Grubstakers - Episode 173: Rick Caruso and the 2028 LA Olympics feat. Molly Lambert & Jonny Coleman

Episode Date: June 24, 2020

This week we're joined by Molly Lambert and Jonny Coleman of NOlympics LA to discuss California real estate billionaire Rick Caruso and the upcoming 2028 LA Olympics. We review the shady history of the games, the role of Epstein connected LA power broker Casey Wasserman in bringing them to the city, and the devastating impact of the 1984 Olympics on LA. The 2028 games will continue their proud tradition of allowing a small number of super wealthy people to put their hands in the public's pockets and screw over low income locals in the process. Unless we stop them. You can learn more and get involved at: https://nolympicsla.com/ You can listen to Molly Lambert's podcast Night Call here: https://podtail.com/podcast/night-call/

It's the kind of thing that makes the average citizen puke. I look at this system and say, yeah, you know, what's going on? I don't know anything about this man except I've read bad stuff about him. And I don't like, you know, I don't like what I read about him. We are more than just one coin. We create the world around this coin. Come. Invention. Come. Come. The evil has gone.

Hello and welcome back to Grubstakers, the podcast about billionaires. My name is Sean P. McCarthy and I'm joined as always by my friends and co-hosts. Andy Palmer. Steve Jeffries. And dear listener, as you may or may not be aware, in the year 2028, the city of Los Angeles will be hosting the Summer Olympics. And we are going to talk today about the possible consequences of this and why there are some groups that are opposed to this. And we are joined today by two members of such a group, the No Olympics Los Angeles Coalition.

We are joined by Molly Lampert, the host of the Night Call podcast, and by Johnny Coleman, a local Los Angeles organizer. So first, I just want to thank you both for being here and talking to us. Thanks for having us. Yeah, glad to be on. And so I guess to kind of start with, let's explain the history to people who don't know, and this is myself included here, of what happened with the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles and why that leads you to oppose the 2028 Olympics. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, no, we get that a lot, especially in LA where there are some positive residue of the LA 84 Olympics. And it's kind of the prototypical example of like how an olympics can go wrong which it does every time and when when this olympic bid was kind of

came back from the dead after it looked like boston was going to be the american representative for 2024 a whole bunch of other cities either voted it out or kicked it out and then somehow la looked like they were going to get it again, but not for 2024, but for 2028. And the whole time they were selling the idea of we're going to do it again. It'll be, it'll be like LA 84 again. There was very much kind of like a make America great again, kind of vibe to it. And then for a lot of like more affluent, whiter communities in LA, they remembered the LA 84 Olympics like very positively because it was, quote, no traffic, and it, you know, quote, made money for the city.

And so I was, you know, I'm a journalist by day. And as this process was happening, and I was getting more radicalized and getting more into organizing myself around housing and homelessness and policing, it became very apparent that LA was going to like default its way into another Olympics. And I started looking deeper into LA84 with some other people I was organizing with. And it was just a horror show of like all sorts of, in all sorts of directions, um, that had been kind of very, you know, conveniently whitewashed in the media. Um, the big things in la d4 were were were policing and and land grabs and and all and everything in between so we had daryl gates

who was one of like arguably one of the worst law enforcement officers like in american history he's like that famous um he's a little bit before my time, but everyone I know who remembers him just talks about what a monster he is. He was famously the one who was pushing the chokeholds. And he's a major reason driving the police force of like, you know, all the civil unrest that happened in the 90s. But he was basically given, you know, the LAPD has always been bad. Like every other, like major city police force has always been bad. And we don't, we don't argue that any of these problems kind of are invented out of, you know, thin air, like they're, they're an accelerant.

Right. But we had a bad police department that was given the pretext and the toys to just, um, really do what they've always wanted to do but under the pretext of doing something that has like a disneyfied kind of air to it that was like feels benign because of the marketing machine behind it and so in addition to the lapd getting trained by the idf um and having i think what was called at the time, the largest, the largest law enforcement and, um, military occupation during peacetime in American history. Uh, they got all sorts of toys that you would see when I say toys,

obviously I mean like violent machines of like police violence and state violence, like, like, um, tanks battering rams that you would see later in the eighties being used to like just literally destroy entire homes in south la um and so the policing aspect of it was was really kind of clear and there's a lot of documentation it wasn't just like speculation wherever this was well documented the la times the new york times um but culturally it had kind of been erased in favor of this, this narrative of, oh, we didn't have traffic because there was a, there was a major campaign to, um, dissuade people

from using their own infrastructure during the time the Olympics were coming because we wanted to put on a good face for all these international tourists and travelers. Um, and so the other big myth from the LA four Olympics was that they made money. They brought in, um, a Republican to run the 84 games peter uber off who eventually became the major league baseball commissioner and he was kind of active in some other um areas in sports uh in sports but he he basically ran the olympics like a business like you know like running the city like a business kind of politician and he found all these kind of new ways to make money off corporate sponsorships so they were the nickname for these the 84 olympics was actually the

capitalist games um and that's how they technically did produce a surplus quote unquote from the operating budget but the problem with the operating budget is it doesn't account for all these other resources whether it's police, whether it's transit that go into the equation and get leveraged but aren't included. So the city always ends up spending more than it makes back and it never really makes a profit. And so that's why the Olympics in 84 was kind of this unusual experience. However, so it had a few million dollars left over. None of that money went back to the city. It went to a private foundation that is now controlled by people who are investing that money into Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, the people that are destroying the communities and the planet. really hard on that group they're called the la 84 foundation they're kind of a classic neoliberal scam um but in general they've had before we came along a pretty positive reputation because la is a media desert basically we have one newspaper and the newspaper is media partners with the olympics and the la 84 foundation so they've never really been quote-unquote objective nor do we expect them to

be but so we've kind of over the last three years i think punctured a lot of these myths and because of what's been happening in the last few months i think a lot of la is starting to catch up to these narratives and really starting to pay attention and question policing especially and there's so much evidence of the 84 games with policing there's also all sorts of land grabs because the two interests that usually push an olympic bid are whether politicians private security and policing interests and developers uh in addition to like telecom and media interests more and more but the la 84 olympics basically set the standard for the the capitalism on steroids version of the olympics they were before they were bad before 1984 but you just saw an escalation in everything

like ronald reagan was literally at the opening ceremonies i think the only american president doing all his make america all you know that was the re-election year it was a couple months before the re-election it's just if you really look at it in the lens from what we know now, it's like it's a horror show. Anyway, I always get excited about LA84 because it's kind of held up as the one time America fixed the Olympics. And it's dripping with both LA and American exceptionalism and nationalism and McDonald's and Coca-Cola

and all the reasons that sports capital is like fucked up everything. And it's fucked up our police department forever. Like it's now it has tanks because of that. And that's normalized. They sugarcoated the the, you know, the tanks destroying, you know, quote unquote, cracktons when they're really just, you know, people's houses that might be suspected of something that started with the Olympics then. Yeah, totally.

