documentary with Michael Moore? I'm forgetting the name of it. And we talked a lot about it here over at Rising. We even interviewed him, and he was the most honest person because he's like, yeah, we have to radically cut consumption. I mean, actual quiet part out loud that came from most of the people who study carbon emissions, et cetera. Was what was the single most important thing for drop of carbon emissions? It's when everybody stayed at home during COVID That's the truth. If you actually wanted to see it, a dramatic cut. All of us have to stay at home, reduce our consumption, stay inside. People don't want to do that.

[Crystal Ball]

That's.

[Sagar Enjeti]

We live in a democratic society.

[Crystal Ball]

It just requires. I mean, first of all, renewable energy technology has improved dramatically. In particular, solar has improved dramatically.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yes, but how is it made? It's made in China from filthy materials. It has a ton of emissions. The lifetime offset of a solar panel in the United States will never offset the amount that it requires to make it. This is the problem. We want to make these windmills, which, again, are not efficient. They have what, 10 to 25% carrying. The most efficient power that we have is called nuclear power. Nobody wants to build it. Everyone's too afraid.

[Crystal Ball]

That's not true either. I mean, even the climate left has embraced nuclear like Greta has.

[Sagar Enjeti]

When's the next reactor coming?

[Crystal Ball]

Nuclear? It's not going to happen again, Sagar, like, okay, so the way things are is just. Just how they're gonna be. That's your position. And I find that really. Look, you might be right, but I have to say what I think would make a better situation where we don't have to constantly be watching people tearfully talk about how all their possessions are lost and they've had to flee the home that they've lived in for decades and decades, and where parts of the country are just increasingly uninhabitable and where you can't be insured and where the only people who have a prayer of surviving in a reasonable fashion are the wealthy, who can pay for the private firefighters and rebuild even if they don't have homeowners insurance. You might be right that we're too far gone to be able to deal with it. We certainly have not dealt with it to this point. But it's just not true that the technology doesn't exist. The technology does exist. What doesn't exist is the will to actually have the collective action required to try to tackle this problem in a serious way, which you're right at this point, require a lot of mitigation. But also, you know, rather than just letting it rip and see what happens when it's 2 degrees Celsius and when it's 5 degrees Celsius, to actually try to, you know, get the trends under control. Because we do have the technology now to be able to.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Well, I think we do. We've had the technology since 1970s called nuclear reactor. And let me not let people off the hook. Here's the truth. When you actually want to build a nuclear reactor. Oh, I don't want that in my neighborhood. It's too unsafe and all this. And so what happens? We use bullshit zoning regulations to keep it out. We haven't built a new reactor in the United States since 1976. It's great that elites, people and others are talking about how good it is in practice. If the Federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission green lit a reactor tomorrow, it would still probably take a decade before we were able to buy it. The story out of Georgia is extremely black pilling for both how much it costs for the number of community pushback. I just, I feel like a Democrat. There is a Democratic check on what is real and what is not. I would love to see 10001500 reactors across this country and then you can have as much AI electric car and all of that as you want. We don't have to burn a single, you know, we don't have to have any oil, natural gas, et cetera. It will not happen because I know, you know, you can see even today this boomer fear of the reactor cyber.

[Crystal Ball]

Why not use everywhere the platform you have.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Oh, I do.

[Crystal Ball]

Nobody's been to advocate for that. Rather than just dismiss it as like, well it's not gonna happen.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I have, let's talk about nobody been more pro nuclear than I have. I've been putting it out there. But I've also watched with trepidation and with reality about how even Diablo Canyon, you know, bringing back on that was a Titanic fight in the state of California about how in Germany. Sure, it's great. Greta said it well, most of the reactors are going offline. They're still burning more coal or burning Russian natural gas. Even Japan, the country I love. Even the fact they had one nuclear disaster where not, not a single person was killed and they basically took off a huge percentage of theirs because people are afraid. It's like dealing with this is just so maddening because the truth is, is that the actual democratic check on this stuff, what I was talking about with oil or with nuclear, many people are either afraid they can have all the facts that they want, they're just not gonna listen. And in the meantime we have all these issues that we have to deal with, but. But the solutions, while they may be easy and staring us in the face, actually convincing people of that. I have not seen a correct playbook for it both on nuclear or climate or any of this.

