Adam Carolla on California's Collapse: Fires, Failed Leadership, and Gyno-Fascism

29:58Well, it damages the product. That's for sure. Because, you know, if you're looking for a meritocracy and if you said, all right, the Superbowl's here and it turns out all 11 players on the defensive side of the ball are black. And then someone goes, there needs to be a Jew in there and there needs to be a couple of women and a few Asians, it's going to hurt. It's going to hurt the level of play. So, of course, all the DEI hires will hurt because Kamala Harris is a DEI hire. Now you go, well, Adam, what do you talk about? Look, Joe Biden said it. He said, I want a woman of color. All right. So whether it's the fire chief or whether it's the vice president of the United States, if you're going to limit your pool to women of color, there's going to be a lot.

30:58It could be fire chiefs. It could be vice presidents and it could be airline pilots. Either way, if you're going to limit that pool or guys who put on stucco, either way, you're going to if you limit your pool of roofers to women of color, you're going to have a hard time finding a qualified roofer and you're going to have to wait a while. So the product is going to suffer, number one. Number two, the part where you kind of grow up and see people who look like you being James Bond or being the president of the United States and that kind of stuff. I would say 40 years ago was a pretty noble pursuit.

31:42I don't think it's necessary today. All the race hustlers act like it's 1959. They never admit that we, you know, we had a black president for two terms and the most celebrated people in our society. I don't know if it's Oprah or LeBron James or Michelle Obama. They they love women. They love people of color. Like, you know, every white kid grows up wanting to be Michael Jordan. You know, we're sort of past that point. Do you think that this is like what is now going to be the core driver of politics in this next cycle? We're going into a pretty crazy 2026. There's this big rise in socialism. The reactionary side is that there's this insane fraud that seems to have taken place in Minnesota that a lot of people are saying is just the tip of the iceberg.

32:36Is this going to end up becoming the pivot year or two years where politics is really going to end up being where this plays out and where America decides what this next evolution is going to look like? yeah i think so i think um dr drew would always come to me and he would say you know what's coming around the corner you're the guy you're the prognosticator you're the indian with his ear down to the ground who knows which way the wagons are coming and he would say to me what's next what's what's next and so i i said to him this about eight years ago maybe 10 years ago And I said, I don't know.

33:17And he said, no, you know, think about it. And I said, all right, what's next is going to be safe spaces and octagons. And he said, what does that mean? And I said, all the people that are tired of living in a nanny state, being told we're going to get rid of your internal combustion engine and replace it with an electric car and all that kind of stuff. they're just going to they're going to self-segregate they're going to move to florida they're going to move to texas they're going to move to tennessee and then all the safe space people are going to end up in portland oregon and seattle washington and los angeles and stuff and eventually the safe space places are going to fall apart and the octagons are going to thrive it was funny because i'd been saying this to him for years and then several months ago trump announced he was putting an octagon on at the White House.

34:09And Drew started yelling. It's like literally happening. The octagon people and the safe spaces people. So now the safe spaces don't work. That's the clean needles and the no judgment injection zones. And all that pie in the sky doesn't work at all. It'd be nice if it did work, but it doesn't work. The second you start handing out free food and free money for welfare, disability, it'll all get corrupted immediately. It's human nature. You know what human nature is? Dogs at the airport. I never saw a dog at the airport ever. And then 15 years ago, I saw a dog at the airport. And I said, what's that dog doing at the airport?

35:00Well, that's a service dog. And I said, well, that's a poodle that's on a 20 foot leash. No, that's a that's a sir. And it's got to be dazzled collar. No, that's a service dog. I said, OK, what happened? Somebody said, look, we're on the honor system. You get a note from your doctor saying you need your service dog. You can travel with your dog for free. And then 10 minutes went by and the airport looked like a kennel because people are weak and they will take advantage of whatever system they can take advantage of. And if you're going to start handing out money to daycare centers, they're going to catch on real fast, especially if they come from a place that's corrupt, where this is not really frowned upon.