And my job recently has been doing a lot of research in L.A. history. And not only did it help kind of create the circumstances and all the tension that led to the 92 uprising, but the people we've been looking a lot at recovery narratives, both from COVID and from the racial uprising now to see how has L.A. 84, Tom Bradley, who's problematic for a lot of reasons, he hired the guy Peter Uberoth from the Olympics to run the rebuilding effort of L.A., which is like a night. There's no reason Peter Uberoth, like a Reagan Republican, should be doing that. And they did it using this very corporatized nonprofit approach to it. And it was a massive failure. And anyway, so that's kind of and most people in LA do not know that history. So we're kind of whether whether they're from here or transplants like myself. And so a lot of our work is just educating people about what went wrong in 84, what went

wrong in response to 92. And what's been going wrong ever since then with regards to development and over policing. And now you can see it being a national narrative, what's going on with policing budgets, obviously. So it's, it's like an interesting time for our story to come out there, I think. Absolutely. And, you know, just doing a bit of cursory research for this episode, I did try to find, you know, any criticisms of the 84 Olympics in Los Angeles on the first few pages of Google, and you just can't really. It's all positive. I read one Curbed article. It was a real estate website that was long as hell. I skimmed it. It was all praising the Olympics. It's all, oh, it came in on time and under budget, and it made money and all this stuff, except for they had one brief sentence about how,

I guess, in order to make the city look nice, they painted the houses of people who are living in desperate poverty in order to make them more color symmetry. But you mentioned also real estate developers and something we'll talk about a little bit more in this episode is a billionaire named Rick Caruso. According to Forbes, he's worth about $3.4 billion as of June 2020. And, you know, like you said, real estate developers definitely have an interest in pushing these kinds of major sporting events. Yeah, totally. You know, a lot of people don't know the reality of what happened in 84. And even fewer people know what happened in the 1932 Olympics, because that was the first time LA hosted them. And I just read a book recently about it. And that was literally a real estate developer's idea. And he got together with the six newspaper tycoons at the time.

And they're like, let's sell L.A. as a single family oasis. And that's why they did the Olympics. And they were very open about it. So that's kind of in our DNA of constant reinvention and reselling under different real estate speculation premises, basically. Yeah, I've read up a little bit on some economic development reports about past Olympics. portray it in terms of like how did the output increase or the gdp increase for the city as a result of the olympics activities and it does usually increase but that's a very crude measurement of development as any development economist will tell you and they usually when you dig down below kind of those surface level metrics, you find that it's at best uneven and at worst like deleterious to public housing and like social welfare programs. So like it has like, um, the output is all going to basically McDonald's and, um, Coca-Cola, Pepsi,

and also to real estate speculation. I was reading another paper that concluded that the Beijing Olympics in 2008 led to an exacerbated real estate cycle. So it had higher highs and lower lows as a result of all the speculation that people were doing as to uh capture i guess the option value of holding a investment property due to the olympic stuff that was being built around it just environmentally

i was assuming that would happen in la in 2024 if they end up doing it. Yeah, I mean, I've been doing deeper research on, you know, hotel subsidies and kind of their return, right? Because it's a similar argument and it's very related to the Olympics as well about all these promises of jobs and the boon to the economy most of this stuff and this is coming from more like centrists or people who's like politics i don't align with agree that the the return kind of like the same with like publicly financed stadiums in general is very specious and it's very hard to track and you know you brought up beijing in 2008 and you know the number i see quoted um is 1.5 million evictions happened over the decade before that for the olympics so it's like there's no figure that's ever going to convince me that like mass evictions are like

worth it you know what i mean yeah but but it's but but yeah there's not a lot of convincing you know it's we're always like oh when there's money changing hands or financial arguments being made it's always yeah i'm sure someone is profiting, but it's who is profiting, right? Like who's consolidating the contracts, you know, maybe,

maybe service workers get an extra two weeks of work of overtime that they otherwise wouldn't have gotten. But what good is that if they're priced out of their community, you know what I mean? Kind of, it's, it's really, there's not a lot of, the money is fast and it's, that's why, you know, capital is very good at making sure that small businesses

get cut out because a lot of times small businesses are promised a lot of things no matter where they are. Yeah. The Olympics come out of the world's fair. So they're very similar to the world's fair and they're basically marketed the way the world's Fair is, which is just sort of like a grift on cities that they're going to come in and bring all this new commerce and, you know, shake up the infrastructure, but not actually. They're just going to come in and fleece everybody for a few months and then leave town like a carnival yeah the really the the really horrible example from la 84 of this of this happening um that again like no one in 84

no one in city hall knows about apparently because we've talked to them and they look at us like we're speaking you know a different language and they say basically they promised a lot of small black uh mom and pop uh owned businesses inA. that they would get all this. You know, they did all these contracts beforehand. And what happens in the lead up to every Olympics is the closer you get, the financial interests that are pushing it will push everything out and nothing else matters. They'll blow everything else out. So if you have other civic projects, this will absorb all the resources. If you make small if you make promises to small businesses, they will not be honored.

So you'll see like literally streets blocked off and commandeered for whatever reason, if they want to, that might mean you can't access your business or you can't access your home. So for LA 84, I think over a dozen black owned businesses were bankrupted because of a bad, bad deals that the city didn't honor. And they sued the city a year later for millions of dollars and they won because it was that egregious. So we saw that in Pyeongchang in 2018, you know, a small skiing village, basically all those base, all the small businesses there were furious because they you could not access their part of town. And so if anything, not only does it not help, it usually gets screwed and crushed.

Like street vendors, which are a huge part of LA culture, it's like they will not be anywhere near Olympic venues. And their living depends on this. So they will, who knows what's going to happen, you know? Right, and also because they're going to allow ICE to have free reign of the city if they do have the Olympics. So, you know, another reason why most people would not want to be near the Olympics.

It'll be, you know, we saw what it will be like. We saw a little preview the past few weeks, you know, when they brought in the National Guard and just had them parked on every major tourist street, you know, they will occupy the entire city. Yeah, in 2002, the first Olympics in America after 9-11 and under the, you know, this what they designated National Special Security Event. So for the Super Bowl, for the RNC, the DNC, the World Cup, and the Olympics, it's a joint command between DHS and local law enforcement.

