ld have been had by your insurance kicking in and at least paying for what you lost, that would be half as big. But it wouldn't be just a change of you being half as mad. It's the difference between, and here's where I have to be careful, it's the difference between people feeling bad and people feeling homicidal. Was that indirect enough?

We're looking at the government of California, and I can tell you from personal experience my emotions, I'm trying to keep under control. And if you're seeing a lot of Californians talking in ways that you think are unusually calm given the situation, like James Woods, you saw him acting completely calm that the house he loved and just rebuilt and remodeled was lost, and he had no insurance. Now he has better resources maybe than other people, but he broke down on an interview. So don't mistake how strong people are acting with how they're feeling on the inside. This feels like we got raped. That's what it feels like. It doesn't feel like a tragedy happened. It feels like we got raped. All of us. Even if you're not directly affected. Do you know what this is going to do to the possibility of getting insurance anywhere in the state? This just made the entire state unlivable. They're going to have to tax the bejesus out of us to pay for whatever this cost. The level of economic destruction, I don't even think you can calculate it. It's bigger than anything that's ever happened in the country.

And so I feel a sense of rage that makes me in revenge homicidal head instead of recovery from an event head. I want to be just in the helpful recovery mode. But man, when they give you the double tap, you know, one in the chest, one in the head. One in the chest was the bad fire management. The one in the head was you don't have insurance because we changed the rules in an obvious way, in a way that obviously would make insurance go away and not be available. You do that. I don't think the, let me say it in the way that I heard it stated. I'm not going to attribute this, but without attribution, I heard yesterday a Californian who was directly affected say of one of the leading politicians who's getting a lot of blame, again I won't be specific, and the advice was, I wouldn't show yourself in public now. That advice I think was well intended as a security thing. You need to know that people feel homicidal. They don't feel just hurt. This is not like other things. The level of incompetence apparently is so extreme that it doesn't feel like an accident. It feels intentional. It wasn't intentional, but it feels like it. It feels like people just raped us because they didn't give a shit.

So if you think we're going to get over this, I doubt it. I doubt it. I don't think we're going to get over this. And you didn't have to be in the fire zone to not get over it. I'm not getting over this. This is the wakeup call. It's the tap on the shoulder. It says, you know all that complaining you did? Complaining is nothing. Complaining is nothing at this point. Pretty serious action, and I hope it's not the homicidal kind, is required. And I do believe that people of character are going to act really differently. And some of them will be sacrificing their personal fortunes. Some will be sacrificing their reputations. But the risk-reward equation just changed completely. Once you realize you can't live in this state the way it is, then you're going to take a bigger risk to change it. You know, if you're just like, ah, I don't like it, but next year is going to be a lot like this year, you're just going to get on with your life. But now it's an existential risk just to be managed by incompetence. It's an existential risk of incompetence.

Now I will remind you, as I was reminded just moments ago before the show started, that it was a while ago that I warned that DEI would cause massive institutional and corporate and government incompetence, and it would be really, really obvious, and it could destroy everything we love. Now when people mentioned that on TV, such as the amazing Scott Jennings, he got into that conversation on CNN. It went completely off the rails, and it was a, I'm going to call it a rare communication mistake by Scott Jennings. You know, when I talk about him usually it's like, oh my God, he just explained things so well among this panel of Democrats, and he won that day, and I'll be forwarding it around. So in general he's the best we have. If you're looking at who's the best communicator who's not Trump himself, it might be Scott Jennings. He's really, really impressive. But on the DEI stuff, total fail.

Now I think it's easy to correct, and I would expect he will. Here's the correction. And I posted this. I hope he sees it. But accusing people, specific people, if what you're doing is accusing specific people of being DEI hires, we don't have that kind of information. You know, we could tell that they're in a certain demographic group, but you can't tell that that's the problem. You can't look at a specific case and say, oh, if Karen Bass had been a white guy, everything would be fine. Now that might be that she's a DEI hire, and then that's the whole story, and the police chief is a DEI hire, and you've got everything you need. It might be. But we don't have that kind of information.

So when Scott Jennings brought up the DEI element, he had a couple of black female panelists who just ate him up. And what they did is they do the thing where they say, why are you saying that black women can't do a good job? Nobody says that. That has absolutely nothing to do with the DEI conversation. The DEI conversation is not about the capability of any particular group. It's not a capability. It's a system incentive design problem. That you could replace anybody in this equation and you get the same bad outcome. So nobody's saying that there's something special about black women not being able to do stuff. I'm not aware of anybody who has that opinion. It's more about the system.

