Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
Speaker 1: where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
Speaker 1: today's best minds, and we have such a great show
Speaker 1: for you today. Think like an economist. Justin Wolfers joins
Speaker 1: us to talk about the good, bad, and very bad
Speaker 1: economic vibes coming from the Trump White House. Then we'll
Speaker 1: talk to MS now's own Jacob Sober about his fabulous
Speaker 1: new book Firestorm, the great Los Angeles Fires, and America's
Speaker 1: new age of disaster. But first the news Somalie.
Speaker 2: We thankfully taped our episode before the horrific shooting in
Speaker 2: Minneapolis the other day. I can't think of how long
Speaker 2: it's been since I've been that angry. As we're seeing
Speaker 2: here is Mega will never have any shame about what
Speaker 2: they will turn into a culture war and a message
Speaker 2: to their base that if you do horrible things, they
Speaker 2: will stand by.
Speaker 1: So I want to talk about a few things in
Speaker 1: this story. One is that the police, or ice or
Speaker 1: any law enforcement does not have the right to kill you,
Speaker 1: even if you do bad stuff. They do not have
Speaker 1: the right. We still have due process in this country,
Speaker 1: you have bodily autonomy. You cannot kill people even if
Speaker 1: you don't like them, even if they are a quote
Speaker 1: unquote leftist, as the New York Post said yesterday. But
Speaker 1: that said, I think the worst part of this story.
Speaker 1: And look, not all victims of police violence are beautiful,
Speaker 1: red haired Christian women who have six year old children
Speaker 1: who they've just dropped off at school and a glove
Speaker 1: compartment filled with stuffed animals. Most victims of police violence
Speaker 1: don't necessarily look like that. But Magilworld has stumbled into
Speaker 1: a hornet's nest, and they are just keep they just
Speaker 1: keep kicking at the hornets. Here is a woman who
Speaker 1: is every woman in Minnesota, right. She looks like everyone
Speaker 1: in Minnesota. She acts like much of Minnesota. You know,
Speaker 1: a lot of times Trump World will somehow imply that
Speaker 1: a victim of police violence is a criminal or deserves
Speaker 1: this because they were maybe a drug addict, or maybe
Speaker 1: you know, we're involved, or maybe held a weapon. This
Speaker 1: is a woman who had just dropped off her six
Speaker 1: year old at school. So with that, there have been
Speaker 1: videos that we have seen of her trying to make
Speaker 1: a three point turn while the ice agents jumped in
Speaker 1: front of her and shot her three times point blank.
Speaker 1: Now there is a new video which has audio. So
Speaker 1: Renee Nicole Good says that's fine, dude, I'm not mad
Speaker 1: at you, and the ICE agent shoots her three times
Speaker 1: in the face and says, fucking bitch, we all rage.
Speaker 2: Al hawk activities right there.
Speaker 1: But also, you can't shoot people in the face you
Speaker 1: can't like, even if you don't like them, even if
Speaker 1: they make you upset, you can't shoot people in the face.
Speaker 1: And then, by the way, after she's shot in the
Speaker 1: face three times, a thirty seven year old woman with
Speaker 1: a six year old child, she is then denied medical care.
Speaker 1: There is a doctor who comes and tries to treat her,
Speaker 1: and ICE says no. So not only is this like murder,
Speaker 1: but it's some kind of terrifying where they keep her hostage,
Speaker 1: and instead of acting the way normal government might, which
Speaker 1: is to say we have to investigate this, we can't
Speaker 1: comment until it's investigated, they without any investigations, say, you know,
Speaker 1: this is not how any of this looks. She was
Speaker 1: an activist, she was this, and.
Speaker 2: Then moleftists movement right radical leftist movement.
Speaker 1: And they malign her. And then they say the FBI
Speaker 1: is going to do the investigation and they won't let
Speaker 1: Minnesota do the investigation. This is not a federal government
Speaker 1: that any state wants involved in their state. And this
Speaker 1: is where you're going to see a breakdown of federalism.
Speaker 1: And I can't tell you how scary it is to
Speaker 1: have a federal government that we pay taxes to and
Speaker 1: they come in and do insanity to us. Right, Minnesota
Speaker 1: was just minding their business and Ice and Border Patrol
Speaker 1: came in, killed one woman, shot two other people yesterday
Speaker 1: and now won't let the local authorities investigate because they
Speaker 1: want what do they want? They want to have their
Speaker 1: own people do the kind of investigation you see in
Speaker 1: a Banana Republic. I cannot express to you just the
Speaker 1: level of corruption. And by the way, two other things.
Speaker 1: The reason you know that Trump world knows this is
Speaker 1: a loser and knows that this is going to fuck
Speaker 1: them and by the way, good.
Speaker 2: God, yeah they fucking got But.
Speaker 1: The reason why they know this the problem is because
Speaker 1: you don't see Donald Trump out there right dancing and
Speaker 1: being jubilant. You see Jade Vance. And Donald Trump is
Speaker 1: more than happy to let Jade Vance be the face
Speaker 1: of failure.
Speaker 2: It is true, he's going the full bided Kabbola and
Speaker 2: just letting JD do all the unpopular fish. What I
Speaker 2: think though, is great. Hats off to Congressman Jared Moskowitz
Speaker 2: is he did a profound performance of the Congressional for yesterday,
Speaker 2: bringing the attention to something we need to do, which
Speaker 2: is it's time for Ice Barbie Christi Noman to go,
Speaker 2: and many Democrats seem to be calling for this. Though
Speaker 2: I wish someone in the leadership were a little more
Speaker 2: stern with it, but that's a different story for a
Speaker 2: different time.
Speaker 1: She should be impeached. I think that she should go.
Speaker 1: I think that Trump world, unless you hold these people accountable,
Speaker 1: they will not do anything. Two good things happening the
Speaker 1: Democratic leadership has done that has been good War Powers Act.
Speaker 1: Five Republicans voted with Democrats in the Senate on this
Speaker 1: War Powers Act, trying to prevent Donald Trump from doing
Speaker 1: any more stuff in Venezuela. My strongest guess is that
Speaker 1: Donald Trump has completely lost interest in Venezuela and we
Speaker 1: won't hear from it again. Probably not great for Venezuelans.
Speaker 1: And then the other thing that they did, which I
Speaker 1: think is good, is that we had Leader Jeffries get
Speaker 1: this Obamacare tax credit. This expansion for three more years,
Speaker 1: and that has been seventeen Republicans voted for that. So look,
Speaker 1: that now goes to the Senate, and there's a world
Speaker 1: like just like with the Epstein files, which by the way,
Speaker 1: this DJ has not released to release one percent of
Speaker 1: the Epstein files. It is still pretty good to see
Speaker 1: some of these Republicans breaking with Trump. Obviously not what
Speaker 1: we need, but still good.
Speaker 2: So, speaking of the Epstein files, Molly, I think this
Speaker 2: maneuver by Congressman Rocanna and Tom Massey never would have
Speaker 2: seen us seeing Thomas Massey doing good things a year ago.
