The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 421: Edward Ring—What to do About Bass

Episode Date: January 14, 2025

Edward is the co-founder and director of water and energy policy for the California Policy Center. He's written voluminously on how to fix California's problems, and he has lots of thoughts about the Los Angeles wildfires: why they happened, who is getting it right, and who is getting it wrong.

It figures. The second this podcast begins, my mother calls. Hang on everybody. Let's just take a second. Hey, Mom. Uh-oh. You're busy. Well, I'm just recording a podcast right now, so say hi to everybody. Hi, everybody. I hope it's going well. Well, we literally just started, but I got to call you back, okay? That's fine. I just came from a wonderful concert. I'll tell you all about it. I can't wait to hear it. I love you. I'll meet you. Bye.

Okay, bye-bye. Hi, folks. I swear we didn't. set that up. That's my mom. She's just checking in on me, which I guess leads to the obvious question. How many people have checked in on you in the last five days? Ah, that's a good one, man. I mean, I would say probably 30 or more. Yeah, me too. And I don't even live down there, but they know the office is there. You were here. Yeah, you were here. Oh, God, folks. What a strange one. So it's the first podcast of the New Year, high and happy New Year.

If you've been following me on the Facebooks and so forth, you know, I've been writing about the greatest disaster in the history of California. That might be a bit much, you know, the earthquake was a big one. The earthquake was a biggie. Certainly the biggest in my lifetime, this thing is going to come in probably close to $200 billion in property damage, probably more. I mean, the fires are still burning as we're speaking, so who really knows? That's what I was going to say. Could be the costliest one, but we don't know yet because it's still going to. on. They're expecting more high winds tonight. Yeah. So just for some perspective here, this is the map of, you know, where you are. Where I am. I'm the little tiny blue dot in the center there. And you see

in between those fires. And I'm right on the edge of in the hot zone and, you know, be ready to bug out at any minute. Yeah. This is basically what's been happening, folks, as I'm sure you all know by now LA has been burning. And for a lot of people, we got real familiar real quick with an app called Watch Duty or Duty watch, which is it? You said Duty. No, you had it right. It's Watch duty. And it's no joke, man.

You check this thing to check the progress of the fire. And are you in the hot zone, the red zone, the red flag zone, the evacuation zone, evacuation adjacent zone? Microworks has been right on the edge of the zone next to evacuating, whatever heck that means. We've just been reduced to like gran'amels. It's like the world is a color-coded map that we check constantly. At least when I was down there, if you're watching this on video, you can see. I'm in a different type of canyon now. I'm in Manhattan, where we just filmed a new episode of People You Should Know.

that went great and finally took my mind off of the blaze for a bit, but I assume, Chuck, it's still very much on yours. Yeah, it's very much, very much on mine. And Rico's just about ready to jump out of his skin. He's here. He's in town because he's doing an episode of Suitz, L.A., in which he plays himself. And spoiler alert, he's kind of an asshole in the episode. More typecasting.

Right. But he's also here because he's getting a hip replacement surgery. And he's a little in his head because it's like at any minute we're ready to bug out. He doesn't want to postpone this because he's got more work. You know, he's on that hit show English teacher, which is coming back for a second season. He's going to start shooting that in February. Good for him. So there's a lot going on.

Or so he thinks. I mean, right now, anything going on in L.A. in February has to come with an asterisk. Well, no, they shoot in Atlanta, so they... Oh, never mind. Well, he's going to be fine, then. He'll be fine. Look, first thing, I mean, in all seriousness, thank you everybody for reaching out with your concerns.

Everybody at MicroWorks is fine. Chuck and I both know a lot of people who have lost everything in this mess, and it's a human tragedy. And honestly, if you're a friend of this podcast, you know that we don't really chase the headlines, and we try and find guests who are evergreen and talk about topics that hold up, you know,

for years to come. but honestly, Chuck, it feels weird. It feels a little tone deaf not to talk about this. So I kind of called an audible and messed up your whole schedule. I apologize, but... It's my stapler. It's my stapler. I am sorry about that.

But great call on Edward Ring, our guest today. If there's anybody better informed about the state of California, the state of water management, the state of land management, I don't know who it is. What's his business card say again? I just ask him and it totally went out of my mind. Director of Water and Energy Policy for the California Policy Center. He's the real deal. This is not going to be a big political conversation. We will touch on it because the title of this episode is called What to Do About Bass, which will be made even more clear as our conversation

unfolds. But I just thought it would be important and personally edifying just to get some answers to some questions that honestly, I'm not hearing from Governor Newsom, I'm not hearing from Vice President-elect Trump, I'm not hearing from President Biden. I'm just not getting answers from anyone. That's frustrating for me, but it's made a lot of people, a lot of Angelino's just downright angry. And there's going to be a lot of anger and there's going to be a lot of confusion and there's going to be a lot of blaming. And, you know, as I say to Edward, I'm not trying to pounce. I don't want to play a blame game and I don't want to get political.

But damn it, there has to be some accountability. And we have to understand what went wrong and what can be done to fix it, irrespective of D's and ours next to the names of elected officials. We just have to get their brother. And I don't know how we're going to do it unless we talk honestly. Preach. That's just it. I mean, look, everybody in this town is really fed up.

We've had alarms that have gone off saying you need to evacuate right away, followed by oops. No, that was just a mistake. This has happened twice, and it scares people. People are on edge. I have thousands of comments on three posts that I made when I was down there. If you haven't been following that, the short version is I landed about an hour after the fire started. And coming in on the... plane, I looked out the window and I thought, huh, that's an interesting fog bank. I really haven't

seen fog like that down here before. I didn't know there was a fire. I got straight in a car, went straight to a set where we were filming a documentary for Microworks. And as I was recording my part, as I was being interviewed, the phones started making sounds. Phones don't normally make like alarms. I mean, it's shocking. And of course, we all looked at the phones and saw, oh, there's a, huh, there's a fire. But it's up in the palisades. We were way down in Venice. So we turned our phones off, you know,

and just went about the business of making TV, or in this case, a small film. And then when we turned the phones back on, the wind, it was howling. We thought, this is so unusual. And then, Chuck, as you know, it just, it was both in fast motion and in slow motion. things happen very, very quickly.

Like I remember driving up Wilshire toward the office, looking at my phone, looking at headlines, and then actually looking out the window and seeing flames on the horizon and thick, billowing smoke. But then in the foreground, right there on Wilshire, people are pushing their kids and their strollers and they're texting and their window shopping.

