Transcript 0:00 A lot of times I wake up and I walk around or I drive around, and I, I just-- I can't believe I get to live here. [upbeat music] Daisy, how many times have you been to LA? That's a really good question. 0:15 I'm going to say three. Hmm. I think I'm at... My God, it might just be three. Actually, four. [crowd cheering] Ya burnt. Daisy, one; Francis, zero. Okay. Well, I get it. You've been to LA more than me. That's fine. 0:32 That's cool. And I didn't grow up in California. Hmm. So why are we talking about it? Why, why did we decide to do an episode about Los Angeles? We all know that media can be pretty New York-centric. 0:43 We've done some episodes that were pretty New York-centric. We both live in New York. Famously. 0:48 At the same time, I really try to pay attention to what's happening in Los Angeles, and I've seen a lot of interesting commentary about how it's a city in transition right now in multiple ways, and we thought it would be interesting to dig into those and talk to people that we have preexisting relationships with. 1:09 Obviously, like, you can't just parachute into a place and get a real sense of what's happening. Like, the episode is limited to the perspectives of these three people, but I think we chose the three exact right people. 1:20 Mm-hmm. Los Angeles is my favorite place that I've ever lived. I have no intention of moving anywhere else. Paula Mejia is a Colombian-American writer and editor. 1:29 She's written about art and culture for The New Yorker, New York Magazine, GQ, NPR Music, Oxford American, The Paris Review, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, and more. 1:40 I can't take another 30-something New York creative director moving to Highland Park. Rehan Anwar was a co-founder of FWB and also has his own fragrance business, in addition to being a noted coffee connoisseur. 1:55 He's always building something. Lately, LLMs, automation, and marketing at Whisperflow. Whenever I'm there and I say, like, "I'm from Los Angeles," there is, like, a visible, like, grimace that happens. 2:07 Tasbeeh Herwees has 15 years of culture reporting experience, with bylines in The Los Angeles Times, GQ, Teen Vogue, The Fader, Vice, Bon Appétit, Vulture, and more. 2:19 She's the publisher of No Bad Days, a newsletter about Los Angeles. [upbeat music] Well, we'll start with a very census, census-esque... I don't know. I can't-- [laughs] I just, I- [laughs]... I can't think. 2:30 How long have you lived in Los Angeles? I have lived here for almost exactly five years. Hmm. Hmm. I've been in LA my whole life. I currently live, like, maybe two blocks from where I was born. 2:40 I'm one of those dudes, like- Do you wanna shout out the hospital? Does it still exist? Shout, shout out to Kaiser. It still exists. Permanente? Yeah. The very same. It still exists. That's why they call it Permanente. 2:49 Born and raised in different parts, in LA proper and LA County. So I was born and spent most of my childhood in Palms, which is, like, near Culver City. 2:57 And then we moved to Gardena, which is in LA County, but outside of LA proper. My family lived in Cerritos for a year and Cypress for a year, and then I moved back to LA for USC, and then kind of just never left here. 3:10 I always had the aspiration of moving to New York, but it never really happened, and now I feel like it won't ever happen, and that's okay. 3:19 That's sort of like a black hole thing, where it's like you're traveling in space, and you're, like, sort of going by this black hole, and you, you could get sucked in, but, like, you've successfully avoided that, and you just never have to feel that gravitational pull again. 3:29 Yeah, and I feel like I micro-dose New York a lot. Like, I used to do, like, month-long house swaps, and then I'd come back here and, you know, no regrets. 3:37 What are three words that you would use to describe the city right now? Tense, galvanizing, and surprising, I would say. Hmm. Yeah. Stale, searching, milk toast. You're over it. I'm not over it. I'm not big over it. 3:51 I just feel like there has been an energy transference in LA that has kind of cursed. I would say innovative. 3:57 Like, as the film studios wither and, like, there's a lot of exciting stuff happening in the underground scene in LA. Like, the other word I would say is insecure. 4:07 I have a friend who says it used to be that I wanted to, like, put walls up around LA so no one can come in, but now I wanna put walls up and keep everybody in because every other day you hear someone making the escape to New York. 4:19 The third thing, I don't know. The third thing? Sunny? I still blame everything on COVID in this really- Mm-hmm... 4:26 small way, where, like, things were pretty darn good until about, I would say '19, 2020, and then it just got progressively more weird over time. 4:38 One thing that was particularly surprising to me and stuck with me is how much COVID came up and, like, COVID as being such a pivotal moment for LA that is, like, still so influential today. 4:51 I have a few hypotheses on that. I think the industry that LA is known for is not really a work-from-home industry or a laptop job. Hmm. True. 5:00 I think COVID and frustration around COVID probably, in some way, contributed to the writers' strike, but that strike was probably inevitable anyway, but I think COVID probably doesn't help. Mm-hmm. 5:12 I also think that Los Angeles and New York have different relationships to real estate, and there's a lot of money that's just parked in New York real estate at all times. 5:21 And for that reason, it's a bit of a, like, no-fail situation- Yeah... for certain parts of the economy here. Yeah. 5:29 We're immediately starting by compar- comparing [laughs] LA to New York, which I feel like I'm gonna do a lot throughout our, our convers- [laughs] conversation here. 5:38 LA has been slow to come back from the early days of the pandemic. There was, I think, a demonstrable shift that I saw in how people were Interacting socially in the city. 5:51 I mean, I'm older, and it's entirely possible that I just don't know where [laughs] the cool things are happening as much anymore, which is completely understandable once you're into your 30s, and, you know, you get a little washed, as we all do. 6:05 Chopped and dunked. Chopped and dunked, exactly. That's not to say that things aren't happening, but the energy of it feels different. In addition to- Mm... 6:13 drinks costing $25 now, and people just not being as up for those random conversations- Mm-hmm... with strangers in that same context, that maybe pre-pandemic I think would have been easier to foster. Yeah. 6:28 Like, the nucleation sites have changed. It used to be like, all right, cool, we'd meet at a shop, we'd meet at, like, a record store, we'd meet at a whatever, and now everything has to be, like, a capital E event. 