Speaker 2: They're going to try to get a judge to oversee
Speaker 2: the release of the Epstein files so that Pam Bondi
Speaker 2: could stop obstructing and protecting the pedophile cabal.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they want a special Master. Rocanna has been really
Speaker 1: great on this and this is a really small We
Speaker 1: know that there's a reporting that says only one percent
Speaker 1: of the Epstein file stuff has been released. That is
Speaker 1: absolutely insane. I am just super horrified by that. I think,
Speaker 1: as far as I can tell, that there is a
Speaker 1: real appetite for releasing of the Epstein files, and I
Speaker 1: think that Donald Trump is doing everything he can to
Speaker 1: obfuscate and try to not let people see them, not
Speaker 1: have the DOJ release them, and so having a special
Speaker 1: master would be really great. So I think that this
Speaker 1: is a really smart way to do it. Again, these
Speaker 1: guys have had to just do everything they every which
Speaker 1: way they can to get people to pay attention to this.
Speaker 2: So, Maali, the continued competence of Mega Rain's true. Again,
Speaker 2: they just are the most competent.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, they're known for their competence.
Speaker 2: He only hires the best people. And the prosecutor has
Speaker 2: been disqualified from investigating with James A. Judges ruled great stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, here's where we are. Trump blocked a Trump appointed
Speaker 1: federal prosecutor from overseeing a criminal investigation into New York
Speaker 1: Attorney General. Do you know why he did that, Kelly?
Speaker 1: Because US district judge ruled that Trump loyalist John Sarcone
Speaker 1: has been unlawfully serving as interim US attorney for the
Speaker 1: Northern District of New York. There have been a couple
Speaker 1: of Trump people where he's put them in as US
Speaker 1: attorneys and they have been ruled to be illegal. So
Speaker 1: this is yet another one. This federal prosecutor has oversted
Speaker 1: his legal one hundred and twenty day appointment, and we
Speaker 1: saw this. This was the thing we saw with everyone's
Speaker 1: favorite pageant queen in the Southern District of Virginia. You
Speaker 1: know what they're doing is they're doing emergency power stuff
Speaker 1: because they can't get congressional approval for stuff. And that
Speaker 1: is the secret to Trump is you can't get the courts.
Speaker 1: And that's why, like when we talk about fixing the system,
Speaker 1: one of the things that we're going to really need
Speaker 1: is we're going to need all of those emergency powers.
Speaker 1: I mean, there are emergency Powers Acts that have not
Speaker 1: been repealed since nine to eleven. There are things that
Speaker 1: are working not the way they're supposed to. They're working
Speaker 1: on these sort of emergency war power stuff and that
Speaker 1: has to stop. We have to sort of reset back
Speaker 1: to a system of like the most checks and balances
Speaker 1: you've ever seen, where you have real democratic norms and
Speaker 1: you really don't have any of these sort of special
Speaker 1: emergency powers. Because that's how we got That was sort
Speaker 1: of the first step towards this presidency of a kind
Speaker 1: of unchecked power. We have exciting news over at our
Speaker 1: YouTube channel. This second episode from our Project twenty twenty
Speaker 1: nine series is out now. It's a reimagining where we
Speaker 1: examined what went wrong with democrats approach to politics and
Speaker 1: how we can correct it and deliver changes to help
Speaker 1: people's lives. The first episode dove into the very sexy
Speaker 1: topic of campaign finance reform, and our second episode deals
Speaker 1: with an even sexier topic, antitrust and regulation. We look
Speaker 1: at how antitrust and regulation can protect American citizens and
Speaker 1: make America thrive in an era of rampant corruption and
Speaker 1: predatory crony capitalism. We talk to the smartest names in
Speaker 1: the field like Lena Khan, el Vero Bedoya, Elizabeth Wilkins,
Speaker 1: and Doha Mechi. Republicans were prepared for when they got
Speaker 1: the levers of power. We need democrats to be too.
Speaker 1: So please head over to YouTube and search Molli John
Speaker 1: Fast Project twenty twenty nine or go to the Fast
Speaker 1: Politics YouTube channel and find it there and help us
Speaker 1: spread the word. Justin Wolfers, as a host of The
Speaker 1: Thing Like an Economists podcast and a professor at the
Speaker 1: University of Michigan, Welcome back, too Vast Politics.
Speaker 3: Justin Wolfers, Well, I love Hall exaud If you always
Speaker 3: said about talking, ready can only she say, Thank goodness,
Speaker 3: it's economic style.
Speaker 1: Can totally.
Speaker 2: I'm so excited.
Speaker 1: Things are going great every time we talk about the
Speaker 1: numbers that come out of this admin. We finally got
Speaker 1: some labor numbers from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics.
Speaker 1: Talk us through what these numbers mean.
Speaker 3: Okay, can we do a second rehearsal. Will you sound
Speaker 3: liss bored?
Speaker 1: Well, no, I'm not bored. I'm cynical about these numbers.
Speaker 1: And I don't know how cynical to be about these numbers,
Speaker 1: because remember, I mean, I know it was six months ago,
Speaker 1: but Trump did fire the head of this organization because
Speaker 1: he didn't like the set of numbers they released. So
Speaker 1: I want you to sort of talk us through what
Speaker 1: they mean, if they're real, etc. Etc. It's not boredom,
Speaker 1: it's cynicism.
Speaker 3: Okay, great, So the numbers were good enough that he
Speaker 3: didn't fire anyone this morning. Right, So let me go
Speaker 3: back a step and bring your whole audience in.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: We're always trying to get a pulse of what's going
Speaker 3: on in the economy. You might think that measuring the
Speaker 3: economy is very straightforward. It turns out, for an economy
Speaker 3: this big and this complicated. It's very very complicated, indeed, because.
Speaker 1: You have different element of the economy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, how do you even know who's doing business? How
Speaker 3: do you know how many people are out there? How
Speaker 3: do you know? You might be able to say what
Speaker 3: share of people have a job, but how many people
Speaker 3: are there in the US even there are so many
Speaker 3: unknowns and this makes this a surprisingly difficult technical task.
Speaker 3: So the most reliable indicator is what we call the
Speaker 3: jobs report. That's why you and I, Molly tend to
Speaker 3: talk on average after the first Friday of every month,
Speaker 3: which is when these latest numbers come out. Measures the
Speaker 3: unemployment right, which is one of the best indicators for
Speaker 3: how the economy is doing for you and I, But
Speaker 3: the one the markets really watches employment growth. They watch
Speaker 3: that because it's got very good statistical properties. There's more
Speaker 3: signal than noise normally in a normal hero then end
Speaker 3: the lesson there and move to talking about the world.
Speaker 3: But we're not in the normal moment, or in a
Speaker 3: moment where as you say, Molly, the president fires statisticians
Speaker 3: who give him facts he doesn't like, has tried to
Speaker 3: put in place Charlattan's and clowns and undermined the very
Speaker 3: notion of truth. So how much should you believe these numbers?
