Bulwark Takes - FEMA on the Brink! Can We Survive the Next Disaster?

Episode Date: August 12, 2025

Jonathan Cohn talk with an old friend Juliette Kayyem. They discuss FEMA’s recent challenges and growing responsibilities in the face of escalating climate disasters, especially extreme heat. They examine how climate change is making disasters more frequent and costly, stretching FEMA’s resources to the limit. The conversation also touches on the recent Texas disaster, using it as a case study of how unprepared infrastructure and slow responses can worsen the toll of extreme events. The discussion highlights the urgent need for both federal support and local action to adapt to the climate crisis.

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Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. But MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hey, everybody. It's Jonathan Cohn here at The Bullwork. You know, it is just a little more than a month since we had one of the worst natural disasters that I can remember, which was those terrible floods in Texas. More than 100 people died, most of them children. And, you know, we're still trying to figure out what happened, but it raised a lot of questions. But are we ready for natural disasters? What is the state of FEMA? Especially with the Trump administration in charge, making all kinds of cuts. moving resources all over the place. So are we ready? Are we ready for the next disaster? We have a guest today who can answer those questions because she is one of the leading experts on the subject. Juliette Kayem. You probably know her from CNN. She's also the author of Security Mom.

The Devil Never Sleeps to Terrific Books. She teaches at Harvard. She's been working in and around disaster preparation, homeland security for years. Juliet, thanks for being here, spending some time with us here at the bulwark. It's my first time with the bulwark. Like, long time fan, first time caller. I'm so excited. I have to say it's nice to see you. I mean, usually when you're on the TV in my house, it's a little triggering because, you know,

Juliet's on TV, something awful has happened, right? I mean, there's been some kind of disaster or whatever. I mean, did they get that in your house? I mean, do your kids? I mean, your kids are my kids. No, they don't know what I do for a living. So like I, I'm the, where I go on air now because they don't make you go to a studio anymore is like next to the big TV room and I'll literally leave and say, I have to go

on air and then come back out and like they, there's been no attempt to watch me. Like whatever they're watching or not watching and on their computers. But they, they kind of have a sense of what I do. It was funny. Yesterday was this military shooting in Georgia. And we have a place in Rhode Island and one of the kids is here. And my parents are here. And this is totally random.

And I don't even know why I'm saying this. But it was interesting to hear him describe to my parents. You know, we thought we were going to have a free day. And he goes, oh, this happens to mom a lot. She thinks that she's free and then she's not. So I was like, yeah, that's basically it. So yesterday was one of those days. So, you know, I was thinking about it.

I mean, we've known each other a really long time. Just like five years since college. Just five years since college, right? It was barely, we're barely out of college, you and me. And I was actually thinking, I don't know, how did you end up in this field? I mean, how did you end up like doing this? A combination of things. So I went to law school.

I was a civil rights attorney. I thought I was, you know, I lived in South Africa. I'd worked in Alabama on death penalty appeals. I thought that was going to be my career. And then before 9-11, there were a lot of sort of terrorism, counter-terrorism efforts coming out of DOJ that kind of needed a civil rights view of it. This was pre-9-11. So I was in that field doing that from the civil rights perch got nominated to the National Commission on Terrorism before 9-11, which was assessing the threat. So that when 9-11 happened, I hate to say, like some careers are just made by horror, there were very few people.

people encounter terrorism at that time. But I will admit, or I say often, I had a course correction 20 years ago this month. I had spent by then, by 2005, I had spent almost 10 years in counterterrorism. And that was Hurricane Katrina when I just thought, my God, we've spent five years at this stage trying to stop 19 guys from getting on four airplanes. Success. Like, we did that. That hasn't happened again, but we can't even save, you know, an American city from drowning. People forget 2,000 people died on Katrina or because of Katrina-related causes. And so I really then got into sort of preparedness and Homeland Security then. And then, you know, in government, media, academia and private sector now, I do a lot of work in the private

sector. Yeah, you know, Katrina really was one of those defining moments. And I think if you weren't honestly, like 9-11, I think if you were, if you've only learned about in the history books or you were pretty young when it happened and you weren't that connected, you can't fully appreciate what a big deal that was. I mean, for days on end. I mean, I remember, we were just glued to the TV and watching. And it was this incredible spectacle of this, you know, we're in the middle of the United States of America, right? You know, the most advanced civilization in history. And just there were video, people just, you know, couldn't get food, couldn't get water.

