Speaker 1: You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from kf I
Speaker 1: AM six forty KFI AM six forty Bill Handle.
Speaker 2: Here. It is a Thursday morning, February twentieth. It is
Speaker 2: nice days, nice sunny out there. What's the weather going
Speaker 2: to be amy, It's.
Speaker 3: Going to be some clouds this morning and then mostly
Speaker 3: sunny with eyes in the seventies.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's gonna be a beautiful day.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And where did I just hear that? What was one
Speaker 1: of the cities.
Speaker 2: It's going to be fifty degrees below in the east
Speaker 2: twenty degrees below.
Speaker 1: They're in some of.
Speaker 2: The most devastating winter weather that has been around in
Speaker 2: a very very long time.
Speaker 1: Kentucky is all underwater? Right?
Speaker 2: Is it snowing in New Orleans? I have no idea
Speaker 2: good place to be in southern California. Too many people
Speaker 2: are moving in. Okay, just want to know what the
Speaker 2: weather was like. FEMA one of our favorite agencies. FEMA
Speaker 2: actually has a great reputation for helping people out and
Speaker 2: distress it.
Speaker 1: FEMA's like the Red Cross, you know.
Speaker 2: They come in almost immediately and help whatever area. Eve
Speaker 2: Soul States actually when there are disasters like the fire.
Speaker 2: So here's what's happening. The cleanup of those the various
Speaker 2: areas that were devastated by both fires eating and peladiice
Speaker 2: Paradise fires had to start almost immediately, and it did,
Speaker 2: and FEMA came in, federal contractors, Female hired a bunch
Speaker 2: of contractors, and they're cleaning up the place, even at
Speaker 2: a more rapid rapid pace than was here to heretofore
Speaker 2: being anticipated.
Speaker 1: And so here's what always happened.
Speaker 2: Is they would come in, FEMA would come in, the State,
Speaker 2: would come in, clear up a debris area, a debris field,
Speaker 2: and then test the soil for contamination. Having found out
Speaker 2: that in many cases the policies that were being followed
Speaker 2: the actual removal involved not only removing the debris, but
Speaker 2: also removing several layers of top soil, several inches of
Speaker 2: top soil. That's part of the cleanup. So the state said, okay,
Speaker 2: you know, thank you very much. The FEDS are now
Speaker 2: being involved, and now let's talk about the soil testing.
Speaker 2: And FAMA said, nah, we're not going to do the
Speaker 2: soil testing. I say, wait a minute, You've always do
Speaker 2: it in the past. Yeah, well we think and this
Speaker 2: is the director of FEMA, the Federal Coordinating Officer Curtis Brown.
Speaker 2: He writes back to the California Safety Standards folks, California's
Speaker 2: Office of Emergency Services, and he says, we're not going
Speaker 2: to do any soil testing.
Speaker 1: If you want to, you do it on your own.
Speaker 2: And now you have the Office Emergency Services in California saying,
Speaker 2: wait a minute, we're not going to know you have
Speaker 2: to you have to test the soil. Will now not
Speaker 2: going to And by the way, even if you test
Speaker 2: the soil and you find out that it's too contaminated,
Speaker 2: we're not going to go any further down in terms
Speaker 2: of removing top soil.
Speaker 1: What do you do with that?
Speaker 2: Is this the ongoing battle of California versus the Feds,
Speaker 2: I think so so far.
Speaker 1: In the other areas.
Speaker 2: Traditionally, when you've even California, but you've had flooding that
Speaker 2: goes on throughout the Mississippi Delta, and you've had the
Speaker 2: hurricanes that have just destroyed so much of the South East, Southeast,
Speaker 2: the eastern part of the United States, there has always
Speaker 2: been just part and parcel of cleanup. You do the
Speaker 2: toxic testing and then you get to work. This time,
Speaker 2: the answer is no, even worse than that, And I
Speaker 2: wish it was just I wish they had just said
Speaker 2: FEMA said, now we're not going to because we hate
Speaker 2: you guys, because we're part of administration that just isn't
Speaker 2: very happy with California.
Speaker 1: That's the way we're going to deal with it. No, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: This is the fun that I just love what Brown said.
Speaker 2: Curtis Brown and saying no to the California Emergency Services
Speaker 2: folks is soil testing jeopardizes the speed and the budget
Speaker 2: of the cleanup, and it would delay recovery by several months.
Speaker 1: He writes.