And it's like, this is happening. And yet we're all in this weird kind of trance where we didn't quite know what it meant and which direction. That was five and a half days ago. At this point, it was a week ago by the time you guys are listening to this. And people are still feeling that way. I've never seen the like of it. Yeah. This is something unprecedented in my experience here in California, too.

I've been closer to smoke before. And when I lived in Burbank up on the hill, I remember being out with my garden, all over my house and ash come raining down on me. It looked like it was snowing gray. I didn't know any better. I was just standing there spraying water in my backyard. Didn't evacuate, just stayed. And my house was fine. It didn't come over the ridge, thankfully. But, well, look, there's so many stories, and now you know ours, but they're not a lot of great answers to some really important questions. Edward Ring has a few. Stick around and get a load of him in an episode called what to do about bass.

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Skills USA. Edward Ring. What a pleasure to meet you. Good to meet you, Mike. I have been reading your, what's the right word? Your stuff. Your rants?

My brother. Your observations. Yeah, diet tribes. Ah, yeah. I told him that was mildly insulting, but he just laughed. Well, typically we don't jump onto the headlines to take these kind of deep dives. But this is our first episode back in the new year. And this topic is on everybody's mind.

And I just thought, rather than pretend it wasn't happening, we should just kind of hit it head on. I think maybe in the world of I told you so's, you've got to be somewhere near the top of the list right now. Would you mind if I just read, if I can find this thing, the last two paragraphs of something you wrote, oh, where is this thing? Well, as I search for it, tell me, you're in Sacramento? Yeah, Sacramento area, I am. If you have a business card, what exactly does it say these days? Well, I'm with the California Policy Center.

I'm the director of water and energy policy there. And you know our friend Will Swame? Familiar with Will. In fact, Will replaced me. I was the first president at the California Policy Center. I trust you left of your own volition. Will's doing a much better job than me. Well, here's what got me, Edward.

This is five years old. You wrote this. I won't go through the whole thing. but the last two paragraphs just jumped out. If an honest history of California in the early 21st century is ever written, the verdict will be unequivocal. Forests that thrived in California for over 20 million years were allowed to become overgrown tinderboxes.

And then, with stupefying ferocity, within the span of a few decades, they burned to the ground. Many of them never recovered. This epic tragedy was the direct result of policy. put in place by misguided environmental zealots, misinformed suckers who sent them money, and the litigators and lobbyists they hired, who laughed all the way to the bank.

Did I write that? Your name's on it. Tell us how you really feel. Yeah, well, that was in a moment of passion, but it's, you know, justified passion. You know, when you're in the midst of a fire, this isn't the first fire. This is just the first one that,

one that was really big. I guess we had the Oakland Hills fire in the 1990s. That was pretty bad, and this is much worse. But in the meantime, we've had superfires just burning our forests, willy-nilly here in California. We've lost millions and millions of acres of forest, and a lot of that was preventable. You're understated in a way that I notice a lot of people who are really passionate about a thing for many, many, many years eventually kind of get to. Like, I kind of feel like there's probably not a question I can ask you that you haven't been asked or a statement or a diatribe you can launch into that you haven't done already. So forgive me. But I guess I feel right now really torn because the fires are still burning. I don't know when the dust literally settles or the

in this case, what the actual damage is going to be. So it feels a bit inelegant to just jump on and say a lot of the things that I know a lot of people would like to hear and frankly that I would like to say. But by the same token, there's just no way we can stumble forward with no accountability in this thing. So I guess in just clear measured terms, what in the world are we watching right now and why in the hell has it happened? That's a big question.

The fire's not over. As you said, the winds haven't stopped blowing, and we don't know where it's going to finally end. And it's a tragedy. So you do want to be measured when you're dealing with a tragedy because we're sitting back here and talking about it. But meanwhile, there are people losing their homes, and some people are losing their lives.

You can't possibly say enough to respect just how bad that is. But you're right. We have to look at why. and we have to start holding people accountable. But, you know, obviously, when you say I've answered a lot of these questions before, I haven't answered questions about the details of this specific fire. And there's a lot of things we're learning as we go because, you know, it's impossible to know in advance the water infrastructure

of every neighborhood in a state with 40 million people. And so, you know, we're just now finding out about the fact, for example, that there was a three-acre reservoir. It's almost like a tank, but it's a small reservoir. that was up on the hill. Actually, it was, you know, I'm sorry. That was a 300-acre reservoir. As I said, we're still learning about all of this, 300-acre feet.

That could have put a lot of water on these fires, and they should have left that reservoir full. It was emptied for repairs. Was that San Jenez, I think they called it? Is that the name of it? I believe so. Yeah, it sounds like a good California name. I'm sorry.

That's a little further north than where we are. But there's more than one Santa Ana's. certainly, surely, I mean, there's Santa this and Santa that and there's plenty of Santa Anaezes. Whatever it's called, though, it's, you know, 300 acre feet of water that would have gravity fed a lot more fire hydrants. You have to be fair to acknowledge that if you open up every single fire hydrant, you're going to lose pressure. You just can't, but they would have lost pressure a lot later. They would have been able to open a lot more fire hydrants, and they would have been able to put a lot more water onto those fires. if they'd had all of that pressure from that uphill reservoir.

But it was emptied for repairs. And it was emptied for repairs before the end of the dry season. I mean, we haven't had any significant rain in Los Angeles yet this year. We know that the Santa Ana's blow in the fall and sometimes into the early winter. So there was no reason to empty that reservoir. As I understand it, I don't think they have a contractor lined up yet to actually repair the cover on that reservoir. And for something like that, you want to empty it. Immediately, after you empty it, you want to have somebody in there fixing that,

and you can hopefully get in and out in three or four weeks and fill it back up again. So that right there is a detail. There's a much bigger, broader systemic problem with our water and infrastructure policy. But if you want to point to things that could have been done right away, that's one of them. They could have pre-positioned fire assets when they knew the Santa Ana's were blowing. They should have called everybody in and gotten ready with all of their equipment, and they should have alerted other agencies. And that should have been done in advance because we knew that the Santa Ana winds were blowing.