We couldn't rescue them. It was a, it was a real, a real jolt. I remember that so vividly, and I feel like it's sort of gotten memory hold in some ways. Yeah. And it's a, and it was a total failure of government on every level. I mean, you just didn't need those kinds of fatalities. and also political. I mean, people, you know, we'll talk about the politics of disaster,

but one of the iconic images of Bush, George Bush, who was wildly unpopular at the end of his second term. People don't remember this because he's now more popular because of Trump, but is that iconic photo of him in an airplane circling over New Orleans. And you look at his polling, his polling plummeted, after Hurricane Katrina never recovered. It wasn't Iraq. It wasn't Afghanistan. He was wildly unpopular because there is an expectation by the American public that government, you know, this is what government is for. Like, you know, it's supposed to save you from drowning as we talk about

Texas. And I am of the school that Donald Trump would have had a second continuous term. It's a big but for, but for COVID, that the fact that it was a homeland disaster, that he could not manage well and manage so horribly, that's where people lose confidence. Well, you know, you mentioned hurricanes. And, you know, you know this. I grew up in South Florida. So this is, you know, this time of year,

like it's like the hair is on the end. My next stand up. Like it's like muscle memory. You know, where are the storms? Where are they coming? And actually, I have an aunt who was in Hurricane Andrew, lost dress. She was literally like in the bathroom with the mattress.

overhead while the house came down around, or she survived, thankfully. And I remember that response. And this is a long time ago, before you were even doing this. And there was some criticism of the Bush administration when responded there, too. And it got me thinking, we think, I mean, at least if you follow this stuff, you start thinking about all the times we didn't have a adequate response. You've been doing this for so long. Before we get into like what Trump's doing, what's going now, I want to set a baseline.

What is that good response? Yeah. Have you ever, who did this right? Have we ever done it? Right. No, I mean, look, this is before Hurricane Maria, hurricane fatalities were down. In fact, so we know how to do it. We know how to assess what the weather is telling us and what we tell people to do. The greatest, this is sort of a misnomer of hurricane deaths up until Hurricane Maria for several consecutive years, the leading cause of hurricane-related deaths was carbon monoxide poisoning because people were using makeshift

generators to get electricity. So, yeah, so we got good at things. And there was a movement towards sort of a little bit of tough love on this. So one of the things I've written about is, you know, you want to use carrots to get people to evacuate if you need them to. We've gotten emergency managers, they've got a lot more responsive to communities and need people and pets. Hurricane Katrina, one of the lessons out of Hurricane Katrina was people will not move unless they can take their dogs and cats, so you better have shelters for that. But one of the tactics that got started in Florida was for the 10% that won't move, you then go to their house and you say, okay, I get it. You have your freedom. We love your freedom. You know, we support freedom.

But do me a favor. Take the Sharpie pen and write your name and social security number on your arm because we will not deploy resources to come get you and God knows what happens to a body after it's been in water for three days. That got people to move. It's their choice. You have freedom. You get to do what you want, but I have freedom, which is I'm not going to come get you until it's safe for my people to get you. So there was a combination of tactics that that began to work and science got better so that it got us in a position that was predictive, better predictive. So a good response is local capacity, local response, state coordination, federal support. It's always been the same.

Locals are our first responders always. And so, you know, do the locals have capacity? Is the state supporting them in that capacity? And then is the federal government coordinating resources to deploy? And that's, it's basically not rocket science. And that's the way it should work. So we know what a good response. looks like um so let's let's talk about text i was talking i mentioned this at the top uh i i mean

i actually am surprised that still hasn't we're not still talking about that i mean given how i mean it was so many children was so so horrific you know and it's hard because when these things are happening your temptation is who screwed up who messed up and in real time it's quite hard to tell obviously and look these are you know better than i do and natural disasters are genuinely difficult so yeah but we you know it's it's been a few weeks now and there was just testimony, I know, just yet the other day in Texas. I mean, looking at, you know, given what you've seen, were there major failures there and what were they? I mean, look, each disaster is that I study is both, you know, is both going to have a very specific cause and a very systemic

cause. So the specifics in Texas are that key personnel were literally not in place. I mean, that's what we're learning now in sort of the key county where most of the children, where the camp, most of the camps were, that the three top leaders had either taken time off or on vacation. Now, that, in a good emergency management system, that shouldn't matter. You'll have redundancies. You know, you avoid, in my lingo, you avoid the single point of failure. It does seem like no one filled the gap. And the reason why we know this is because to study disasters, you not only study the bad responses, you study the good responses. There's a number of counties around that area that were on this very, very important phone call on July 3rd at 10 a.m.