And a whistleblower came out a few years ago, I believe from the NSA in like 2015, and said, oh, for 2002, we just stole so much civilian data across the city for no reason. I mean, obviously for reasons, but no specific purpose just because they could. And that just happens with every Olympics. You just find out all these things that the surveillance and police state have done. Now with Tokyo next year too, your face is basically the ticket for the 2020 Olympics if they happen, and that's basically the ticket for the 2020 Olympics if they happen. And that's what the people want to make it happen for 2028 to normalize facial

recognition. So you see policy start to shift six, seven, eight years out in front of an Olympics to make sure all this happens as frictionless as possible. Now, taking a short step back, you mentioned a lot of evictions, you know, people like losing their homes. I was wondering how that manifests specifically, whether it's basically rent prices being driven up just because of the Olympics being in town or whether there's a lot of use of eminent domain to force people out of their homes for Olympic venues and that sort of thing. Or, you know, or most likely a combination of both. It's a whole like, you know, arsenal of tools that happen now, displacement, because we, you know, we have a big stadium, the most expensive stadium in American history going up in Inglewood. And I was getting an argument with someone the other day saying that, oh, there was nothing there before. It was a parking lot. So there's no displacement.

And you're like, that's obviously not just how the only way displacement works right so classically uh before kind of the rise of the airbnb it was mostly in the format of yeah just like raising buildings um having policy changes or regulations suspended because it's like a planned like state of exception in the years before the olympics um the big one in California is CEQA, which will come up later with our friend Rick Caruso, because he's talked about that's an environmental regulations, but they're trying to make like loosen those so you can build for other purposes. You know, a lot of things can be pushed through under the pretenses of the Olympics that might not otherwise happen. In LA right now, for example, we have

another another California law is called the ellis act which means if you change the nature of a property let's say from a rental to a hotel like a commercial space you can you can legally do that you have to pay like a relocation fee but um it basically incentivizes raising low-income housing to build luxury housing or hotels or mixed use stuff. So we know people that live by the Coliseum right now, that as early as 2018, have started the eviction process, because of they want to create more hotels for 2028. So it's not only taking off much, much needed, low income housing in LA, and we're like the most uninhabitable city right now. And it's turning into something for an event in 12 years.

So it's taking off housing stock, adding stuff we don't need that will raise the help, raise the rents, you know, in gentrifying areas to make them more affordable. That would indirectly help price out other people for the next decade. There's also Airbnb. Airbnb announced a 10 year partnership with the Olympics last fall. They've taken a big hit from COVID, but they've bounced back really hard because obviously people want to get the fuck out of their houses right now. Airbnb similarly, I don't know how much y'all know about that, but very much contributes to

the lack of affordable housing in cities because it's basically taking off housing from the market, right? It's like making housing more scarce and driving demand up and driving prices up. And so that there are literally, you know, LLCs running 20 different Airbnbs in LA. It's not just someone who has an extra room in their house. You know, there's so many people abusing that. So we're fighting them directly to that. That 10 year contract goes right through the end of right after 2028 Olympics. It's interesting to bring up Airbnb, too, because the 2024 Olympics in Paris were pushed in by a more progressive mayor than ours that actually ran on an anti-Airbnb platform.

So now she's got the hotel industry furious at her in Paris and creating a weird wedge that still hasn't been resolved. So hotels, Airbnb, all sorts of other weird speculation around that. Eminent Domain is sometime used in LA to destroy destroy public or we don't have much public housing left, but low income housing. That's famously what happened for Dodger Stadium. Obviously, the Clipper Stadium, which is next to the SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, is almost done being approved. And they're going to be using Eminent Domain to gobble up all sorts of businesses and property in the area. So, yeah, there's so many different ways. And obviously, different countries and different municipalities have their own different rules.

But a lot of us went to Tokyo last summer and met with anti-Olympics organizers from around the world. And we obviously came to the conclusion that obviously the context, the cultural context, the political context is different in these places. But in the big picture it all basically operates the same so they're doing the same shit in tokyo like we can look at tokyo right now in 2020 and be like this is what la is going to look like in eight years and it's a pretty good you know estimation of where we'll be and so it was good to go there but it was also really

frightening well i don't know it sounds to me like you both want to put all the hardworking steroid doctors out on the street. Yeah, I mean, yeah. We get that a lot, you know, like fun killers or like what, you know, there's obviously a Portlandia sketch about anti-Olympic stuff or whatever that we're just like looking for a problem. But it's, no, it's like, I mean, no, we get that a lot. Like more from the athletes, the people who really earnestly love the Olympics, they're like, if you look at what they're doing to the athletes historically and in the last year, from psychological, physical, sexual abuse, wage theft, like, rampant wage theft, especially for American athletes. You name it like these people are they're basically

treated like soldiers and their their bodies and their lives are disposable right it's the same thing of like oh you should want to like completely destroy your body for patriotism money what's that you don't need money you're doing it for the good of you know unless you lose and then we don't need you anymore yeah like. Like Molly said, you know, that the Olympics were born out of the, um, the world's fair, which is basically as old as our like American, you know, university systems and other things like modern policing. You know what I mean? It's like, there are all these institutions that have had a certain lifespan and seem like they may be kind of, especially the NCAA comparison is, is apt because the Olympics hide behind the veil of like amateur may be kind of especially the NCAA comparison is is apt because

the Olympics hide behind the veil of like amateurism somehow these are the best athletes in the world at whatever they do so it's it's nuts that they've gotten away with that for over 100 years but I think people are finally from all different angles figuring it out but they can't we're trying to help synthesize that yeah Yeah. I would imagine that the no Olympics movement, like some of them, some of y'all are actually really serious sports fans and you're kind of in agreement that, yeah,

I mean, I would, well, personally, like I would love to have all of those games. I just don't want there to be unequal development tied to it. And like there, there's probably a way to host as big of a mega sports event

without having a serious deleterious effect on workers basically well i think you're seeing this with all the leagues it's like no billionaire should be in charge of any of this stuff because they will use it to exploit people in places. So, you know, if there's going to be sports, then there have to be leagues that are owned by the players. You know, you see with the NFL and the NBA, they're like dealing with this too now under COVID. It's like they want everyone to just like get right back to work, even though it's totally

dangerous and dangerous for the players and like anybody who works in those leagues but the the desire for just you know to make money the push to make money above all else is so strong that you know some people see like the human carnage of this and they really don't care because they just want to like wave that flag you know um my grandmother was a athlete who's a german jew who was um going to be on the german track and field team in the 1936 olympics um and she was toyed with essentially uh when the germans were deciding whether or not they had to keep jews on the team if the world was really going to boycott if they didn't. But they ended up dropping my grandmother from the

team. You know, they really like used her. And she was really upset also, because she would have won, you know, and then she's also like, well, if I had won, who knows what would have happened to my family, you know, I would have been expected to heil Hitler on the podium. So I think I've always because of that personal connection, I've always been thinking about like, how did the Olympics relate to fascism and nationalism and, you know, questioning anything that's that's selling us nationalism or selling us, you know, world togetherness, because it feels it always felt something about it felt very propaganda is stick to me and then finding out from this work about things like that the Nazis invented the torch relay for the 1936