6:36 You have the rise of pop-ups. You have the rise of, you know, line culture. Fucking every major city has line culture now because the line is a, a source of enjoyment for people. I heard about that- Right... 6:46 on a podcast. You'll pull up to Erewhon, it'll be, like, a 30-minute wait for a smoothie or something. I was gonna ask you, what's the best thing to get from the Erewhon hot bar? Buffalo cauliflower. 6:55 That's what I've heard, and I believe it. I've never... You know, I can't say I've ever had bad buffalo cauliflower. If you have a deep fryer, some hot sauce, and a dream, it's pretty hard to fuck up. 7:03 Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are also more interesting, better spots than Erewhon, but I will not tell people what it is because I don't need- So you're gatekeeping on our podcast about taste? 7:12 I am always gatekeeping because I'm Lazy Daisy. That's where it comes from. I don't need a line anywhere. I was just talking about how I hate lines. I find motherfuckers like you very interesting. [laughs] It's true. 7:22 They, I, I, that's gay. O- okay. You were saying how, like, the nucleation site of gathering has changed post-COVID. Now it's like it has to be formal events. It's all eventitized. 7:31 I don't know if it's Lumified or Party Fold. What is the most LA event that you have been to recently? My good friend Kelsey has a poke pop-up. She sells poke out of the trunk of her car. It is phenomenal. 7:42 And whenever I pull up there early enough, I'm like, "Oh, this is very, very Los Angeles," right? Like, you have a bunch of, like, Michelin star cloud chasy people. You have a bunch of foodies. 7:53 You have a bunch of people being like, "Oh, like, so what do you do?" Like, "Oh, how do you know about this place?" You know? It's very much that energy, but the food's very, very, very good. 8:01 What is the most LA thing that I've been to lately? I have no clue. I went to, like, some premiere afterparty at the Guest House that, like, all these, like, young celebrities were at, I guess. 8:12 But it's like, the thing with LA is I feel like that stuff is so weirdly accessible. 8:16 Like, if you just are savvy enough to, like, get yourself through certain doors or whatever, like, it doesn't feel as exciting as maybe it would feel like for other people in other places experiencing proximity to celebrity, but- Mm-hmm... 8:29 I don't know. I spend a lot of time with gay guys, so it's, like, a lot of raving, but, like, there must be something, and I just can't remember it right now. 8:36 Maybe the most LA thing is, like, spending so much time raving with gay guys that you can't- [laughs]... remember what you did. 8:41 [laughs] I went to a premiere for a new A24 horror film called Onslaught, and went to the party after, which was at El Cholo, which is one of the oldest Mexican restaurants in LA, I believe. 8:55 You know any place where you're there, and you're like, "Oh yeah, there's Jason Momoa cutting it up with someone else" [laughs] I would say that that was a fairly Los Angeles event that I went to recently. 9:03 [upbeat music] I have my own sort of viewpoint on why I don't know that I would ever live in LA, and it's actually more about car culture- Hm. Yeah, I, I hate having a car... than anything else about the city. 9:17 I l- always have a great time when I visit Los Angeles. 9:20 We did talk a lot about how in certain areas of the city the bus is a lot more accessible than people give it credit for, but I don't like driving in super developed areas. It's really stressful to me. 9:34 Rehan was definitely our number one driver. I've been in Rehan's car. [laughs] How was that experience? One of the times I went to LA, Rehan drove me around. [laughs] Jo, can you put in some vroom vroom sound effects? 9:44 [laughs] I'm in Rehan's car. Vroom, vroom. How much time do you spend driving in a given week? I spend, like, a f- few hours a week driving, but I, I like driving. 9:54 I have met people who are like, "Yeah, so I just, like, voice memo into Claude, and I do all this" I'm just like, "No, that's not what that's for." But I listen to a lot of music, and I speed. You speed? Oh, yeah. 10:03 How many miles above the speed limit do you like to go? Like, 20 or 30. [laughs] Okay. 10:08 Oh, look, guy like me, my assumption, my impression is that the traffic in LA is such that it would be quite difficult to even do that. Okay. 10:15 This is very much the one other fun thing about being in LA, is you have to be out of sync with everyone else to enjoy the city to its max. 10:23 The times where I can drive, the times where I can go r- out and stuff, it's like, it's very much not normie hours. Hm. And that's kinda what keeps me sane. 10:31 A frequent knock on Los Angeles is that it is a car-centric city, which is true. Although we have the second highest public transportation ridership rates in the US after New York. 10:43 I mean, it'll take you a long time [laughs] to get from point A to point B, but it is more functional in that way, I think, than people expect. 10:51 I started taking the bus when I kind of, like, fell out with my family for a while, and I gave them back the family car that I had. And for about four to five years, I was taking the bus or taking the train. 11:03 I have reconciled with my family and gotten the family car back, but to this day, I probably use it, like, once a week to go to psychoanalysis. 11:10 And then other than that, I am taking the bus or the train wherever I can go. Um- There's something really circular about, like, reconciling with your family to get the car back to go to psychoanalysis- [laughs]... 11:19 to talk about your family. [laughs] Full circle. [laughs] We are back. [upbeat music] What's the worst thing about LA right now? 11:30 I really don't wanna sound corny, but a lot of times I wake up and I walk around or I drive around, and I, I just, I can't believe I get to live here. It is an underdog city in a lot of ways. 11:41 There's always something else under the hood that people just aren't really curious enough to understand what that might be. 11:48 When you say underdog city, uh, I'm, like, trying to think of, like, are, are any cities not underdog cities? 11:52 Like, the only place I can arrive to is, like, maybe New York, and you're just, like [laughs] you're just pitting all cities against evil New York. [laughs] This is all to say that I loved my time living in New York. 12:03 It was so formative, and I have great friends there. 12:06 But putting everything up against New York as a comparison, you're gonna set yourself up for disappointment every time because it's just a completely different set of circumstances and- Navel yard gazing, you could call it- [laughs] Yeah, exactly... 