Speaker 2: However, FEMA does not prevent the state, local governments, or
Speaker 2: individual property owners from conducting their own soil testing if
Speaker 2: they want to. We encourage the state to conduct soil
Speaker 2: testing if they wish, if they wish to do so,
Speaker 2: Brown wrote, but we are confident that our current practices
Speaker 2: speed up recovery while protecting and advancing public healthy health
Speaker 2: and safety. This is one of those nicotine doesn't actually
Speaker 2: harm you. This is big Pharma saying higher prices are
Speaker 2: actually good for you, that can suer lower prices are bad.
Speaker 1: And this is FEMA saying.
Speaker 2: Soil testing lack of soil tasting is good for you.
Speaker 2: Not testing the soil is actually good. Okay, so kick back,
Speaker 2: enjoy us not doing the work because you know it's
Speaker 2: better for you.
Speaker 1: You know it's going to be well, it is going
Speaker 1: to be quicker. That's true.
Speaker 2: If we don't test the soil, you know that permitting
Speaker 2: will be faster because testing soil coming back saying there's
Speaker 2: still toxicity levels and therefore we have to dig down
Speaker 2: even deeper to remove top soil. You know that's good
Speaker 2: to delay things. That's true. He's absolutely right. But we
Speaker 2: all know that if we don't test and you build
Speaker 2: on toxic levels, that's actually good for you.
Speaker 1: What's up is down, what's down is up.
Speaker 2: And really that letter you wrote, what you think is
Speaker 2: on square paper, is actually a round piece of paper,
Speaker 2: don't you know that. By the way, I'm looking out
Speaker 2: the window, I see blue skies. But if the National
Speaker 2: Weather Service tells me that it's raining, it's raining, and
Speaker 2: even further, I would say, they would say it's raining
Speaker 2: cats and dogs until you eat those cats and dogs. Now,
Speaker 2: I understand that that's kind of a stretch. I get
Speaker 2: that a little put a political statement there, give or take.
Speaker 2: Why don't we just change subjects on this one. Going
Speaker 2: back to the fires for a moment. And as I've
Speaker 2: said over and over again, we're going to be doing
Speaker 2: fire stories for I don't know months, probably, and how
Speaker 2: to deal with the aftermath of these just killer firestorms
Speaker 2: that hit, those devastating wildfires that eating and the Palistas
Speaker 2: eating fire in the Palisades. And so we're talking about
Speaker 2: our building permitting process is going to be changed. Yes,
Speaker 2: they're going to be speeded up. Are there going to
Speaker 2: be people who yesterday we did a story on be
Speaker 2: able to take and do our own permitting for example,
Speaker 2: or our own investigations inspectors will be able to do
Speaker 2: it ourselves or at least the builders, the engineers, etc. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's one of them possibility. And then then it goes
Speaker 2: a little further. If you go to a place in Hissperia,
Speaker 2: right on the edge of the Mohave Debt Desert, there
Speaker 2: is a place called cal Earth, and it returns us
Speaker 2: to our roots, sort of one of those hippie dippy
Speaker 2: yippie places where people who live in commune should go
Speaker 2: forward and set up their own living environment, that sort
Speaker 2: of thing. But I'll tell you what they have there
Speaker 2: and this is where it's taken it to a new level.
Speaker 2: There is at cal Earth a place called Earth one
Speaker 2: and cal Earth is a campus and nonprofit organization that
Speaker 2: pitches new ways of living and they have championed a
Speaker 2: building style called the super Adobe. It's a house, but man,
Speaker 2: what a house it is. It's not a box house.
Speaker 2: What it does is it looks like vaulted domes nestled
Speaker 2: inside each other. The walls are curved, the ceilings are
Speaker 2: tall and arched. It's almost like something out of a
Speaker 2: Star Wars movie, you know, one of those weird planets.
Speaker 2: And what this building can do, it can withstand a
Speaker 2: colossal natural disaster, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, fire, and it is
Speaker 2: a really interesting building because what it does is utilize
Speaker 2: materials from the earth. Not that technically everything isn't but
Speaker 2: it's not lumber. It has some concrete, it uses adobe,
Speaker 2: which is mud and water, some binders, it uses some rebar.
Speaker 2: Point is it is a lot cheaper than building and
Speaker 2: it looks like it does a whole lot more.
Speaker 1: In terms of what it can do to avert fire.
Speaker 2: And right now, super Adobes have been constructed all over
Speaker 2: the world.
Speaker 1: Homes and ADUs and.
Speaker 2: Resorts and orphanages and clinics. A super Adobe and Nepal
Speaker 2: survived both a seven point three and a seven point
Speaker 2: earthquake that leveled everything else where.