Olympics you know makes a lot of sense especially since we've seen a lot of torches reappear as a fascist symbol recently. You know, it puts it all in this context. But we've also seen with No Olympics work, it's like we've actually sort of built this international solidarity that the Olympics are always claiming they care about of like everybody coming together for a day. And instead, it's like we've met people from all the major cities that have you know had olympic bids or had olympics come and ravage the city and every city has the same problem every city has not enough public housing you know a huge uh homelessness issue because of the issue of

housing and it's all of that same stuff which is just pushing profit above you know human need basic need yeah totally it's like we don't need we don't need billionaires we don't need coca-cola to have sports like we can do other things and a lot of people and myself included like the left has staged a lot of different over you know it's been a while now it's been decades now but like successful kind of alternatives to the Olympics, the workers Olympiad in Chicago and different European cities, because these criticisms aren't, aren't new by any means. So, yeah, we feel like, and we've been saying this all along and now with COVID first and what's happening with the state violence uprising stuff has really, I think, hopefully made people question what sports is, where it fits a play. You know, like, will NBA players risk their lives to go to Celebration Florida

or will they, like, fight back against the owners? Like, maybe they will. Like, maybe we can reimagine sports in the next couple of years. Or if they do go and it gets all fucked up, you know, like, why should they trust the owners? The owners clearly do not have their, you know, and you see that anytime a player gets injured, it's like they instantly become, you know, useless to a team if they can't play anymore. Which is how capitalism works. It's like if you can't make money, you have no value. And that is the dumbest way to possibly

uh think of a human being yeah and our basic deal is like anything else and i think this is really like resonant is that like it's not about reforming the olympics right it's like this is designed to break cities if this stuff doesn't happen by accident that's the point it's designed to extract capital the way that like a factory is designed to like extract capital from workers. It's like designed to take out more than it can give back and to leave town before it has to be accountable for giving anything back. So that's the thing. It's like they could, you know, if they wanted to even have the appearance of trying to put something where they go, they would, you know, build housing and leave it. But none of them do that because it's also like

none of them have any reason to be invested in the cities because they just are moving on to the next one, you know? There's no accountability mechanism by design. They suck out all the blood and then they move on to the next victim. Well, I think that's a good segue for just both of you to tell our listeners about No

Olympics Los Angeles Coalition and basically with the question of, so what's your goal? Like, can you stop the 2028 LA Olympics or, you know, and obviously if people want to help, what should they do? But, you know, kind of how you got into it, what the organization does and what the objective is. And I want to just note for the listeners, I think you got into it, what the organization does and what the objective is. And I want to just note for the listeners, I think Molly got into character for this with the no Olympics mug. There's a fun story behind that mug. Oh, yeah. I made it at Color Me Mine when I was interviewing Haley Bieber, Justin Bieber's wife.

So you got soft support from the Bieber clan. Yeah, a little bit. She came out for Bernie, which I was like, alright, alright. I compared Nolympics to other types of organizations. I was like, you know, you gotta meet friends. We were talking about church, and I was like, I have a group of friends that we meet and talk about things that we are thinking and feeling. Yeah. So to answer your question, yeah, we, um, we've been going kind of nonstop for three years, you know, it was always born out of, it was born out of a DSA LA chapters, homeless

and housing and homelessness. Um, yeah, this is like the longest lead time anyone's ever had to try and stop an Olympics. So, you know know one of our things we've always said is like so many things could happen between now and 2028 that would make it impossible you know or just not like major economic or feasible other events that would change the complexion of it so we've already we're already seeing that happen you know and and it is part of the grift is that everybody who voted this in which was all without any input from the people of la it was all just city council and they're all

in the pocket of these developers and so is the mayor they're all going to be gone for the most part especially the mayor will be like you know he's gone in a year and a half yeah like it's not there's a reason why they're doing these deals so they can leave town before, you know, the shit hits the fan. Like, all of this, you know, we want to make L.A. this great city that, you know, everybody loves to be part of. It's like, well, if you wanted to do that, you would address homelessness by building housing and you would, you know, not evict people from their homes during a pandemic. Right. Yeah. No, I think so.

I think to answer your question it's it feels like realer than ever we've always lived in a world where like any outcome is possible like being realistic like other people have fought the olympics and not been able to stop them you know that's a very real possibility but now it looks very possible that like even tokyo 2020 2021 might not happen because there's a big governor election in tokyo where people are running specifically to cancel the election as the as their as the major the tip of their platform what i said election cancel sorry cancel the olympics um that's a good platform too though yeah can't be actually no presidents this year that's actually i would support that

supporting just not having a president for the next four years um careful what you wish for I mean no actually I'll take that chaos um but no so it feels like it's a possibility um you know they're like like there's no public support for this there was a poll that said 88% of people wanted to do like the support of the olympics that was paid for in part by the olympics it took us a few years to find this out. We did our own polling, which showed very different things. But I found out last Christmas time that the guy who ran that poll, his name is Fernando Guerra at LMU.

At the time of his running the poll, he was a lobbyist for Sandstone Properties, which has at least four Olympic hotels in development and a deal with Uber for flying taxis for 2028. I shit you not. So it's a completely astroturf bid. We have a situation where people in LA, a large amount of people give a shit about what's going on at city hall right now and where money is being spent in policing, which I was hoping was going to happen. I didn't imagine it was going to happen this quickly, like overnight almost. So the Overton window has shifted. I think anything is possible.

Capital has a really good way of kind of regrouping and coming back strong with recovery narratives and tying that to sports. I'm originally from New Orleans, so we saw what happened with the Saints after that and how the city's basically been privatized in the last decade. So it's like it can go a lot of ways. But after after Katrina.

