Peter Hamby
speaker
144 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 24 Jun
Peter Hamby’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And I wrote about this for Puck and it's, you know, I wrote about Karen Bass, obviously, and we'll talk about that, but there's just so much I've learned living out here, like the political fights around real estate and insurance and zoning and coastal commissions and, They get really, really intense and personal and angry because property here is everything and it always has been.
And it always has been when it comes to rich white people taking water and golf clubs and redlining. It's just property and real estate in Los Angeles defines its politics.
So I saw somebody, uh, reference the amount that has burned so far is like four times the size of Manhattan. Wow. So, you know, not the population, obviously, but in the context of Palisades or Altadena, like just imagine if like in Washington, like Georgetown just burned up overnight and disappeared like the neighborhood just gone, like gone, gone, gone, gone.
Like what would that mean to the rest of, of, of the city, you know? And then how, how, sorrowful would you be about all the history that was lost? Or Altadena is literally the same example. And we should mention too, it's not just structures. I was watching this sort of daily briefing this morning with all the local officials here, and there are many. The death toll is going to keep rising.
It's not just homes. A important part of the city has been incinerated, and at least one of them, when it comes to the Palisades at least, also happens to be a hugely important power center for money, influence. political power, fundraising. Like that's what Palisades is. And we'll talk about Rick Caruso in a minute, but that's his backyard too.
Yeah, so much to unpack there. And I mentioned this book and I've been tweeting about it. Like this book, Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear is like a fantastic history of Los Angeles and the choices made to live on the edge of disaster. Like something Mark Andreessen didn't say because he's rich and can rebuild his house no matter what, you know, there's some human error, not human error.
That's the wrong word. There's just like, you know, humans make decisions to live in places that are dangerous. And historically humans didn't live like Los Angeles was not, uh, an irrigated place until the Mexicans and the Mormons figured out how to bring water here and plant orange groves. If you read your old Oregon Trail history books and play the game, they were going to Oregon.
They weren't coming to California because Oregon was green and you could have farmland. Here, water is scarce. Joan Didion's devil winds blow east to west, and that's been happening forever. In this very book, Mike Davis writes about the clipper ships coming up along Southern California back in the 19th century and seeing flames on the mountains. This stuff predates climate change too.
It's a peculiar climate, the Los Angeles basin. It seesaws between rainy seasons and dry seasons. In the rainy seasons, lots of vegetation grows and then it dries out and that creates tinder for these fires. The individual blame thing is very hard in Los Angeles. In this sense, it does remind me a little bit of Katrina.
So in Katrina, you and I both remember, we were just sort of starting out in our careers at the time. I was at CNN. The first week I worked on The Situation Room was Katrina. And it was like watching...
george bush but also kathleen blanco and ray nagin and you know the new orleans police department and no one wanted to take the blame you never would as a political figure or a public official i know it's funny i was talking i was talking to jeb about katrina like a decade and a half after and you know he was like my brother gets the blame ray nagin gets all the blame and there's plenty of things that both of them did wrong but he's like kathleen blanco was the worst
Yeah. And by the way, everyone should go back and listen to that Atlantic podcast, Floodlines, which sort of... Oh, so good. So good. It was just a revisited...
all of that like from from a timeline perspective but told the story from the people who weren't whose voices weren't being heard in the live tv coverage you know in particular a lot of the black community but also some of the just myths that became facts very quickly you know the the looting or the gunshots and there was some of that but you know the stuff that the national media was talking about and that was 2005 that was before
you know, Twitter and a lot of like social media adoption, you couldn't fact check these things and they just became apocryphal. So anyway, here can't blame any single person that needs to be said. As I write in my piece, people here in Los Angeles would like the all in hosts and everyone has VC founder in their bio and Elon Musk to shut the fuck up. Okay.
Like Elon Musk came here on Sunday and like, there's this thing about Musk that you've probably, it probably grates on you too. He has accomplished a lot. This guy, he is smart. Like he deserves credit for a lot of things that he has built and companies he's built. But since like getting the political bug, he has this like, like annoying college sophomore contrarian thing going on.
He like just Wikipedia something, then postures as an expert. So he goes and live streams on X to the Palisades, talk to these firefighters. And he's like, so you guys ran out of water, right? You didn't have enough water. Right. And the firefighters are like, well, no, we had enough water. It's just the volume of these flames. It was too much to fight with the flow that we had.
And so like, it's nice to see these firefighters like fact-based, uh, retorts to Elon Musk who's trying to bait them and they're like not giving him anything so the other thing to keep in mind about Los Angeles is I'm in Venice I'm in the city of LA if I was a mile that way I'd be in the city of Santa Monica which is not in the city of LA if I was this direction to the West a little bit.
So the East, I'd be in Culver City, which is its own city. West Hollywood, own city. Malibu, Pasadena, lots of incorporated cities for various reasons that I mentioned before. A lot of white people wanted to sort of protect their neighborhoods back in the day. They don't want to pay LA city taxes. They contract with Los Angeles County for various services.
So Los Angeles County has jurisdiction over some of these areas where the fights are happening. Now, to be clear, the fire departments are coming in from all over Southern California. They're coming from all parts of LA to fight these different fires. Like, good on them. But there's the Department of Water and Power. There's public utilities, which are managed by boards.
The county is managed by a board of supervisors. Every city has its own leadership. And then our mayor... even before Karen Bass, they don't have a lot of power compared to other cities. The power in the city rests with the city council. And so the mayor, and we saw this with Garcetti beforehand, a good mayor, like a Tom Bradley or Richard Reardon, can really set the agenda and show leadership.
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