That Texas held. And the other counties said that they went away with like a spooky feeling and started to get ready, acclimate people and stuff. So that's the That's, I think, I think you will, I think, you know, people don't always perform well. The systemic issue is, is really the alert system. There's a number of reasons, but for it. But the problem with disasters or the way I describe them and teach them is, or not the problem, is it, you know, everything's a disaster. Democracy is a disaster, whatever. Why do we, why do we call, like, why, when I say a hurricane, why do you instinctively understand that to mean something different than, you know, climate change or whatever else? And that's because, as I just, your runway is short. In other words, to understand a disaster, the crash landing is coming. You can't avoid it. And your ability to respond is, is relatively short. It might be seconds in an active shooter case or, or maybe weeks if you're lucky for a pandemic.

And so when you know that the crash landing is happening, the way I think about it is you either have to be ready for the crash landing, that's the preparedness aspects, or you try to buy yourself more time. You try to extend the runway. And that is because then people can respond, right? They can get ready. They can run. They can do whatever. And that's why early alert systems are really important. And that's why the investments across the board, locality, state, and federal, in terms of what the choices that Texas leadership made about what could happen to the river, about what could happen to those kids, they basically did not invest in an early alert system. We know downriver that those work. They wake people up, right? Like you don't send emails at three in the morning. You got to wake people up and give them time. Your runway is short. One of the, one of the news, papers, maybe it was the time did a sort of tick talk of what happened. If those girls had been given four more minutes, just four more minutes, they could have walked maybe 200 feet up. And then you're

safe. All you need is, you don't, I mean, when we say there's a flash flood, it's not a tsunami. It's just you go from zero feet to eight feet. You got to get above eight feet, right? So that's the kind of thing that we look at in terms of, did they have enough time? And the early alert system deprive them of that. So I would say it's a combination of both. The state leadership is looking to blame the local leadership. The other sort of lack of time was up at FEMA and DHS. as Christy Noem has, as part of Doge, the Secretary of Homeland Security, has said any expenditure over $100,000 has to be approved by her. Well, in disaster management, I mean, you're throwing so much money, like quickly because you're just trying to save lives and you'll do an audit later or you'll figure out. But, you know, what you spent.

But Craig Fugate, the former head of FEMA during Obama for eight years, had a, you know, had a theory, you know, either go big or stay home. I mean, he was like, you either are going to deploy those resources or you're not. But deploying them three days late, it doesn't help anyone. And we have learned now that requests for, request to deploy search and rescue teams from FEMA. FEMA has that capacity was over $100,000 that sat on her desk for 48 hours. That's a search and rescue has to start within hours to make it worthwhile. So there were a number of big problems with the response. Never let anyone make you think that stuff just happens.

These are avoidable deaths and they were avoidable deaths. Well, you mentioned Christy Noem and the Trump administration. And can you talk a little bit, just give an overview? Because I feel like, you know, it's one of the hard things with the Trump administration. So much is happening, so many announcements, so many policy changes. It's really hard to keep track of what they said they're going to do, what they're actually doing, what's being reported they're doing. So just kind of from the standpoint of their approach to disaster readiness, what are they doing? What are they changing from before?

So, I mean, so I followed this enough. Yesterday, I happened to testify or speak to this FEMA review counsel that Donald Trump formed. I figure you're not going to listen to me, but I might as well speak because I was asked. So I'll tell you what they're doing is I have a better sense now. Donald Trump comes in right after the California fire. So he is on as sort of I hate states and localities because I hate this state in Los Angeles, California, Los Angeles, and announces that he's going to get rid of FEMA. Well, the pushback, of course, comes from Republican governors as well.