Speaker 1: It was constructed in the.
Speaker 2: Thomas fire, Ventura County, seventeen twenty eighteen. Super Adobees came
Speaker 2: out of them unscathed. Now this has been around for
Speaker 2: a whole long time. Matter of fact, Adobe the earth
Speaker 2: and building material, the Adobe. If remember when school, when
Speaker 2: we were kids and we made Adobe bricks, because the
Speaker 2: missions are out of Adobe bricks.
Speaker 1: And they're still around.
Speaker 2: The other day I was where which one of the
Speaker 2: San Frano mission is still around. It was built in
Speaker 2: the seventeen hundreds of adobe. It's not concrete, it's Adobe
Speaker 2: bricks that are made by the Indians.
Speaker 1: Of course that when we were kids thought Father Sarah
Speaker 1: was this.
Speaker 2: This great loving Catholic priests who lovingly took the Indians.
Speaker 2: Turned out he was enslaved all of them and killed
Speaker 2: half of them with the disease. But with diseases, but
Speaker 2: that's a different story. You look at the Spanish missions
Speaker 2: and the homes that were built and the buildings were
Speaker 2: built of that time, made out of adobe. Those just work.
Speaker 2: You don't need the building materials. There aren't toxins involved.
Speaker 2: The cost of building one of these super adobees is
Speaker 2: about a third the price of building the same house,
Speaker 2: same size home, using conventional labor, conventional architecture. It seems
Speaker 2: to be the way of the future, and you know
Speaker 2: what it is, it's a way of the past.
Speaker 1: And it's really kind of looking this up. You want
Speaker 1: to look at cal earth.
Speaker 2: It relies on the arch you know, these domes and
Speaker 2: the homes can be connected to the electric grid, sewer lines.
Speaker 2: I mean, they're basically a home that is made out
Speaker 2: of the earth, and it seems to work.
Speaker 1: All right.
Speaker 2: Good shot, by the way, always being studied by NASA
Speaker 2: United Nations is looking at these buildings and you may
Speaker 2: find that now they're weird looking because they really do
Speaker 2: look like a movie set. But if it works and
Speaker 2: it works, people are going to have to do something
Speaker 2: and this may be the answer. And kind of looking
Speaker 2: at a picture, it's actually worth looking at. It literally
Speaker 2: does look like it's on a set of Star Wars,
Speaker 2: you know, one of the what's that planet that the
Speaker 2: Ewoks live on?
Speaker 1: Do I have an indoor yeah, it looks like something
Speaker 1: from indoor.
Speaker 2: One of those bars that you walk into if you
Speaker 2: have fourteen eyes and you.
Speaker 1: Know eight skulls. All right, Done with that, I have
Speaker 1: a question.
Speaker 2: Is it ever possible to justify a lawyer charging one thousand,
Speaker 2: nine hundred and seventy five dollars an hour? And on
Speaker 2: top of that, it's your taxpayer dollars that are going
Speaker 2: to be used to pay this a lawyer. So let
Speaker 2: me tell you, and at the end of this conversation,
Speaker 2: by the way, I'm going to say, you know what,
Speaker 2: this actually may make sense.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you why.
Speaker 2: First of all, we've got an issue with the fires,
Speaker 2: of course, and the law suits hit before the first.
Speaker 1: Fire was even out.
Speaker 2: So you have La City is being sued in regards
Speaker 2: to the Palisades fire we had. In addition to not
Speaker 2: having enough water pressure enough water, there was that reservoir
Speaker 2: that same thing he has water reservoir that had what
Speaker 2: one hundred and seventeen million gallons of water that was empty,
Speaker 2: and there's lawsuits are gonna fly there big time. Keep
Speaker 2: in mind, each of these lawsuits, every homeowner is looking
Speaker 2: at millions of dollars of money that wants back the
Speaker 2: insurance company, same thing. The insurance company end up paying up.
Speaker 2: They just turn around through the city. So what does
Speaker 2: a city do with Apartment of Water and Power. They
Speaker 2: have to hire lawyers because lawsuits have already hit. So okay,
Speaker 2: we have a city attorney's office. They don't have the
Speaker 2: expertise to do this. Now, these city attorneys are not
Speaker 2: super specialists in wildfires. There are firms that are not.