35:42It's sort of business. Piracy is pretty good business over there. It's like they exported pirates. Right. Right. They should have sent them to Pittsburgh. But thank you. The point is, is what do you think is going to happen when you take this culture, you put it in a place and then you announce there's sort of free money floating around and there's not going to be a lot of checks and balances? Well, then this is going to happen. It's it's it's it couldn't go any other way and it's going to happen everywhere. Okay, so is your prognostication at this point, you know, there's the old adage that hard times make hard people, hard people make easy times, easy times make soft people, and then soft people make hard times again.

36:28And is the United States going through this era where the easy times, the economic success, the growth of the economy, the extraordinary expansion of wealth in this country has now gotten to the point that it's broken? we've become call it too soft and too oriented around safety over growth around protectionism over expansionism where all of this has basically led to a moment where we're effectively eroding all of the greatness that we've built or many of the great systems that we've built or the great opportunity that existed in the united states is being now eroded away and we're going to enter hard times is that a fair kind of estimation of the cycle or do you think it's like geographic That Florida and Texas are different than California and New York and Seattle and Oregon.

37:18Where are we? Yeah, I think it's sort of all the above. Obviously, I think it's a regional thing because the people who want freedom and want to drive a Ram pickup truck will move to Florida. And so you're going to get a lot of like minded people. I mean, I can't tell you all the people that I've known in the last five to 10 years that have packed up and left. And as somebody who's lived in California my whole life, you know, I found it. It was kind of interesting. One is. Living in California, you don't experience people who leave California. You only experience people who come in from somewhere else.

38:01So, you know, it was always a novelty And also, when you work in a writer's room That guy's from Pittsburgh And that guy's from Chicago You really know it during football season Because they all come in And you go, hey, the Rams are on this Sunday You guys want to watch a Rams game? And they go, I don't give a shit about the Rams I'm a Steelers guy You know, they're all cowboys There'd be a room of 16 guys in LA I'd be the only Rams fan Because they all came from somewhere else I mean, literally Los Angeles has two or three Steelers bars. It doesn't have any Rams bars. Right. So everyone was from somewhere else.

38:39Nobody ever left. The only time I ever heard of someone leaving California in the past is, oh, their company relocated to Denver. I got to move out. Whatever. Now I talk to people and they're like, I'm leaving. And I go, your company reload. No, no, I'm leaving. I go, where are you going? And it used to be a thing where it's like, well, I'm going to retire and go to Maui or my folks died and they got a place, you know, in Montana or something. They just go, I don't know, Florida, Nashville, Texas, Austin. Anywhere but here. Yeah. Well, that I mean, someone should tell Gavin Newsom not only have people leaving, but they're leaving going, I don't care.

39:18I'll go anywhere. I'm just leaving. So you think that there's one side of America that's going to continue to go the way it's going, and then there's the other side? And is the U.S. going to find itself with two Americas? And what does that look like? Well, it'll look good for, look, Orange County's in Los Angeles, but Orange County doesn't look like Los Angeles. It's clean, it's safe, and it's normal. And when something like COVID comes around, they're like, we're not shutting our beaches. Good luck. You know what I mean? I mean, there's literally a sign about halfway to Orange County from L.A.

39:54that basically says, hey, criminals, don't try that crap here. We will prosecute you here in Orange County. And thus, Orange County is orderly, it's clean, and it's nice. What I'm saying is the safe space people are the free syringe people and the safe injection site people and the sort of open border people and the Somali daycare people. And we cannot judge and our homeless, our unhoused neighbors and so on and so forth. and their remedy for fixing school test scores is to get rid of test scores, they will fail because their system cannot work. The other side is diet and exercise. It's like, oh, you want to lose weight?

40:47Diet and exercise. What about this dietary fudge? Not going to work. But my kid likes dietetic fudge. Not going to work. Diet and exercise. But my kid doesn't like. I know. No one likes it. Now get to work. They won't do that. and their whole thing is free buses and free needles and free everything and defund the police and it'll collapse under its own weight. It already has. And then they're going to have to look to these other states and ask for help at a certain point. Well, so let me ask you this then to challenge the notion that two Americans can coexist. California is projected to have an$18 billion budget deficit in the 26 to 27 cycle.