And let me explain that a little bit better. So the first point is that as soon as you apply it to any individual, you're on thin ice. You don't have the proof of that unless you worked with that person every day. You probably don't know if they're doing a good or bad job. You know, sometimes there are other variables that make stuff impossible. But here's what you can say. You can say number one that leaders focus on what is easiest to measure. That probably is the number one most important thing you need to know about management. That managers manage to things that can be tracked. Why do they do that? Because when they get their bonuses and their awards and their raises, it's going to be based on what can be measured. What is easier to measure than diversity improvement? It's easy. What are you? I'm a woman. Got it. What are you? I identify as black. Got it. Right? Easy to count, easy to keep track, easy to see how it changed from what it was to where it is.

If you give any manager that situation where it's easy to know if you did it right, or at least if you hit the goal, I won't say right, but you hit the goal, they're going to manage that, and they're going to let other things lapse because it won't affect their pay. For example, suppose several years ago the people in charge had decided to do a big water management improvement. How long would it take to get that approved, to get it built, to see if it worked? And then even when you built it, you wouldn't know if it worked. You would only know that there weren't any fires lately. You wouldn't know that it worked. So if you've got this big, ambiguous but way more important thing to do, the water management is way more important than other things, but it takes a long time. You can't tell what any one person did to make it happen. It's really hard to be held responsible for that. So if you're a manager, you go for what can be measured easily. You focus on it. That's where your pay depends.

Then on top of that, the second thing you need to know is that every major company is trying to improve their diversity at the same time. And I would argue even the companies that may have renounced their DEI efforts, the individual managers are still going to be hiring with a DEI goal. You don't need a DEI program because those same managers are still going to be bragging if they get more diversity. You could give up the entire incentive system, but if one of the people says, well, I diversified my department, and the other manager that they're competing against for the top job says, oh, I do some long-term things that are really smart, but how did it turn out? Well, we won't know because lots of people involved. It could take years. If it doesn't work, it might not be my fault. It could be the legislation.

So anyway, if you have every company trying to do it at the same time, even if it's not part of an organized program, you're going to run out of your target demographics. And here's the important thing to know. You could switch out the target demographics and replace it with any other group, and it's the same. That's why it's not a racist observation. For example, let's say your DEI program was you had to hire more Irish people or Irish Americans, and that's it. How's that going to work out? You're going to maximize Irish Americans. Now there are a lot of Irish Americans, but if everybody suddenly said, oh God, I got to get myself an Irish guy, you would run out of highly qualified Irish Americans on day two. On day one, all the smart ones with a good resume have already been hired. We got an Irish guy. Yes, it's going to look good on my resume.

So when Scott Jennings on CNN allows his panelists to argue that black women can do any job, nobody's disagreeing with that. The right qualified person of any demographic can do pretty much any job. And the thing that you have to understand is you can replace that target demographic with anybody. You could take black women out of the conversation entirely, put Irish men. Same problem. If you're managing to the number of Irish men on your staff, you're in trouble. You're going to have massive incompetence. If you fast forward 20 years, and here we are, we are in a position of massive incompetence. Is it the cause of any specific demographic group? Can't tell. The only thing you can know for sure is that this was a guaranteed outcome. That the design of the incentive system and the natural limitation of any demographic group to have unlimited people in it is all you needed to know on paper. It couldn't have worked. And that's why it's so important to reverse it and reverse our thinking about it.

So Scott Jennings, I hope you make that correction. The first thing you should say is it's not about any individual. It's about a system design. If you have incentives that make people do the wrong thing, they'll do the wrong thing. And that's where we are.

Now some of the worst takes on this. Bernie Sanders weighs in while people are running for their lives and posts this: 80,000 people told to evacuate. I think it's twice that now since he posted it. 80,000 people told to evacuate. He said blazes 0% contained. And so far I'm thinking, oh, this is Bernie being helpful. He's telling us how bad it is, and then he's going to hit us with what we should do about it. He says eight months since the area has seen rain. Okay, that did make it worse. The scale, the damage and loss is unimaginable. Thank you for recognizing how bad this is. And then he said climate change is real, not a hoax. Donald Trump must treat this like the existential crisis it is, meaning climate change.

Well, you could imagine how I felt when I read that. Have I mentioned that we Californians don't feel like we went through a tragedy? We feel like we got raped by politicians. So Bernie, burning you indirectly, and the fact that California was focusing on your little pet project, climate change, which I believe is mostly freaking fake because it only applies to people who think the news is real and science is not corrupt. If you think the news is real and science is not completely corrupted by money, you might believe that this climate change has been proven by all the smart people to be a danger. Now it might be a danger. I of