We knew it was dry. It is the Santa Anaz Reservoir. It's a 117 million gallon Los Angeles Reservoir. And according to the free beacon, it was empty when the disastrous fire struck the city of Los Angeles because city leaders scheduled it for maintenance during the fire season. And just a week before the firestorm exploded, Mayor Karen Bass called for nearly $50 million and cuts to the Los Angeles Fire Department after its chief already warned that a $7 million reduction to the overtime budget severely limited its response to wildfires. Yeah, the guy I saw reporting was standing right in front of the empty reservoir, and he read that quote and then turned around.

And, of course, there's not a construction truck to be seen. There's no trace of any work happening. And so on the one hand, maybe it's a big thing, maybe it's a small thing, but it's certainly one of a gazillion things and one of countless questions that a lot of angry people have. Why was that reservoir empty? And I've heard the question posed, and there just hasn't been anything close to a satisfactory answer. I want to get into something that I've heard you talk about in the past, which is sort of a a philosophy of scarcity versus an attitude of abundance. And the way we've sort of bought into this

notion that everything that needs to be done in the face of a drought, for instance, needs to be rooted in scarcity. And I'm just so interested in the dichotomy of that and hope you can say it in a way that makes sense to my brain. Well, you know, abundance is synonymous with resilience, and it's synonymous with affordability, which in turn is kind of synonymous with this so-called equity we're so concerned about, and it's also something you can do sustainable. So you can attach all of the buzzwords that we care about so much to the concept of abundance. You don't have to achieve those things through scarcity.

And the mentality in California has been, in order to cope with the climate crisis and in order to be sustainable in other ways. And by the way, being sustainable in all the other ways for the environment is not necessarily compatible with coping with the climate crisis. We could really digress on why that's the case. But in general, in both cases, their approach is scarcity. We have to use less. And obviously that's true, you know, ultimately, right?

I mean, if we didn't use less, if we had population growth, for example, at the rate that it's still occurring in many parts of Africa in the Middle East, I actually calculated this once. If everyone increased and had family size of the average family in Somalia, in 12,000 years, we'd be a ball of human flesh expanding at the speed of light in all directions into the universe. You know, so Malthusians are correct at some point, right? Sooner or later, the Malthusian is right. But notwithstanding that, we have plenty of water. We have plenty of land and we have plenty of energy, not only in California, but in the whole world. In fact, the population trends,

which Elon Musk has been pointing out recently, but I guess it was Ben Wattenberg, wrote a book in 1986 called The Birth Dirt, saw this coming a very long time ago. We're experiencing more or less a population crash that's rolling its way into every nation. in the world one after another. And while we want population stabilization, we don't want a population crash.

But no matter how you look at that, the trend is where there's going to be fewer people consuming resources on the planet. So that's, you know, the big long-term sort of strategic picture that we're looking at with our population is there's going to be fewer of us. And even if you look at where we're going to top out the most optimistic predictions,

should I say optimistic, the most generous predictions put I said about 10 billion people, we're at 8 billion people. So the population's not the problem. There's not too many people. The question then is, well, how much energy and water should people use? And tell me if I'm going too far afield here. No, I love it.

I just, I mean, is it the concentration then? Like when I look at California, I see four or five cities where 40 million people are jammed. Yeah. And I get it. get the water down from the north here, but by the same token, why is nobody talking about more subdivisions, more room, more spread out, it seems? There's so much room. You know, I was getting tempted by, I wanted to tell you that if everybody in the world

used as much energy as Americans use, we would have to double our energy production. Excuse me, if everybody in the world used half as much as energy, we'd have to double global energy production. We're going to do that, but we're going to do that with an all of the above an energy strategy. And that's what we need for water as well. We need an all of the above water strategy. We need desalination. We need wastewater recycling. We need runoff harvesting, even in our urban areas. We need to learn how to take the big gulp out of the delta when we get these huge winter storms that pump, you know, five or 10 million acre feet through the delta in a few weeks.

We need to figure out all of those things. And that's, that contradicts the scarcity mindset. But it's absolutely necessary for the point I just made about energy. I mean, if we don't figure out how to supply more of everything people need, we're going to be condemning big parts of the world to poverty, and we're going to be condemning Californians to not being able to afford anything. They can't afford homes. They can't afford energy. They can't afford water.

It's very easy to sit back if you've managed to achieve a little bit of financial security and say, that's not that bad. Well, yes, it is. In low-income households that our Democratic friends are so concerned about, that is an existential threat. If you increase their bills by $200 or $200 a month, they're making very difficult trade-offs, and they can't afford these things. So we have to figure out how to deliver energy and water and housing to our population. We have to figure out how to do it using the power of industry, not the power of government, because government not only is inherently inefficient, but it literally isn't at the scale.

that we need. We can't log our forests if we don't bring industry back. Our timber industry is one quarter the size it was in the 1990s. That all has to change. We're not going to be able to thrive if we don't have an abundance mindset instead of a scarcity mindset. And you know what? I meant to answer your question about density and I've got sidetracked. I think they call it the weave. I think that's the new word to describe. Trump calls it the weave. He goes on. The weaving. Yeah. It comes back to the question, and the question you asked was it at density, and it is, it is density, okay? California is the most densely populated urban areas in the country. Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Francisco are the biggest, I'm talking, among big cities in the United States, they are one, two, three in terms of their density.

They've got like 7,000 people, 8,000 people per square mile. And Los Angeles, you think, oh, sprawling Los Angeles, you know, it's like 1,100 square miles. Yeah, but it's got 4 million people. So the density is extraordinary. Meanwhile, California is only 5% urbanized. We've got 8,000 mile, not quite 8,000 miles of urban area, urbanized area in California. It's 163,000 square miles, not including the lakes of land in California. We've got 25,000 square miles of ranches, cattle ranching, rangeland, grassland.

And we're trying to, you know, they're trying to get rid of the cattle. industry anyway, why don't you allocate a little bit of that ranch land to housing? And here's a stat I just have to share with you. Because anybody with a spreadsheet can do this, this is not difficult. You take 10 million people, put them on quarter acre lots. And you know, they're getting like, not four houses per acre. They're getting 14 houses per acre. And they're, and they still classify that as low density, by the way, because of the single family dwelling. But you get four houses per acre, four people per household, and then an equal amount of land set aside, okay, for parks and schools and roads and industrial, everything. Okay, you would only use up 2,000 square miles, and you could

fit 10 million people in there. In other words, you could go from, with these sprawling suburbs, right, quarter acre lots, you could go from 40 million people to 50 million people in California, and you would only expand your urban footprint from 5% to maybe 6.5% to maybe 6.5%. you'd only go from 8,000 square miles to 10,000 square miles. So why are we acting like we don't have any open space and we don't have any room and that these suburbs are so unsustainable? I love stories like this. Seven years ago, a guy named Ben Still was a musician.

