ndependent sort of associated territory you're going to bristle at the idea that there could ever be martial law imposed by effectively another country that you're working with. But I don't know that we could say no to that. I feel like if we're going to give security to them there it seems likely there would be cases where the military would have to put a boot on ordinary freedoms just temporarily. That's what martial law is and everybody hates martial law but I feel like we need some kind of out. Now maybe we don't need it because even the military base that would be stationed there would be far more powerful than a bunch of Greenlandic citizens with their handguns or whatever. So I suppose we could get anything we wanted if we really needed it. But it'd be nice to put in the deal so everybody knows it's possible.

And then you could say hey you guys you could get American passports. Do you think the Greenlandic people would like to have an American passport? I don't know if that's good or bad. It'd be an addition to maybe whatever they already have. So why wouldn't that work? Can you think of any idea why they would not take that deal? So they still have independence. They make a bunch more money. They get free military without having to pay any taxes for the military. And they get some freedom from Denmark. Where's the downside? It's all upside.

And Trump made this conversation possible by what did Stephen A. Smith say? By the way he acts. That's right. So the way he acts makes this possible. That's what the way he acts gets you. Greenland. Maybe. We'll see.

Well let's talk about the LA fires. I know that if you're not in LA you're just wishing we could stop talking about this. I get it. I get it. But I think this is more relevant to all the rest of you than you think. First of all it would be fascinating to understand what went wrong so it doesn't happen in your state and also to give you an idea whether it can be fixed.

I'm going to give you the bad news first. You ready? I think that the rebuilding cost will be at least a trillion and nobody can pay for that. So the rebuilding, if you put it on top of the regulations that exist, you know all the environmental stuff, how long it takes to get a permit, the complications, the removal of the toxic debris, the cleaning of the water, the rehooking up of things, there is actually no way to get from here to there. There is no way to rebuild that. And if California is just abandoned effectively to the criminals because nobody's going to live there and it just isn't affordable to fix, homeowners can't fix it on their own. There really isn't any way to fix it in the current normal system.

So let me say that again. There really is no solution there because the federal government isn't going to put a trillion dollars into it. The homeowners can't afford to rebuild. California isn't going to have enough money or even close. It's going to destroy all of her insurance and maybe all of our banking in the entire country. I don't think people understand that when California falls the country gets more than a black eye. It's an existential threat to the rest of the country. I think California might be toast unless you want some good news. See I set you up. And by the way when I say there's bad news and good news, they're both possible. I'm not underplaying one of them. There doesn't seem to be any path that you could recover.

Want to hear why bad it is? How bad it is? But why do you think that Californians can't get insurance? You've heard the government blame the insurance companies for pulling out and trying to get too much profit, right? You've heard the insurance companies blame the government because the government won't let them raise their prices. I'm a Californian. Let me tell you what's true. There is no solution. It wouldn't matter if the government or the insurance companies did everything smart and logical and legal. There is no solution.

So here's what happens to a normal Californian. You get in your house. Let's say you're going to stay where you are for a while. You can afford your house and maybe you've even retired in it and you figured out how to keep affording even after retirement. Now your house goes up in value but you're still okay and in fact you're happier because if you sell it you make more money. But also your property insurance doesn't change much. You're like oh I still pay roughly the same amount. Taxes, that does go up but not as much as the value of your house. Then your house doubles again. Now your house is worth four times what you paid for it. As long as you stay there forever your property taxes will be the original cost. Good.

But what about insurance? The cost of insurance is for replacement. So now your cost of insurance is going to have to be four times what it was when the value of the home was you know well do the math backwards, right? Nobody can afford that. If you say to somebody I'm going to double or triple what it cost you for — I think in my case it was maybe a 10x increase. 10x when I got a market price from an actual insurance company that is still in California. It was 10 times what the old price was for fire insurance. 10 times. So it was something like $1,000 a month went to $10,000 a month. Now I could afford it if I wanted to pay that but that's because I'm still working. I'm not retired and I didn't buy my house when it was you know a tiny fraction. It has gone up since I bought it.

So nobody who's a normal person with a normal job, even these rich people living in the Pacific Palisades, some of them were super rich you know the Louis D. F. ones, but if you're looking at the James Woods, Adam Carolla and then you know down a level to people who don't have jobs that good, either those people just barely can hang on to their homes. They might have had them a long time, so long that it was cheap when they got them and they were paying cheap property tax, cheap insurance relative to the value of the home. They kept going up. But if they have to rebuild and especially those who maybe move because most of those people are going to say I don't want to wait five to 10 years for my house to be livable and by the way why would I live there? It's all burned down even if my house survived. So those people are going to say well I got to move somewhere else. What are they going to do? They can't buy a house and then not get fire insurance if you just had got burned out of your old place.