Speaker 3: And the answer is so far these are as honest
Speaker 3: as can be, so I believe them. Now, let me
Speaker 3: be clear about what I do and don't believe. What
Speaker 3: I believe is that these are a serious estimate of
Speaker 3: what's going on, using serious, high quality statistical methods. Now,
Speaker 3: remember it's always difficult, so that doesn't mean they're exactly right.
Speaker 3: Second thing is right. Now things are even more complicated
Speaker 3: because we just had a government shutdown where some numbers
Speaker 3: weren't collected, and even more, the Bureau of Labour's satistics
Speaker 3: is under resource.
Speaker 2: But what I don't.
Speaker 1: Believe is that we had the longest government shut down ever,
Speaker 1: so there's not a precedent for it.
Speaker 3: Right, For the first time since nineteen thirty nine, we
Speaker 3: literally skipped a month of measuring employment and unemployment in
Speaker 3: the United States, which we've never done before.
Speaker 2: I know, Molly, like me.
Speaker 3: It kept you awake, thrashing in the middle of the night,
Speaker 3: yea cold space.
Speaker 1: What did it to the viewers?
Speaker 3: I should that the audience. I should know Molly would
Speaker 3: call me and just say, hold me, what is going on?
Speaker 3: So all of this makes things more complicated. Plus, the
Speaker 3: economy is even more complicated because what we have is
Speaker 3: an enormous immigration shock going on, and so it makes
Speaker 3: it even more difficult to know literally how many Americans
Speaker 3: there are. What hasn't happened is these numbers went to
Speaker 3: the White House, and the White House said no, no,
Speaker 3: The Department of Lies and Propaganda would like you to
Speaker 3: believe the following instant. So these are true numbers. Now
Speaker 3: here's the other way I know they're true. They don't
Speaker 3: serve the administration's purpose. What happened this month as we
Speaker 3: learned that job growth last month was fifty thousand, which
Speaker 3: is very very low. That's so low that you could
Speaker 3: say you'd call it nearly zero. We had almost no
Speaker 3: job growth. And then the other thing that happens is
Speaker 3: every month we learn more about what happened earlier in
Speaker 3: our history. Sometimes mentioned businesses don't send in their reports
Speaker 3: of how many people are on payroll on time, and
Speaker 3: they send them in a little bit later. As a result,
Speaker 3: we revised the numbers to make them more accurate. And
Speaker 3: one of the really big things that happened was that
Speaker 3: we learned in the fact that October is one of the
Speaker 3: worst recent months we've had that jobs fell enormously in
Speaker 3: October and they rose by lesson we previously thought November. Again,
Speaker 3: for the audience, I don't want you to take month
Speaker 3: to month up and downs very seriously.
Speaker 4: Often, what we'll do is.
Speaker 3: We'll average over what's happening over the past three months,
Speaker 3: and when you do that, here's the payoff long later. Finally,
Speaker 3: the poff when you look at the last three months,
Speaker 3: we're losing.
Speaker 1: Jobs and it's proof that they're not juicing the numbers.
Speaker 1: The point you're saying is that they if they were
Speaker 1: juicing the numbers, they have made them great.
Speaker 3: If they were liars, if there were high quality liars,
Speaker 3: these wouldn't be the liars they'd tell. There's a little
Speaker 3: bit of leave unsaid right there, but no, these are
Speaker 3: absolutely serious estimates. What these estimates tell us, though, is
Speaker 3: that we're in a job's recession, by which I mean
Speaker 3: it's not clear. A recession typically means output is declining.
Speaker 3: It may be we're going to find out, but the
Speaker 3: number of jobs is declining, the number of workers people
Speaker 3: in work is declining. It's been declining for the past
Speaker 3: three months. It's also the case that for wildly oninteresting
Speaker 3: technical reasons, these numbers may be overstated. FED Chair Powell
Speaker 3: said of this last press conference, he thinks they're overstated
Speaker 3: by sixty thousand per month. Based on these numbers, ever
Speaker 3: since Liberation Day, remember the beginning of Trump's trade war
Speaker 3: that happened in April, We've created almost no jobs. It
Speaker 3: may be that we subsequently learned we've actually been shrinking
Speaker 3: the number of jobs we have in the economy since
Speaker 3: Liberation Day.
Speaker 1: So it could literally be zero right now.
Speaker 3: It's awful close to zero.
Speaker 1: But it could literally be negative fifty thousand.
Speaker 3: More than that, it negatives fifty thousand per month over
Speaker 3: the last seven months.
Speaker 1: So and this is just and you don't have and
Speaker 1: these measures don't measure every aspect of employment, right because
Speaker 1: certain employment comes in later. That's why there's revisions.
Speaker 3: What Powell said, FED Chair, who has the best economic
Speaker 3: staff in the world, is he said, their estimate is
Speaker 3: that these numbers overestimate monthly job growth by sixty thousand
Speaker 3: for quote technical reasons. Now, let me explain what technical
Speaker 3: reasons are so you understand why this isn't so simple. Really,
Speaker 3: what the way we measure employment is we send out
Speaker 3: forms to all the firms that are out there and
Speaker 3: ask them how many workers they have. Now, if I
Speaker 3: sent out a form to one in every hundred firms
Speaker 3: that are out there, then all I do is I
Speaker 3: take the total number of workers and I multiply by
Speaker 3: one hundred, and that would tell me how many jobs
Speaker 3: they were. The problem is, we don't know if we're
Speaker 3: sending them out to one and one hundred or one
Speaker 3: on one hundred and one, because we don't know how
Speaker 3: many firms there are. The reason for that is every
Speaker 3: day businesses are dying and every day new businesses are
Speaker 3: being born, and the government doesn't necessarily see them until
Speaker 3: the next tax season. So we literally don't know how
Speaker 3: many businesses there are. And so if there are fewer
Speaker 3: small businesses being born, or if there are more old
Speaker 3: businesses dying than we'd previously thought, and there's good reasons
Speaker 3: to think that's the case based on other statistics than
Speaker 3: our existing methods, which are honest, are honest, but inaccurate.
Speaker 3: So it looked no one expects that the current pessimistic
Speaker 3: numbers that show no job growth. Let me get rid
Speaker 3: of the negatives, double negatives. The current numbers show no
Speaker 3: job growth, effectively no job growth since Liberation Day. Everyone
Speaker 3: expects that to be an overstatement, too rosy, too optimistic. Wow,
Speaker 3: If anything, reality is worse.
Speaker 1: So I want we're going to go to the next
Speaker 1: question here, which is the Dow, which is not the economy,
Speaker 1: the markets, public markets.
Speaker 3: I just want to stick on jobs for a moment
Speaker 3: because I think that I really do want people to
Speaker 3: understand the job market is in a very dire strait.
Speaker 3: So the first thing I want to say is, this
Speaker 3: is the end of December data, and so we have
Speaker 3: the full year.
Speaker 2: What happened in twenty twenty five. Twenty twenty five is one.
Speaker 3: Of the worst years outside of a recession, we've ever had.