Speaker 2: That's all they do, but they have a lot of
Speaker 2: experience dealing with it. And in case in point point
Speaker 2: in case, Munger Tolls and Olsen a law firm that
Speaker 2: was hired by the city. They have defended the city
Speaker 2: before with wildfires. They defended the City of Maui and
Speaker 2: the Maui Electrical Power Company when those fires hit.
Speaker 1: They've defended PG and E. They just have a lot
Speaker 1: of experience.
Speaker 2: Wh when you talk about, oh my god, the city
Speaker 2: had to pay the insurance companies had to pay X
Speaker 2: number of dollar, these huge dollars, well that's because after
Speaker 2: that it would have been far more than that had
Speaker 2: not good legal expertise come in. So part of the
Speaker 2: defense that Munger Tolls has to argue is why the
Speaker 2: reservoir was taken off line. Why it remained out of
Speaker 2: service for so long. Keep in mind that this law
Speaker 2: firm that has been retained and I can't even imagine
Speaker 2: how many tens of millions of dollars they're going to
Speaker 2: make on this where they're going to charge the partners
Speaker 2: nineteen hundred and seventy five dollars an hour, associates built
Speaker 2: from seven forty five to eleven eighty an hour. And
Speaker 2: the Lacity attorney said that this was a discounted rate
Speaker 2: structure and that was one of the reasons that Munger
Speaker 2: was hired because they were able to give us a
Speaker 2: discount at almost two thousand dollars an hour. So here's
Speaker 2: the reason a firm like this is retained. And it
Speaker 2: takes a big time firm to do this. This is
Speaker 2: not an individual lawyer specialized expertise. The DWP in this
Speaker 2: case needing immediate representation right now, going up to speed
Speaker 2: because at an emergency, and the city said had actually
Speaker 2: interviewed three law firms before selecting Monger Tolls a lot
Speaker 2: of experience, obviously do a decent job. We don't know yet,
Speaker 2: but when you're dealing in this hierarchy, when they talk
Speaker 2: about lawyers making buckets of money. I always tell people
Speaker 2: with old bills, should I become a lawyer? No?
Speaker 1: Don't. No, am I going to make a lot of money?
Speaker 1: No you're not.
Speaker 2: Now if you're going to reach this kind of rarefied air,
Speaker 2: a couple thousand dollars an hour, yeah, there aren't too
Speaker 2: many people that do this. For example, those of you.
Speaker 2: I remember my daughter Pamela, who's a great has a
Speaker 2: great voice. Dad, I want to go into show business.
Speaker 2: I want to sing, I want to do musicals. I go,
Speaker 2: that's great. So will you support me? No?
Speaker 1: I won't.
Speaker 2: But you said I'm good. I say, I think you're
Speaker 2: very good. But you're not spectacular better than everybody else
Speaker 2: out there. And then when you finish being spectacular and
Speaker 2: better than anywhere any any of you are out there,
Speaker 2: or anybody else is out there, then you are competing
Speaker 2: about a thousand other spectaculars better than anybody else out
Speaker 2: there for one role. This is very rarefied air. And
Speaker 2: you don't get to be You don't get to charge
Speaker 2: nineteen hundred and seventy five dollars an hour by accident.
Speaker 2: It just doesn't work that way. So when we look
Speaker 2: at these outrageous amounts of money that are being charged
Speaker 2: in a lot of people's opinion the other way. And
Speaker 2: by the way, am I defending this? I guess I am.
Speaker 2: You know I am defending it. I remember when Rush Limbaugh,
Speaker 2: I remember he used to be on KFI. Of course
Speaker 2: KFI came up through the ranks because of Rush Limbaugh,
Speaker 2: and Rush was making I don't know, thirty five million
Speaker 2: dollars a year, and I'd be talking to people and
Speaker 2: they go, oh my.
Speaker 1: God, how can anybody make that much? How can he
Speaker 1: get paid that much? I go, he's a bargain.
Speaker 2: They're lucky to have him for thirty five million dollars
Speaker 2: a year. You know, why does Tom Cruise get twenty
Speaker 2: million dollars the picture? Because he produces He produces the results.
Speaker 2: Why does Conda get paid minimum wage? Because he produces
Speaker 2: results at a very competitive wage. And this is iHeart. Okay,
Speaker 2: enough of that. By the way, what was the most
Speaker 2: I ever charged.
Speaker 1: As a lawyer? Yeah, yeah, I'm just.