Yeah. So basically, yeah, I mean, it has the same problems that all these other American cities are happening. But the last time I was home, like a year or so ago, the last public school had closed. It had gone full charter. It's a battle here um you know areas in new orleans i would never have seen becoming trendy or gentrified or becoming gentrified and i know a lot of people are fighting that and there's a lot of good work happening down there um but yeah and i think stuff like the sports narrative and coming back really helped non-profits

and other and then and the way sports is tied to non-profits and policing and gentrification just really got people not to think about these hard things when people just want to get back to normal. And that's a very, it's a relatable thing to want to have your sports back and to have your mega events back. But so anything feels possible right now, especially because people hate our mayor. They're very skeptical about other institutions now,

especially policing. And you've literally got like a week or two ago, the head of the L.A. police union, arguably one of the worst unions in existence, going on Fox News saying, well, if you guys defund the police and that means you can't have security for the 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Olympics. And we're like, great. Let's I think right now people's allegiance to an event eight years from now that they don't really even know is happening for most people is less strong than people's desire to fuck LAPD right now. And so we've seen just a lot of new members come to us. There's a lot of excitement. There's a lot of political energy on the left. It's like across groups and issues. We're also facing like upwards of like 500,000 evictions in the coming months to add on to our like 70,000 unhoused people now and that's a night

you know from most of us are coming from a tenant organizing background like that's the next nightmare that's coming but we're hoping that this all naturally threads together with the policing work because who who you know who carries out evictions? It's police. This is all threaded together. And I think sports now are being used as this mirage of normalcy of like, don't worry, there will be sports again.

Like football will be back in the fall and everything will be fine. And it's obviously really for racists, you know, because they're like, we don't want to deal with this because we're racists. So like, bring us back football. And it's like, obviously, everything is political, including sports.

And part of that politics is like worker conditions. And so, you know, even people who I think would love to not think about the worker conditions of athletes are being forced to think about it, which is good. Because they should. You shouldn't get to just enjoy things without having to think about it. That world is gone. Yeah. And as much as the push to reopen is going to happen, it's like I work in an industry that is just was crumbling before COVID. And we're going to have a big alienated workforce, too. And a lot of people are hungry for knowledge that they've been starved of or L.A.'s own history is like constantly being whitewashed in particular. I'm sure it's happening everywhere, especially it's an la thing and um yeah i think the next six months is going to be a roller coaster

of a lot of like who like i i can't even pretend to know what's going to happen in six months so unlike our mayor who said in 2017 like what happens if la gets a big earthquake his response was something like oh i'm pretty pretty sure UCLA will still be around. L.A. is a resilient place. Our mayor currently, too, is it's he's not only our problem. Potentially, he's also everyone's problem because he's also on the co-chair. He's a co-chair for the Joe Biden campaign. So if Joe Biden becomes president, it's very likely that eric garcetti will be um in the cabinet somewhere my gut says like a climate position will be created for him or even secretary of state because he has some weird military like butch stuff going on um

because he still has presidential ambitions i think i don't know if he's going to be able to after this whole lapd mess but no he's done he's cooked but he's he's well healed billionaires love him so he's just not of other rich people though i know but like he can be like if we run all the rich people out well that's the that's the dream right that's what this podcast is for that's yeah yeah it is it is funny how state and local politicians are so good at pretending to care about climate change because they they don't necessarily have the power of someone in the senate um to do anything about it and so they can just you know say things about it and then do all the you know under the table deals that no one's ever going to see with polluters and whatnot 100 percent you know garcetti is the head of like the c40

international mayor's group he's branded himself really hard and we work sunrise la's in our coalition i think to answer someone else's question from earlier we have a bunch of groups from climate to racial justice abolition groups tenants, tenants groups in LA, LA Tenants Union, Black Lives Matter, Ground Game, like a couple dozen groups. I'm definitely forgetting some. And yeah, he's co-opting the language of the left saying, oh, this is LA's new green deal he rolled out last year. It's trash.

It's trash. And the Olympics just make it worse, you know, because you're diverting all these other resources and energy and years of, you know, municipal time and energy away from where it's needed, no matter where you are. There's something that your city needs and it's this is going to suck away from it. Yeah. But so that's a good transition into kind of the theme of this podcast, which is, of course, billionaires. But also we often ask the question, who benefits?

You know, who benefits from the L.A. Olympics? And one of the people that we're going to talk about briefly now is Rick Caruso. We mentioned at the top of the podcast, a billionaire, according to Forbes, $3.4 billion net worth. Forbes also gives him a 7 out of 10 self-made score, which is a little bit amusing because I found a New York Times article that said that Rick Caruso grew up in Beverly Hills, California. His father was a millionaire who owned a whole bunch of car dealerships and apparently also started the dollar rent-a-car. And I will just, Rick Caruso got his start as a property developer, but I'll just read you this sentence from the New York Times.

He worked as a lawyer before getting into real estate by buying property and leasing it to his father's business, unquote. So when you say seven out of 10 self-made score, he had the smartest and most innovative real estate empire strategy, which was to use his dad's money to buy real estate and then lease it back to his father. So seven out of 10 self-made score. But maybe you could just tell us and our listeners a bit more about Rick Caruso in general and also how he relates to the 2028 Olympics. Yeah, before I got into politics, I just knew him as the guy who's a big mall developer. Yeah, he developed these horrible malls in L.A. that everybody loved that are basically Disneyland malls. They're like outdoor malls that are themed a little bit. But Johnny found this amazing article from the LA Times in 2004, where they profiled Rick Caruso, where he was in New Orleans walking around on Bourbon Street and just going like, ugh, disgusting.

He just like, he hated Bourbon Street because it was like, you know, grimy and like a real place. So he, but he likes like theme details, which is also like there is a New Orleans part of Disneyland for the same reason that Walt Disney was like, oh, like this would be great without all the, you know, actual be great without all the actual history and all the riff-raff. Yeah, like a faint air of actual fun. So yeah, he

developed these small, the Calabasas Commons, I think was the first one, and then he's built a bunch of malls just like that that are fake Italian and play like Sinatra andael buble on like you know speakers everywhere and have a trolley but um they're totally fake public spaces they're super you know have a lot of security um and they said basically a vision of like the city under an

olympic rule with no, no unhoused people. You get a $500 ticket for smoking cigarettes at the Glendale Americana, and they will give you that ticket. Right. They're like an indoor mall turned outside, but it's a fake town. So that makes it more insidious because it's like this creepy. It looks like a public space, but it's very privatized. Yeah. People can live there at some of the malls upstairs. it's like this creepy it looks like a public space but it's very privatized yeah people can

live there at some of the malls upstairs i don't know who does that weird like european rich people or something like but yeah apparently it's like you know all the developers love him and he got the approval to build the grove because his dad was best friends with a member of city council who was like let my son my millionaire son build his fun little project that everybody in the neighborhood's opposed to and they were like sure of course yeah and it's now it claims that's the grove that's the big famous one in the middle of like hollywood where they do what the mario lopez show or whatever and they claim to have more like daily visitors than disneyland it's like yeah it's just a mall. It's just a mall.