Speaker 3: Second fact I like, just because I think it's fun,
Speaker 3: is since Liberation Day, Canada has produced more jobs than
Speaker 3: the United States. Canada, who arguably will meant to be
Speaker 3: one of the biggest losers out of trade War, Canada,
Speaker 3: which is one tenth the size of the United States,
Speaker 3: is producing almost twice as many jobs. So really, what's
Speaker 3: going on is the United States economy has stopped? Why problem?
Speaker 2: Why look around?
Speaker 1: No, I know why the American economy has stopped, But
Speaker 1: I want to know why Canada. So what Cana has
Speaker 1: picked up all the slack.
Speaker 3: No, it's not that American jobs have gone across the
Speaker 3: boarder necessarily. It's just that the American economy has stopped
Speaker 3: and other economies have not.
Speaker 1: So they're picking up this slack. So if you could buy,
Speaker 1: if you could import export with the US, and now
Speaker 1: you can't because it's too expensive, you just go to
Speaker 1: Canada where it's cheaper.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to buy at that.
Speaker 3: I just want to say, there are two economies that
Speaker 3: happen to me, next to each other. One of them
Speaker 3: has stopped growing and the other has not. That right
Speaker 3: tells you something has gone wrong in the United States
Speaker 3: that has not happened elsewhere through North America.
Speaker 4: That's the one.
Speaker 3: You think of. Anything that's happened in the United States
Speaker 3: but not in other countries.
Speaker 1: No, certainly not, and certainly not a trade war that's
Speaker 1: good and easy to win. Even though the real number
Speaker 1: of tariffs we know from the New York Times supporting
Speaker 1: is the tariff numbers are actually about half what the
Speaker 1: administration is they are, it's still enough to kill the economy.
Speaker 3: Let's go back and explain that two ways. I want
Speaker 3: to be clear about what the New York Times is saying,
Speaker 3: and I want to be clear about what's going on
Speaker 3: with the economy. I'm sorry for being a boring professor.
Speaker 3: Every time you see something interesting, I'm like, let's slow
Speaker 3: down and explain right now, it's.
Speaker 2: Good, okay.
Speaker 3: So a question I've gotten frequently is if tariff's are
Speaker 3: so bad, why hasn't it destroyed the American economy. But
Speaker 3: one of the things is we actually haven't had tariffs
Speaker 3: very much.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Remember Trump was elected in January, everyone said, where's your
Speaker 3: tariff regim and he finally got around to.
Speaker 4: It in April.
Speaker 3: He announced it in April and Liberation Day, and then
Speaker 3: seven days later said, oh, just kidding, I didn't realize
Speaker 3: that would freak global markets out. I'm now going to
Speaker 3: take ninety days off. He then took ninety days off.
Speaker 3: That takes you from April through to April, May, June, July,
Speaker 3: and then he got to July and then realized he
Speaker 3: hadn't made ninety deals in ninety days. In fact, he'd
Speaker 3: made none, and said, well, we're going to put the
Speaker 3: tariffs back on. But he realized in that ninety days
Speaker 3: he'd forgotten to think about what they should be. So
Speaker 3: he gave himself another twenty four day extension, then announced
Speaker 3: a set of tariffs actually were remarkably similar to what
Speaker 3: they'd been way back in April. And then his tariff
Speaker 3: nerds said, well, we can't get that entered in the
Speaker 3: computers quick enough. That'll take another seven days. And so
Speaker 3: once we start to faff around, it takes to like
Speaker 3: August or September until we get tariffs, by which point
Speaker 3: he also starts offering exceptions. So went back, renegotiated with Canada,
Speaker 3: and basically most trade with Canada became tariff free. He
Speaker 3: backed down on a range of things. Remember the term taco.
Speaker 3: And it turns out, if you're willing to bring just
Speaker 3: the right bauble to the White House, you can whisper
Speaker 3: and say, hey, we'd like a special exemption or exception
Speaker 3: here there or somewhere else. And so it turns out
Speaker 3: there's the tariff regime as announced, and there's the tariff
Speaker 3: regime has actually implemented. So first of all, the announcements
Speaker 3: were months ahead of the implementation. The second thing is
Speaker 3: the announcements were big and public, and the walkbacks were
Speaker 3: fairly private, and so it turns out the amount of
Speaker 3: tariff revenue we've taken in is much less than you
Speaker 3: would have expected given the bold pronouncements, which is to say,
Speaker 3: there are now so many exceptions, loopholes riddled through the
Speaker 3: whole darn thing that and I think there's as good news.
Speaker 3: Trump has actually implemented fewer tariffs than you said he would.
Speaker 3: That's the reporting from the New York Times. So we
Speaker 3: do have tariffs, but they're not quite as bad as Trump.
Speaker 1: And they're at a lower rate than he says they are.
Speaker 3: Right now, let's come back, Well, if there's not huge tariffs,
Speaker 3: what's going on with the economy? So, first of all, one,
Speaker 3: these are still big. These are still the biggest tariffs
Speaker 3: we've had in about eighty ninety hundred years. Second of all,
Speaker 3: tariffs aren't the only thing. Tariff's might be the only
Speaker 3: thing people like to talk to me about, but they're
Speaker 3: not the whole economy. So what else is going on
Speaker 3: in the economy? I think the first thing is a
Speaker 3: huge crash in confidence. You look at consumer confidence, it's
Speaker 3: never been this low. You look at the share of
Speaker 3: Americans who judge the quality of American macroeconomic policies being poor.
Speaker 3: It's literally never been this high right away, that's going
Speaker 3: to cause problems. The second thing is you've got this
Speaker 3: tremendous rise in uncertainty. Right The uncertainty is partly tariffs.
Speaker 3: Will we get into trade war with China next weekend
Speaker 3: probably depends on what's happening with Epstein more than anything else.
Speaker 3: The uncertainty of those far greater than that, right. Remember
Speaker 3: the CEO of Intel walked into the White House and
Speaker 3: walked out having accidentally left behind ten percent of his
Speaker 3: company that somehow got nationalized. The White House is taking
Speaker 3: big positions in private sector companies. The White House is
Speaker 3: calling CEOs and telling them what to do. The White
Speaker 3: House is picking up foreign leaders and just bringing them home.
Speaker 3: The White House is deciding their wives and their wives,
Speaker 3: and the White House is deciding if and which states
Speaker 3: American states that wants to invade next. All of this
Speaker 3: it's tremendous cause of uncertainty. We're two weeks away from
Speaker 3: a healthcare overhaul. Of course, we've been two weeks away
Speaker 3: from a new healthcare plan now for ten years. All
Speaker 3: of this means if you were my staff and you
Speaker 3: came to me with a big vestment project. He said,
Speaker 3: justin we should invest millions in this new factory. I
Speaker 3: would say to you, hey, Molly, how much does it
Speaker 3: cost to wait a few months and see if some
Speaker 3: of these regulations actually pan out in ways that would
Speaker 3: undermine my investment. I've always got the possibility of delaying,
Speaker 3: and that's become an absolutely compelling choice now for a
Speaker 3: lot of companies. And that's part of what's going on
Speaker 3: with the economy too.