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For the same reason, we're acting like there is no, water and that there are no more forests that they've all been denuded past the point of return when in fact it seems as though they're more robust than ever it's almost as if everything is not just incorrect but backwards but really upside down opposite phil everything you've said as i understand it earlier you called it um all the boxes right it's sort of an all-in idea this notion of being totally integrated with the environment, I'm sure there's a term for it, as opposed to say an obsession or a concern with a single idea or a single species, for instance. Like what happens when it's all about the spotted owl and not about the environment in which

the owl lives or the people that are also, so forth and so on? It kind of feels. like the more we focus on one thing, the more likely we are to lose sight of everything. Can I talk about the forests? Yeah. California's forests, I think worldwide, because of the wonderful fertilizer impact of slightly higher levels of CO2, they are flourishing worldwide. Worldwide, if you look at forest canopy, it's actually increasing. In the state of California, what we've done for, we've gotten really good at fire suppression,

really, really good at it. At the same time, our timber industry went from harvesting 6 billion board feet a year back in as recently as the 1990s to 1.5 billion board feet a year. So we're not pulling anything out. If you don't pull that wood out mechanically and you don't let it burn anymore because it used to be, they'd have fires, the Native Americans would start fires, but also lightning strikes would start fires. And the force would routinely burn. And the upshot of that is we have forest density now in California that is five times, you know, and it varies. It's anywhere from three times to ten times. In the Sierra, they've done multiple studies.

They think it's about five times the historical density, the tree density. There's five times as many trees as was normal for millions of years. And the result of that is the forests are unhealthy and they burn and they sell as weak in climate change. It's not climate change, it's fuel. And it's not only fuel, it's dry fuel. And then when they go in there and they look at the trees and they go, oh, the bark beetle is killing the trees because it's hotter and the trees are vulnerable. No, the bark beetle is killing the trees because you've got five times as many trees

competing for the same amount of water, the same amount of soil nutrients, and the same amount of light. And they're weakened and they're dehydrated. A lot of them are dying. And of course they're susceptible to things like bark beetle infestations when that happens. So that's what we're doing to our forests because we're not willing to manage them responsibly. And your point about the spotted owl is spot on because that's what they call single species management. And single species management should be contrasted to what wildlife biologists are now calling total ecosystem management. That's the turn.

And that is a, yeah, that's a great thing. Well, does it strike you as, I mean, if not ironic, perhaps poetic, that, What you just described that's happening in our forests, it sounds an awful lot like what's happening in our cities. Too much concentration, not enough light getting in, not enough resource is getting disseminated, too much crowding, not enough elbow room. It's the same analysis, it seems. It's not healthy. You have these highly dense cities, and again, the mantra is to densify cities even more. declaring California a sanctuary state. We're inviting the world to come to California. And, you know,

that's enriched California. I'm not of the school that, I mean, I'm really glad that there's all these geniuses living in the Silicon Valley that came from somewhere else. That's not a bad thing. That's actually kind of a good thing. But if we're going to do that, you know, if we're going to expand our population, it's wrong to try to fit them all into the same urban footprint and not expand our urban footprint one bit while we're, you know, aspiring to, admit millions of additional people to come here and live in California, it's just going to get worse. I mean, you can see it. I see it in Sacramento. You can see it everywhere. Like, fly in a plane and look down, and you can see all the new subdivisions compared to the old ones. The old subdivisions

are all filled with trees, you know, and you see a bunch of green and you see a rooftop here and there. The new subdivisions, you know, you could reach out your window and borrow a cup of sugar from your neighbor. You know, they're like less than five feet apart. You know, they're like less than five feet depart these so-called detached single-family homes, which is, you know, crazy. There's no room for trees. And then if they want to have a tree, they can't because they want to have a solar panel. It's just people want to have yards. They want to have elbow room. It's healthy. It's possible to do that, and we're not doing it. What a shame. You know, I read something the other day that, And it just goes to changing these deeply held assumptions and beliefs that I think,

I don't know when a mistaken belief becomes misinformation or disinformation or dogma. However it happens, it happens. But I was reading about the exclusion zone that surrounds Chernobyl. And how in the last 20 years, biologists and, people are just amazed at the abundance of wildlife and growth. And some have described it as like a monument to biodiversity. The exact same chunk of land that 20 years ago was essentially blacked out, along with a third of Europe, by prognosticators who said, all right, game over.

You know, this was it. This is awful. It's going to take thousands of years to get better. And when you think about what happened, who really died? How meant how, who did we lose, whether it's Chernobyl or Fukushima or Three Mile Island and so forth? And the outsized level of certainty we have about the dangers of, say, nuclear versus the reality of what actually happened. Strikes me as interesting. And I wonder if there's a corollary there vis-a-vis our beliefs around our forests and our water supply and all of the things that are in the headlines as we speak.

Well, you know, you triggered my memory because I recall Jane Fonda coming to my college when I was a youth and saying, and she would accuse you of doing, quote, using comparison to deprecate the risk. Isn't that powerful? Well, let's throw away our entire sense of proportion because it's an agenda-driven tactic. You know, we're using comparison. God hell forbid that we would do a cost-benefit analysis on some of these things. It also gets to the heart of the climate crisis because a lot of people who, you know, they may acknowledge that it's not a, not necessarily a crisis, but what if it is, you know, and then they invoke the so-called precautionary principle. Well, we'd better, you know, drop everything and do whatever we possibly can because if it does happen, you know, life is over, you know, it's the end of civilization, it's the end of all of our species. everything dies, you know, the earth burns up.

So, you know, on the off chance that that's actually going to happen if we don't do everything, we don't just drop everything, give up our property, our prosperity, our freedom, you know, just forget about it. Let's have a police state and let's ration everything because it might happen. You know, and meanwhile, where is the cost of that being assessed? I don't know if I answered your question, but it's oftentimes you get the, sort of phrases or sentiments coming from people that want to stop all development, they point out the worst case, but they're being very selective about which case is the worst case.