12:20 in New York. I still feel that, you know, with my whole chest, that everyone wants to be Los Angeles so bad. Like, when I go to Happier Grocer, I'm like, "Oh, okay, cool. Erewhon Light, cute." Okay. 12:29 Well, that- You know... that's interesting 'cause when we talked to Paula, she was framing LA as an underdog in relation to the Big Apple. Hmm. 12:35 If you spend enough time on X, the everything app, you may feel that way, but I don't. The COVID thing. You've brought up COVID a couple times. COVID has come up in- Yeah... 12:43 all three now of the, of the conversations we've had for this episode, and, like, the lingering effects of COVID in Los Angeles, in how it's affected real estate, the social fabric of how people gather. 12:53 You were mentioning that. I find that interesting because it's not something that's comes up as much in conversation in New York now. It feels like New York bounced back way better than LA for whatever reason. 13:05 Why do you think this is so much more a conversation in LA rather than over here? Okay, cool. I can get into this part. Sorry. I realize I, I, I sense blood in the water, so I'm gonna take it. 13:13 Part of this is New York transplants' fault. It really is. "I just need to get out of the city, you know? 13:19 COVID was really my turning point, so I decided to come west to LA," and it's these people's fault that everything got very expensive and annoying. 13:26 Like, if I need to go to Canyon Coffee, which y'all have a Canyon Coffee over there now, but whenever I go, I see everyone wearing the fucking, the MoMA Yankees hat. Do you know which one I'm talking about? Oh, yeah. 13:35 I see three of them every time. I'm just like, "Oh, y'all ain't from here. Okay." Yeah. I don't know. 13:41 There's just something about Los Angeles that, like, really stresses people out for some reason, and I hope it's not, like, stereotypes about superficiality or anything like that 'cause that just seems so lame to care about. 13:54 I don't know. Like, you don't think New York is superficial? It happens. It's everywhere. I don't know what it is. 13:59 There's something about LA that just, like, really upsets people, and maybe it's because you don't really have to be smart here, and maybe people resent that you don't have to be smart here, and you can kinda just live in your own world. 14:12 I'm not from San Francisco, but I'm from Humboldt County, so, you know, far northern California, and when I was growing up, tension between Northern California and Southern California was always like, in Southern California, they're superficial. 14:21 It's all about money. It's just, like, palm trees, and the weather's good all the time, and up here it's, like, foggy and damp and cold and, like, they don't understand. 14:29 But still it's- Yeah, there's, like, this fetishization of struggle that I don't really understand. [upbeat music] Paramount is threatening to leave town over the antitrust case if this merger is not allowed to happen. 14:42 Is there, like, any sense that you're getting among people you know that, like, LA's status as, like, this Hollywood company town, like, that that's ending? 14:52 I should preface this by saying that I am not an expert in the Warner Mount happenings. 14:58 My sense is that the recent warnings of Paramount threatening to leave California, it seems like a game of chicken to me between- That's my sense as well... 15:08 them and Attorney General Rob Bonta for the antitrust lawsuit that California has joined other states in suing. 15:15 And I've seen these headlines of people saying, "LA is the new Detroit," you know, auto industry leaving Michigan and this decline of a city. 15:24 And Detroit is an amazing city, first of all, but secondly, I don't think that that is an accurate way to describe what LA is currently going through, and certainly it has been extremely difficult. 15:38 I mean, there are people who are incredibly seasoned here who are struggling to find work, some people who can't afford to live here anymore, who have opted to leave. 15:47 But there's still so much infrastructure that's entrenched here, and I would be surprised if, at least in the near term, that was really the exodus that I think people are, are threatening or talking about. 16:00 Everyone I know in the film and TV industry is really struggling. 16:03 Like, even the more successful people are having trouble, like, getting things greenlit or whatever it is, or, like, someone I know who's an actress who got flown out for two days to do an commercial in Barcelona 'cause it was cheaper to film and fly everyone out to Barcelona than it is in LA. 16:17 So there's a really, like, intense feeling of shrinkage, and this Paramount deal will be disastrous. The layoffs will happen. There's already a lot of unemployed folks in LA. 16:28 Like, I've heard from restaurant owners in Burbank, near Paramount and other places, near CBS, that they're experiencing, you know, drop in business. 16:36 There is an intense feeling of, like, attack, and there's no one protecting us from the stuff that's coming. 16:43 But I, I have a lot of faith in, like, the city's independent artists and have a lot of faith in, like, the people doing exciting things and, like, the venues that were too expensive to hold parties or screenings at are now not too expensive to do that. 16:54 So a lot of independent artists are taking advantage of the fact everyone is really hungry for cultural activity, and they're making it happen whatever way they can. The glass half full here- [laughs]... 17:05 being that, that in a period- I know, like-... of a downturn, it's easier to make art. [laughs] Yeah, and rent has never been lower, folks. [laughs] Really? Are you serious? Like, rents... Yeah. 17:15 Rents are dropping all over the city. You can get a two-bedroom for two thousand a month. Like, Santa Monica, you could live by the beach for two thousand a month. 17:22 State of LA as a company town for the, the film industry. Fucked. So fucked. 17:28 So I think both of you know that I was at Fox for a year and change around the time of the strikes and then kind of have stayed in touch in the rise of the generative AI era. 17:38 It's very fascinating to see that bleed into politics where people are like, "Oh, tax credits should exist for local productions," yada, yada, yada, and some people being like, "Oh, we should maybe work with AI companies and figure out how they best fit in with studio workflows." 