Speaker 1: All important and relevant things. So let's talk through what
Speaker 1: we are going to see now. The markets are doing
Speaker 1: really well, and there's a set there's an understanding that
Speaker 1: it's like a ke shaped economy that there are it's
Speaker 1: a recovery where we're seeing tech giants make money. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's an AI I mean, is this a bubble or
Speaker 1: is this a part of a healthy economy? Explain to
Speaker 1: us what is happening.
Speaker 3: Okay, I'm going to start again once a lot of there,
Speaker 3: so we'll go slowly. Let me start with the claim
Speaker 3: that the stock market is doing well well. It's perhaps
Speaker 3: the White House's most frequent economic claim. They're like every
Speaker 3: economist out there says, our policies suck, but look what's
Speaker 3: happening to the stock market. Now, the thing is, the
Speaker 3: stock market reflects two things. That reflects the underlying innovation
Speaker 3: impulses from the private sector and then possible changes caused
Speaker 3: by the public sector. One way of figuring out what
Speaker 3: they is going on with the private sector is to
Speaker 3: look in other countries, because things like AI are genuinely global, right,
Speaker 3: things like a shift in global demand genuinely global. And
Speaker 3: so once you do that, it turns out that the
Speaker 3: US stock market performance has actually been genuinely weak. Almost
Speaker 3: any other industrialized country you visit has had stronger stock
Speaker 3: market growth since Inauguration Day than the United States. We're
Speaker 3: at the very very bottom. So that says there is
Speaker 3: something that's driving global markets up. Whatever it is, the
Speaker 3: US is doing worse relative to every other country. So normally,
Speaker 3: if I were to look for, you know, what could
Speaker 3: an administration claim credit for, I'd say, compare the US
Speaker 3: to the rest of the world. Well, the US is
Speaker 3: doing worse than the rest of the world. That says
Speaker 3: markets have become relatively less optimistic about the US economy
Speaker 3: relative to every other economy since the administration came to power.
Speaker 3: So the claim that the stock market is says markets
Speaker 3: believe that what the administration is doing is good. I
Speaker 3: think is upside down and wrong. It shows the infatuation.
Speaker 3: It shows that American business reporters know how to look
Speaker 3: up the Dow Jones, but don't know how to look
Speaker 3: up what's happening in the rest of the world. I
Speaker 3: know it's weird to say that Americans can be a
Speaker 3: little inward looking, but.
Speaker 2: Certainly for a moment.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so, actually, I think stocks are not voting for
Speaker 3: the president. Second, what the hell is going on? Well,
Speaker 3: we are in the middle of this extraordinary AI transformation,
Speaker 3: whatever you think of it. AI is an extraordinary technology.
Speaker 3: There's two parts to the AI story. One part is
Speaker 3: the long run, which is many of the jobs that
Speaker 3: many of us do, it many of the boring parts
Speaker 3: of our jobs computers are going to be able to do.
Speaker 3: I choose to speak about that in optimistic terms, which is,
Speaker 3: if it takes away the boring parts of yours and
Speaker 3: my job, my you and I get to spend more
Speaker 3: time doing fun things. And that's been what past technological
Speaker 3: revolutions have done.
Speaker 2: So the structure of our labor.
Speaker 3: Market, of our economy, of our lives, what our children
Speaker 3: are going to grow up and do is going to.
Speaker 2: Be fundamentally different.
Speaker 3: But that's a statement about future decades. In order to
Speaker 3: create that AI companies are going to have to build
Speaker 3: out these huge data centers, which are literally just big
Speaker 3: rooms full of computers. And so what they're doing is
Speaker 3: they're at a race for the future, and so they're
Speaker 3: spending trillions of dollars gajillions, eleventy kajillion dollars on these
Speaker 3: data centers. And it turns out that that's a huge
Speaker 3: part of what's actually growing in the US economy right now.
Speaker 3: So then you can think about the US as been
Speaker 3: two economic stories. There's what's going on with your AI buildout,
Speaker 3: which is going to be short term, and there's what's
Speaker 3: going on with the rest of the economy. Well, the
Speaker 3: AI build out has been very strong. That has kept
Speaker 3: stocks up around the world. It's kept the American economy growing.
Speaker 3: The rest of the economy, though it has been very weak,
Speaker 3: in particular the parts of the economy Trump claims to
Speaker 3: care about, and that his policy agenda is meant to
Speaker 3: benefit manufacturing, the goods producing sector, which is helped by
Speaker 3: which if anyone is helped by tariffs, it would be
Speaker 3: goods because tariffs are on goods, they're actually doing incredibly poorly.
Speaker 3: Much of the rest of the economy is looking pretty weak.
Speaker 3: Is that responsive, Molly.
Speaker 1: Yes, justin Wolfer's will come back?
Speaker 3: Yes, when of you won.
Speaker 1: Jacob sober Off is a correspondent for NBC News and
Speaker 1: ms NOW and the author of Firestorm, The Great Los
Speaker 1: Angeles Fires, and America's New Age of Disaster. Welcome Too Fast, Pology.
Speaker 4: It's Jacob sober Molly, thanks for having me back.
Speaker 1: I'm so excited. So let's talk about this book. You
Speaker 1: were on the ground covering those fires the minute they started.
Speaker 1: You grew up in one of the most affected areas,
Speaker 1: the Palastaates. Yeah, yeah, so let's talk about it.
Speaker 5: I'll cover a lot of things in my time at
Speaker 5: MS NOW and before that MSNBC and NBC News, but nothing,
Speaker 5: I think, in all of my years here has ever
Speaker 5: made me sort of stop and think I cannot understand
Speaker 5: or comprehend what I'm witnessing in real time, as watching
Speaker 5: my own childhood neighborhood carbonized in front of my face,
Speaker 5: before my eyes, and in a way, I felt like,
Speaker 5: you know, almost it was a time machine. I was
Speaker 5: going back in time, and I could see my childhood
Speaker 5: literally disappear as I was reporting on Primetime MSNBC on
Speaker 5: the night of January seventh, twenty twenty five. And really,
Speaker 5: I think now that I've spent so much time diving
Speaker 5: deep on this is to look into the future. It
Speaker 5: was the fire of the future, and firestorm means a
Speaker 5: lot of things. It means the actual literal event that
Speaker 5: I experienced, but it's all so the politics around the
Speaker 5: moment and how that contributed to what I went through,
Speaker 5: and so there's so.
Speaker 2: Much it read.
Speaker 5: The book was really like a real time, minute by
Speaker 5: minute TikTok of what it felt like to be inside
Speaker 5: the middle of the costliest wildfire event in American history.
Speaker 5: But it's also an exploration of sort of the factors
Speaker 5: that made it happen and why it's definitely going to
Speaker 5: happen again.