Well, then let me ask it a little more pointedly. If we're living in a world where the average person believes the threat posed by nuclear energy, if we're living in a world where the average person believes thousands died at Chernobyl, thousands, as opposed to, you know, to a handful, right? How are you going to challenge or debunk this idea? How do you get from scarcity to abundance? How do you do that? How much information do you need to present and how much time do we need to get the species thinking the way you want us to think? Well, I think the recognizing that we're not in a population crisis is, you know, one of those, first steps. But what you're talking about with nuclear power, for example, is a perfect example of

what we're up against because you can make emotional arguments and all of the quantitative reality can go right out the window in the face of that emotional argument. I mean, I would be using comparisons to deprecate the risk, right? I mean, if you look at how many people have died from mining and processing and from accidents relating to nuclear power, and then, Then you look at the number of people who have died in the oil industry or in the coal industry. Or, you know, let's find out what's happening with the wind industry because it's, or the electric cars, because it's not just somebody, you know, repairing a turbine on the top of a wind turbine tower and he falls. And, you know, okay, there might be some hazards in that job.

But it's also all of the mining that we're doing all over the world in countries with no environmental standards and no labor laws. and we're extracting all of these vital resources to build a renewables economy that's having a catastrophic effect on the environment and the sustainability and the labor, the impact on even child labor in West Africa or in Indonesia. You look at biofuel and we're just emulating hundreds of thousands, and I'm not making that number up, hundreds of thousands of square miles of rainforest to grow, you know, palm oil diesel and cane ethanol. You know, 2% of our transportation fuel comes from biofuel,

and we've got a half a million square miles of biofuel plantations in the world now. That's crazy. You know, there's only 59 million square miles of Earth. You know, the rest is ocean. You've already used half a million, and you're only offsetting 2% of your fuel demand. So you have to make these arguments, and I guess you just have to make them over and over again, and you have to express them in ways where it's very clear that the proportionality supporting the all of the above energy and water strategy proves that everything has a footprint. Everything has a price.

Nuclear power is when you make those comparisons safer than almost any of the kind of energy that we can generate. To bring it back to California for a moment and the issue at hand, is it true that firefighters from out of state had to, to go to Sacramento first in order to pass some kind of inspection before they were allowed to come down to fight the fire in the palisades? You know, that's another detail that we're uncovering, and I'm not familiar with that one, but it wouldn't surprise me one bit. Part of me feels like it's these smaller, very direct questions that need to be asked first to get people to start thinking, well, wait a second, if that's a regulation that's actually

being enforced. I don't know. To the extent you can trust Google, I read half a dozen articles, and it certainly seems to be true. And I met some firemen the other night and wrote a post about them. They'd come down from Shasta, and they had to pass through Sacramento to get their tickets punched and so forth. It's kind of like a right-to-try thing, you know, if you're terminal, and you have a chance at a drug, for God's sakes, you know, but here we are in the midst of what looks to be the greatest natural disaster in California in history, and people are still going out of their way to be in compliance. Good God, if that's not enough to get you upset, I don't know what will. You know, there's so many examples of that, you know, in terms of prevention.

There was, I forget who it was, but it was up in Shasta County a few years ago. A city council just got fed up, and they sent a couple of guys in pickups with some chainsaws to clear a fire road. Because it was a hazard. We've lost it. The timber companies used to keep all the fire roads open, and they used to trim along the power lines, the high voltage lines, as part of the package so that they could lease the land and harvest timber.

We got most of our timber in California's federal land, and it's been hands-off for years. But they got in terrible amount of trouble for that. They weren't supposed to do that. And the comparisons apply when you're looking. at the canyons in the Santa Monica Mountains, for example, because they needed to go in there and cut out all that underbrush. We had some very rainy winters the last couple of years, and nobody can go in there and thin those canyons unless they do the same thing that would have

been required of these poor guys trying to clear a fire road. They would have had to do studies. They would have to do environmental impact statements, and they would have faced litigation, and they would have had to get permits from multiple agencies. And the cost of doing that is incredible, And when you actually think about what really has to happen, I mean, the three of us, assuming we're all in good shape and youthful and, you know, let's get our chainsaws. Let's just walk into the canyon and start cutting stuff and drag it out. And you can do so much good. You know, you could hire four people to get their equipment and get in a truck and go down there and you could pay them a hundred bucks an hour and you could put them to work for a week or two. And you'd be done.

And it would cost, you know, $10,000 or $20,000, maybe less. When you have to jump through all these hoops, paying attorneys $1,200 an hour to fill out all of these forms and navigate all this stuff with all of these bureaucrats at multiple agencies. I mean, you're not just talking about a permit from, let's say, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, or the county, whoever's managing the land in the canyons, the open space. You have to go to the Air Quality Management District. You have to go to the coastal commission. You've got to go all over the place.

and any one of them can tie you up in knots. So they didn't do any of that work. And that's really where this tragedy began. It's impossible to just send a crew into those canyons and thin out the brush. Well, are you sick of it yet? Are you sick of AI hogging up all the headlines and sucking up all the bandwidth?

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NetSuite. I think it's important for people to understand. You kind of put it in a parent, The amount of federal land in this state is enormous. And I'm not trying to make excuses for California, but it's not just the state, right? I mean, there are federal policies that dictate, what, something like 30 million acres, is it? And what a morass? There's 30 million acres of forest in California.

And it varies because some people define it as conifer forest, and some people include the oak woodland and the chaparral. but conifer forests are probably close to 30 million acres, and about 60% of that, maybe not quite 60% of that, is federal national forest. And it's completely off limits to logging. It has been for years. I just wonder if the average person understands that the presence of logging

and the maintenance of those logging roads that you described essentially functioned as firebreaks. Oh, yeah. And saved countless acres from burning. and now they don't exist anymore. So the whole thing is just one giant, flammable quilt. That's really, you know, you're being a little bit hyperbolic, but not very much. I mean, that sort of sums it up.

That's right. Okay. Let's talk about the language for a minute. Words I've heard constantly in the last five days, heartbreaking, devastating, apocalyptic, Armageddon, unfathomable, all of which I'm down with. But the one that always makes me bristle that I've heard more than anything else is unprecedented. I keep hearing that what we're watching right now is unprecedented. And forgive me, but I think you're old enough to remember.

