Adam Carolla on California's leadership failure: Good vibes can't stop wildfires

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Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes of details. Welcome back everybody. We're watching what's happening in the LA fires. A totally uninspiring press conference is taking place now where 35 people say basically look out for dogs and cats and if they tell you to evacuate, evacuate.

They have zero percent control of the fires, five in all. And it's just amazing how much ineptness we're witnessing and how lack of preparation is making everything so much worse. I don't have to explain it to Adam Carolla. He is living it. He chose to live out there, born out there. And where a successful podcast, the Adam Carolla radio show is.

He's a comedian who's got a great special out, but we'll talk about that in a moment. First off, Adam, do you still have a house? I'm not sure. I was evacuated from Malibu where I live on Tuesday night, early evening, about about six o'clock. It was mandatory evacuation. I took off and went to my studio and which is in another part of town. And and it just kept watching the news, kept talking to neighbors, kept talking to friends.

And we've got some trips and drafts of information. I do know that most of the structures around my condo had burned down, including everything in front of me on PCH, all along the water. I mean, we're really talking about houses on the low end that are twelve, fourteen million dollars. And on the high end, they're seventy million dollars and they're all gone.

All of them, all of that. So everything around me is gone. But I have heard that a few structures, including my condo, may still be intact miraculously.

We just can't you can't go there and confirm it because they won't let you in. I mean, it's it's it's amazing what's going on. And it's amazing how out of all the things you could think could go wrong, I never thought running out of water was something that was going to happen.

But it seems to have happened. Rick Caruso, who was running for mayor, self-made multibillionaire, I think he said this cut twenty three. You have mismanagement of resources and you don't have the right leadership making the right decisions. They clearly were not prepared for the kind of fire that was going to be coming. But in Los Angeles, we got warning days ahead of time, catastrophic winds.

You have the Santa Monica mountains that have not had any vegetation removed in decades. So you had an enormous amount of fuel. That combination alone should have warned everybody in the city that we've got to be over prepared for this. And they weren't. So the reservoirs that feed the hydrants, from what I have been told, ran out very quickly.

And the city was not replenishing the reservoirs for these gravity flow hydrants. It's a nightmare, but it all comes down to the right leadership making the right decisions and having the right systems in place. It's frankly not that complicated.

Your thoughts, Adam? Well, yeah, I mean, we don't do any of that in California. We're fixated on having the first lesbian or the first black or the first gay lesbian black who's running the fire department or in the city council.

I mean, we're all you know, here's what we do. It's like every city who announces their sanctuary city, they announce their sanctuary city and then what? Nothing. And then somebody gets dropped off and they go, what do we do with these people?

We don't have the resources for this. It's the exact same mindset. We just talk about this stuff like everyone deserves a seat at the table and that no child should go to bed hungry and everyone and then we do nothing.

It's all just talk. It's that that's how we do it in Los Angeles. And then when something happens, we don't know what to do. And then at some point we'll announce it's unacceptable after it's done. We just go, it's unacceptable. And that's how we roll because we're incompetent.

But we basically run on good vibes and good vibes are great until the S goes down and then we got nothing. So Adam Crow, our guest, Adam, this was you talking about this problem in 2022 on another network. I want to talk about my white privilege so badly. I could not find a job. I walked to a fire station in North Hollywood. I was 19. I was living in the garage of my family home.

My mom was on welfare and food stamps. And I said, can I get a job as a fireman? And they said, no, because you're not black, Hispanic or a woman. We'll see in about seven years.

So that was you in 2017, my bad testifying. So you called this and that's what this fire chief was bragging about. This fire chief was saying, hey, I'm a lesbian and I heard a lot of diversity. You're going to love my diverse firefighters. I know it's like, well, when when when are you going to be diverse enough? And they're like, never.

But in that clip continues. And the part of it that comes in about twenty five seconds is I took the test to be an L.A. county fireman. I went and took the written test because I signed up for it. And seven years later, they notified me that my test date had come up. And I just went and took it, even though I was a carpenter by then, I wouldn't took it just because I was like, I signed up for this test seven years ago, which, by the way, when you're 19 is a long time between 19 and 26.

Right. That's a lifetime. So I went took it on a Saturday at Hollywood High and I'm standing in line and I couldn't believe that I signed up to take a written test to be a firefighter. And seven years later, they notified me. So I kept asking everyone around me, when did you sign up? I turned to a woman behind me. She was a woman of color who was five foot nothing and about one hundred and five pounds. And I looked at her and I said, when did you sign up to take this test?

And she said Wednesday. So who would you want coming to save you? Adam Carolla with his strapping 26 year old boxer carpenter or a five foot person who on a whim probably decided I'll sign my name here. She she looked like Paula Abdul's younger sister and she didn't look like she could rescue a box of Legos out of a burning house, much less, you know, someone full grown human.

So having said all that, these people, Adam Sandler, we're hearing about Billy Crystal. We know about Jennifer Addison lives up there. It's hard to imagine anybody house surviving. And if yours is, it's lucky you're going to have nothing around you, no infrastructure. Adam, this must be really tough on you, especially because you've grown up there. You've been there forever.