Speaker 1: When you say the fire of the future, what does
Speaker 1: that mean? Because I think of that part of California
Speaker 1: because of the winds, it's a different situation, So explain
Speaker 1: what you mean.
Speaker 5: I think that the Fire of the Future is a
Speaker 5: lot of things, and I didn't really understand what it
Speaker 5: was until I went to Washington actually in the fire
Speaker 5: happened in January, and I went to Washington for the
Speaker 5: correspondence dinner and we did this town hall on Ms.
Speaker 5: Stephanie Rule, and I with fired federal workers. That same weekend,
Speaker 5: I sat down with a career emergency management official that
Speaker 5: I had met when I was covering the family separation crisis.
Speaker 5: And he went from AJHS and tried to help the
Speaker 5: children during that to leaving that job because of his
Speaker 5: opposition to the policy, and went to every mass casualty
Speaker 5: fire event over the last five years. And this guy,
Speaker 5: Captain Jonathan White, said to me, he's the one who
Speaker 5: said what you experienced was not some aberration. This is
Speaker 5: the fire of the future and it's here now. And
Speaker 5: the reason why is and he said, give me your notebook.
Speaker 5: I was taking notes sort of a Mexican restaurant in Washington,
Speaker 5: and he said he drew an X on the page
Speaker 5: and he said, it is the confluence of four things.
Speaker 5: One obviously climate change. Two our infrastructures falling apart. Three
Speaker 5: changes in the way we live with electric car batteries exploding.
Speaker 5: You know, these toxic substances of the past now coming out.
Speaker 5: But for misinformation and disinformation, the amount of misinfo and
Speaker 5: dis info that permeated literally as toxic as the fire
Speaker 5: and the things that we're all breathing in ourself was,
Speaker 5: if not unprecedented, I think a sign of what's to come,
Speaker 5: particularly during this administration, which is why the book is
Speaker 5: called Firestorm, the Great Los Angeles Fires in America's New
Speaker 5: Age of disaster. Donald Trump was a president elect, but
Speaker 5: it didn't stop him from interjecting, injecting himself into the
Speaker 5: not only the recovery process, and lying about what was
Speaker 5: going on, and picking fights with Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass,
Speaker 5: but really in real time as the fire was unfolding.
Speaker 5: I don't think it is an overstatement to say it
Speaker 5: changed the way that people experience the fire itself. No politician,
Speaker 5: Democrat or Republican has absolved for and there'll be lots
Speaker 5: of investigative reporting how did this happen?
Speaker 4: Why did it happen?
Speaker 5: But the thing that makes it new and different is
Speaker 5: the amount of politics that surrounds events like this today
Speaker 5: and how harmful it is to the people that experienced them.
Speaker 1: So I want to talk about that more because that
Speaker 1: is really interesting. So the disinformation, misinformation is certainly one
Speaker 1: element of this and the politicization of something that is
Speaker 1: right should not be politicized one way or the other.
Speaker 1: But the thing about this fire and why it was
Speaker 1: so much worse than any other fire we've had, maybe ever, right,
Speaker 1: was because it moves so.
Speaker 4: Quickly Hurricane force wins. Yeah, I mean hurricanes.
Speaker 5: I've covered up the natural disasters, have covered humanitarian crises
Speaker 5: all over the world. But what this was and why
Speaker 5: it was different was that you had hurricane force winds
Speaker 5: coming over and it was predicted by the way. I mean,
Speaker 5: this is a story as much as it is about
Speaker 5: the fire and about the politicians you know, who are
Speaker 5: involved in the fire, as it is about the workers,
Speaker 5: the government workers who were involved, the first responders who
Speaker 5: were involved, the people that try to stop us, and
Speaker 5: the National Weather Service. Two guys in particular, doctor Riel
Speaker 5: Cohen and Dave Gomberg from the National Weather Services office
Speaker 5: in Oxnard, just west of LA predicted that these were
Speaker 5: we're called mountain wave winds. If there was a spark
Speaker 5: coming over the Santa Monica Mountains or the San Gabriels,
Speaker 5: would result in catastrophic fire like we have never seen before.
Speaker 5: And guess what, that's exactly what happened, and all it
Speaker 5: took literally in the Palisades was you know, there are
Speaker 5: two different approximate causes. I guess you could say of
Speaker 5: the fire the Palisades was a holdover fire from an
Speaker 5: arson fire seven days earlier and an Alta Dana. The
Speaker 5: Eaton fire was faulty electrical equipment. The prevailing theory.
Speaker 1: Is falty electrical equipment.
Speaker 5: Where when you look at the San Gabriels, yeah, and
Speaker 5: Eaton Canyon, there are these huge lattice steel towers that
Speaker 5: run electrical equipment up and over the San Gabriels, and
Speaker 5: one of them was inactive and through a process of electrification,
Speaker 5: yet one spark, and once that spark happens, it led
Speaker 5: to literally not only thirty one deaths between the Palisades
Speaker 5: and Altadina, but literally thousands of homes destroyed. I always
Speaker 5: think that these events become x ray vision, and for
Speaker 5: me they were, especially in the aftermath of reporting this
Speaker 5: book x ray vision about the things that are underneath
Speaker 5: the surface of our society. And in the homeless capital
Speaker 5: of America, more unhoused people sleeping on the street than
Speaker 5: anywhere else. Instantly, tens of thousands of more people were
Speaker 5: homeless forced from their homes, and we're only a year in,
Speaker 5: but so many of them have not returned, and so
Speaker 5: there's just so much, so much to talk about, so
Speaker 5: much I learned at the end of the day, it's
Speaker 5: a story about people as much as it is about politics.
Speaker 5: And while this is a tough story, it's also a
Speaker 5: hopeful one because I met so many people with whom
Speaker 5: I shared, you know, the experience of I lost my
Speaker 5: own childhood home in this fire. My brother lost the
Speaker 5: house that he was living in, friends of mine on
Speaker 5: both sides of town. My son had his ninth birthday
Speaker 5: party in Altadena at a pizza place called Sidepi that
Speaker 5: burned down in the fire. And so there's so much
Speaker 5: that we share too. And that's why as depressing of
Speaker 5: a year as it was, as hard as it was
Speaker 5: for me to cover this and to spend the better
Speaker 5: part of the last year researching how something like this could happen,
Speaker 5: I left feeling really hopeful because of the people that
Speaker 5: I got to meet and learn about, whether it was
Speaker 5: JPL engineers two hundred of them lost their homes in
Speaker 5: the fire living in Alta Dina to Caltech, or the
Speaker 5: firefighters that did everything they could just to stop the
Speaker 5: fire from each and every home.
Speaker 4: That's why I love this job. That's why I love
Speaker 4: getting to do what I do.
Speaker 1: I want you to talk about what it's like now,
Speaker 1: because it is environmental catastrophe. I would love you to
Speaker 1: talk us through, like the stages of the post fire,
Speaker 1: what the area is like now, what it looks like
Speaker 1: it could become.
Speaker 2: There's so much.
Speaker 5: Work to do, and what I had hoped was that
Speaker 5: what it would be was sort of a unifying moment.
