No Priors Ep. 99 | With Rick Caruso
Elad Gil (host), Rick Caruso (guest), Sarah Guo (host)
In this episode of No Priors, featuring Elad Gil and Rick Caruso, No Priors Ep. 99 | With Rick Caruso explores rick Caruso Blasts LA Leadership, Outlines Faster, Smarter Wildfire Rebuild Rick Caruso discusses the recent catastrophic Los Angeles wildfires, arguing they were worsened by decades of poor brush management, underfunded firefighting infrastructure, and empty reservoirs rather than being a pure act of nature. He contrasts his private preparedness playbook—non-combustible design, rapid-response protocols, private firefighting resources—with what he calls government negligence and budget misallocation. Caruso links the fires to broader structural issues in LA and California, including rising crime, weak law enforcement, homelessness spending with little impact, and decaying infrastructure. He advocates treating the rebuild like a business project: parallelizing cleanup, infrastructure upgrades, and permitting so residents can begin rebuilding within a year while modernizing systems for the 21st century.
Rick Caruso Blasts LA Leadership, Outlines Faster, Smarter Wildfire Rebuild
Rick Caruso discusses the recent catastrophic Los Angeles wildfires, arguing they were worsened by decades of poor brush management, underfunded firefighting infrastructure, and empty reservoirs rather than being a pure act of nature. He contrasts his private preparedness playbook—non-combustible design, rapid-response protocols, private firefighting resources—with what he calls government negligence and budget misallocation. Caruso links the fires to broader structural issues in LA and California, including rising crime, weak law enforcement, homelessness spending with little impact, and decaying infrastructure. He advocates treating the rebuild like a business project: parallelizing cleanup, infrastructure upgrades, and permitting so residents can begin rebuilding within a year while modernizing systems for the 21st century.
Key Takeaways
Wildfire damage was magnified by preventable policy and infrastructure failures.
Caruso argues the Palisades fire was fueled by 40 years of unmanaged brush, empty reservoirs in a gravity-fed system, and an underfunded fire department, turning a severe event into a historic catastrophe.
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Proactive, resilient design can materially change outcomes in disasters.
Palisades Village survived because it used non-combustible materials, had backup water systems, private firefighting teams, and pre-defined rapid-response protocols—demonstrating how design and preparation can save structures and jobs.
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Treat rebuilding like a business project with parallel workstreams.
Instead of a slow, linear government process, Caruso recommends dividing the region into quadrants, using multiple contractors, and running cleanup, design, and infrastructure upgrades in parallel under incentive-based timelines to enable rebuilding within a year.
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Use the disaster to modernize infrastructure, not just restore the old.
He advocates using the rebuild to underground power lines, upgrade water and hydrant systems, implement recycled water use, and integrate advanced technologies, rather than recreating the same vulnerable systems.
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Public safety requires both proactive policing and real accountability.
Caruso ties arson, looting, and overdose deaths to a wider pattern of non-enforcement, loss of officers, and lenient prosecution, arguing for empowered proactive policing, tougher stances on serial offenders and gangs, and better paths away from crime for those who want second chances.
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Homelessness and drug crises show money alone doesn’t fix systemic issues.
Despite billions spent on homelessness, LA’s street population continues to grow, and areas like MacArthur Park see extreme overdose calls—evidence, in his view, of misdirected spending and lack of focus on outcomes.
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California needs longer-term financial discipline and infrastructure focus.
Reflecting on the vanished $100B budget surplus, Caruso endorses ideas like a sovereign wealth fund (Norway-style) and urges redirecting state resources toward core infrastructure, education, power, and water systems that enable safety and prosperity.
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Notable Quotes
“To be in the second-largest city in the United States and to run out of water and have fire hydrants empty is completely insane.”
— Rick Caruso
“Maybe you couldn’t have prevented the fire. I’m completely convinced you could have substantially mitigated the fire.”
— Rick Caruso
“If we approach this thinking like a government, it’s gonna take years. If we approach this thinking like a businessperson, you could have people building again in a year.”
