Find my Dilbert 2025 Calendar at: https://dilbert.com/ God's Debris: The Complete Works, Amazon https://tinyurl.com/GodsDebrisCompleteWorks Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: Politics, Southern California Fires, Elon Musk Starlink Donation, California Water Mismanagement, LA Mayor Bass, Delta Smelt, California Fire Insurance, California Government Incompetence, DEI, Bernie Sanders, Governor Newsom, California Government Trump Resistance Plan, President Trump, Preemptive Pardons, Dan Crenshaw Stock Picks, Scott Adams ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
Well, there you are. You're here. I'm here. All right. We're going to find our comments and get them going so I can see what the locals people are saying to me. And then we will blow your mind with the best show ever.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization. Probably the best day you can ever have, but if you'd like to take this experience up to levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine. At the end of the day, it makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now. Go. Sensational. Best sip of the day. Well, of course, I'm going to be talking about the L.A. fires, but I'll wait just a minute for people to stream in.
Before that, I would like to note, do any of you remember, I can't remember how long ago it was, so we're going to test your long-term memory. It was a long time ago, but there were these two terror attacks, one in New Orleans and one in Vegas. Any of that sound familiar? It was so long ago. Right? Trump is doing it again. He's doing that thing where time is completely distorted.
So when the Vegas terrorism thing was the headline story, I said to myself, ooh, this is going to be in the news for a while. So I'm going to do a Dilbert comic in which Dilbert's boss's secretary says, suggests that he takes a vacation in Vegas because he didn't know where to go on his vacation. So she suggests that he buy his Cybertruck and drive it to Vegas and stay at the Trump Hotel.
Well, anyway, you'd have to see the comic. It's pretty darn funny, but it's running today only for the subscribers. You'd have to be subscribing on X or Locals to see it. But... You know, I was prepping it to publish it this morning, and I thought, oh, my God, that feels so long ago. So long ago. So Trump time distortion happened again. All right. Just one more thing.
Then we'll talk about the fires. I tried to use ChatGPT last night to digest a big legal document that I was asked to review, and I thought to myself, oh, perfect application for AI. I'm going to upload the document, and then I will query it to say, okay, is this handled? What about this? What's it say about this? And then it would summarize it for me, and I'd save a bunch of time.
I was so happy to be in the age of AI. So I took my PDF file and I uploaded it and said, we can't handle a PDF file. And I said, in 2025, the advanced intelligence, the most important technology in the world, can't read a PDF file? But it said, you know, JPEG it could read. So I thought, oh, all right. All right, well. So I just changed it to a JPEG file. And I upload it. And it fails.
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Chapter 2: How did the LA fires impact Californians?
The reason the water pressure was insufficient is that there were so many hydrants being used at the same time, attempted, and the entire place had been destroyed, so there were a lot of open fountain-like water being wasted just in homes. So if the area was served by the same water source, be it the hydrant or inside the house, if the house...
has broken pipes and the water is spewing everywhere and everybody's trying to use water at the same time to put out the fire. There's not going to be enough water pressure or maybe even water. So water and water pressure were both a problem. Um, it's not entirely clear that either of those were some direct mistake that you could put on some particular person. They're all complicated.
There's a question of forest management. You know, Trump has been on it for years, literally years. He's been saying that California is not managing its forest.
like places like austria where they don't have this kind of fire and managing the forest means partly removing the underbrush you know the really really flammable stuff because the trees can do a much better job of surviving if if it's just going tree to tree it's not going to go as fast as if there's this underbrush that's just ready to go Because the living trees are a little bit wet.
So they'll slow things down. But the dead underbrush, it's going to be traveling like crazy. So the forest management thing is a real thing. It's really important. It's really not done well. But I don't know if that had a causation in this case. Because most of what I saw burning were residential homes.
And there's at least one report that I don't think is confirmed that somebody said the fire started in somebody's backyard and then spread up a hill. If it started in somebody's backyard and spread up a hill, which is not confirmed, not confirmed, it's just something I saw a fireman on the scene who was working and said... Um, if it was set by somebody, we heard reports that, uh, which are fake.