Yeah, and that was the one, too, that people were, you know, spray painting, tagging and stuff during the uprising around the Fairfax district. And there was, like, this idiotic wave of people who were like, oh, God, not the Nordstroms. You know, protect the Nordstroms. And, like, came out to, like, wash the BLstroms you know protect the nordstroms and like came out to like wash the blm you know spray paint off of it the next day yeah so it's like people have this civic

pride about the grove even though it's only been there since 2004 yeah and rick caruso is probably i would say like easily in the top 10 of you LA has, I think, 59 billionaires technically now. Although hard to quantify because everyone has second, third, fourth homes in all these big cities anyway. But we're up there. But I would say he's probably one of the 10 worst. He's got a yacht. Yeah, he's one of the 10 worst people in LA. He's got a yacht called Invictus.

Invictus, yeah. That is. But his history is threaded through Um, he, but he like, he's, he's, his history is threaded through USC, which full disclosure, I went there for undergrad. So I can definitely say what might be the most corrupt academic institution on the planet. Um, at least in America. Um, yeah, we were saying too, it's like, it's, you know, it functions the same way as like Ivy league schools, which is like for all these people to meet each other and form connections and then also use like alumni fundraising to grift. Yeah, I mean, like any major either private or public school in a city, particularly private schools that I'm aware of, it's one of the biggest landowners, developers itself.

Rick Caruso went there in the early 80s when USC got rebranded as a serious school like in the later 90s. He was there back in the day when it was lily white, you know, rich kids from LA and Orange County, like all white essentially, besides like athletes.

When it was more of a party school, he was an SAE I know. And that is like, when you imagine what the worst fraternity at usc would be like that is sae um uh he so he comes out of that tradition just real good old boy network went to law school and then realized oh there's actually he's doing like real estate law but then realized the money isn't actually development. Then he somehow got into with Mayor Bradley, the guy who bought the 84 Olympics in. He got it. He was on the DWP for a minute, like Department of Water and Power.

He's clearly making a lot of money and getting involved in a lot of other areas. And I think in the beginning of the 2000s, when the LAPD was trying to rebrand after the nightmare of the 80s and the 90s. He was on the Police Commission, which is a very, you know, powerful position in LA. Yeah, there's this weird merry-go-round of people that shuffle between the Police Commission, the DWP, like baseball team ownership and developers. And that's who runs LA. And probably every city is just like, you know know totally out of touch with the people that live in the city just a bunch of like rich white guys and a lot of them are are like second generation rich white guys um uh Rick Caruso is on the bid but so is Casey Wasserman who's a sports

agent in LA that um also very corrupt and also comes from a corrupt dynasty of Lou Wasserman who was a famously corrupt agent who founded one of the big agencies who was in deep with the mafia and so the quick hits on Casey Wasserman

where grandfather was in the mafia was friends with all these actors literally got ronald reagan into politics so we can thank him for that um his son casey's dad jack myers got in trouble in the late 80s also with the mafia in some fbi sting for some bribes and financial crimes casey grows up super wealthy gets to know know Eric Garcetti as a rich kid. They both go to Harvard Westlake. Are those the fireworks?

Yeah, those are the fireworks. Yeah, yeah. Told you. Told you you'd hear some. That's real. Yeah, that does sound different than what's going on here. Yeah, right?

CIA is trying to disrupt the recording. That's just a sigh off. Yeah. They get the message in their slack channel to go to Andy's address and set off their M80s podcast trying to stop the Olympics take them out

Rick Caruso's dad also had a court case caught a case about a lot of financial stuff and then he was like magically pardoned in 1970 so it's like, I feel like these guys also come back later to be like, Oh,

actually like your grandfather's legacy was squeaky clean and he founded this agency and everybody loves him. And so let's continue. Yeah. Some quick hits on Casey Wasserman. So he, he took his grandfather's name, not his dad because his dad was more disgraced than his grandfather.

He owned an arena football team team which is only notable for i think having a player die during a game he tried to get an nfl stadium built with our mayor during the aughts which is a big colossal fuck up he was very much on some george w bush energy of like get a sports agency or screw around and he somehow kind of started like really turning a profit recently which sucks um he um well he's made himself be like i'm the sports super agent you know i'm jerry mcguire or whatever but it's like he was on the epstein plane oh yeah he was on the epstein plane he's in that famous vanity fair article that mentions uh clinton spacey and chris tucker but his name is never mentioned in that and anytime he's written about that no one ever mentions that. He's one of these people who's rich and influential, but not necessarily

famous, and doesn't want to be, because that means being held accountable for this kind of stuff. But yeah, he was on one of the flights, in the Epstein flight logs, that they went on a trip to Africa, supposedly for AIDS vaccine research or something, and it was

a creative way of framing it. It was Chris Tucker and Bill Clinton and Kevin Spacey. It's in Vanity Fair. It's well documented. It was mentioned in all the news stuff. We've been trying to get people to write about it. He locked down his social media on July 24th

last year when we were in Tokyo. And the first... It's also locked down a year later. Because he represents like Megan Rapinoe, you know? So I was like, hey, like Megan Rapinoe shouldn't be represented by somebody who was like, you know, hanging out with child traffickers on an international flight. I feel like it shouldn't be controversial to say that anybody who was on the Epstein plane like should not have power and money.

And just to back up for a second for the listeners, according to Casey Wasserman's Wikipedia, he is the man who led, like, the leader of Los Angeles's bid for the 2028 Olympics. So this is the guy who's probably, more than anyone else, most responsible for this. Yeah, he is the most connected to it. Eric Garcetti, the mayor he it was for his political vanity and to like kind of level up the way mitt romney used the salt lake olympics earlier to kind of get on the national stage and for wasserman it's like to make his own profit because he'd be the person

that would be repping like the gold medalists and he's selling the sponsorships because he's he's also a co-board member in vox he has he has a lot of interest in a lot of other media companies. So like you were saying earlier, he's just doing all the contracts to himself. And he's got money in stadiums. He's got money in everywhere. He gives millions to the L.A. Police Foundation. So when the L.A. Bid Committee was coming together, he personally called a couple buddies to raise 60 million dollars to create all the propaganda for the bid um during the bidding process we found out that one of the companies that he gave a contract to was one of his own media companies and he claimed he was out of it

was like over a million dollars he claimed he was out of the room when that conversation happened and the press the press you know reprints this uncritically it's insane but it's him and all of his rich buddies got together and said let's make a fuck ton of money based on these other stadiums that are kind of already in progress we're going to magically get this and it's great and we'll make a lot of money and hopefully people won't care about all the bad stuff that happens so we can we can um cover it up enough so papa john you want to throw papa john in and oh this is the best so you so casey waserman you know i told you both of his his dad and his grandfather were both well known for money

laundering with the mob um he bought a pr firm called laundry service a few years ago um all right that's an ominous name or that that's a... Two on the nose. Yeah, all of this shit is just two on the nose. And he's... One of his clients was Papa John during Papa John's crisis PR stage when he had to go... When he said the word you're not supposed to say on a call when you're trying to prove that you're not a racist.