17:52 And you have entire large studios who are like, "All right, cool. Maybe it's our time to be out of LA, out of SoCal writ large." Hmm. 17:58 If you put your chips down and really believe that, like, Andreessen, for example, is right about #AmericanDynamism, uh, maybe all the money's coming from El Segundo and, like, all the defense contractors and shit. 18:08 But I, A, don't think that's happening, and B, I think it's still gonna take a lot of energy to unseat- LA has this, like, wealth of- Hmm... of creativity in the way that it is, right? 18:18 The weather's great, the people are great, and obviously people are all here for each other. We just need to make it a little easier for people to support each other. 18:24 Tazbia was telling us how, like, it was cheaper to fly people out to Barcelona and produce it there rather than just to produce it in LA where everybody already was. 18:31 Is that the danger where, okay, maybe everybody is still just based in LA, but we go to, you know, countries in Europe or wherever where it's just way cheaper? Yeah. 18:40 I mean, I don't know for how long that remains economically sustainable given the entire state of the world we're in, but clearly for now, that works out well for a lot of folks. 18:50 Things don't work without proximity, right? Like, this is why you need scenes. Shout out to our boy Jose. This is why you need, you know, a confluence of smart enough people all speaking the same language. Yeah. 18:59 And I think that happens in LA, again, for creativity in a way it doesn't in other places. LA as a creativity town versus New York as a creativity town, what's the difference? Yeah. 19:08 I think that LA is very much like zero to one, like ground floor of just like, "All right. I have an idea. I wanna make it happen. I'm surrounded by enough cool people to make cool shit happen." 19:18 LA is that for like visual culture- Yeah. Mm... maybe music to an extent, and then in New York I feel like it lends itself more to, like, the written word, books, trades, news, that kinda shit. Yeah. 19:27 That's why I've always feel New York is very over-represented on X, the Everything app. Whenever I say that, I get hate. 19:33 [laughs] What was interesting to me, though, is all of them framed this downturn as a creative opening. Out of work or underemployed TV writers that Tazbia knows are opening clubs and venues and third spaces. 19:50 In the absence of, like, the health of our institutions, there's a lot of exciting stuff happening in the underground scene in LA, like all of these, like, former film, TV writers are, like, writing for the stage and doing cool stuff at, like, the new theater in Hollywood or, like, the Echo Theater Company. 20:08 There's just a lot more exciting things happening outside of the mainstream. 20:13 And I got into this fascinating conversation with these two girls about the current state of just original films doing really well at the box office and whether the right lessons will be applied from the studios, which is people are hungry for more original storytelling, not let's make five more Backrooms and five more [laughs] Obsessions, but derivatives. 20:35 That's also a thread that you were writing about for Dirt as a correspondent, too. Mm-hmm. 20:39 Like, the balance between guaranteed profit from franchise IP, but also the value of original IP in the AI era and where these studios are really putting a premium as they're, like, tightening the belt. 20:53 I think the thing is that the franchises are not guaranteed moneymakers anymore. 20:59 With these two horror films in particular, I know that [laughs] every studio is mining YouTube like crazy right now, trying to find the next precocious YouTuber who might be a horror auteur just waiting in the shadows there. 21:13 But we'll see. I mean, it does seem like there has been a renewed interest in going to the movies. So I am choosing to remain optimistic here. We'll see. 21:24 [percussion music] There was one statistic that we asked everyone about. Mm. 21:28 That statistic was that the amount that the city made from the World Cup was about the same as the amount that the city lost in the June 2025 ICE raids. Mm-hmm. 21:41 I had not seen those two figures side by side, but that is striking. 21:46 Over the summer, there was this, a different surge of energy that you could feel here, but I think the ICE raids created this perception that certain pockets of Los Angeles, particularly downtown, are unsafe. 22:01 There are pockets of LA where it's this socioeconomic discrepancy is so, so, so pronounced, and it very much, at least for me, feels like certain people in government aren't doing their jobs. 22:11 Well, let's talk about- Is that a Karen Bass sub tweet? Yeah. Oh man, fucking everyone hates Karen Bass, and everyone's right. 22:18 Talk about someone who has been unable to take, like, a proper victory lap and has just been pilloried hardcore. 22:23 I think her time has been very much like a, a stop the bleeding in LA, but she's also been constantly, like, raked over the coals for not doing enough. 22:31 Like, it's funny to watch New York from LA 'cause we're just like, "Take me to Mamdani-stan, baby. Please. This man's doing it." That is not what's happening here. Yeah. 22:41 And it's been funny to watch that shake out in the mayoral race, too, 'cause, like, Nithya Raman's also kinda, like, come in for that, and she's leading now obviously because of a lot of missteps from the Bass campaign. 22:51 Karen Bass was, like, the candidate a few years ago when, uh, the last election happened, right? It was like Rick Caruso versus her, right? And so she was the one- Yeah... that people liberal to left rallied around. 23:01 She was sort of the best option. Exactly. And Rick Caruso should never run for office, period. I wanna make that abundantly clear. In LA, we love our malls, and this man runs, like, two of the big, big boy malls. 23:13 He runs the Americana and The Grove. And whenever I go to the Americana and Grove, I'm just like, "Oh man, this guy was about to be, like, an elected official. He was gonna be mayor." That would suck. 23:23 I have to pay for parking whenever I go to The Grove, and I get mad every time. It's clean. It's nice. It's not cheap for anyone to operate a business there. It doesn't feel like a livable, breathable community. 23:32 It feels very much like a private equity cesspool. Another big thing that came up was Mamdani envy, right? Mm. And the ineptitude of Karen Bass in the light of Mamdani. 23:44 The virgin Karen Bass versus- [laughs] The Chad Mamdani... Zoran Mamdani. In the time that I've lived here, I have yet to speak with someone who is a Karen Bass fan. 23:55 There is just a sense that things could be so much better. 