[Crystal Ball]

Your ideal like if you could just saag run the world, it'd be nice, wouldn't it? Your ideal, there'd be no weed. Would be to tackle climate change using nuclear energy.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Well, I think that at a certain point things are mostly far gone at this point. A lot of it is going to be mitigation to the extent that we can reduce further carbon emissions. I would build 1500 nuclear reactors tomorrow across the entire United States, fulfill Richard Nixon's vision of 1,000 nuclear reactors at a minimum green light. This have abundant electrical power in which Americans don't have to worry about their power bills. We could build as much as we want. All the AI people can hook up to the grid. If you want an electric car, you can drive it and we would have dramatically less carbon emissions. That is an abundant future. But I'm realistic too. I don't think it's gonna happen.

[Crystal Ball]

Listen, I, that, that is a great direction and I just don't know why you sneer at people who, you know, rather than just saying like, well it's not going to happen, who try to make the case for and try to hold on to a possibility that we could do something on that scale and try to actually mitigate the forces. I don't understand why you would sneer at people who are still trying to make that case.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It's not, I'm not sneering per se. It's like it's attitudinal because the attitudinal shift is one of which it's like people just don't. The attitudinal shift is. We have to have. Is that all of these discussions like you were talking about, dei, et cetera, irrelevant. It's a cover up or it's the fault of the fossil fuel companies from 35 years ago covering up studies. I don't think that that's the problem. I think people have plenty of information. It's just that they don't care or they have very, very low institutional trust to do anything about it.

[Crystal Ball]

I would posit that you're missing a key part here, which is that you are acting like we live in a democracy. And I mean we covered. And I have a piece of this in my monologue, but remember this dude who was like an ExxonMobil lobbyist and he was caught on camera, thought he was doing a job interview and he laid out the playbook. He said, yeah, it's not really, you know, it's not really tenable for Exxon to just pretend like climate change isn't real. Anymore. They did that for years and it was successful. And you still have members of Congress and whatever who will deny that climate change is real or diminish it or whatever. But he says, you know what we'll do? We'll back a solution that we know is never gonna happen politically and we will buy off members of Congress. And number one senator that he mentioned was Joe Manchin to make sure that our interests are protected and nothing ever changes. And yeah, so that playbook has not gone away. It is tremendously effective. And then like I said, you have a lot of Zuckerberg, Elon, all of the players in the AI space, of which there are many who also are very interested in, you know, not having this conversation and not changing the status quo because of the way that AI and crypto are so resource and carbon intensive. So, yeah, I do think that that dramatically impacts what is possible because, you know, it's not that anytime you poll people about wanting a green energy transition, about support for the Paris climate accords, et cetera, et cetera, they're very receptive to that. There's long been a majority coalition in favor of a green transition. But I do think that a lot of what, what blocks change is politicians who are bought off by the fossil fuel industry and other industries who want to keep things the way that they are. So listen, I'm not saying that what I want to happen or what you want to happen, what you laid out is likely to occur, but I'm not gonna, like, stop fighting for it because I think it would be better for the country and the world if we didn't have people having to stare down these fires basically on their own and losing all their possessions and losing their lives at, you know, having to deal with the terror that is these persistent extreme climate emergencies.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I totally get it. I think the point that I'm generally trying to make is that the attitudinal way that people receive a lot of information about climate change is default skepticism. West Virginia is a good example. Why do people in West Virginia not give a damn when people come over there and tell them about transition? They don't believe you because they lost all their jobs from coal, which they blame on green energy. You, you can say that it's probably more to do with fracking if we're all telling the truth, but they don't wanna hear it. They think the Hillary Clinton, we're gonna put a lot of coal miners out of work. That attitude of disdain, of hatred of what is already a blue collar profession, which is predominantly Culturally, now shifted to the right is one of extraordinarily lack of trust in cultural institutions. And yeah, you can. I mean, you're sneering at DEI discussion. They hear it and they see it because a lot of these people understand what it's like to be discriminated against because they're working class, white and that's part of their culture. And they understand very clearly that at least culturally, Trump or Joe Manchin or these types of people are the ones who are fighting for them on the issues that they care about and they trust them to look out for more of their interests, more. And you know, I would also say, who replaced Joe Manchin, Republican. So what do we know? It's like the party and the capture of the state, which Trump was, what did he win it by? 40, 50 points? It's one of the biggest swings to a Republican. There is a good example of what I'm talking about, about lack of institutional trust, both on culture, which clearly these people care about a lot, but also in terms of who they want to look out for their interests. And that's a difficult conversation to have. And it's one where any discussion of Green New Deal or anything coded, even somewhat left wing, is just a non start for a lot of these folks. Again, it seems politically, from what I can see.