You know everybody. And almost all of them are literally in the line of fire. Now the Hollywood Hills are burning. I have a dear friend, a very good friend who I spoke to yesterday, who I know has a house down on PCH, down on the ocean. And he has another home up the hill and he loves them. And he spends time there and he's just trying to convince me to get another place up the hill. I talked to him yesterday.

I said, how's it going? He said, we lost both houses. So there's nothing, there's nothing there anymore. And yes, if my home makes it, I don't know what I'm returning to rubble, essentially.

I'm just going to watch bulldozers for the next two years. Just push people stuff up and down PCH. There's literally nothing in front of me. I used to look out my front window and see multimillion dollar homes with the ocean beyond.

There's nothing, they're not there anymore. It's very hard to get a hotel room, very hard to find a place to go. Are you realizing that now? Are you talking to people that are scrambling? You know, I'm glad you brought that up.

I have a show tonight in Vegas, so I just left for Vegas, you know, a day or two, a day or two early. But I do want to make this point, I'm glad you brought it up, which is these fires are started by homeless people, oftentimes and or fallen power lines, because we have a decrepit infrastructure for power. And that's another problem that we've never addressed, which is to bury the power lines in the ground, but we don't do it. And so we don't have water, we don't have power, homelessness, all of these people in Malibu, all these people in Santa Monica, all the people in the Palisades, all these people now, Pasadena, I mean, there's people who are literally homeless because their homes were burnt to the ground. None of them are sleeping in a cardboard box under an overpass tonight, because they're not, they're homeless, but they're not junkies, and they're not mental patients. Those who are, those comprised of homeless in Los Angeles. We say, oh, the unhoused community, they're not unhoused. They're drug addicts who have mental problems. I am homeless. Everyone in Malibu is homeless. No one's sleeping on the street because we have a support system.

We're responsible. We have, I had Dr. Drew reach out to me. I had Jimmy Kimmel reach out to me. I've had a ton of people reach out to me and go, would you like to stay at my home? Because I'm not a schizophrenic drug addict who's ripped them off, who's sleeping in the street. So this whole thing of like homeless, everyone in Malibu is homeless.

Nobody slept outdoors one day. Does anyone really think about what that means? And for the record, it's not because you were born into money. It's not because people were born into money.

It's whether you're looking to put up with the, have the infrastructure available in your life. And James Woods talked about it last night. Neighbors, doesn't matter how famous or not famous you are. Neighbors helping out. The guy with Alzheimer's, 96 years old, who doesn't know, with faucets burning, a neighbor pulled him out.

I don't know if they were famous or not. So people helping people is helping. And I don't know, I think I told you this in 92, I lived in Malibu, Los Flores Canyon Drive when the sea lion was there and all my stuff burned. But I was a single guy just renting a small room in a beautiful place. And I remember the chaos that surrounded it. But I also remembered Gold's Gym said free membership for three months.

Gap said you can go get two pairs of jeans for every three. And I had no money. And I remember the Oakwood Apartments said you could stay here for a few weeks.

And they was fully furnished. There was a sense of community in Los Angeles, which has made up a very driven mercenaries in many respects, who can make their way through a very tough industry. And I'm seeing that again. Yeah, you know, people, people step up, people do the right thing. People are generally decent. And I like I said, you know, soon as everyone found out about the fire, I all I had was people reach out to me asking if I wanted to, I need a place to stay. That's how that's how people are.

But if you're schizophrenic and a drug addict, then no, we can't we can't have you in our home around our kids and our jewelry. And the other thing is over billions of dollars every year, billions of dollars every year for the homeless budget and eight hundred nineteen million for the whole firefighter budget to create sixty five percent of the homeless budget. And it was cut back 17 million dollars last year by this genius mayor who wanted to do twenty three million.

And suddenly someone got into it and said just 17 will be enough. Adam, on a much lighter note, you're going to you're an important part of Fox Nation's first ever night of comedy. I was there. It's awesome. You were great. Fox Nation's first ever. It's you, Jim Brewer, Anthony Rodia, as well as Jimmy Fala, who's genius.

He was the emcee there. So check it out beginning today on the night. Today's the night. Right. So today you can get it on Fox Nation, the world's favorite app.

Adam, I know it's not the perfect time, but it is out there for people that want to break. Well, yeah, I mean, listen, you turn on the news and if it's not something going down in Ukraine, it's something going down in Israel. It's not that of all places. It's going down in Malibu, California. You know, like you can expect to hear news about Ukraine and news about Gaza and get depressed.

But Malibu. So it's depressing. Every time you turn on the TV set now, maybe go to Fox Nation and have a laugh. Absolutely. And by the way, that's at my college, Long Island University is where you did it. And I know in some level it was an homage to me. I'm going to try to I'm going to sell myself on that. It was. All right, Adam, thanks so much.

Hang in there and let us know what happens with your condo. Adam Carolla, thank you. Fox News Audio presents the Fox Nation Investigates podcast, The Button Files. A person's final story can be told through their bodies in an autopsy. World renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Button covers three incredible cases where he helped change the course of the investigation.

Sometimes it takes more than one look to put the pieces together. Listen and follow at FoxTrueCrime.com or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Listen to the show ad free on Fox News Podcast Plus on Apple Podcast, Amazon Music with your prime membership or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.