41:25there are some estimates that say that the pension shortfall in California for public employees that have retired is$600 billion, maybe as high as a trillion dollars short of the legal obligations of payments that need to be made to those retirees coming up in the years ahead. That money has to come from somewhere. The United States is$40 trillion in debt. We're burning$1.5 trillion, maybe$2 trillion a year. Debt costs are climbing. this becomes a spiraling problem. Because all of these regions, all of these pockets that may think and act differently, share a common balance sheet, share a common government, and have to share the fiscal responsibility together.

42:03How does this resolve? Because one side might say, hey, I want to balance my budget here in Texas. The California side says, hey, I'm going to burn all this money and make all these promises I can't keep. But at some point, they can't all go separate ways. They all share the federal balance sheet, the federal balance sheet being used to bail out states left and right and bail out for states lack of preparedness and provide services when states aren't stepping in to provide services and so on and so forth. Doesn't this all come to a head because of the fiscal issues that we're facing? Yeah. And I'm speaking, you know, less.

42:37Well, first off, I'm speaking about the next 25 years versus the next 125 years. And I'm also sort of speaking more socially than I am in a, we're going to have two armies. Is Florida's army going to do battle with California's army? Like I'm not that far into it. I'm basically saying the people in Los Angeles who want a nicer place to live, just move to Orange County. They just go, I don't want to raise my kids in Los Angeles. I don't, the school system sucks. I'll go. I know plenty of people who went, I don't want to leave California, so I'll go to Orange County so my kid's going to have a good school system.

43:16So they're just going to sort of relocate. I think the people who are a little more... Businesses too, Adam. Washington's got this new payroll tax for employees making over$125K. They want to charge a 15 % payroll tax. So now Amazon, Microsoft, Costco have all spoken about leaving the state, but that obviously creates a huge, huge hole in those budgets. Yeah. And Tesla and SpaceX and all things Elon Musk going to Texas and all that kind of stuff. So there's going to be that migration. Eventually, they're going to get to, yeah, the deficit and unions and payrolls and retirement funds and things like that.

43:56And then we're going to have to have another conversation. But I'm saying the first part of this is going to be the physical relocation of businesses and of families to places that are more hospitable for them. Or, I mean, listen, Gavin Newsom can say anything he wants, but people understand what a school is and what a good school is. And they're going to move to a place that has a good school if they have young kids. And that'll be that. We can talk coastline and we can talk about mountains and skiing at noon and swimming in the ocean at four in the afternoon. We can talk all about that. But but people are are going to self-segregate and they're going to move.

44:42And it's on. And that's what's happening. So that's going to be the first part. The second part, when we start getting into weird martial law and the military and stuff like that, that will be dead by then. We'll be OK. So we got a while. Yeah, that's what I think. Yeah. I see a lot of people that are ultra high net worth moving out of California right now and considering moving their companies right now because of this new billionaire tax act. I don't know if you followed this, but there's a proposal right from this guy, Dave Regan, who's the head of the SEIU to do a one-time 5 % tax on anyone's net worth over a billion dollars.

45:20He's gathering signatures right now and he's doing it as a direct ballot measure. So you in California can propose an amendment to the Constitution as a ballot measure, and you get 800 ,000 signatures, and it ends up on the ballot. Seems like it'll be pretty popular, people will vote for it. And now there's this thing called the oligarch tax act in Congress to take 8 % of the net worth of people over 50 million. But it seems like they're already sort of coming down the ladder where they're saying, hey, the governments in order to fund all of these social programs and the expenses are going to start to take private assets.

45:52How does that affect this migration? Because it seems like as the people leave, as the money leaves, they're not going to cut spending. They're going to look for other ways to grab money. Does that just drive the migration up? Yes, it's definitely going to drive migration up. And they never really kind of understand that, which I'm always interested in. And then also, you know, in the wake of the Somali, Minnesota thing and whatever the corruption they're going to find in California, which they've already found. And God knows how it's going to dwarf the Minnesota situation when they do get to the bottom of that.

46:27It's a it's it's a tough sell to in the middle of all your fraudulent waste explaining we need more money from the workers. Basically, the people that are the builders and the creators and the workers. So obviously, look, there's two ways you can go about. you know, you can go the utility bill is too high in our house. And you could say to your wife, well, you should close the windows at night and not walk around in your underpants and not run the furnace at 90 degrees all day. And then she could look at you and go, or you could take a second job and we could just pay the bills. and you go, all right, well, and they're both true.