[Crystal Ball]

I think you again leave out an important part of that story, and I'm not saying there's nothing to the story you just told, but I think you leave out an important part of that story which is over years and years, there was a massive amount of money spent in the political system in West Virginia to back groups like quote, unquote, Friends of Coal that tried. The explicit goal was to convince people of exactly the story that you're telling that they would be screwed and the state left behind and all the jobs would go away and that, you know, anyone who wanted to improve the environment and deal with climate change was an enemy and hated them and hated their way of life, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, you can't leave out that part of the story which is, you know, I don't think at this point, I don't think we, I don't think we have a democracy. I think we have an oligarchy. I think that the whole system is completely bought. I think these politicians are completely bought. And the genuine, like when Green New Deal was first revealed, huge majority support for it, huge. Even in places like West Virginia, there continue to be majorities in favor.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I think this is one of those green energy Sunrise polls. There's just.

[Crystal Ball]

No, it's not true. Go and look at it. Like you can't just.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, because it was probably asked in the question of like, you can't just.

[Crystal Ball]

Miss the numbers when you don't like them.

[Sagar Enjeti]

No. You know, but I'm saying. Okay. But nothing in their voting pattern bears that out. So. So this is like when people talk about Medicare for all it polls popularly on paper. Go and actually ask people, do you like your doctor? Do you wanna leave private health insurance like feeling, eh. Do you trust the government to administer. Oh, absolutely not. Some 50% of people, in practice people can intuit that this is not how it would actually happen. So nothing in the voting pattern of West Virginia, of Louisiana, of Texas or Pennsylvania, any of the places which are the most affected and most tied to oil and gas, who would be the one susceptible to the quote, unquote, just transition indicates to me whatsoever that they support the Green New Deal. If anything, the Green New Deal politicians of AOC and others are the ones who are most reviled by them. There are a lot of reasons for that, but we have to have some.

[Crystal Ball]

Realistic skepticism as to why propaganda effort to convince people that this would be impossible and unworkable. And all I'm saying is the cost of it is always raised. And all I'm saying is what is the cost of not acting? Because to me it seems pretty dire at this point. And you know, this will be the most devastating fire in LA history. The cost of is going to be astronomical. A lot of that is going to fall on individual people or it's going to fall on taxpayers at the federal and state level. So you know, there's. The cost of inaction is also both deadly and extremely expensive and causes massive disruptions to, quote, unquote, the American life. You can ask people here, you can ask them in western North Carolina, you can ask them in certain places in Florida and Colorado, all around the country. And those zones are going to only expand and expand. So while I absolutely agree that politically it seems very unlikely and in fact I feel pretty like I think we're all pretty much, if I'm being totally honest, but I don't think that that doesn't mean I'm gonna stop like, advocating for what I think would be a better direction.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I don't think that we're all, quote, unquote, fucked. Like we live in the richest country in the history of humanity. Like, we will figure it out and.

[Crystal Ball]

Like not figuring it out. No, but okay, I mean, you're the one who Just said we can't do anything and we have no ability to actively solve big problems. And I think you're probably right.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I'm sure you'll find this in Athema but I do have some, you know, some actual confidence in the free market and innovation. People in Thomas Malthus time said oh, the population collapsed. Remember what was it? The 1960s book about population bomb. Totally fake. The invention of GMO and a fertilizer product had made it to carrying capacity of Earth is now what are we at seven something billion. So look like in 1960 they had the same catastrophic apocalyptic narrative by 20 years it was outdated and it seemed utterly ridiculous. So do I think we're all fucked? No, I think we're gonna be okay. Are some people who live. What's that island that's sinking? Is it the Maldives or Marshall Island? Yeah, one of those. Yeah. I wouldn't wanna be you, but you know, how about la?

[Crystal Ball]

Would you wanna be an LA resident? Would you wanna be living on the Gulf Coast? Would you wanna be in investor in North Carolina?