I don't know if you ever saw it, but in 1962, the fire service put out a documentary. It's worth a Google, folks, if you haven't seen it. seen this. It's called Design for Disaster. And it's narrated by the late great William Conrad. And it's very in your face. And it's very, but everything in it. This was a fire, by the way, that tore through Brentwood and got into Bel Air. Like, we're looking at this happening right now. I mean, really, Edward, is anything unprecedented when it comes to? to what we're looking at? Well, I think in nominal dollars,

the amount of damage is unprecedented. Sure. There's more people in those hills now, so there's more that can burn. And that's true in general, you know, as people settle into the so-called urban wildland interface. But no, I mean, the Santa Ana winds have turned the canyons around Los Angeles

into blast furnaces, you know, periodically for millennia. The only thing that's changed is where in there. And the other thing that's changed in recent years is we're just not being rational about trying to get the fuel load down. How irrational are we being? I mean, give me a compendium. What do we say when we're told, look, it's climate change. And if you don't see it as climate change, well, then you're just blind, you're a conspiracy nut, you're a climate denier. What can be said to come back to forest management and to come back to water management and all the stuff that's on your business card that you're an expert in?

What are we to say? Well, if you're truly concerned about the so-called climate crisis, you should be more committed to having an abundance mentality because you have to have the resilience. You burn everything out of the system when you ration everything. And then when you need more, it's not there. So I think that's where you would want to start. But it really comes down to what do environmentalists really want. A responsible environmentalist, I think, is willing to balance the fact that we have this inevitable human footprint. And we have to respect that and nurture that.

And then there's the environmentalists that just want to, you know, burn everything down. They want to burn down civilization. You really have to ask the question, which environmentalist am I talking to? Because some of them won't listen to reason. They'll say, well, we don't belong in those hills anyway. Those hills belong to the mountain lions. Let's clear everybody out and return it to nature. Excuse me.

While I plug my computer back in, can you talk about the mountain lion population? Is it waning? Is it waxing? Are we on the verge of an extinction? Where are we? Well, I will answer that. And, you know, it's kind of similar to the polar bear population, which we're frequently hearing how polar bears are endangered. and they're not. Their population is increasing. The numbers with the mountain lion are dramatic.

The estimated population of the mountain line when it was protected, and I think that was in the early 1970s, they thought that the population of mountain lions had gone down as low as 600, and estimates now put the mountain line population at over 6,000, so we have 10 times as many mountain lions. But what we're getting now is this insistence from the environmentalist community, that we have viable mountain lion populations in every single sub-region of the state. So I think I answered your question. I mean, they are thriving. And, you know, they're not like sharks or condors.

I mean, mountain lions are fecunded. They have a lot of cubs, and they breed every year, and it's very easy species to bring back, and we've done that. I'm glad that we saved the California condor. All of us are environmentalists at heart. It's just how do we interpret our values of environmental, And where do we draw the line? But do we really need mountain lions everywhere? Do we need them in the suburbs of Pasadena, for example? Probably not. And now they're reintroducing wolves. And they're talking about reintroducing grizzly bears. So where do you draw the line in California? You know, shall we all just vacate everything and cram ourselves into, you know, 20,000 people per square mile and just have high rises and everything else goes back to nature? Or, you know, I mean, Where do you draw the line?

The mountain lions are doing great in California. And I'm glad I like mountain lions. Well, the mountain lions are doing great. The forests are doing great. There's way more water than we thought, except in the reservoirs where we need it, in the case of fires, apparently. So Trump, not to get it too political, but has said very pointedly and super specifically that the water that we need that could come to. down through the Delta is not happening because of smelt. Gavin Newsom has said super specifically

and very pointedly that that's a complete and total fiction. He just said this on a podcast yesterday, and it's making the rounds today. And it just strikes me that, okay, well, here's an instance, one of these guys is just dead wrong. Yeah. Who is it? Well, Newsom's wrong. And Trump is, at the very least, there is an indirect, and I would say there's a very direct, indirect relationship between how much water we pumped south over the years and how much infrastructure we have available to fight fires. Because California, urban areas use 8 million acre feet of water a year, right? And in the 1990s, the urban areas used 9 million acre feet a year of water. And we're talking about going from 25 million people living in urban areas to 35 million people living

in urban areas, using a million acre feet less water. And what does that mean? You've got all of these people that were adding to our urban population without expanding the water mains or the pumps or the reservoirs or the amount of water we import. So you don't have as many tanks on the hills. You don't have as many pocket reservoirs all over the hills on the perimeter of the city. You don't have as many pumps. Everything has been basically maintained at best. Nothing's been expanded while we add all of these people. So that is going to have a consequence when all of a sudden you need a whole lot of water all at once. So Trump's right about that.

We should have kept increasing our water flows to the cities. We've done a lot of reasonable conservation. They want to spend $7 billion in California to force the utilities, the water utilities, to put an outdoor water meter and an indoor water meter on every, consumer. So all the businesses, all the households have to install a separate water meter. Then they want to send a bureaucrat around to give everybody a water budget for their outdoor water and tell them if they're using too much and what they can and can't plant in their yards. And they want to restrict indoor water use to 42 gallons per person per day.

That's already been legislated and is taking effect now. I mean, it's taking effect over the next few years. why not use that $7 billion to build another reservoir or to expand some of the capacities to move water from north to south? The tunnel is one option, but there are other options. There are a lot of ways to capture the millions of acre feet of water that go through the delta when we have storms, even in drought years. So Trump's right about that. And Newsom is specifically wrong when he says that we need all this so-called unimpaired flow in the delta, because that's only one variable that may or not be the critical variable. We've also got alien predators. We've got striped bass that sit outside the salmon hatcheries and wait for the smelt hatchery and wait for those fish to be released and they eat them all. So what are you going to do about bass? What are you going to do about introduced predators? And what about more innovative hatchery management where you put a wetland adjacent to a hatchery because there's all kinds of land to do this sort of thing in the delta? And then you could let the fingerlings grow up and get a little bit bigger before you release them into the river so they don't all get

the probability of making it to the ocean is much higher that way. Do some habitat restoration and get the nitrogen out of the waste stream because we've cleaned up, you know, to tertiary treatment where you get to the point where everything that's really bad is out of the sewage, but you still have a lot of nitrogen-rich effluent. And there's about 400 to 500,000 acre feet of effluent coming out of the 37 water treatment plants, ringed. the San Francisco Bay, and the hidden agenda for all this unimpaired flow is they want to dilute the nitrogen that builds up in the bay so that they don't have algae blooms. But whenever they do have an algae bloom, they say it's because of the high temperatures and climate change, when in fact,

it's because they won't clean up their wastewater treatment plants. That's part of the reason they want the unimpaired flow. But the whole mentality that the only way to help these fish is by having more water flowing through the rivers is completely false. Of all the incredibly quotable things you've said so far, I think my favorite has to be, what are we going to do about bass? For a moment there, I thought we were talking about the mayor. Do you know that California has the best, it's an introduced species, okay? It's only been around since the 1860s, but it does really, really well, and it's really,

really hardy, and it loves the Delta. And we have the best bass sport fishing in California in the whole world. You are asking a lot to do something about the bass, but let's not deceive ourselves. and act like that doesn't have a lot to do with the survivability of salmon and smelt. No, I'm with you there. I'm just, I'm talking about Karen Bass. What are we going to do about the mayor? What is Bass going to do about the mayor?