So there isn't really a solution because the value of the property is so inflated relative to its actual market value that there's no solution. And I don't see one. That if you straight line it there's no solution. So let me say it in a different way. What you expected when you saw oh there's a big fire emergency, houses burned down, it's really really bad. Did you say to yourself well this is a little worse than normal emergencies. What will happen is you know FEMA will come in and you know people will adjust. That it's going to take a few years but they're going to rebuild and then maybe it'll even be better than it was. You know they'll build better homes and you know we have to wait a few years but we'll be back to normal. That's not this. This is unbuildable. This is almost the total destruction of the entire Southern California.

What's that going to do to Northern California? Well who's going to pay for it? Probably me. So they're going to make Northern California I think unlivable because there'll be taxes like crazy or they're going to have to steal some of our water or something. But it's going to be completely unlivable if you assume the normal things are the only things that can happen. We are doomed. Let me say it as clearly as possible. If you assume normal business, normal recovery, normal emergency, normal rebuilding, nothing like that's going to happen. It can't. It's economically impossible.

That was the first problem. The reason we don't have insurance is because it was already economically impossible. We just added a trillion dollars to the insurance burden. So where it was impossible before now it's just laughable. The insurance is not coming back. They're not going to come back to the state because we tweaked something. They can't afford these houses. It's a terrible place to offer insurance at any price because if you have to increase the price by 10x which is what happened to me nobody can live there.

So is it the government's problem or the insurance company's problem? A little of both. More the government than the insurance companies. But mostly it's that our property is completely insanely overpriced. Do you know what the real price of those homes should have been? So let's say a $5 million home in Pacific Palisades in a place that did not have — they didn't know it but suppose they knew it that it did not have protection from a major fire. What would be the actual market price of the homes that built? So they were selling for 5 million. What would you pay for a home that's probably going to burn down, right? You'd say to yourself well I mean well before it burns down this is like heaven. I'm told that was like the best place anybody ever lived in their life. Like people really really like that place. So you might say well I don't know if it's going to burn down. Yeah I'm seeing the numbers 300,000. Because if you lose 300,000 you might say well first of all you could insure it. The insurance companies would say no actually you couldn't. You couldn't insure it because the rebuilding cost is what the insurance company would care about and that would still be you know several million dollars. So you'd have to buy it for something like $300,000, not insure it. And then if you lost the entire 300,000 to a fire just say well it's not the end of my world. Like I can recover from that. I'll just have to live somewhere else.

So the real problem — and by the way this I should give credit to Friedberg on the All-In Pod because if any of the All-In Pod guys are watching they're probably saying is he stealing Friedberg's point? Yes yes I'm stealing Friedberg's point because I hadn't somehow that was a little bit invisible to me because I was looking in the wrong place. I was looking at the insurance and you know I wasn't looking at the house value. So that's the bad news. The bad news is there is no mechanism for recovery.

The good news is we got a new president. Now I think he would be unlikely to spend a trillion dollars to rebuild the same bad situation. But suppose as Joel Pollak pointed out in an article on Breitbart you happen to be lucky enough to have the great builder as a president and there's this fellow in Southern California named Caruso who is also a developer and he's the one who lost narrowly to Karen Bass. I think he's also Democrat but he's not a crazy Democrat. He's a can-we-do-common-sense Democrat. A common sense Democrat with experience in building has my attention. But you would need a lot more.

I'm going to throw out some wild ideas in the spirit of brainstorming that isn't with good ideas but if I throw out enough bad ideas you're going to get the point that this is solvable, right? So these are the bad ideas. Suppose just for Southern California, maybe Northern as well, the insurance rules are changed so that individuals can offer insurance. So in other words somebody like me I can just say hey I'd like to put you know invest in California insurance but I only want to invest in homes that have certain fireproofing and/or local good management to get rid of the burnable stuff. So I would say okay my neighborhood is in good shape. The if something burned in my neighborhood there's a lot of tile roofs. People have removed the trees. Then I might say hmm okay as a personal investment I'll put a little money into this. Let's say crowdfunded insurance. Now it might be a good idea. It might be a bad idea. But unlike the insurance company if the insurance company takes a total loss they're out of business and I think they might be out of business after this. But if I as a personal investor said you know what I'm going to put $1,000 into this because I think next year it could be worth you know 1,200 and then if I lost my 1,200 I would say oh darn and nothing would change. I would just lose my 1,200. You know it was a financial bet. Didn't work out.