Mission accomplished to that PR firm. Can hang up a giant banner. Yeah, exactly. So after that blow up you know the laundry service or whatever got a lot of bad pr and uh and a big fight internally happened and apparently casey wasser uh papa john has a tape recording of casey wasserman threatening to like ruin papa john or in something in a way that is like crosses a legal line. So now Papa John is suing him and I think might have the upper hand and the moral high ground in this situation. So that's who we're dealing with. Larry Nassar, who is, you know, this massive abuser of Olympic gymnasts, umasts had several hundred survivors come forward a couple years ago, kind of when we got gymnastics. It's swimming, taekwondo, boxing, you name it. It's like the Catholic Church,

the levels of unaccountability are beyond compare. And Casey Wasserman's response was, yeah, you know, we see you, we hear you. Cool. Like, you know, like, we'll be better. Like, he won't listen to them. It's just, it's maddening kind of what happens sometimes. And how Molly said, he's like the right level of famous and powerful that most people in L.A. have never even fucking heard of him.

Right. Well, you know, and what I was taking away from what you just told us is that we might actually get to, in a few years, read the news story that papa john strangled himself in his prison cell yeah he committed suicide um because of the grief um probably because he had too much garlic sauce yeah yeah had too much congealed garlic sauce um no casey was by stuffing a rat dipped in garlic sauce in his own room yeah he killed himself by eating an entire papa john's pizza yeah exactly no but i mean it's like you look at a hundred years ago and the conditions were you know and just in general and you know the yellow journalism happening and you know he obviously has his fingers in every pie there is in

la and our next big goal is really getting people to pay attention to not just casey wasserman but steve sober off and caruso anduso even caruso they know what the grove is but most people don't know who he is and he wants to run for mayor too so that's why he's equally scary because he's kind of a comp he's like what if casey wasserman and eric garcetti had a you know like had a baby and all these guys are like patting themselves on the back so much for how great they all think they are it's like they're so removed from reality yeah i mean like look at a photo of rick caruso he looks like a madman like extra like reject it's people who are literally trying to make la feel like it's in the last century some you know idealized utopian version of it that

never existed yeah and like obviously rick caruso is a republican but yeah his his design aesthetic is so like eurocentric it is like just the opposite of what los angeles actually is or should be yeah casey casey just sold his house for 68 million dollars last week um i'm sorry 86 maybe it was originally 150 million dollars he sold it to his buddy david geffen and he also just bought paradigms music department because it's a he's on like a distress asset shopping spree he's like that level of you know rich when you're that rich you can fail over and over again and you always get more chances to fail yeah go back and look at photos from the 2000s of casey wasserman versus now like he was a fuck up for so long but he got a million chances and eventually started

hitting and now he's perceived to be you know he's in the philanthropic philanthropist he's in the philanthropist class now you know where people just assume his money is benevolent and it's kind of our job to make people uh just look under the rock a little bit and now people are willing to go do that and do that sniffing out uh to to just uh elaborate on the uh madman comment about uh rick caruso he's uh just to clarify he's the kind of guy who um he's kind of madman character where once um someone closes a door he says disgust something disgusting to a secretary that's the that's the kind of vibe you get from him is, you know, he's very nice to the executives. And then he reveals himself to be very gross.

Yeah. And just to say a couple more things about Rick Caruso, you know, you were talking about all this corruption and these bureaucracies like this. His Wikipedia did have one other funny thing that jumped out at me, which is under the header public service. It says that in 1985 at age 26, he was, as we mentioned, named to the Los Angeles department of water and power. This is under the header public service. And then two years later,

he mysteriously develops his own real estate firm. So it just gives you this like real, you know, Jack Nicholson's Chinatown kind of vibes where it's like, oh, so he gets in with the city government because of connections from his dad. And then suddenly he goes into real estate after, you know, clearly probably being involved in city planning, getting all these informational advantages that most people don't have. Oh, for sure. Another, I mean, it's's again obviously two on the nose but yeah it's

super chinatown we talk about all the time another connection like that is casey wasserman's father-in-law was peter uberoth's right-hand man for la 84 paul ziffrin so the co-architect of 84 is the father-in-law to the co-architect of the 2028 Games. Because why wouldn't it be? Of course it is, right? Like, you know how to run it. You know how to game it. It's a family business. You have the connections.

It is. It's organized crime. The IOC mafia. Oh, yeah. I mean, and just to touch briefly on the IOC, the International Olympic Committee, founded by a eugenicist, Pierre de Coubertin, Baron Coubertin.

He's a baron. To this day, I think 10% of the ioc is still european royalty um henry kissinger is an honorary member so henry kissinger gets paid more per diem to go fall asleep in the stands than most american athletes do to compete that's cool um all men of other financial criminals, European oligarchs in particular. The IOC is why the Olympics are bad, right? If it was the athletes and some accountability structures, maybe. But, you know, they're based in Lausanne, Switzerland, like down the street from FIFA. Now, see, FIFA is arguably maybe a little bit more openly corrupt, but like, you know,

they're based in Switzerland for a fucking fucking reason you know i mean like this is a high level extra national you know organized crime ring and um and it's it's weird because everyone kind of knows that even if you're not paying attention or quote unquote super political it's just the marketing power usually dominates that and makes us forget there's a reason it happens every four years and not every like two i mean i guess that you know the summer olympics only happen every four years i guess so it's wild and one last thing to to get to about rick caruso i did find an la times article from 2016 that pointed out as of 2016 he had made political donations to all but one of Los Angeles's 17 elected officials. And, of course, you know, the city government, he's making these political donations. These are the same people who approve his permits for building and all this stuff.