I completely missed that. It was so good. I hesitated to even point it out. But clearly, Chuck, this has to be the title of this episode. What are we going to do about the bass? Oh, God. I guess final thoughts. I mean, in the end, it's as a non-Malthusian myself, my heart just breaks.

I know three or four people who lost everything down there. Surely you must too. How do we think about this at this point, knowing that this episode is going to go up in a couple of days? I won't hold you to it because who knows where we're going to be, but just in terms of the human rebuilding, what's going to happen to L.A.? How do the people come back from this? It's not going to be easy. You know, you take Pacific Palisades as an example.

One of the great things about California is the Prop 13. And people who have purchased homes, you know, their grandparents purchased a home, and it's been in their family for three generations or more. And they don't pay a crippling property tax burden. And the principle there is pretty good. You know, the idea is you buy your house. and by the time you've paid off your mortgage and you're retired, inflation has elevated the price of the house,

but the assessments are limited to 2% a year. And so people can afford to retire in the home that they, you know, raise their family, they can pass the home onto their children. That means that there were people living in Pacific Palisades that simply don't have the financial wherewithal to rebuild a house. And, you know, construction costs in California are just sky high. I was hearing $400 to $500 a square foot, which is two to three times what it is in many parts of the country. The permits take three years.

In Texas, they could take as little as three days. The number of agencies you have to go through to get a permit, even in good times, are they going to be able to streamline all of that? Are they going to be able to come up with programs to help people that live in those homes that aren't wealthy to get those homes back? That's going to be real tough. and the insurance, you know, this number is changing all the time, but the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday said that $25 billion is the damage. It's more than that. We know it's a lot more than that. But the fair program, the fair access to insurance the California has put up ever since the insurance company started leaving, they've only got $300 million in reserves.

So there has to be a federal bailout, you know, and the whole insurance industry has been ruined by Democrats in California. They don't let out of state companies come in to compete. They don't let insurance companies pass reinsurance costs to the consumer. You've got a broken insurance industry on top of all of this. I didn't answer your question because I don't know. I mean, it's going to be really, really hard. It's never going to be the same.

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Pure talk. One final thought too, just because it's, I bet you all have a thought on this, but I got a call from a utility a couple months ago, a big one. And they wanted to know if I'd like to essentially work for them on a kind of PR initiative. They're struggling mightily because, well, because everybody hates them. And they hate them because they turn the power off when the wind blows.

And they turn the power off when the wind blows. because if one of their lines go down, the laws in these particular states allow them to be quite literally sued out of business. And so they reckon they don't have much of a choice, but they're not sure how to articulate that to the masses without becoming even more hated. So they thought perhaps I could do it on their behalf.

If I politely said maybe not today. But I'm sympathetic in the same way that I doubt people are walking around feeling sorry for State Farm, but if you tell State Farm, you can't raise your rates. And they're looking at this incoming stream of disasters, and they're looking at the Tinderbox that California has become, how badly can you blame them for saying, look, thanks, we're not going to play here anymore.

Well, they'll just go bankrupt. They have no choice but to pull out. It's so sad because if California, was, you know, harvesting its own timber and milling it. And if California had, in general, industries that are encouraged to produce and compete, building costs wouldn't be so high. And if California has streamlined the permits process, the building process in terms of what it costs to get all those permits, wouldn't be like $50,000 to $100,000 per home, sometimes more than that. In other words, the claims would be lower if you could fix the whole system on the back side

in terms of fixing and rebuilding everything. The claims would also be lower, of course, like we've talked about, if you could prevent all of these fires, and we know how to do that. What's that thing called the all-encompassing thing we were talking about earlier as opposed to the single-species thing, the opposite? The ecosystem management. It's that again. It's that.

It's like every single problem is connected to another attendant challenge, and if you focus only on one, then you're going to, wind up with a dry reservoir somewhere, you know? By the way, Chuck, I forget her name. I think it, I don't want to get it wrong, but I just read that the woman who was specifically in charge of that reservoir is paid $750,000 a year. Yeah, I heard that. Yeah, that would be out of the LA Department of Water and Power. Yeah, she's a bureaucrat, $750,000 a year. And, oh, God, forgive me, but I got to ask you real quick about one other thing, because in my world, this comes up all the time, the union with regard to fire. What do people need to know about that, that they don't, and what,

if any unintended consequences of really taking care of our firemen? Better question, what could the union do that they're not doing to help with something more than suppression, like maybe prevention, for instance? Well, that's right. You know, that's a trillion-dollar question because the Firefighters Union in California is very powerful, politically powerful. If you wanted to actually get the state legislature to make some changes to the laws that are restricting all of this prevention, you know, they're keeping crews out of the canyons because they don't kind of hire a $1,200 an hour lawyer to go through all of the sequo hoops, for example. The Firefighters Union, I mean, those guys don't lose.

