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

**David Friedberg** (0:00)
Adam, great to meet you. Thanks for being here on the All-In Podcast. Yeah, this is awesome for me. I'm a big fan. I grew up in LA. I listened to Love Line on K-Rock as a teenager, pre-internet, like before the internet really took off. So the content you and Dr. Drew put out on Love Line on drugs, sex, human psychology, this was stuff that didn't exist in our everyday lives and the discourse that you guys had. It was really kind of expansive for folks, at least in my cohort growing up in LA. We learnt a lot. So I want to thank you for that. I think you've pioneered an important corner of the world of content and media for a long time. So thanks for that.

**Adam Carolla** (0:40)
Yeah.

**David Friedberg** (0:40)
You've lived in LA for a long time, right?

**Adam Carolla** (0:42)
Yeah, a whole life.

**David Friedberg** (0:43)
And so we thought this would be a great conversation to have on the one year anniversary of the Palisades fire, because we know that you've been an outspoken voice on the actions and the reactions to the Palisades fire. And while we're talking, we can also talk broadly about LA., about California, about the US and where things are headed. Every business has an ambition. PayPal Open is the platform designed to help you grow into yours, with access to business loans so you can expand and reach hundreds of millions of PayPal customers worldwide. And your customers can pay all the ways they want today, with PayPal, Venmo, Pay Later, and all major cards, so you can focus on the future. When you need a partner trusted by millions, there's one platform for all business. PayPal Open. Grow today at paypalopen.com.
Let's just do a quick recap. So the Palisades fire a year ago destroyed 6,837 structures, including about 5,000 homes. And as of November of 2025, only one home has been rebuilt. Can you just give us your view on what's gone on since the fire? Why has this been such a slow process? And why have all of the promises that were made in the days and weeks after the fire forgotten about?

**Adam Carolla** (2:00)
Well, I'm uniquely qualified to address this subject because I live in Malibu and I was physically there on sunset the morning the fire started. I literally walked out of the Equinox gym and I looked up Sunset Boulevard up in the mountains and I saw smoke. It was 9.45 in the morning. So I was like, live there was evacuated that night, but also have a background in construction, building, permitting the city, regulation, that kind of stuff. So it's a subject that I'm pretty passionate about. And I think it leads into a bigger conversation about Los Angeles and California and how come there's no affordable housing and how come when they build homeless units that are 400 square feet, they're $900,000 a unit and so on and so forth. So it would be nice to use this as sort of a stepping stone to that conversation.
I've lived in California my whole life and I was in construction my whole life. Then when I got into show business later, all I did was use the show business money to fund more building projects. So I never got away from being on a job site. It just happened to be my own home versus other people's homes. And, of course, as an owner builder, was always having to deal with permits in the city and so forth. I always knew it was super cumbersome and super expensive and actually did more harm than good. It dissuaded a lot of people from building. A lot of people went, I don't want to deal with the city. I don't want to, you know, when you talk to fast food franchises, they'll go, I'll open a store in any city, but I'm not going to do Los Angeles. It's too much. And it becomes.
Too much work. And so then either people bootleg things or they don't start their project at all, because if you go through the normal channels, which is engineering and then plan check and permitting and approvals and all that, it's not only really expensive, but it's super time consuming and it basically convinces you to scrub the project. I was friends with Suzanne Summers and her husband, Alan Hamill, and they live, I mean, I'm still friends with Alan, obviously, Susan passed recently and they're a great couple and they love Malibu. And they used to come out and stay at the Malibu Inn and go out to dinner with me.
And they live in Palm Springs. And I said, well, you love Malibu so much, I don't get why you don't live in Malibu. And they said, oh, we lived in Malibu, but a fire came in and took the house down. That was probably 20 years ago. And then when we wanted to rebuild, the Coastal Commission was so burdensome and there was so much regulation. And, you know, these are people in their early 70s, late 60s. They don't have 11 years to rebuild a house. They're in the twilight part. They're in the retirement years. At a certain point, Alan Hamill just said, I couldn't deal with the Coastal Commission anymore. It's his property. He just wanted to rebuild a slightly different structure. You know, some talk about a carport and whether you needed closed parking or whatever. Eventually, they just packed up and they went to Palm Springs and they built a house there. So that's essentially what it does. It dissuades a lot of people from rebuilding. I was displaced in the wee hours of the fire that night. Probably, I found myself at 2, probably 4 a.m. just walking into a random hotel in Burbank, California and trying to check in at 4 in the morning. I always remember it because the person behind the desk wasn't there and I asked the guy who was buffing the floor and they said, she's at lunch. I thought, it's 4 in the morning, meaning she's in the back room eating a sandwich, but you can wait a half hour. Anyway, we got checked in and the following morning, I got up to come back to the studio, but the power was out. The wind had broken the telephone poles in my Burbank studio, and so the power was all out. So, I said, well, should we run a Best Of or something or should I just, let's just sit down here in the hotel room. I'm going to pull, move this table, move that chair, and I'll just do an emergency broadcast from the hotel room. And in that broadcast, the following morning after the fire, I said, do not expect any rebuilding. You guys have no idea what the permitting process is. You have no idea how much red tape there is in regulation. Oh, they're going to talk some kind of story about expediting things and making things easier and faster and so on and so forth. It is not going to happen. This is Los Angeles. Karen Bass is the mayor. There will be nothing rebuilt. I guarantee you that. Good luck pulling a permit. And then, by the way, all you ass wipes that vote Democrat every year, when you don't get your permit, maybe you should think about a different direction politically. And that's what I said eight hours after the fire. And it's been a year and there's I'm in Malibu. There's nothing rebuilt in Malibu.