— Rick Caruso
“Why would you build the same system when you know you’re in a fire hazard area? It doesn’t make any sense.”
— Rick Caruso
“This isn’t about politics. The problems we have now are so much bigger than politics.”
— Rick Caruso
Questions Answered in This Episode
What specific policy changes or accountability mechanisms would prevent a repeat of the reservoir and brush-management failures Caruso describes?
Rick Caruso discusses the recent catastrophic Los Angeles wildfires, arguing they were worsened by decades of poor brush management, underfunded firefighting infrastructure, and empty reservoirs rather than being a pure act of nature. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How scalable are Caruso’s private-sector fire-preparedness practices, and what would it take to mandate similar resilience standards for all high-risk communities?
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Where exactly has LA’s homelessness spending gone, and what outcome-based metrics should be used to judge those programs?
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How can cities balance necessary proactive policing with protections against abuse and overreach in high-crime, high-tension environments?
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What would a California sovereign wealth fund concretely look like, and how could it be structured to safeguard infrastructure investment from short-term political cycles?
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Transcript Preview
(instrumental music plays) Hi, listeners, and welcome to No Priors. Today, we have special guest, Rick Caruso, on to help us understand the fires that have been devastating Los Angeles over the last couple of weeks. This is recorded on the afternoon of January 27th as everything is still changing. Rick is the founder and former CEO of Caruso, a real estate company that has developed properties around Southern California, like the Grove, the Miramar Resort, and Palisades Village, which has the only structures in the town left standing in the wake of the Palisades fire. He was also the runner-up in the 2022 LA mayoral race, the former president of LA's Police Commission, and a member of the Board of Water and Power Commission. Rick served under three different mayors and is very well-attuned to both Los Angeles-related politics and policies as well as the state of California more generally. Rick, thank you for joining us on No Priors today.
Well, thank you for having me. Good to be here.
So, you were born and raised in Los Angeles. Um, I know you're very prominent in the, the LA community and sort of more broadly in the state of California. Could you just give us very quick background on, um, how you got your start in real e- real estate development in the city and some of the things you've done relative to city government?
Sure. Well, I actually started out as a lawyer, and I practiced law for a number of years and... Interestingly, it was with, um, a large law firm out of New York, and I, I say it was a large law firm for the reason that after about six years of being there, the law firm imploded, um, and it forced me to make a business decision. I always loved business, and I started out, you know, very small. I bought a duplex. I fixed it up, rented it out, and then I built my company over time, and what I realized is what I really love doing is being around people and, you know, creating spaces that people enjoy, and the retail sector was the space that I could do that, and began building very small retail centers, and one by one, we built The Grove, we built the Americana brand, Palisades Village, and... I've got an incredible team of people and they're smart and innovative and, uh, we've been able to accomplish some really good things.
That's great. Yeah, one of the, I guess one of the other key threads of your life has really been public service. And I believe that you've served under, uh, three different mayors in LA over time. Uh, you were, um, the runner-up in the 2022 LA mayoral race. Uh, you were former president of LA's Police Commission. You've had a variety of roles. Could you tell us a little bit about your public service engagements?
Yeah, I appreciate... I'm a big believer in public service. I enjoy it, and I just think it's an important thing to do, so... At a very young age of 26, uh, Tom Bradley tapped me to be on the Board of the Department of Water and Power, and I then became president. Um, after that, Dick Reardon asked me to go back on the board, so I was at DWP for about 13 years. And then after that, Jim Hahn, uh, the mayor at the time, asked me to head up the Police Commission because LA back then was having really rising crime, we were losing a lot of police officers. Very similar to what's happening today. And to come in and turn LAPD around, and, uh, I did. I brought in Bill Bratton as the chief of police at the time, and we were able to get crime down to levels not seen since 1950, so... I, I'd been very fortunate to have been involved in government service, and s- reason I decided to eventually run for mayor was because I saw what could be done, especially if you're not beholding to worry about getting reelected, if you're just focused on doing the right thing, and, uh, becomes a very powerful, powerful mindset to have.
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