23:58 There's a constant influx of people that come here to chase a dream, and that's always been the case, and people who see the potential that the city has and are frustrated that it's not being used in this meaningful way. 24:11 And I think the rise of Zoran Mamdani galvanized a lot of people here to think, "Well, maybe we should be more ambitious with what we can do with the city." 24:21 There was that video a couple weeks back of the mayor, Karen Bass, her team did this video of her trying to do a Zoran, basically, where she's at the site of this pothole that needs fixing. Some constituent- Yeah... 24:32 has said, "Come fix this pothole." They go out there. There's a car parked over the pothole, and she's like, "Hey, guys. We're here. We can't fix the pothole. There's this car parked here." Wow. 24:40 I would say everyone's really pissed off at Karen Bass right now. I mean, for the most part, people are really pissed off at Karen Bass. 24:46 Um, she has loyalists in certain parts of the city, but everyone's just really pissed off. 24:51 I think this latest, where she kind of, like, helped push through the merger, the Paramount, um, settlement, like, that really pissed people off. 24:59 You know, she always seems to be out of town when there's a disaster happening. 25:03 The pothole thing is one example, but, like, there is a sense that, like, all of city services have been degraded, but every other year the police force gets new cars. It's just so maddening. 25:16 We talked a lot about media in LA and- That was a positive note from, from these three conversations for sure. 25:21 Was a positive note because I think that there's a lot of independent publications, including No Bad Days, that are flourishing. 25:29 When I came up with the idea just a couple of years ago, there wasn't much in the way of local smaller media as there is right now, actually. 25:37 Like, there's quite a few publications that have come up in the last couple of years, like LA Material, The Southlander. 25:44 There's always been kinda like the Boyle Heights Beat and these kind of smaller public benefit news organizations. 25:50 But the thing that really made me wanna start it was when LA Weekly was bought off, and that was kind of basically the end of the alt-weekly in Los Angeles. 25:58 And then over the last couple of years, you've kind of seen, like, layoff after layoff happen at the LA Times. And I think the la- the last couple of layoffs was when I decided it could be fun to do this. 26:10 It's called No Bad Days. It's a newsletter about Los Angeles. I kind of just write about whatever I want. I think I'm writing about Justin Bieber today performing in MacArthur Park. But next week I think we're... 26:19 And I say we because my friend Tosten Burks has been helping me out with some of it because we're trying to scale it up. 26:25 Tosten and I are planning to write about a new play by Jenine Nabers, who is a writer on Swarm and a lot of other TV shows, Atlanta, I think, Unreal, and she has a new play that's kind of loosely based on, like, The Cosby Show scandal. 26:40 So that's next week. So it's really kind of just whatever. On the Substack platform, what performs well is not deeply reported stuff. 26:48 It's usually just kind of whatever I'm writing on my kind of imaginary deadline and don't know what to say or do, and I'll, I'll write something, you know, kind of off the cuff, and then that'll do numbers. 27:01 And that's [laughs] that's been the kind of disappointing aspect of the Substack ecosystem for me. Something that feels more thoughtful or more deeply reported won't do well on there for I think what are obvious reasons. 27:15 I've chosen it for the kind of audience-building mechanism that they have, but I don't love it. Uh, this is where I should probably plug Beehive, uh, as a Beehive employee. 27:23 [laughs] But that's, that's maybe not what we're talking about here. Uh, let me read just some of the headlines of your stories. 27:28 Um, so at the, at the top of No Bad Days, the, like, five at the top there, there's "What Happens to a Studio Town When Its Studio Shrinks?" 27:35 There's "A Perfumer Explains What Stinks in Boyle Heights," "Coming of Age Under the LAX Flight Path," "Meet the Coalition That Wants to End the Olympics Everywhere," and "Don't Call It Crypto's Woodstock". 27:46 Your most popular, a few of your most popular, there's "How the LA Review of Books Destroyed Itself," "Why Former Managing Editor Sarah Yasin Quit the LA Times," "Hollywood Couldn't Blacklist Poppy Liu," and "How to Fall Back in Love with LA." 28:00 These are your four most popular, and then before that, five of your most recent, just to give the listener a picture of what you're writing about. Okay. That's way less embarrassing than I thought. 28:09 No, I actually really love my audience. Like, I mean that so earnestly. Like, they're- Yeah... 28:14 so wonderful, and I think part of it is that there are other LA newsletters, there's other LA, like, media stuff that's very, like, um, depoliticized and kind of, you know, just, "Check out this new Chris Black's, you know, handover pop-up at whatever," you know. 28:31 That's fine. That's great for, like, cultivating, like, a mass audience of kind of people who just wanna stand in line for something. 28:38 But I think I've developed a really great, earnest, funny, interesting audience because I have not held back in terms of, like, what my, what my politics are. Mm. 28:49 So if you look at the top three, like, most po- I'm actually... 28:51 I haven't looked at that in a while, but I'm quite surprised that the top three are pieces that I'm really proud of, like "The LA Review of Books Destroyed Itself," which was deeply reported source. 29:01 I think I interviewed, like, five people anonymously for that piece about the internal politics of the LA Review of Books and how they were kind of censoring Gaza coverage and in general just being, like, weird and prudish about sex workers and stuff like that. 29:14 And then the second one was, like, an interview with my friend Sarah Yasin, who quit the LA Times. Um, she's my friend. 29:20 It's not kind of like a pure journalism piece, but she was able to be kind of frank and honest with me in a way that she couldn't be with other publications about why she quit the LA Times and why she founded The Key, which is a new magazine about, focused on Palestine. 29:33 And then the third one is an interview with Poppy Liu, who is in, um, I Love Boosters, which is, you know, this kind of leftist fantasy film by Boots Riley, and she converted to Islam, and I'm Muslim, so that was a really fun, like, interview to do. 29:48 So I think my audience self-edits itself, and people who don't what I, where I stand on certain things leave, and people who do, like, stay, and they, they participate in the comment section and have, like, really great engagement on my articles because people are really engaged in, in what I'm writing about, which is great. 