[Sagar Enjeti]

We're about to do a segment about how price jack price gouging is happening with rent. I mean there's still a city of what, 10 million. And in fact apparently the number of people who want to move to LA and to buy real estate there is so high that they can't even keep up with demand. So clearly the people themselves, most of them wanna stay. I think some of the ultra wealthy will flee and a lot of people still wanna move there or wanna live there. It's part of the reason it's one of the most desirable and wealthy neighborhoods in the entire US So I think that things will be okay. I'm not thinking things are gonna be great, but we seem to figure it out. Does that mean that it'll be like waving a magic wand tomorrow and it will all just go away? But like I think the demographic population bomb example is a good one. Most people who have that analysis are wrong. In a very, very short period of time. People said that about oil. America will never be energy independent. I was just reading a book about 1980s in the Permian basis in Texas it said this basin is dead. Nobody will ever take any more oil out of it. It's economically depressed. 2005 Fracking is invented. The boom and the number of jobs and economic activity that since that have exploded in the area in the last 20 years has turned America into the largest energy producing country in the history of the world. So things can change rapidly through technology. We were talking about how we're all going to be reliant on the Saudis by 2009. In fact, the Saudis are the ones who are trying to depress our oil industry. So I just think things are a lot more moving. Technology has a way of changing the conversation in a way that is very, very difficult to predict. I think the only thing we can predict with any certainty is that some technology will come forward. That doesn't mean everything will be perfect, but it does mean that the status quo will not be the same.

[Crystal Ball]

Well, I'll hope and pray that you're right.

[Unknown]

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[Sagar Enjeti]

All.

[Crystal Ball]

Right, let's go ahead and get to this next Piece which is Hassan Piker actually talked to some of the incarcerated firefighters, some roughly 1,000 of which have been sent out to fight these blazes. This is part of a program, long standing program in California where California inmates are trained in fire prevention and firefighting techniques. There's a number of camps established across the state and then they're sent out to fight these places alongside professional firefighters, but earning some $5 to $10 per day. So Hassan who lives in the, in LA or the LA area went and actually spoke to some of these individuals. Let's go ahead and take a listen.

[Unknown]

To that dangerous work. Will you like it? Yeah.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Do you feel like it's a, it's.

[Unknown]

Almost like a respite from being. Is it better than being in prison or. No, it's way better. Cuz I was in a prison yard, I'm seeing guys get stabbed, get jumped, get beat up. The cops treat us like, treat us like. But here we get better treatment, right? They, they talk to us like humans. They talk to us like humans. We got a job, we, we're, we're underpaid but we got a job. Yeah.

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

You feel me? And then the community comes out and shows us all kinds of love. We never, we never received that growing up. We never received that kind of love, that kind of recognition for anything we've done. So now doing this kind of stuff and all this love coming, that's life changing for a lot of guys. That's all they need is a little bit of recognition with this. It's life changing and we get opportunities at careers.

[Sagar Enjeti]

What was it?

[Unknown]

How long was your sentence? You know, Let me ask. 17 years.

[Sagar Enjeti]

17 years.

[Crystal Ball]

God damn.

[Unknown]

They're going to shave it off. They're going to shave it off. They going to shave it off. They shaving so long they better shave it off.

[Sagar Enjeti]

California state doesn't have any sort of like reintegration program. Has MCRP program and thank God for.

[Unknown]

Scott but he's trying to integrate his ARC program. So MCRP is the reintegration program from being incarcerated to being on the outside. It's limited but it's offering you a way to try to de institutionalize. But in a sense it's kind of just keeping you on a leash sadly to say, but that's what it is. Yeah, they do offer some programs but they're very limited, very limited because you're.