These are fake reports. Somebody, and Oh, that's, that's one of the fake ones that I think I reposted. So that's bad on me. That's just a mistake. I should not have been trusting that kind of information that early in the story. All right. So that's just on my, that's just an unforced error. So on my part, believing that story, uh,
that some homeless person said it, which did not happen, that's on me. That's just an error. I should have said somebody reports it, but we don't know. That would have been the right answer. So we still don't know. But I can tell you that I don't see a direct link from forest management to this particular fire.
I do see a gigantic risk if our forests are not well managed, and that appears to be the case. So we don't know about the water reservoir thing. There are a whole bunch of questions about whether water resources have been managed correctly for years. It doesn't look like it. It looks like there are enough allegations of things that could have solved the problem.
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Chapter 3: What role does Elon Musk play in disaster response?
There's going to be another story to that. I don't think it's as clean as we traded smelt for human beings, although in some ways it looks exactly like that, but probably there's a little extra context on that one. And then the part that is definitely true is that the insurance policy caps
that California tried to put on fire insurance policies caused a shortage of fire insurance policies because the fire insurance people said, no thanks. If we can't make money, we don't want to be in your state. So they pulled out. So what makes this particular situation go from tragic to How do I say this without being canceled?
All right, I'm going to speak as indirectly as I can, and you can piece it together. If an ordinary tragedy happens, you get into tragedy mode. You're trying to help people, you're feeling sad, you're feeling impacted. You're basically just feeling terrible, but trying to do what you can, if it's just a tragedy. If it's a tragedy which would have been halved,
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've seen 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 even 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 caused. 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-y, homicidal head instead of recovery from an event head. I want to be just in the healthful recovery mode. But man, when they give you the double tap, 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 resident, let me say it in the way that I heard it stated. I'm not going to attribute this.
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Chapter 4: How does water management affect wildfire outcomes?
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, 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. 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. 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. OK, that did make it worse. The scale of 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 can 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 you, by politicians. You know, so Bernie. Bernie, you know, indirectly.
And the fact that California was focusing on your little pet project, the 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 often say, I don't know. I don't know how much people are contributing to it. I see both sides. I don't think any of them are believable from my point of view because I can't tell. But I can tell you for sure that if you think the climate models are predicting the future, you have not looked into it very much.
If you think we can measure the temperature of the Earth over decades, you haven't looked into it. And I find that I can't even have a conversation with somebody who thinks all of that climate, the alarm part is true. You can't even talk to them because they've been so hypnotized. They think the news is real. The news is not real about anything important.
The news could have a correct fact now and then, but the narrative is never real. Narratives are always motivated. They're not real. If you believe the news is even trying to be real, you can't be reached. You have to first understand that they're not trying to tell you the truth. It's just not, it's not their business model.
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Chapter 5: What are the criticisms of California's government during the fires?
And it looks like California completely screwed the pooch in every dimension. At least it looks that way. We don't know that that's true. But let me talk about the future of California politics because everything has a political element to it. Here's how Trump posted it. He said on one of his posts on Truth, I think,
He said the governor, New Scum, as he calls him, chose to save the extinct fish instead of sending water to Southern California to fight apocalyptic wildfires. Now, this is another example of how good Trump is in messaging. To take this big, complicated situation and just turn it into New Scum chose an extinct fish over saving the lives of Californians, it's an oversimplification.
And I don't even know if the fish part is really a valid, I don't even know if that's a valid claim. Because if you turn on CNN, they're going to say, well, but you know, it's Republicans' fault too, and blah, blah, blah. I don't know what they say. But there's more context to it. However, as a political messaging thing, The brilliance of the summary is what Trump does better than anybody.
Nobody does that well. He is the best ever at summarizing. Nobody summarizes better than he does. Adam Carolla, who apparently is one of the more famous people being displaced, he looked like he was in a hotel room, and he did a video and he was explaining something that you might not fully understand outside of California. Do you know how hard it is to build something in California?
