Spencer Pratt on Fixing LA: Wildfires, Homelessness, Corruption & the Fight to Take It Back

The conversation opens with the debate held a few nights earlier, which the interviewer calls "an unbelievable debate performance" that friends texted about and people tweeted about. The reply is not about performance. It is a complaint about time: the debate should have run "two hours or three hours" because there was a long list of failures by opponents that never came up.

The response describes the debate as a contest between facts and lies. The speaker calls the opponents "pathological liars" and argues that viewers reacted strongly because someone on stage was working "with only facts and the truth". The speaker also describes holding back: Democratic mothers who support the campaign had asked for calm, so the speaker tried not to interrupt, and says that without that request the reaction would have been "liar, liar."

They know they're lying, and nobody gets to yell, They're lying.

After a sponsor read for an ad platform, the interviewer asks how the preparation was done, since many people did not expect such a well-briefed performance. The answer is that months of adversarial media appearances were the training. The speaker contrasts their own interviews, described as "arguing, arguing, arguing", with how Mayor Bass and Councilwoman Raman are treated: they "can just lie" and get thanked by reporters.

Because of that scrutiny, the speaker says every claim needs extensive backing, down to "who was there, what they were wearing, what they had for breakfast." The interviewer sums this up as being held to a higher standard. The speaker also mentions asking the lawyer who represents them in the case against the city, the state and LADWP, described as "one of the most famous lawyers in the world", how to stay calm with opponents. The lawyer's answer, as retold, was: "Spencer, I always have the truth."

When asked to tell the fire story, the speaker starts earlier and argues that emergency communication failed before the fire began. A son was sick with pneumonia, the speaker was checking his temperature every night and was on the phone a lot, and still did not know about the extreme wind and dry-weather event. The speaker concludes: "we weren't even informed at the level clearly we should have been."

On the morning of January 7, during an ordinary routine, the family's nanny came in with the two-year-old and said workers up the street had seen a fire on the hill. The speaker stresses that fire was not a surprise. The interviewer, who grew up in LA, adds that fires there have been happening for thirty years. The speaker mentions the earlier Getty Fire and friends fighting a fire in Malibu three weeks before, says they had even talked about starting their own fire brigade, and states: "this isn't a shock". Santa Ana winds were also familiar.

The speaker describes seeing smoke from the Highlands area and links it to the Lochman fire, which the speaker says "we now know" had started seven days earlier and smoldered for a week. The speaker's wife took diapers and children's clothes to the speaker's parents' house elsewhere in the Palisades, which seemed safe. The speaker stayed behind, feeling confident because, in the speaker's words, the heavy taxes they pay meant firefighters would come.

A central factual dispute from the debate concerns water. The speaker says Mayor Bass claimed that only one reservoir was empty. The speaker says they live next to a different one, the Palisades Reservoir, holding "5,000,000 gallons", where the fire department ran regular drills (corrected mid-sentence from "almost, not weekly, but biweekly") and where helicopters could dip for water.

The speaker also disputes the mayor's description of the Santa Ynez Reservoir as being for drinking water. The speaker says LA Times reporting shows it was built for wildfire protection, which the speaker says explains its cisterns and helicopter dip sites. The speaker says they filmed themselves waiting for helicopters without knowing the reservoir had been drained, and names Janisse Quinones and LADWP as having drained it in June 2024. None of these claims are documented in the interview itself.

Still assuming the town would not be allowed to burn, the speaker did not pack. The speaker called the fire department directly about an area of dead brush that could carry the fire to nearby houses and says the answer was: "We have no assets available." The speaker's father came and hosed down a hillside before they left, still expecting firefighters.

The fire then crossed over from Temescal Canyon toward the parents' house, and the speaker's older sister called urging the children to leave. The speaker says repeatedly that there were no sirens. The interviewer says many friends in the area said the same. The speaker argues that without sirens or sheriffs, LAPD, or emergency vehicles on the street, people did not feel scared enough to pack or leave.

So you always think everything's like a movie, but nothing was like a movie.

On the winds, the speaker says they stood at the top of the Palisades until the fire came down the hill at about five or six in the evening, and that winds "did not go past 40 miles per hour". The speaker cites a CBS News report published the day before the interview, featuring a journalist who was there, as confirming the speaker's debate account. One participant then qualifies this: the fire did move and "It was windy, but it wasn't."

The speaker reports talking with Bobby Garcia, identified as a chief at the US Forest Service, who said the initial fire was not "made skinny" by attacking both flanks. The speaker notes the uncertainty here: the after-action report has been edited several times, according to LA Times reporting that the speaker says Mayor Bass denies. The speaker's main allegation is that LA City never called in fixed-wing air support because the mayor was in Africa and the deputy mayor who was supposed to do it "was on house arrest". The speaker credits LA County, CAL FIRE and the US Forest Service with responding.

The speaker says they watched the house burn on security cameras on a phone while stuck in traffic near where the 10 meets the 405. The speaker describes seeing a son's bed burn "in the shape of a heart" and then watching each room go.