[Crystal Ball]

Usually private owned companies again earning $5 to $10 per day to risk their lives in these fires. Obviously that's atrocious. They should be earning a Lot more. You ask yourself, okay, well, why do they do it then? And number one, and those guys described it, you know, described some of the aspects. Number one is the sense of, like, okay, we're able to get back to the community and earn this level of respect, which is something we don't normally get to experience as, you know, incarcerated people. And then the other hope is that the sentence will be somewhat reduced, although the amount that it's reduced is, like, very, very small. For every one day they serve, they get two days knocked off of their sentence. But the other hope is that, okay, well, then when I get out of prison, I'll be trained and I'll be able to get a job in this sector. And, you know, there's a lot of research that says when you are able to get a job coming out of prison, you're much less likely to reoffend and end up back in prison. There's a nonprofit called the Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program, which tries to help individuals like these guys who participated in this program be able to enter into forestry and wildland firefighters. Their recidivism rate is 10% compared to the California state average of 42%. So it is a significant amount. The problem is that actually, up until just a few years ago when they passed legislation to deal with this, if you had a criminal record, you couldn't go into firefighting, so all of your training and your hopes would be completely quashed. And it's still very difficult. So not a lot of individuals are able to go out of prison and go into this particular industry. The other thing that's a concern here, Sager, especially when you're using incarcerated labor force for insanely low wages, they also found they were much more likely to experience injuries, whether it was cuts, bruises, dislocations, fractures, also injuries from smoke inhalation. So there's also concerns that they're not treated the same way and protected in the same way that the professional firefighters are.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, I was reading here just now about the way that this program is justified in terms of the work release and also their ability to then transition. I know that this is common in many prisons to train certain types of skills that can transition, like electrician and or other jobs. But obviously, it seems pretty crazy that you couldn't work this job. So there was no point really training. And I mean, obviously it's something to do to get out there. But, yeah, it was interesting to see this. I didn't realize that this is such a widespread practice in the state of California, which I Do think has the largest prison population of any state in the overall. I mean it makes. It's also the most populous state in the entire union. So. Yeah, I had no idea that this was such a common practice.

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah, it is pretty wild. At the same time you were referencing there's a lot of price gouging going on right now in the state of California specifically with regard to rental apartments. So obviously people homes have been devastated. Massive areas have been evacuated. You have a lot of people looking for a temporary place to stay. Can put this up on the screen. Apparently the, you know, the desire for rental housing in the area is just absolutely insane. The headline here, real estate on LA's west side grows further out of reach with the fires. This real estate agent says usually I get five to 10 applicants in total for a rental. Today for one apartment listing in Brentwood, I got almost 1,000 applicants. 1,000 applicants. Let's go and put this next tweet up on the screen here. So reporter who, who was digging into some of the numbers here. Furnished Bel Air home on Zillow today went for $29,500 a month. So almost $30,000 a month. A few months ago it was roughly half that. The asking was 15,900. I called up the agency. She said she told her client to relist the home after this week's LA Fire quote. People are desperate. You can probably get good money. $30,000 a month. That is absolutely.

[Sagar Enjeti]

15,000 to 30,000amonth.

[Crystal Ball]

Absolutely.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I mean, look, again, it's hard. I know most people are like, oh, if you can afford 15,000amonth, you can afford 30,000. It's like not the point. The point is that you're watching rapid shrinkage of the housing market. And I was actually just reading this morning from the Wall Street Journal about how a big problem in the state of California are elderly citizens who are like 69, 70 years old who bought their home some 30 years ago and are house rich. And it's a good problem to have. But now your house is gone. There's a big question. They bought their house at half a million, 600,000, something like that. Now it's worth 2.2, 3.5 million. I talked previously about that with the Pacific Palisade specifically where the average home price is roughly like 3.5 million. Most of the people who bought them did not buy it for anywhere close to that. There's a lot of questions for them about the carrying cost of those houses. There was a Prop 13 in the state of California locks the Amount of property tax that you pay to only increase by some 1 to 2% and not on the assessment of the current home value. So the question for them right now is if that's going to reset whenever they rebuild their home, will they be reassessed at the current market value? There's no way that if you're making Social Security or even like $100,000 a year, that you can afford $40,000 a year post tax expense on property tax. So there's that.

[Crystal Ball]

Have you been able to get an answer about that?