47:19I mean, either California could rein in some of its insane spending or they could just get more money to take care of those obligations. And they're both true. And they would actually percentages of both would work. You know, you could cut spending 10 % and you could get 10 % more tax revenue. And that would work. So it's not like Ro Khanna is mathematically wrong. He is creating a problem, which is you guys can't just keep looking at people as piggy banks, especially the ones that are creating the jobs and creating the industry. you need to start looking at ways to rein in your spending. And I think it's a fundamental flaw in general with Democrats, which is let's just look around for whoever has the most money and see how much we can get.

48:22People of California, the people in the highest tax brackets are, you know, They're already at about 50 % with state and federal. So you can look at them for more. But A, I think it's in terms of when they go, oh, Trump's a dictator and this is tyrannical and these are oligarchs and whatever. They can say whatever they want, but taking more than 50 % of your money, I would argue, is the ultimate government overreach. No one ever thinks of it that way. They think in terms of wearing masks or shutting schools or getting Jimmy Kimmel fired from his job or something. But the government putting their hand in your pocket all day, every day and, you know, wanting all the wealth tax and the estate tax and the expiration tax and all that kind of stuff that that is in.

49:25It's insane. And yes, it will drive people away from wherever entities doing that. The thing I worry about is that it's very hard to cut spending on the flip side, Adam. By my estimate, more than half of Americans rely on a government check, either directly or indirectly. So you're either employed by the federal, state, or local government, or its agencies, or one of its contractors, or you're receiving one of the retirement checks from a government agency. And so it's become very difficult because a majority of the population is receiving benefit or living from some sort of government flow of capital, which makes it very hard from a democracy perspective to say, hey, I'm going to vote to change that.

50:06Who would vote to cut their own income? Right. You take like the retirement age, you know, you go, look, Social Security is not going to be able to keep up with this. So why don't we make the retirement age 70? And then everyone goes out of their minds. And I'm like, look, people live 20 years longer than they used to. You know, you look at RFK Jr. over there. He's doing chin ups. The guy's 71 years old. I mean, 70 ain't what it used to be. And by the way, I'm 61. I have no intention of retiring at 65. I know plenty of guys that are in their 60s. They don't even, you know, I talk to Dr. Drew and attorney Mark Garagos every other day.

50:47Those guys are nowhere near retiring and they shouldn't retire. We shouldn't want them to retire. So someone's got to go, look, we're going to raise that age to 70. By the way, I don't know, Jane Fonda's 90. She's at work right now as much as I hate her work and her. But the point is, is somebody is going to have to have some balls. And I know it's not popular with all the people who are used to getting money from the government. But someone's got to be the adult in the room at some point and stop worrying about their next election and start talking fiscal sanity. So who do you think is the right candidate for California?

51:25Have you looked at the slate? Who do you like? And I guess, who do you think is probable? We cannot have business as usual. A business as usual is we are just bottoming out in some sort of slow motion train wreck here. So, you know, the Swalwells, who, by the way, is a dope. You know, a lot of these people are dopes. And I don't I don't think people really understand that, you know, like you could you can vehemently disagree with many folks on the other side of the aisle. and you could disagree with Jim Jordan or Tom Cotton or someone like that, but they're not dopes. Eric Swal is a dope. Kamala Harris is a dope.

52:12Karen Bass is a dope. These are dumb people who shouldn't be in charge of things because they don't have the intellectual capacity for it. Now, I disagree with Barack Obama. I think he's a liar and a race hustler, but he's not a dope. Eric Swallow is a dope. And so first things first, I don't really want a dope. You know, we I don't want a dope governing. And. Now, Gavin Newsom's a sociopath, but he's not a dope, but there's something wrong with him, clearly wrong. And he doesn't think clearly and he's not linear at all. And I've interviewed him for an hour and he's there's something wrong with him.