30:07 Where are you going for local news, local media? I read the LA Times most mornings. LA Material I think has been such a refreshing outlet started by some LA Times alums. Oh, I should mention I used to work there as well. 30:21 [laughs] Um, but at LA Times, I should say. But they have been doing really impressive work, I think, in tapping into what people are thinking about, but also just doing some very granular stories. 30:35 Like, there was a story about why the escalator at, I think the AMC Burbank is always broken, and it's true, it al- always is broken. 30:43 And so th- so tho- those kinds of granular, like, very much for Angelino storytelling I really appreciate, in addition to very hard-hitting reporting that they're doing about politics in particular. 30:54 LA Taco is incredible. 30:57 In terms of doing the, the on-the-ground shoe leather reporting, they are still actively tracking the ICE raids after many outlets have moved on in terms of interest or are not covering them as rigorously. 31:11 They're still doing this intensively every day, and I think really very much becoming an trusted news source for the community. They also do incredibly creative things. 31:21 Like, they've been doing a series where they've been asking people that work at strip clubs or who are doing sex work in some capacity as a dominatrix or something, like, "Where do you like to eat? Where do you go?" 31:32 And so getting this really different, you know, a s- a sense of the city from people who are not often asked about what their experiences of the city is like. So LA Taco I think is indispensable. 31:43 Eastside Rag all day, every day. Good as fuck. I read Tesbie's Substack. I don't subscribe to it. I don't subscribe to anyone's Substacks, but I read hers. Shout out. It's really good. Eater LA every so often. Mm. 31:54 But, you know, that's... Eater is, is very much like a, a PR trade magazine. I know both of you have seen me kinda rag on new media being shorthand for trade magazines. Mm-hmm. So I love a trade in that way. Yeah. 32:07 Let's talk quickly about, like, the tech scene in LA, which we did mostly- Mm-hmm... talk to Rehan about. 32:12 I don't know if we talked about this, but when I think LA and tech, well, one, I think of Snap, Snapchat, Snap being- Mm-hmm... 32:18 in Venice Beach, but I also think of TBPN, and TBPN being so influential now in the tech media space, and it being based in LA. I do not think about TBN, TBPN. Well, well- I try not to think about TBPN- Lucky you... 32:30 at all. [scoffs] Mm-hmm. I think about it, I think about it every day. I see it on Twitter. Not in the world I'm living in. [scoffs] Well, must be nice. [upbeat music] Ya burnt. Daisy, two. Francis, zero. 32:44 My new j- job has exposed me to the type of founder who might come out of, like, Caltech and, like, start their business in Pasadena. 32:52 And those are not necessarily consumer-facing technology businesses that we would hear about, but they are building the type of deep tech that could really, like, have really big ramifications, you know, in satellite communication and robotics, stuff like that. 33:08 So I feel like I had some ignorance around that before having these conversations. Yeah. 33:13 Pasadena is very close and near and dear to my heart because it's that specific interesting where it's, you have CalArts and Caltech, and this is very much, you know, the middle of the two. 33:21 Some of the biggest advances, I would say, in arts and media are a function of this confluence. My personal, personal one is very much, um, ambient music is Southern California native music for this specific reason. 33:33 It's slow and meditative because you need to deal with traffic, and you need a system that sounds good enough. Altec Lansing, for example, based in Pasadena until they got bought decades ago. 33:44 But y- that's an LA company, right? Same for, like, a lot of the JPL offshoots. Same for a lot of the Caltech offshoots, right? 33:50 Like, these are folks who are like, "We're gonna take math and science, and we're gonna make something out of it," you know, like something fun, interesting, consumer. 33:56 So I think that streak has always kind of persisted and, uh, you know, you get a lot of really, really cool stuff out of it. 34:02 Yeah, I really liked how you avoided saying the intersection of art and technology by saying sort of the middle of it. It's not the intersection of art and technology. That's for, that's for San Francisco. 34:10 You guys can say it as much as you want up there. [sighs] Man, I... Like, when I go to SF, I feel like I'm entering an alternate universe. Like, no one here knows what Salesforce is. You know what I mean? 34:20 Like, no one is impressed by anything I do for my day job in Los Angeles, which is fabulous. Like, you know, it's great, and I've worked for some pretty buzzy, like, tech companies. 34:30 So when I'm in SF, people are impressed by that, which is really strange, and honestly, like, [scoffs] it's lame. It sucks. Like, it's not great. [chuckles] I have not been part of a tech scene in LA. Mm-hmm. Thank God. 34:44 I'm sure it exists on the West Side somewhere, like when I worked at another tech company that was in Venice Beach. But that was, like, almost like working at, like, a frat house. 34:53 Like, it wasn't like working at the tech companies that are in SF. Like, I feel like LA tech companies tend to be a little bit more like party houses and frat houses or, or at least they used to. 35:03 I haven't worked in one on this, in this part of town in a while. [upbeat music] We talked a lot about food, but also, like, LA is a city that's, like, really tantalizing to the senses. Mm-hmm. 35:15 Paula had just written a post for GQ about a perfume that figures in The Shards, which is an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's book, and we asked her what her LA perfume would be. 35:26 Oh, you mean Giorgio Beverly Hills right here? Um- Absolutely. [laughs] Yes. 35:33 So I had done some reporting about how Rodeo Drive became Rodeo Drive a few years ago, and so I was familiar with Giorgio, which was one of the first luxury boutiques of its kind on this, what used to be a very residential street that had, you know, a hat maker and a candy store and catered very much to area residents, and then became this... 35:57 I think set the template in, in a lot of ways for what we see as the kind of luxury experience of shopping now. 36:03 I mean, I think they had a pool table and a fireplace, and they had, like, an espresso bar, and this was, like, [chuckles] early '80s, so very unheard of. And the story of Giorgio is fascinating. 