[Sagar Enjeti]

No, no one has answered me. There has been. So I asked, actually some California policy heads. Some people said, well, maybe, but they have to rebuild it with the same configuration. There's also a question of the actual cost of timber and a lot of the housing inputs that go into it. Also, if you rebuild more than, I think it's 110%, it could trigger a reassess. There's a lot of regulation and red tape here where, I mean, look, if you got the opportunity to rebuild your house, you may want to do things a little differently. You don't necessarily want to do something. Same floor plan from 1970. I would. Right. So doesn't seem unreasonable to say, well, it was an opportunity to do something new, but if you do, you're going to get penalized for it. And then actually it could trigger your own carrying cost of this. So there's a big question mark of what you're going to do and how they're actually going to be able to both have the rebuilding. Gavin Newsom has said he's going to waive the the building regulation to allow this to happen. That's a good step in the right direction. The entire state of California is a NIMBY nightmare for anybody who wants to build housing. True residents like it that way. Let's also not absolve people of their responsibility. But for the people who have been massively affected by this in the interim, it is a absolute scramble for a place to stay. So there's a video that's been going around of a woman talking about her house and how she, you know, she just hosted Christmas, her kids grew up there. So she's like, I'm staying in a hotel. It's like, well, we can all do the math. Average hotel price in the United states is like 200 bucks. In the middle of a disaster and all this. We all know a couple hundred bucks, you know, 5, 4, 500. You stay there for a month, all of a sudden you're out, like, couple of Grand. And you do that, you know, over time, if you're lucky, you can go stay with family. But what are a lot of people gonna do? They're gonna go bust. They don't necessarily have the cost. So this affects tens of thousands of people. And it's a huge question mark as to what happens. I mean, I have relative confidence the, you know, the people who are genuinely worth millions will figure it out. They can afford the 30,000. But I actually am concerned about these house rich folks, because what do you do? I mean, if the vast majority of your net worth is tied up in your house and your house burns to the ground and now property tax is an existential question and you already pay the highest income tax in the United States on estate income. What, you know, like, do you stay? Do you go? Will estate actually do everything it can to put you back in? I'm pretty skeptical. And then I didn't even talk about the probably thousands of renters and others who. They have nowhere to go. I mean, what do you do now? You have to compete in a constrained marketplace with now the richest of the rich also entering it and driving, driving the rent up. So it's a nightmare. It's a nightmare.

[Crystal Ball]

And then the longer term prospect too, of, you know, homeowners insurance. Already State Farm canceled thousands of policies in Palisades, you know, in Pacific Palisades. Looking at the risk of wildfire and saying this is, you know, this is not a good bet for us anymore, you are definitely not going to be able to get home owners insurance in the private market. The California has a, like, insurer of last resort program. It already is very much stretched thin. And this is a story that's playing out not just in California, but in all kinds of states across the country. This catastrophe has also really raised a lot of questions about the practice of hiring private firefighters. So New York Times has an article about this this morning. But also the sun had an article about this too, where Rick Caruso, who was a billionaire developer, former mayoral candidate, he hired a private firefighting force, fire crews, to protect his properties in the area. There continue to be questions about whether these crews, because, remember, the hydrants were running dry because of the level of, you know, insane demand to try to cope with these fires. So the other question is whether these private firefighting crews are using the public water and siphoning off some of the critical resources to try to protect properties of people who aren't billionaire real estate developers or celebrities or who else? Kim Kardashian had previously, in a previous Fire had faced a lot of criticism for hiring a private firefighting crew to protect her own property. And you know this. You also have insurance agencies that hire these crews too, to protect the properties that they've insured. And you might say, okay, well, if you're rich and you can do it, why wouldn't you do it to protect your own property if you don't have confidence that the government is going to be able to handle it? But obviously, number one, there's the question of resources. And if you're taking away just because you are wealthy and able to do it, that's one problem. And then the other problem is just over time, if this becomes an individual, like, I'm going to have an individual fire response versus we're gonna have a collective societal fire response, then obviously you're gonna end up with the wealthy having their property, protecting the working class getting screwed. And we're increasingly on this trajectory. The number in the New York Times article saga was 45% of firefighters in this country are private.

[Sagar Enjeti]

How did I not know this?

[Crystal Ball]

I had no idea.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Am I running in the wrong circumstances? I've never even heard of a private fire department. It would not even cross my mind ever to be like, let me call a private fire agency. I didn't know that you just call 911.

[Crystal Ball]

I had no idea.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, I didn't know 45% well.

[Crystal Ball]

And apparently you know the origin out.

[Sagar Enjeti]

West, because, you know, for us here.