52:56But I don't lump him in the dope department. I will take and Katie Porter's an idiot and she's a dope. And by the way, her being mean to her employees is the least of my worries. I have no thoughts about that. She's a dumb cow. I heard her statements about some advertising campaign that Chase Bank came out like five years ago. And she's clearly an idiot. So we don't we don't want her. We don't want any business as usual. You know, Steve Hilton, Larry Elder, Rick Caruso. It doesn't matter. Anybody who sort of is not a dope and can think like a business person and approach California that way, I'm in on.

53:39I mean, I don't know where Rick Caruso's, you know, what his future is. I'm pretty friendly with him. I assume he's going to run. And he's great. Steve Hilton's great. Larry Elder's great. It's anybody from the right side will fix this. It cannot have a succession of more dopes and Swalwells and guys like that. Do you think the state can survive as a single party state? You know, I saw the statistic yesterday that I think 1100 bills get signed into law a year out of the state assembly because it's a uniparty state. So, you know, there's this extraordinary, some people would call it pillaging of the budget and pillaging of resources of California for personal interests that all get kind of funneled through the state senate state assembly process.

54:20and bill after bill after bill after bill just gets pumped and signed versus having a more kind of purple state where there could be a process where there's debate. Is there a path to that in California? Or is it too long lost where all the people that could make it a purple state are leaving or have left? And can we get there? Yeah. You know, I think the fire woke some people up. I think all of a sudden people are sounding a little bit different. You know, in a weird way, Hollywood is sort of a bellwether. Like they're, they can kind of take the temperature of the state by sort of where Hollywood is, you know, and they were all very far to the left and very liberal and very woke.

55:04And for the first time ever, you do hear people talking about not wanting to trans the kids, you know, in the, in the business, you know what I mean? like piping up, you know, and you have comedians and you have actors and they're talking about like, you know, why weren't those reservoirs filled? And no, I'm not voting for Karen Bass. And she should have. And what how do we let this place burn down? And by the way, what's up with all this production leaving to Atlanta and leaving to New Mexico? All of a sudden, the stuff is sort of landed on their plate a little bit. Like their house burned down and they have to go out of the country to film their next sitcom.

55:51And they're sort of like going and there's a homeless guy pissing on their front porch and their niece got stabbed by a homeless guy just walking to school. And there's these campers, these Winnebago's everywhere dealing fentanyl in front of their house, you know. And for the first time ever, they're kind of going, I don't know, maybe this isn't the direction. And it's true. A lot of them have left. But Hollywood is a little bit of a yardstick to kind of measure the temperature of the town. And for the first time ever, I am hearing those types, comedians, and speaking out loud, not whispering anymore.

56:34You just have to hide. You know, if he had something bad to say about Karen Bass, he had to say it quietly. You couldn't send a tweet out and that kind of stuff. And so there is an awakening. And it's what would logically happen if your house burned out. Right. This guy named Rob Henderson who writes about these things called luxury beliefs, right? Right. Sure. It's all it's a it's a luxury to have a belief in doing X, Y or Z until it shows up your doorstep. It's the fact that you don't have to deal with it. You don't have to live with it. but eventually if it does affect you personally then you realize wait a second maybe this is not the right decision it's it's like turning off the natural gas so that people can't have stoves now the the poorest of people can't afford to cook their food because it's so expensive to use electricity to to heat your food and you know the luxury belief is oh it's better for the planet but for the majority of people it hurts them similarly once the winnebago show up and your niece gets stabbed, you realize maybe that wasn't the best policy or set of policies.

57:31And gas is six bucks a gallon and you drive a gardening truck and it's a Ford F-250 extended cab and it's filled with 2 ,000 pounds worth of equipment and you're getting seven miles to the gallon and you're on a gardener salary. Yeah, you're going to think about cheaper gas. You're not thinking about the Coastal Commission at that point. You just want the price of gas to go down because you're driving a pickup truck filled with gardening material. So I work in Silicon Valley, and a lot of what Silicon Valley is on the receiving end of at this moment is this extraordinary anti-tech, anti-AI sentiment that seems to be brewing and bubbling on both sides of the aisle.

58:17Democrats, Republicans, for different reasons, are viewing the tech industry as kind of this evil, the oligarchs, the new kleptocrats, and so on. From where you sit, where is this headed? Is this a pronounced issue from your view? I mean, maybe we're all very sensitive to it here in Silicon Valley, but is the generally anti-tech sentiment becoming louder, becoming more significant? How does this affect, you know, the next kind of cycle in politics, do you think? Well, I mean, we always need a villain. And so it's easy when it's World War Two, we just hate Nazis, you know, and it's pretty straightforward.