Speaker 5: And I can talk about all the details of the recovery,
Speaker 5: but the reason I hoped it would be unifying as obvious.
Speaker 5: And there was one story in particular that's in the
Speaker 5: book that to me exemplifies how we sort of took
Speaker 5: a wrong turn. I was standing in the Palisades on
Speaker 5: the second morning of the fire. It was January eighth,
Speaker 5: and I was about to go up on a special
Speaker 5: report with Lester Holton. I looked down at my phone
Speaker 5: and it said Katie Waldman was calling me. Katie Waldman
Speaker 5: is now Katie Miller, which was in my phone as
Speaker 5: Katie Waldman because I knew her during family separation as
Speaker 5: the junior most Press deputy at the Department of Homeland Security.
Speaker 5: She married Stephen Miller during that policy. This is Stephen
Speaker 5: Miller's wife. And while I told her I had to
Speaker 5: call her back because I was about to go up
Speaker 5: on this special report, she texted me, just like so
Speaker 5: many other people did when I was in the Palisades,
Speaker 5: can you go check this address. You're the only person
Speaker 5: I know who is there. And I said, what could
Speaker 5: this possibly be about? It was Stephen Miller's parents' house.
Speaker 5: She asked me to go by and check and see
Speaker 5: if it was still standing. And just like I did
Speaker 5: for the kids that i'd oaken carpool or my brother,
Speaker 5: more other people that called, I did. I went by
Speaker 5: and it had burned down. And I had hoped that
Speaker 5: it was going be this moment of like Olive Branch,
Speaker 5: that we would find common cost. And to your point
Speaker 5: about the recovery in the aftermath, not only was she
Speaker 5: working for Elon Musk, who was spreading misinformation about why
Speaker 5: the water sources had run dry during the fire and
Speaker 5: amplifying Donald Trump's conspiracy theories about the fire during the fire,
Speaker 5: but this is an administration that has decimated so many
Speaker 5: of the key agencies that are going to be critical
Speaker 5: in the recovery. National Weather Service meteorologists have been fired.
Speaker 5: Scientists and NASA's Earth Science program that study wildfires are
Speaker 5: on the chopping block. At NIOSH National Institute for Occupational
Speaker 5: Safety and Health. I had stood there on the corner
Speaker 5: in Morgantown, West Virginia, talking to some of these employees
Speaker 5: that look out for the health and well being of
Speaker 5: firefighters and firefighters safety at a time when there were
Speaker 5: a risk of cancer more than ever before. I had
Speaker 5: firefighters during this fire say because of the environmental catastrophe.
Speaker 5: I thought during the fire and certainly after that, I'm
Speaker 5: probably going to get cancer from battling this. And that
Speaker 5: office was decimated by this administration during the DOGE cuts,
Speaker 5: and the list goes on and on.
Speaker 4: That's just a partial list.
Speaker 5: And so when you talk about the recovery, Yeah, there
Speaker 5: are toxic substances all over as part of these fires,
Speaker 5: and there will be more when a fire like this
Speaker 5: happens again. The question is how do we deal with them?
Speaker 5: You know, the answers we have to reckon with the
Speaker 5: fact that politics is getting in the way of us
Speaker 5: actually doing that.
Speaker 1: Are people rebuilding or now slowly?
Speaker 4: I went to McNally Avenue.
Speaker 5: McNally Avenue is the street that I interviewed Gavenusam on
Speaker 5: for me the Pressed the Saturday after the fire started.
Speaker 5: He and I spent I think twenty minutes there talking
Speaker 5: about what he would do, and you know, he by
Speaker 5: the way, you know, nobody's absolved in terms of the
Speaker 5: politics of this, about what they've been able to do
Speaker 5: and what they've been able to accomplish. He promised a
Speaker 5: Marshall Plan two point zero in the wake of the fire,
Speaker 5: and there's still a really, really long way to go.
Speaker 5: But on McNally Avenue where I met Kate Henigan, who's
Speaker 5: a senior JPL engineer who lost her home and her
Speaker 5: story is detailed in the fire or Herbin Lloyda Wilson,
Speaker 5: a married couple who met at UPS and are incredible too,
Speaker 5: incredible working class pe people, like so many people in Altadena,
Speaker 5: that block was it looked like it was firebombd you know,
Speaker 5: And I was just there, I think last week, checking
Speaker 5: up on the block again. I'm going to see them
Speaker 5: actually tomorrow, and there's one home or two homes that
Speaker 5: are starting to be rebuilt. It's a long way from
Speaker 5: coming back from this, and that's the case also on
Speaker 5: the other side of the town in the Palisades, because
Speaker 5: in addition to becoming victims of this horrible, horrible tragedy,
Speaker 5: we live in a city that is unaffordable.
Speaker 1: But is it safe to rebuild there? I mean, what's
Speaker 1: the toxicity in the groundwater?
Speaker 4: And then, yeah, it's such a good question.
Speaker 5: The La Times has been doing and I was with
Speaker 5: Tony Briscoe actually last night LA Times reporter who has
Speaker 5: done some extraordinary reporting on why the federal government didn't
Speaker 5: do soil testing for certain toxic substances the Army Corps
Speaker 5: of Engineers. The answer is when the La Times tested
Speaker 5: the soil, I think, he said, because the federal government
Speaker 5: wasn't twenty percent of the homes, if I have this right,
Speaker 5: had the toxic substances above the level of what would
Speaker 5: be safe to rebuild. And so the onus is on
Speaker 5: so many home owners and people to decide whether or
Speaker 5: not they even want to come back now knowing that
Speaker 5: this stuff, whether it's lead or asbestos, which is in
Speaker 5: the lungs of the firefighters who battled it, but also
Speaker 5: in the ground. According to this reporting of so many
Speaker 5: the people who want to come back to their homes.
Speaker 4: I mean, what would you do. I don't know what.
Speaker 1: I would not come back. Yeah, wouldn't you not come back?
Speaker 4: No? I don't think so.
Speaker 5: What's the question my own brother is facing in the Palisades.
Speaker 5: Their daughter was born in the weeks after the fire.
Speaker 5: They're not going back to their house anytime soon. And
Speaker 5: it's a part of the story that this firestorm, this
Speaker 5: hurricane of fire. I have never seen anything like it,
Speaker 5: by the way, and I describe it in detail in
Speaker 5: the book embers flying horizontally, buildings burning horizontally, as as
Speaker 5: the fire flies past her face with data mount arrowinds.
Speaker 1: I mean, as as a student of Joan Didion, as
Speaker 1: all female journalists consider themselves to base more successfully than others.
Speaker 1: This is what she writes, you know, she writes about
Speaker 1: this all the time. And I do wonder how much
Speaker 1: of this, Like, obviously, environmentally we're in a lot of
Speaker 1: trouble and the climate has changed in numerous ways. But
Speaker 1: I just wonder how much of this more for my
Speaker 1: own edification, Like what is California here? And what is
Speaker 1: because the wind stuff? I don't know the say it
Speaker 1: to Anna, I don't know that that I mean, it
Speaker 1: may we may see changes in the jet stream that
Speaker 1: will create that, but we don't have that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think you're right.