36:15 It was a husband and wife who had a very acrimonious separation, but in the process, they created this cultural behemoth specifically related to this perfume that came out in the '80s that is notable in just how potent it is. 36:34 It's one spray, and you, you almost can't wash it off, and to some people, it smells incredibly cloying, and to others, it smells like, you know, bright, sunny place. 36:44 Apparently, there was an unofficial rule in the '80s for certain restaurants and hotels that they would not allow people who wore Giorgio to be there because it was just a wave of this incredibly pungent odor. 36:57 But the perfume kept coming up again and again in the show as a way of really setting the tone for the conspicuous consumption that defined the '80s in Los Angeles and what that meant. 37:09 And so I was curious to learn more about it, so I had a, a fun conversation with the prop master for the show and a perfumer who could tell me a little bit more about what that signified specifically. 37:20 Uh, but yeah, that was, that was a really fun story to work on. What is the smell of LA to you? Like, if you were gonna make a perfume that would be the smell of- [laughs]... the 2020s. Oh, I love this question. 37:31 I would say jasmine. Uh, sometimes you'll- Mm... you'll walk by, and you'll just get this, this wave of this smell that I love. Probably marijuana, um, as well. Jasmine, marijuana, roasted meats. 37:46 The taco stand on the corner making some asada. And I would say also cut grass, that you see the landscapers everywhere all over the city maintaining these very green lawns and shrubs. 38:00 But let's just go with those four notes- [chuckles] I love these notes... for this perfume. Yeah. I wanna bask in it. We did not ask Rehan the same question. I feel like he would've had a good answer to it. 38:11 You are such a, a food guy. What is like, uh, L- what is, what, what is the state of food in LA? 38:17 Which is sort of an annoying question, but I mean to say, like, the identity of how you are eating in LA and how you think that would compare to, to a New York, a San Francisco, whatever, an LA of five years ago. 38:28 Like, what is food in LA to you right now? 38:31 I think right now my inner, like, MBA kinda comes out, which is just, it's hard to run a restaurant, it's expensive to run a restaurant, and you see a lot of those decision-making processes come back down to how people market and sell food. 38:43 Which, you know, like, that's hard. 38:45 In terms of really good things, thankfully, uh, as a result of that, you see a lot of really good, again, people slanging food out of their cars, people doing, like, sidewalk vending, that kind of stuff, which is very phenomenal. 38:56 And for a lot of, like, legacy restaurants, a lot of brick and mortar, it has kinda shifted to a hybrid like, all right, cool, four days out of the week we're doing a regular menu, and on day five it's a pop-up or a collaboration with some other brand or some other restaurant, whatever. 39:09 Almost everything in that state of food feels very, um... Oh my gosh, this is gonna be on a podcast. 39:15 Feels very B2B sassy in this really weird way, where it's like, "Oh, our restaurant's a platform, and we're collaborating." Hmm. Do you guys have Corgi Cafe yet? I don't know. 39:24 I- we don't, we have so many beautiful people here that I think it would be hard to sc- have a Corgi Cafe properly. Yeah, like where- You need some-... does the Corgi end and the cafe begin? The, exactly. 39:34 We- Every, everywhere is Corgi Cafe in LA if you want it badly enough, guys. The, the pop-up- Oh, absolutely. I mean, there's like a high rank of Chopped people in Los Angeles to staff a Corgi Cafe. 39:42 The pop-up thing, there's just so many people doing pop-ups at so many places now. I can think of, like, a couple places very near me here in New York that do at least one monthly pop-up. 39:53 I feel like five years ago even, that wasn't as much of a thing. This is, I mean, this is like LA, New York, multiple places, but, like- Mm-hmm... does that strike you? They're popping up. 40:00 The pop-ups are popping up- The pop-ups are popping up... everywhere, guys. [laughs] Oh, yeah. The pop-ups are popping because of two things. 40:06 One, LA, like ma- most other major cities, has had kind of a death of real estate. Mm-hmm. Which really sucks. 40:13 Like, there used to be corridors in LA, you know, even people from any other city can, like, rattle off, like, Melrose, Fairfax, et cetera, and like, oh, those were known. 40:21 And those neighborhoods are functionally like ghost towns right now for a variety of reasons. A lot of LA folks will talk about, for example, the strikes a few years back as, like, a big socioeconomic tipping point. 40:32 That's thing A. And thing B, it's also just, like, culture's changed a lot down here too for, for that... I mean, as a result of that, right? 40:39 Like, it's harder to sustain a business if you don't have this big day in, day out, like, corporate culture that- Mm... gives you stability and a bankroll. 40:46 One thing that I realized we forgot to ask our other guests about, but kind of seems like some- one thing that I think of when I think of LA restaurant or food culture that we don't really have the equivalent of in, like, Manhattan, but definitely in the outer boroughs, is the strip mall restaurant. 41:02 Mm. Right. Are they still thriving? Oh, hell yeah. Fucking love a strip mall restaurant. Um- What's your favorite? They need love, so I'm not gatekeeping. Bridgetown Roady is phenomenal. 41:12 They get written up, but I feel like that needs to be a spot that's rammed. They [laughs] they do a, a chicken Caesar wrap with saltfish in the dressing instead of anchovy. Mm. And it's jerk chicken, and it is... 41:24 And, and the, and the wrap itself is more akin to, like, a prata or a beef roll. And it's just, like, really over... It's not health food, but it's so freaking good. Actually, that's an interesting thing. 41:32 A lot of spots that have made it in LA are former pop-ups gone brick and mortar. It's called a startup, baby. And I think that's been very cool to see. Oh, yeah, exactly. It's a startup. [laughs] 100%, baby. 41:41 That's how we do it. So Bridgetown's one. My quadruple OGs at Barú are another, where it's, they started in a strip mall. 41:47 I have a tweet about going to a Michelin Star unmarked spot in like 2015, and lo and behold, many years later, they're still around and they're still crushing it. Yeah, they're like a fine dining establishment. 41:57 They're great. That's actually a, one really fun way to go around eating in LA, and maybe it's the same for every major city now. It's, go to a spot that's three years old. Mm-hmm. 42:04 It's probably s- like super dialed and super great. Yeah. You can walk in now without reserving two weeks in adv- or you can reserve- Yeah, if you don't-... you know, three days before. Right. 