58:54And then at a certain point, it gets a little more complex, you know, when it's Vietnam or something like that. And then, you know, then at some point, it's, you know, Monsanto and these big chemical companies, you know, we always sort of need somebody to protect my constituency from. So, you know, elect me and I'll protect you and your kids from this company that's dumping raw sewage into the river and so on and so forth. And now that we've sort of cycled through all that, I do think big tech is the last, not the last, but I mean the current boogeyman, because we're not really dealing with big companies polluting anymore.

59:41And we're not at war with this nation or that nation. So it's an easy target. And there's some skeletons in the closet about kids and screen time and incentives to keep the kids on the screen and the damage that it may be causing the young kids who grew up staring at the screen and access to pornography and everything else. And then AI, you know, AI, that is the ultimate sort of pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. That's that's the evil wizard. And you elect me and I'm going to rein these people in and I'm going to protect you from this potential harm that, you know, forget about you.

1:00:23What about your kids? You want them growing up, you know, in this hellscape of AI, you know, being chased down the street by by Elon Musk robots, you know. So and also anything America doesn't really fully understand makes it that much easier to pitch them and scare them, you know. So, yeah, there's going to be that. Also, with the sort of, you know, billionaires and Bernie Sanders and the war on wealth and that kind of stuff that these guys making all this money with all their cronies and all that. So it's going to be a real easy target for them. And they'll go after whatever's an easy target.

1:01:06And, you know, in the 80s, it was drug dealers, you know, pretty straightforward. And it shifts. It goes, you know, Germans, and then it goes Vietnamese, and then it goes drug dealers. And it'll just cartels, you know, it'll just move around and switch to whatever's expedient for them. But I would say Silicon Valley, AI and big tech is going to be the boogeyman of the future. Do you think that there's a real fear of job loss and a real understanding or experience to date? I know a lot of people in Hollywood talk about the creative process getting replaced and they're getting written out of the system with AI.

1:01:48Does that feel real to people in Hollywood? How much have you kind of looked at this broadly across other industries? Well, I've always been a big advocate of the trades with my background, and I've always wanted kids and felt like we needed to have them get involved with the trades. And it always drove me nuts, like in the late 90s, when they do all those campaigns about saving the music and save the music programs at school. And I'd be like, what about shop glass? Could someone save shop glass? I mean, for Christ's sake, Malibu's burnt to the ground. Palisades are burnt to the ground. Altadena's burnt to the ground.

1:02:23Do you know how many electricians and plumbers and framers and roofers and drywallers and, you know, sheet rockers and tin knockers we're going to need just here right now? You know what I mean? And by the way, these guys ain't making 14 bucks an hour. They're making 300 bucks a day on the low end. There's good money and AI is not going to replace you in the near future. So I've been a huge, you know, kind of micro let's let's bring shop back. We need it fan for a long time. You know, as far as AI goes, you know, everything technology just replaces things. You know, trucks replace wagons and it just keeps going and going and going.

1:03:11And and and, you know, and it's like, well, should we keep the postal service? We have email. Like, no. And then when your argument is, is we're going to put a bunch of people out of work. If we close the mill down that no one needs, I'd go put them out of work. We don't need it. That's life. That's the way it's going to go. You're artificially propping some industry up is not the way to go. So, yeah. And people are going to start considering this when they're looking at a profession. Yeah. This is also like an important principle that when technology creates leverage for a person in terms of how much they can create or do in an hour.

1:03:47It's not about replacing them, then suddenly more will be done per hour by 10x or 100x. You know, it's not like fewer miles are being driven today, because we got cars and replaced all the horses and wagons, we're driving far more miles by 1000x 10 ,000x. And there are all these new jobs and new industries that emerged around it. Yeah, which I think is one of the fallacies I'm thinking about replacing old stuff. Yeah. So just to wrap up, I mean, maybe looking ahead to 28, we talked a lot about kind of things are headed longer term. Maybe how do you think the presidential election is going to play out in 28?