Speaker 5: Nobody's written more beautifully about the Santa Annas than Johan Diddyon.
Speaker 4: Another.
Speaker 5: I mean, I read so many books about fire as
Speaker 5: I was sort of researching how this possibly could happen.
Speaker 5: Mike Davis wrote The Ecology of Fear, and he famously
Speaker 5: made the case for letting Malibu burn in the wake
Speaker 5: of those fires.
Speaker 4: And the thing that makes me think.
Speaker 5: About, in addition to really how this has been a
Speaker 5: grieving process for so many, especially me in particular, but
Speaker 5: tens of thousands, if not millions of people who live
Speaker 5: here and experience their city falling apart, and then, by
Speaker 5: the way, followed by the ice rates that happened here.
Speaker 4: And there's intersections with all of that.
Speaker 5: The day laborers who were working to rebuild are being
Speaker 5: targeted by the same administration as they tried to rebuild
Speaker 5: from the fires. An undocumented worker was killed as he
Speaker 5: was chased from home depot across the two ten Freeway
Speaker 5: that was engulfed under an umbrella of smoke from the
Speaker 5: flames in January.
Speaker 4: Yeah, climate change is a big part of this.
Speaker 5: But when I say when I talk about a proximate causes,
Speaker 5: it's not the only one.
Speaker 4: And if there's anything that I have taken away from.
Speaker 5: This is that the story that is told in my
Speaker 5: book in Firestorm is a story that in some issuer
Speaker 5: has already happened. Look at Lahina people literally jumping into
Speaker 5: the ocean two years prior to run away from another
Speaker 5: urban conflagration fueled by winds just like this, and Maui exactly,
Speaker 5: and the campfire in Paradise in northern California. At the
Speaker 5: beginning of Newsom told me a story. I spent a
Speaker 5: lot of time with Newsomb for this book. He told
Speaker 5: me a story of how when he was governor elect
Speaker 5: and Jerry Brown was governor, Trump came out to Paradise.
Speaker 4: What did he call it, pleasure or didn't golf Paradise?
Speaker 4: I don't remember when he called it.
Speaker 5: And that was the first time he had seen something
Speaker 5: like this, But since then he has gone to fires
Speaker 5: with similar inputs. I'm at change related inputs all over California.
Speaker 5: The difference between the LA fires and those were this
Speaker 5: was a urban conflagration, This was a city in multiple
Speaker 5: locations because of the winds that you describe ember cast
Speaker 5: that went for miles and miles things for catching on fire,
Speaker 5: miles away from the front lines of the blaze, and
Speaker 5: that in terms of climate, in terms of the mountain
Speaker 5: wave winds that were predicted by the National Weather Service
Speaker 5: workers colleagues of the guys that had been fired by
Speaker 5: this administration since then, that was the thing to me
Speaker 5: on the ground, and as you'll read about, that was
Speaker 5: the most the most unbelievable thing to experience physically, you know,
Speaker 5: I could. I remember one night it was almost Stephanie Rule.
Speaker 5: It was the first night of the fire. I could
Speaker 5: barely stand.
Speaker 1: Up straight right because it was so winding.
Speaker 4: It wouldn't even feel like wind.
Speaker 5: It felt like you were being picked up and thrown
Speaker 5: around every direction you could imagine within seconds. And that's
Speaker 5: why when people want to point a finger at what
Speaker 5: happened here, I'm not so sure that there will ever
Speaker 5: be one person to blame. There'll be plenty of investigative
Speaker 5: reporting about like could there been more fire trucks preposition,
Speaker 5: should Karen mass have been back from Ghana in time?
Speaker 4: Could Kevin Usom have done anything differently?
Speaker 5: Should the reservoir have been full in the Palisades, you know,
Speaker 5: you name it, and then investigative reporting will go on
Speaker 5: for years and years and years. But the reality is,
Speaker 5: once those these guys predicted it, once the fire sparked,
Speaker 5: there was nothing you could do to stop it. And
Speaker 5: that's what I hope I captured well in the book,
Speaker 5: which is that this was once the train went off
Speaker 5: the tracks, there was no turning back. And that's where
Speaker 5: the politics of the moment really took this to a
Speaker 5: place that didn't need to go.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Jacob sober Off, I hope you'll come.
Speaker 4: Back anytime, Molly for you anything anytime. Thanks for caring
Speaker 4: about La.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, we love La.
Speaker 4: Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1: No moment, Jesse Canna Malli.
Speaker 2: There is some blockbuster reporting from four h four media
Speaker 2: who continues to kill it. And this is some of
Speaker 2: the most disturbing report egg I've seen it a while,
Speaker 2: which is that ICE now has a tool that uses
Speaker 2: surveillance technology to track phones without a warrant and follow
Speaker 2: their owner's home or to their employer. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So this is a great example of how we don't
Speaker 1: really know what's happening here, but ICE has billions of
Speaker 1: dollars like billions and billions and billions of dollars. These
Speaker 1: are these two surveillance systems called Tangle and Weblock. And
Speaker 1: there are surveillance systems. They were purchased by ICE. ICE, remember,
Speaker 1: has a gazillion dollars. Weblock can track phones without a
Speaker 1: warrant and follow their owners home or to their employers. Okay,
Speaker 1: so first of all, we really have ICE operating in
Speaker 1: like an extra legal you know, they're operating like Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: They just don't think the law applies to them. So
Speaker 1: and here's this will have sort of you will have
Speaker 1: your city, neighborhood or block will be monitored by ICE.
Speaker 1: They can track the movement of the devices and their
Speaker 1: owners over time, follows them from places of work to
Speaker 1: other locations. According to the material that describes how the
Speaker 1: system works from four four Media, it's really scary. It
Speaker 1: is stalking. It should not be illegal. It's a huge
Speaker 1: violation of our civil liberties. You know, maybe it's for deportation,
Speaker 1: maybe it's for intimidation, maybe it's for any number of things.
Speaker 1: I mean, for example, Renee Good was not a danger.
Speaker 1: Even if she had been a danger, she should not
Speaker 1: have been murdered. But she wasn't a danger, and she
Speaker 1: wasn't here illegally, and she wasn't the worst of the worst.
Speaker 1: In fact, she was an American citizen who had just
Speaker 1: dropped out for a six year old at school. So
Speaker 1: we know these people. They are not focused on the worst,
Speaker 1: the worst. They're just focused on hurting people and doing
Speaker 1: Trumpism and blaming people for getting her. And so here
Speaker 1: we are, ladies and gentlemen, mass deportation now right, it
Speaker 1: wasn't a vibe. It was what they were thinking. And
Speaker 1: by the way, none of that was about deportation. Right.
Speaker 1: It was about violence, it was about hurting people, It
Speaker 1: was about crackdown retribution. Yeah, that's it for this episode
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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.