42:11 Or maybe you cut this part out, because I don't want people to know you can do this. You can actually call the restaurant and be nice to them. You can do that, and it works so often. It's crazy. Mm. Not Instinct. 42:22 Not Instinct, no. Um, I use Instinct for other stuff that I really don't wanna do. Finding old tax stuff or, um, fighting Amazon. I don't use Instincts for, like, restaurant reservations. That's a very human thing. 42:34 P- actually, no. This is the one thing that, that kinda fixed me, which is people would come to my shop with a ChatGPT printout being like, "These are essential oils I wanna buy." 42:42 And I would look at the whole list and I'd be like, "Oh, sweetie, you don't know what you're talking about. This makes no... Did you use ChatGPT on this?" And they're like, "Oh, yeah, I did. I asked." 42:49 And I was just like, "No, no, no." And I'd rip up the list. I'd be like, "All right. One by one, tell me what you need. Let's go." This has happened multiple times to you? Are you serious? 42:56 [laughs] It's ha- it happens multiple times a month, every month. I'm not at the shop all the time, but whenever I'm there now, it still happens every fucking day. 43:03 People, you know, again, people have no etiquette with how to deal with the real world. It's very gross. [upbeat music] Last question for you. Best question. What is the most true and iconic piece of LA media? 43:16 It could be a movie, a book, a show, a song. Which piece of LA media is your paragon? Oh my God. What a horrifically precise question. [laughs] I love it. It's a great question. 43:27 Oh, I have so many ways I could answer this, but I th- I'll go with my gut instinct, which is Mulholland Drive. 43:33 I mean, I think David Lynch, RIP, understood the rhythms and the visual language of the city so well, and I think that that film in particular captures that, the light giving way to darkness and the rot that can sometimes happen in this pursuit of chasing a dream. 43:54 But it's also just so beautiful and strange in so many ways. 43:58 There's a reason that that film is such a touchstone still, and I think probably one of my favorite nights I've ever had here is that, at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, which is a beautiful cemetery, like, in East Hollywood, where a lot of luminaries have been laid to rest, including David Lynch- There is a series called Cinespia where they screen films in the cemetery, and you can bring a picnic, you can bring your dog. 44:22 They have food trucks, and it's basically like a big backyard party. And they frequently show Mulholland Drive there. 44:29 Even before I lived here, I went with a few friends, and sitting there in that place, watching this film, being in the center of town, it was just indescribable. 44:39 And that film is really special, and it shows in both good and bad ways the pull that the city has. My immediate reaction was Vanderpump Rules. 44:48 I don't know if people are gonna respond to that positively, but- Speak your truth... right now I'm thinking Vanderpump Rules. But I'm thinking about, like, the subtext of Vanderpump Rules, you know? 44:56 Not just what's happening on screen, but there's a lot of subtext there that I do think says [laughs] that is very quintessentially LA. But in the early years, I'll caveat, the early years- Mm-hmm... 45:05 were more LA than the later seasons, you know, when they were, like, broke and had popcorn ceilings and that kind of thing. But that's what's coming. I will say, I did see Maddie's Secret, and I did- Mm... 45:14 interview John Early for the... And that felt like a really kind of loving portrayal of Los Angeles, and I really enjoyed it, and I think it's going to enter the kind of canon- The classic... of LA media. Yeah. 45:25 Mike Davis, Case for Letting Malibu Burn, all day every day. Classic. Really solid answer. Frances- Pairs perfectly with the subtext of Vanderpump Rules, specifically the subtext. Yeah. 45:34 I think the subtext for Vanderpump Rules might be The Case for Letting Malibu Burn. [laughs] [laughs] Okay. I feel that. The other answer was, um- Makes sense... Mulholland Drive, David Lynch. Maybe. Maybe. 45:46 I think that, um, I mean, the, the quintessential LA directors in my opinion are, are, are Lynch and PTA. I will always love PTA because he shot a bunch of his movies at my alma mater. 45:55 I'll watch Boogie Nights and be like, "Oh, that was my English class. Sick." And, like, that's cool to me, but I also feel like a lot of people don't experience LA in those ways, right? Mm. 46:03 Like, you could say, like, "Oh, yeah, like these are very quintessentially LA," but it's like, no, you're not from here. You won't get it. 46:09 I think of the moment it's very much, uh, LA's going through this very, uh, profound spiritual class war. Mm. 46:14 And I think Mike Davis speaks maybe more truly to that than this kind of film noir type of search as posited by, like, Lynch. No one comes to LA lost in the same way that, uh, you know, Naomi Watts did. 46:26 It's just not the truth anymore, unfortunately. The last question we ask for a guest I feel like we need to maybe answer ourselves. Yeah. All right. 46:32 Do you have a paragon piece of LA media that represents LA most in your mind? Francis, thank you so much. I do. It's a painting of the Hollywood sign by this artist Ed Ruscha. Wow. I don't know if you've heard of it. 46:42 [laughs] I'm having a couple thoughts. 46:44 And this is like, am I gonna be performative, or am I gonna say what immediately jumped to my head, which I don't think is the best, most representative piece of LA media, but Once Upon a Time... 46:53 in Hollywood does- At least you didn't say La La Land. I've never seen it. God forbid. I think it's an American Apparel billboard. An American Apparel. Okay. It's kinda crazy how nobody mentioned Disneyland. 47:04 I don't think about Disneyland at all. Or Walt Disney. Yeah, but, like, think about it. Disneyland- [laughs] Is he L- Is that LA? That's America... Disney made a whole park about California in California. Mm-hmm. 47:14 You can go and experience California. Well, I, if I wanted to experience California, I would just listen to Joni Mitchell's California. [laughs] Well, and maybe that is the essential piece of California media. 47:24 I wish I could do the... It's not falsetto, is it? I'm not gonna try. You should try. [singing] California. [applause] [cheering] Ya burnt. Joni Mitchell one, Francis zero. All right. That's where we're gonna end it. 47:40 [laughs] Thanks for listening. [outro music]