1:04:20How do you think things are going to go for the midterms? I mean, yeah, I'm in the it's the economy, stupid camp, although I'm not a Carville fan. But I think Trump's implementing a lot of things. I think people, you know, asked him two days in, how come eggs weren't cheaper? You know, stuff takes a minute, you know, takes a minute to get the fuel prices down, takes a minute for tariff revenues and things like that. I think Trump's fiscal stuff is going to kick in in the new year. And I think people are going to start reaping the benefits of that. And I think if that happens and gas is cheap and interest rates are down and homeownership is up and employment is up, then we're going to have four more years of some J.D.

1:05:06Vance or some sort of, you know, Trump 2.0 in office. In terms of the midterms, they may kick in before we feel the full effects. of the positive economic products that Trump is implementing. So that could go, you know, that could sort of go either way. But I think for the, you know, in terms of the presidential election, I feel like if Trump's stuff works, like border closed, interest rates down, fuel cheap, foreign skirmishes either eliminated or, you know, drastically reduced. Then, yeah, someone will go, let's let's see what let's see what four more years of this is like versus whatever Kamala Harris word salad, you know, or, you know, insane kind of, you know, trans the illegal prisoners policy or whatever, whatever.

1:06:08I mean, whatever insanity Gavin Newsom wants to implement, although he'll have to walk all of it back. So that's always the fun part. But I like when people pretend like their ideas that they had in their 50s were now that, you know, that's an idea I had when I was 54 and a half. But now that I'm 57, I put my childish ways behind me and I'm a new person. It's like, no, if you're making those decisions in your 50s, it means that's what you thought. But yeah, it'll be interesting. If the economics kick in and the tariffs work and the gas comes down and the interest rates come down, then, yeah, I think it'll be four more years.

1:06:49It's crazy. I never was interested in politics. I hate talking about it. I hate getting involved in it. Because for me, I've always just been a guy like, leave me alone. Let me do my work. Let me live my life. I don't want to think about government and politics, but it's become so prevalent in our lives. It's become something that all of us almost are forced to discuss and forced to get involved in and forced to have an opinion on and a voice on and understand better because it's so prevalent. I mean, you've been I've been listening for 30 plus years. Was this ever a thing that you spend time on?

1:07:21Because we just spent the last hour talking about friggin politics. No, I'm glad we're ending on this point, which is everybody I know who, you know, gets lumped into being a right winger. All they say is, I just want to be left alone. I just want to be left alone. I want to. I have a property. It's my property. I own it. I pay taxes on it. I would like to rebuild my property. And the government says, no, you cannot. And now I have a problem. And it's getting political. But I don't want it to get political. I just want to be left alone. I got a niece and she's five years old. And I don't want a nine foot tall tranny reading her cat in the hat at the library.

1:08:04But this is avoidable. You can just leave her alone and you can leave me alone. And I'll pay my taxes and I'll be a good neighbor. I'll pick up my dog's poop and we could get on with our lives. But you won't have it. You have to get involved. and most of the people I know who are on my side of the aisle in terms of politically and just sort of emotionally are going, I just want to be left alone. I don't, if I want a gas stove, I want a gas stove. If I want a gas powered truck, I want a gas powered truck. And I would like to be able to rebuild my property using my money to rebuild my property and then pay taxes on that without you getting so involved.

1:08:43So I just like to be left alone. And I think you're almost like a bellwether for the fact that the country and the city and the state and other systems of governing have reached a breaking point. Because so many of us who have no interest in politics, never had any interest in it, never focused on it, never spent time on it, almost got wrangled into it because of all of the artifacts of what these systems have turned into. that they now touch every part of our life, disrupt our ability to live our life, to do our business, to do our things. And we're constantly being prodded and poked in a way that feels really wrong.

1:09:20And so look, Adam, I appreciate you spending the time today. This has been awesome. Great to meet. And yeah, thanks for being with us. My pleasure. We'll do it again soon. I'm going all in. All right, besties. I think that was another epic discussion. People love the interviews. I could hear him talk for hours. Absolutely. We crushed your questions in a minute. We are giving people ground truth data to underwrite your own opinion. What'd you guys say? That was fun. I'm doing all in!