[Crystal Ball]

Fire, we don't have the same common. Yeah, we don't have the same risk. And, you know, some of what they do is they'll like, in advance of a fire, they'll go and try to like, fireproof the property. Whatever is part of what they do too. But the origins of firefighting companies were actually with insurance agencies. And so you used to have this horrifying situation, which we may now be getting back to, where it's like, oh, if you didn't pay into the firefighting service or into the insurance fund and your house is on fire, we're just gonna let it burn. Obviously, the issue with that is that fires don't stay in one place. So if you let the house of the working class person burn, there's no guarantees that that's not going to jump to other properties, jump to the wealthy neighborhoods, et cetera. So. So see, very sort of dystopian situation that is unfolding here as well, you already mentioned. But we can throw this up on the screen. A10, Gavin Newsom passing an executive order, trying to get rid of some of the red tape so that they could rebuild faster in these areas. California, famously, very difficult area to build in. All sorts of regulatory hurdles that have made it difficult and been part of why there's been such a, you know, know, unbelievable cost of living, specifically with regard to housing costs in la, San Francisco, all of the major cities in California. And then the last piece, just so people get a sense of, well, this is a very devastating and expensive disaster. Who's going to be picking up the tab for rebuilding? Wall Street Journal had a breakdown. Effectively, you know, they're projecting there's going to be something like $50 billion in loss. This is a 11 we can put up on the screen something like $50 billion in loss. Some portion of that will be covered by insurance. You know, there's a shrinking California insurance market will leave LA residents more dependent on a patchwork of federal programs, charitable aid and their own savings. State Farm last year said they would not renew policy for 30,000 homeowners in California. That includes 69% of those who live in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood. So those people who, I mean, it is a very wealthy area. So these are, we're talking about wealthy individuals, but they're going to be kind of screwed. California's plan has 451,000 residential policies. That's up from 40% from just a year earlier. So the number of properties that California as a state is now ensuring has absolutely skyrocketed. There is a cap in the amount of damages you can cling there. It's like $3 million. But actually a lot of these specific Palisades houses are going to be more than $3 million to replace Place FEMA kicks in for temporary shelter and supplies. That's relatively limited fund, but can help people with hotel costs and immediate needs. You've got question about whether the federal government is going to pass an aid package. You already listen, Trump doesn't like California doesn't like. Gavin Newsom was well elected to pass aid for Puerto Rico. You've already got two Republican senators who have said that they want a bunch of strings attached before they pass aid because it's the state of California. So question mark about what you could get there. And then obviously the last bucket of money would just be individuals out of their own pockets and what they're able to scrape together to try to be able to rebuild.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, I am. I do suspect that something will go through. I know that those Republican senators, but look, not to put on my blue, staters are going to love me for this we're really gonna say that they're the richest state in the entire nation doesn't get a federal bailout? Come on. If we look proportionately at the amount of income tax and others that California residents and others pay into the overall federal system, it would be ludicrous to say that they cannot get a overall bailout for disasters, especially when we consistently bail out the deferred disaster relief. North Carolina, Florida, Alabama. I mean, Miami. My maybe like, woke take is that all states deserve a bailout in the event of a horrible disaster.

[Crystal Ball]

I don't think that's a woke take. I think that's just like a basic humanity. I'm just saying, like, you shouldn't be punished because the president doesn't like your governor. I don't think it's a reasonable take.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I just don't think it's possible. What is it? 15% of the US population lives in the state of California. That's something. 30, 40 million people who live there. Some of the richest, most important companies to the overall United States. And that's just like a accounting case. I would make the same case for Alabama. What's the poorest state in the union? Mississippi. If a natural disaster hit Mississippi, even if they screwed it up, bail them out. But of course, you know, make sure that what their agencies and others have maybe some strings attached in terms of you have to run it competently, but no matter who you are, if you live in the U.S. i think we should bail out.

[Crystal Ball]

Of course, no one said after Hurricane Katrina where both the federal response and the local response was an utter catastrophe. No one was like, like, because your politicians did a bad job, you're not going to get a bail. Like, that's absurd. But anyway, that's a conversation that is going on right now. So political fight surely to come in the future.

[Sagar Enjeti]

There we go.

[Unknown]

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[Crystal Ball]

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[Sagar Enjeti]

Kid just wiped his runny nose on.

[Crystal Ball]

My jacket and the guy next to me sitting in a pool of perspiration insists on sharing my armrest. Next time, make an appointment with an Amazon One Medical provider.

[Sagar Enjeti]

There's no waiting and no sweaty guy.

[Unknown]

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