And in this article, they talk about a 20-story residential tower on La Senega Boulevard, which at the time was limited by zoning to a height of 45 feet. He makes all these political donations and they give him an exception and allow him to build up to 185 feet. So, I mean, you know, a lot of people, a lot of listeners will be aware of this, but this is just kind of the legalized bribery that greases the skids of so much of the American political system, these perfectly legal political donations. And I guess totally. And I guess just my question for you would be Rick Caruso's motivation for bringing the Olympics. I would assume this is just because he owns a lot of hotels. He just

wants the hotel business or any other speculation on that. I mean, I think he's also a racist, probably just he's a Republican who lives in la who builds these like fake italian open-air malls i mean i'm assuming that just based on the way he judged bourbon street i think he does he does want to turn la into like that you know whitewashed back lot that uh tourists think it is you know he wants to obliterate all traces of the real Los Angeles and replace it with this Disneyland version where all public space is actually private space and there is no real public space where you have to see the plebes. So I think he just doesn't care about the people who would get displaced

because he's going to make money. He's probably never met a poor person at this point. They're going to make money. I think with all of them there's a little bit of like prestige i think to it too but it's money i think we've mapped more people like casey who are who's like the financial you know leader of this and rick caruso's probably like one click removed from that but he's very much in the mix i'm sure but i would say it's mostly through real estate plays um but again i i'm not sure i'm sure his uh portfolio is really really spread out like i i i wouldn't be surprised if he was also had some interest in oakview group and some of

the other private security firms that are attached but um and it's and for him too he's a business person who's maybe thinking about running for mayor so again it's more about the prestige of running a successful olympics because no one else can do it it's like a it's like a rich guy sport kind of like the challenge of doing this um maybe that gets him off to an extent too it's hard to say oh and i said last thing about rick caruso but i would be remiss if I didn't mention one more. You mentioned earlier the corruption of USC, the college, of course. Caruso is the chairman of the board of trustees at his alma mater, USC. And not only that, when you talk about the corruption of USC, well, that was most famously illustrated by the news story where the federal government indicted wealthy people including the actress Lori Loughlin

I believe is how you pronounce it Lori Loughlin is apparently a close personal friend of Rick Caruso to the point where we also mentioned his yacht Invictus her daughter found out that her mother had been indicted over this while she was on Rick Caruso's

yacht at the time is when the news came out. Right, because these people all live in like a five block radius in Brentwood. And that's why it's ridiculous that they make any decisions for the rest of L.A. because they never fucking leave Brentwood. They live in their little suburb where they're like, what if we made Los Angeles more like, you know, the Hamptons, which is the weirdest choice also.

And they just stay there and go on their yachts and stuff. And, you know, the Hamptons, which is the weirdest choice also. And they just stay there and go on their yachts and stuff. And, you know, it doesn't affect them. Yeah, Recruits is the face of, like, trying to reform all the bullshit at USC because they've also had several massive sexual abuse scandals on top of that, sports-related scandals. They co-manage the Coliseumum which is just a historical controversy machine generating machine um there's so many fucked up things at usc uh but at the same time that presents opportunities for us to organize around because at this point the students are fed up the faculty

the adjuncts the the whole system the academic system is crumbling and you know usc is well endowed but they might be having some massive issues moving forward as well. And he's the face of it somehow. Yeah, it's probably not great for morale when your school's biggest news story of the last decade is a massive college admissions scandal. Oh, yeah. And there's probably more stuff still to come out. There's so much money flowing through their military. When that scandal came out and people were like, the USC scandal and i was like wait which one just think several of them in the past couple years even but yeah all these people think they can just use you know that money will will buy

the way out of the problems that money has made you know that if they just keep keep developing and keep throwing money at these problems none of it will ever come back to bite them in the ass but yeah people in la are realizing we're like oh building is not going to build us our way out of like housing these 600,000 people it's just taking the vacant space that is being sat on by rich people and expropriating that or turning into community land trusts or whatever like that's that's what a lot of my day job is about that's a lot of my organizing our organizing is trying to like imagine a future for los angeles like an alternative future to los angeles that is fully irreconcilable with the olympics like there's either la has the olympics and we're going to keep going down this horrible path that we've been on for the last 20 years if arguably for a long long time or we do something else and now

we're at this moment where just all the rules are you know all the bets are off and we don't know, but we think there's a possibility to challenge power here in a meaningful way and make space for someone way further left of Rick Caruso to be the mayor in a few years. All right. Well, I want to thank you both for joining us. This is very informative.

And Molly Lampert and Johnny Coleman of the No Olympics Los Angeles Coalition, thank you again. And I just wanted to give you a chance to tell people how they can help out No Olympics Los Angeles, as well as learn more about it, as well as just plug your own projects where people can find you on the Internet and all of that. Yeah. I'll plug my project first. I am on a podcast called Night Call. We are a dystopian call-in show. So check it out.

We're on the iHeartRadio network now. And you guys should all come on sometime and definitely leave us some calls. Hell yeah. And for Nolympics-related stuff, Nolympicsla.com. There's one O in there. At nolimpicsla on all your major socials. We just started a TikTok. I'm too old to understand it. But we have a bunch of younger folks who are really drill deep in different areas. We did a 10-part series a couple years ago where we did a whole hour just on 84, a whole hour just on fascism in the Olympics, a whole hour on you name it. So if you enjoy this and want to go deeper, we have plenty of other stuff. And yeah, thank you so much for having us. It's always great to be amongst like-minded people who are critical of the super wealthy

and not just treat these people like heroes. So we really appreciate it i also love the name grub stakers because for whatever reason it really specifically makes me think of scrooge mcduck molly's a big duck head i am the only good billionaire scrooge mcduck all right yeah and i also want to say too if anyone's interested in organizing and never done it before um we really like working with new people. And especially in this moment, we've been working with a lot of people who aren't based in L.A. That's what I was going to say. You don't have to be in L.A. to be in Nolympics L.A.

You don't even have to be specifically concerned with the L.A. Olympics. You can just be a general anti-Olympics, a general hater of the Olympics or hater of overblown sports capitalism at the expense of people yeah because it's not just this it's amazon you saw how they acted a few years ago with their hq it's yeah other sports development it's not just the olympics it's how mega event gentrification works so yeah so we're not the fun killers we're the fun qualifiers havers we're the fun havers we are the fun havers we have as much fun as i think you humanly possibly can um doing we definitely have more yeah we definitely have more fun than anyone's ever actually had at the olympics yeah anyhow yeah we're always growing

we welcome new people because that's how we're going to fight and win is across you know states and other you know imaginary borders and all that all that jazz all right well uh one more time thank you so much very interesting very instructive episode molly lampert and johnny coleman of uh no olympics los angeles coalition uh minor uh programming note with regards to grubstakers for our listeners we are taking a two-week summer break from the soundcloud uh we're going to have the usual patreon episodes but for the next two weeks the uh the soundcloud will not be up so so don't panic we haven't had a horrible falling out yet we just need a a vacation because of these

skype episodes uh but hopefully we will go and say and not in the entertaining way if we continue how we're doing it now. Yes, but hopefully the plan is, unless there is another massive outbreak, we will resume in-person episodes towards the end of July. But you can check for us. We should hopefully be back on the SoundCloud July 13th or 14th. But I want to thank you for your support. And one more time, thanks for our guests. Thanks for listening. I'm Sean P. McCarthy. Manny Palmer.

Steve Jeffries. All right. Good night.