You know, they'll go on to the floor of the legislature and buttonhole these politicians and say, this is what we need. It's time for them, I think, you know, I would recommend that along with getting more personnel, more equipment, you know, more training, everybody knows that we probably can't really overbuild our fire suppression infrastructure. But at the same time, let's spend an equal political priority for the firefighters, union should be to change these laws so that we can get our forestry, our timber industry back, and so that we can get crews up into the, say it over and over, into those canyons around our

urban areas like Los Angeles and clear out all of the fuel load. And they know this. You know, these guys are experts. You've talked to some of them, I'm sure, and I've talked to some of them very recently as well and before that as well. And they know. I mean, they know all about this fuel hazard and they've been vocal about it. But they know. need to go to Sacramento and they need to force these politicians to change the rules. And they have the power to do that. Oh, God. I mean, this is the real third rail for me, and I'll just say it out loud. I think most of the people who listen to this understand. It's a very delicate space, but I talk a lot about the skills gap. I talk a lot about the need for more enthusiastic workers

to learn a skill that's in demand, lest we all wait three to four days for the plumber that we desperately need and so forth and so on. But of course, on the organized labor side of the argument, this disparity or this supply and demand imbalance works in their favor. It's good to be a plumber who's in high, high, high demand. And it's probably good to be a fireman that's in high demand when it comes time to negotiate. I'm not suggesting or implying in any way that the fireman's union is resisting this kind of thing in order to stay busy fighting fires. I'm not saying that, but is it really in their interest to get behind policies that eliminate the very job they signed on to do? Well, you know, this goes back to the scarcity mentality. And we didn't really talk about the

motivation for the scarcity mentality, but the scarcity mentality benefits bureaucrats. It benefits people that already own existing assets in the private sector. And, of course, it benefits unions, but unions aren't the only ones. And the real question with the unions then would be, who else is going to, you know, true to their core principles, is going to really look out for the working families in California, if not the unions. I mean, these guys have friends and relatives, you know, maybe their own families who are unable to afford to live in California. And, of course, you know, are victims of this fire. But that's just one example of how the scarcity mentality, which benefits special interests, is harming everybody else.

And isn't that really the mission of unions is to look out for all the working people in, you know, in America, in California, in the world, I suppose? And it's not consistent with that mission if you're going to embrace the scarcity mentality. You know, you have to allow competition. You have to be willing to say there is a limit to how much we're going to get here. We have to be willing to expand the market and compete, and then we can earn it, and then everybody benefits, all the workers benefit. Last question, I promise. In the end, when we can talk about Bass, we can talk about a $750,000 a year bureaucrat,

we can talk about well-intended firemen, desperate to get here to pitch in that have to go way out of their way. to go to Sacramento. We talk about all these different outrages and confusions and things and so forth. But in the end, doesn't this trickle down to the voter? Isn't it really going to come down to that? Individuals getting informed to the point where they don't simply pull a lever based on a D or an R next to somebody's name, but actually dig in a bit more and get a little smarter? Well, it absolutely does. We have to hope that someday California is going to realign, and I don't just necessarily mean realign from Democrat to Republican, but realign in terms of the whole mentality that they're willing to accept and support coming from the politicians that they're choosing. We have to have politicians that are willing to be outspoken about these issues in a way that cuts through the noise and exposes some of the scarcity agenda, the extreme environmentalism as opposed to responsible. environmentalism and is willing to make controversial statements and back them up and then follow up when they get elected, it seems like Californians, you know, every time something like this happens,

we go, oh, this is it. Californians are finally going to be ready to make a better decision. But, you know, a lot of things have changed. I mean, the Internet is really helping, especially now that it's not as censored as it used to be. And people are realizing, for example, that we've spent the official number is $24 billion. It's way more than that when you take. go over a longer time frame and look at all of the different jurisdictions. We've spent, you know, tens of billions, multiple tens of billions to eliminate homelessness. And the only people that have really benefited are the bureaucrats, the subsidized developers and the nonprofits that do all of this stuff. We have more homeless people than ever in California. And that's a perfect example.

And you can apply that example to other sectors of our economy and of our society, certainly to energy and to water and to housing and home building. In every case, there are special interests. that benefit from scarcity. So if voters can simply realize, what is this politician going to do to unlock our economy and let us bring down the cost of living through competition and freedom?

I know I'm starting to sound a little bit ideological here, but there's a very pragmatic benefit to unlocking and unleashing competition in our economy. And they use everything to, whether it's equity or environmentally, there's always a reason to try to stop that.

And it's gone way too far. And that's why we can't afford to live here. And that's why we have all these, we can't handle these disasters as effectively as we should be able to do. You used an amazing phrase in your most recent piece when you were talking about the homeless and special interests being served. You called it the homeless industrial complex. I don't know if that's your, if you coined that or not,

but I think that's just brilliant. And if you could unpack that for just a... It was 2019, but, you know, I think I'd seen something like the social welfare industrial complex or something. It wasn't, I mean, I twisted something that was already out there. You know, at the very most, it's just a permutation of something someone else was already saying. But, you know, now we're hearing that with everything. The prison industrial complex, the firefighting industrial complex, the homeless industrial complex. And it's a very useful, applicable term.

You know, it used to be the military industrial complex. of course. It typifies. It's a good way to encapsulate the idea of special interests taking over a whole sector and not solving the problem because if they solve the problem, they won't, their sector won't expand anymore. Well, our friend Tim Allen is fond of asking, Key Bono, right? Who benefits? Yeah, yeah. And it's a hell of a thing. And I doubt you're this cynical in real life. I'm not, but I can't help but say if there's that much money in not solving the homeless problem,

then why do we expect the homeless problem to be solved? If Californians are okay paying $750,000 a year to somebody who's in charge of keeping an empty reservoir full, where is the incentive to do better? You know, if you're going to run an organization as big as the LA Department of Water and Power, 700,000 a year is actually not the scandal. The real scandal is the failure of leadership. Well, yes. Right?

Yeah. All right. Well, to say it another way, what are we going to do about Bass? I just don't know, Edward, but I'll tell you, it was awfully nice of you to come by and share your big brain with us. I appreciate it. Well, thank you for having me. Hey, where can people? go or what can people do who would like to avail themselves to more of your uh of your knowledge?

Well, I work for the, uh, primarily, uh, for the California Policy Center. So you can Google California Policy Center or if you want to find my more fringe diatribes, you can go to Edward Ring. Just Google Edward Ring and all kinds of stuff will come up. Yeah, not Ed Ring. I tried that and got some other places. And I saw some ring videos. I wish I could unsee. I, I didn't even know that was a thing. Isn't that something? It's a thing, man. It's a thing.

Thank you again, and good luck with you, with all you're doing. Thank you. If you like what you heard. And even if you don't. Won't you please? Won't you please, pretty please, please subscribe. Well, I hate to beg and I hate to plead, but please, pretty, please, so. Spring weekends are all about family, sunshine, and enjoying the season together.

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