All of these people who think, well, I'll get my insurance check or maybe I had some extra money and I'm gonna rebuild. So they're gonna go to the city and say, here's my plan. Oh my God, they're just entering hell. I won't go into the details, but let me just tell you this. Getting a California entity, any city really, to approve a building of anything is pretty much a nightmare.
The house I'm in right now, I had built, but I think it took 18 months just to get approval, something like that. Now, these are people who just think, well, it should be easy because I'm just going to build back the house I had with a slight variety. It's not going to be easy. You're going to spend a year not getting the permit and
And then good luck finding a contractor because everybody in your whole city is trying to hire the contractor who knows how to build stuff. You're not going to have a contractor. You're not going to be able to get insurance. You're not going to be able to pay for it with the insurance you don't have. You're not going to be able to get a permit.
I don't believe the country and maybe even Californians have absorbed how bad this is. You're seeing something closer to the beginning of the problem than the end, as bad as it was. And I don't think we can fully appreciate the economic disruption to the state. Who's going to pay for the recovery? I don't think the federal government's going to pay for it all.
Is this going to raise my California taxes again from the highest taxes to the highest taxes on turbo? How are we going to survive it? How are we going to fix the things that need to get fixed? We're already paying the highest taxes, and it feels like the lowest level of service in return. So, no, if you think we're just going to rebuild, you don't know California.
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Chapter 6: How does DEI impact government and corporate competence?
So if they get a preemptive pardon, we don't have to watch the trial and talk about it, but also it would label them forever as felons. Because who gets a preemptive pardon? I would like to ask the following question. In the history of pardons, How many times has a completely innocent person got a preemptive pardon?
Is there even one time that's ever happened where somebody who was legitimately innocent got a preemptive pardon? Can you think of any time that's ever happened? No. You give a preemptive pardon to somebody you know is damn guilty. So now, to be fair, they might be more worried about some illegitimate lawfare being used against them.
And if that's the only thing they're thinking, well, if you think there was no real crime, maybe. But the way we're going to read it is that they just declared themselves guilty. If they accept a preemptive pardon for something they didn't do, I'm not going to believe they didn't do it. I'm just going to believe, oh, you know you're dirty. You lucky guy and lucky woman. All right.
The Mexican president, what's her name? Claudia Scheinbaum. I will never get tired of saying this. The Mexican president, Claudia Scheinbaum. I'm going to say it another time because it's funny. So the Mexican president, Claudia Scheinbaum, the Jewish woman. I just love that. You know, I have to give Mexico credit because you think of Mexico as, you know, they're going to be kind of a patriarchy.
You presume if most of the residents are Mexican, they're going to vote for somebody who's as Mexican as possible. But they elected... They elected Claudia Scheinbaum, and I give them credit for that. If she does a good job, good work. Anyway, so she's responding to Trump saying that he wants the Gulf to be called the Gulf of America instead of the Gulf of Mexico. And she's shooting back.
And she says the U.S. should be called America Mexicana. Let's see how long it takes me to forget her framing. One, two, three. Wait, what did she say? What did she call it? Do you see how special Trump is? Trump says extinct fish once, and I'll remember it for the rest of my life. The Mexican president, as capable as she probably is, I imagine she's very good in general, to get where she got.
But she tries to match him. He's like, how about, I got it. I'm going to zing you. How about we call it America Mexicana? Why isn't everybody clapping? Clap, please. The difference in persuasion and communication skill is just so striking. You don't realize how good Trump is.
at the what i'll call the little stuff you know just the ordinary communication you don't realize how good it is until you see somebody else try it and then they just do a total face plant i had to read it again america mexicana no that's not a good try Well, Russia's introducing these land robot tank things.
It looks like a little, a miniature tank and it could have wheels or tracks, but it's got loaded with all kinds of weapons and they're going to make a bunch of them, they say, and send them at Ukraine. Here's my question. Can Russia manufacture? Now, I know they have manufacturing, and I know they make weapons, and this is a weapon.
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