Speaker 2: Trying to think of because I used to always do
Speaker 2: it on a We used to do it on a
Speaker 2: case by case basis, but occasionally I would go in
Speaker 2: and on early surrogacy days, early reproductive law days. I
Speaker 2: think at one point I think I hit, I don't know,
Speaker 2: four to seventy five an hour. Now we're going back
Speaker 2: thirty five years or four hundred and seventy five dollars
Speaker 2: an hour actually with some real money for a lawyer today.
Speaker 1: Yeah. But and I.
Speaker 2: Always argued that was a bargain because I knew my stuff.
Speaker 2: They're just what There weren't other people that do it.
Speaker 2: So some other lawyer is going to charge you five
Speaker 2: hours just to figure out what it is. And I
Speaker 2: know exactly what I'm talking about. There is that level
Speaker 2: nineteen hundred seventy five dollars an hour. Man, why don't
Speaker 2: I go back to practicing law. We're done on this one,
Speaker 2: all right now? Moving on to YouTube. It's kind of fun.
Speaker 2: I watch a lot of YouTube TV, and it is
Speaker 2: a fortune, but all my network stuff I do on
Speaker 2: YouTube and YouTube has just turned twenty and it is
Speaker 2: the most watched streamer on USTv screens now. The vast
Speaker 2: fast majority of people watch YouTube for free. I watch
Speaker 2: YouTube TV, but it accounted for almost eleven percent of
Speaker 2: television viewing in January, beating out Netflix and all of
Speaker 2: Disney's stuff and Amazon, And on top of that, YouTube
Speaker 2: is growing faster than any of them. Also, YouTube streaming
Speaker 2: hours on you YouTube, including the live TV service, increased
Speaker 2: twenty seven percent in twenty twenty four, basically went up
Speaker 2: a third.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's astronomical. And has just hit.
Speaker 2: Quarterly advertising revenue of ten billion dollars per quarter. Okay,
Speaker 2: this is good news, very very good news.
Speaker 1: It used to be.
Speaker 2: Remember when YouTube first came out of me was a
Speaker 2: while ago, but it was all about cat videos and
Speaker 2: those short little comedy sketches that people did. Well, it's sports,
Speaker 2: it's traumas, it's three hour video podcasts, shows for preschoolers,
Speaker 2: and then the big one. And I was just introduced
Speaker 2: to this last night with I was visiting my friend
Speaker 2: Anthony Zelman's Minty Mouthman's, and we were about to go
Speaker 2: to dinner in my car needed charging and he has
Speaker 2: a charger thing, and I didn't know quite how it
Speaker 2: worked with his because I have a BMW and he
Speaker 2: has a Tesla and we were we're talking about it,
Speaker 2: and I said, so, how does really connect?
Speaker 1: What kind of adapter do I need? And will I
Speaker 1: be able to do this? He goes, oh, let me go.
Speaker 2: On YouTube and find out and I didn't think of
Speaker 2: it because I don't default. But there is nothing that
Speaker 2: you cannot ask what to do, how it works, how
Speaker 2: to fix it?
Speaker 1: Ten minutes?
Speaker 3: And YouTube and you can be an expert in just
Speaker 3: about anything. I know, and I'm not a big TV
Speaker 3: guy these days, so but YouTube is on in my
Speaker 3: shop when I'm working, and I learned tons of stuff
Speaker 3: from three D printing to cab drawing, a digital design
Speaker 3: to you know, you can learn anything, some of it
Speaker 3: not correctly, but.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. But where's you say? Where's
Speaker 1: the guardrails?
Speaker 2: Here?
Speaker 1: With someone? Here's how to do a surgery.
Speaker 3: But you find a good you know, you go down
Speaker 3: a good vein of people and people that I follow
Speaker 3: and subscribe and and you learn a lot of stuff.
Speaker 3: Wouldworking anything?
Speaker 2: You know, these are various programs, platforms services.
Speaker 1: When you think, why didn't I think of that?
Speaker 2: You know, and across the board, you know, it's not
Speaker 2: just Velcrow, why didn't I think of that?
Speaker 1: But it's Uber? Why didn't I think of that? I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, basically a taxi service, Airbnb? Gee, why didn't
Speaker 1: I think of that one?
Speaker 2: But this is why I'm here and the twelve year
Speaker 2: old who started uber, who is now fifteen years old,
Speaker 2: has just bought himself a Caribbean island. Is there such
Speaker 2: thing as a tech billionaire who is over the age
Speaker 2: of nineteen? Does that exist? This is KFI AM six forty.
Speaker 2: You've been listening to the Bill Handle Show. Catch my
Speaker 2: Show Monday through Friday six am to nine am, and
Speaker 2: anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.