So first of all could you spread the bet to individuals and then would the crowd be smarter about picking the ones they want to back? And when people found out they couldn't even get crowd backing what would they have to buy to get it? Well here's another idea. Number one you have to replace your roof because if your roof burns I'm not giving you insurance. If you're in California and you have a flammable roof I'm not giving you any insurance. But if you want to buy a new roof we can talk.

If you have a robot — let's think I added it a little bit. If you have a robot who's a private fireman and somehow the technology worked I'd give you a better deal because you as a human would leave the evacuation zone and your robot which is less burnable would just stand there with a water pack and zap wherever an ember hits. So the robot would just walk around the house and go and just zap the little embers starting to affect your property. Or like in my house suppose I had trees that are a little too close to the house because the house itself is quite resistant. I built it to be super resistant to fires by the way. I should tell you that it was built specifically to be resistant to fires. I designed it that way. But the trees are too close which makes it less resistant. So somebody comes to me and they say Scott we'll give you some of this crowdsourced insurance but you got to get rid of these trees. Then I say oh are you kidding? These are really mature trees. And they say but no insurance. And then I cut down the trees and then I'm a little bit unhappy but I got insurance.

So could crowdsourcing get you to the point where individuals maybe even in your town can decide whether you're a good bet? Because that's what it might take.

Here's the other thing. You've seen pictures of people who had sprinklers on the roof and they would just take the I think it was a lawn sprinkler they just put it on the roof before they evacuated and it would just sort of keep the roof moist and kept it from burning in some cases. Probably not all cases but some. So maybe there's a new technology that we don't know about. A roof sprinkler or something like that. Maybe the insurance company would do the forest mitigation for the state because there's a profit to be made. If they can mitigate it then they can sell the crowdsource insurance into the city.

Now are any of those ideas good ideas? Not really. Not really. They're all incomplete. But does it help you imagine that if we released on everything we've done before and just started with a clean slate and said all right if you were going to invent this from scratch would it look anything like the current system? And the answer is no. If you invented it today from scratch you'd use AI. You'd use I don't know just a lot of different things. And then maybe there's something with land values that have to be adjusted.

All right. You may have heard that the leader of Black Lives Matter, Patrice Cullors, has lost two of her three Los Angeles mansions in the wildfires. So I'm not willing to say that DEI is the reason anybody lost their house. I do think it's the reason that there's mass incompetence in general. But if you're looking for any one tragedy and one person in charge it doesn't necessarily mean that DEI is there. But the irony of the simulation is that the person most associated with DEI got her house, two of her three houses that she didn't deserve, burned down by DEI. That's kind of perfect you know. Now again I'm not saying it's DEI but that's going to be the narrative about it.

All right. Newsom went on a podcast. Governor Newsom. And he was blaming local leaders for the problem. So he didn't he wanted to make sure you knew it wasn't necessarily the state leadership that he's in charge of. It was rather the local leaders. Local leaders. So the white guy governor thinks the problem is the local leaders. Is there anything about the local leaders that's worth noting? Does it sound to you like local leaders is the racist dog whistle that a Democrat can use? Yeah it wasn't the white governor of the state. It was the local leaders. Do you hear it or is it just me? Do you hear the racist dog whistle? I feel like local leaders just has a little bit of a vibe of racism without using the words. I don't know. Maybe it's just me. That's the way it hit me. I certainly can't read his mind but it's the way it hit me. Sounds like a dog whistle to me.

According to the Climate Change Dispatch California actually had record rainfall in I think it was last year and didn't save it because we don't have the right kind of reservoirs and we haven't built many reservoirs since forever. So poor long-term planning. Those people who say that it's climate change caused the dryness are ignoring the fact that California has always had a highly variable climate when it comes to rain. The most common thing in California my entire life is that oh it's a few years of drought. Oh it's a few years of too much rain. Oh we're back to a few years of drought. Oh it's too much rain. All you have to do is save the rain from the too much rain year and you would have plenty for the not enough rain year. At least for fire. Maybe not for drinking. So yes that would be a case of bad management.

Brentwood is under evacuation order. Brentwood's that famous rich place where people like Kamala Harris, LeBron James and Arnold Schwarzenegger live and OJ lived on top of that. So Schwarzenegger says you know don't worry about me. And of course we weren't. It's funny. Schwarzenegger tells the public you know don't worry about me I'll be fine. And I think the entire public said we know. We weren't really worried about the people so rich they have multiple homes and you know $500 million or whatever he's worth. No we weren't worried.

But apparently Kamala Harris's house got burglarized or at least there's a report that there were people there who looked like they were going to burglarize it and got caught. Now that means there's a nonzero chance that Brentwood could burn down and Kamal