And he starts to backtrack and do all the stuff that he does. So, and Christy Nome picks up on that. So she's totally, we're getting rid of FEMA. In fact, their first FEMA administrator said, we're going to keep FEMA and he was fired. Like, that's how serious they were. Then you started to get a sense that they sort of knew they couldn't do this because people do need a federal capacity and disasters. And that's when people expect government to work. And so now there's just a sort of a reform effort about making FEMA better. So here's where FEMA is now. It's got a leadership who's the fact that I cannot name the administrator of FEMA gives you a sense. Like these are not your top people. I think because of Doge and early retirements, it's down about 20, 22%. So our federal capacity is limited. That's on the operational side. On the policy side, my understanding is that Trump wants to reset the calibration of expectations

between the local state and federal. I think that's based on his sense that everyone's a taker. You know, like Trump just believes everyone's a taker, though, although he's the biggest taker, right? And so he's talking about reshifting that. And I will be honest with you, most of us in disaster management have not been thrilled with the way it's been operating, mostly because disasters are bigger, stronger. we're not forcing people or compelling people to change their behaviors.

There's a mismatch between paying, the federal government paying people after a disaster through federal assistance and the fact that zoning and land use laws tend to be local and state. And so it's just a perverse incentive. There's just no incentive to get these kind of changes that we need system systemically. So I agree with Donald Trump on setting conditions for recovery efforts. I wouldn't touch response. I would make sure that FEMA is there for people when you're on the runway. But afterwards, I do think there's an opportunity to open the door to conversations that I think Biden was unwilling to have because, you know, we don't.

you know, might be viewed as taking things away from people. I don't know about conditioning relief money so that people behave better. It's a, it's a thing Democrats should have owned and they didn't. In fact, Newsom, there was one of the first really sensitive managed retreat bills came out of California. Manish retreat is a very hard thing to talk about, but it's a way in which you work with community so that they build themselves more resilient. they manage the retreat from the vulnerability, the belief being that everybody loves their children, right? Everyone wants their children to survive. And there was an effort by California to begin to this process. Seriously, it's been done throughout the world. We barely talk about it here.

You know, we work with communities to build them away from the vulnerability that harms them and Newsom vetoed it. I mean, he just because it's like, oh, it's going to impact minority communities or poor communities wherever. Oh, minorities and poor people love their children too. wouldn't it be a smart thing to assist them. So Trump walked through that door in a good way. He, of course, then ruins everything because his conditions are based on voting changes in California or supporting Israel, you know, all this stuff that he throws out there. No one's getting anything unless they support Israel. It's ridiculous. If he can tie, if we can get a way in which we're tying federal relief efforts to changes.

in the built environment in these cities and localities, I'm all for it. I think it's ridiculous that we're just throwing money at people and not demanding after a disaster and then being like, oh, we're so sorry that happened. And then we're there again next year. And like, so sorry that happened. And then again next year, like, so like, no, we're dumping sorry. You need to change. Yeah, yeah. And it gets me thinking, you know, those are hard conversations, right, moving people, right? I mean, those are tough. And and to me,

historically, when we've been able to have those kinds of hired conversations in politics. That's when you really actually need some bipartisanship. And that's when you really need people. You need leaders who can actually bring people together and say, look, this is going to be tough for everybody. We need to have a conversation about it to get people to buy in, not politicize it. And, yeah, Donald Trump, you know. Yeah, it's not going to do that. I mean, it would be like a BRAC process, right?

I mean, it would be. And it wouldn't be. I'm sorry, the BRAC process was when we had to close military facilities. Right, right, right, right. And you actually had a bipartisan group, you know, determining, okay, well, Oklahoma needs this. But what I, what I, I mean, you're exactly right, because the time is now that we can begin to, to think about how are we using these federal dollars? You want to talk about waste to build a more resilient society based on conditions, based on requirements that close that, that, that, that really perverse incentive that has been created over the decades. And I don't mean to like, you know, there was a reason that our disaster relief system was built this way is because we believe disasters were random and rare. So you lose your home, you know, and we, you know, to a wildfire and we feel really bad

and we're going to give you money because we're just thinking of disasters as random and rare. Well, that's just not true anymore. I mean, we have systemic cycles and polycrisis and all these things that are happening now. we need to build more seriously. I will say, how do I measure the politics of disaster now? Well, I have an easy way, which is, you know, I'm on air when bad things happen. And in almost every administration, including Trump 1.0, you know, I call myself filler for CNN. Like when something bad happens, they get me on first, you know, because I sort of know enough to kid, I fill the time.

But like, you know, I like cannon fodder. I'm available more and relatively cheap. And I would carry that story for two or three days. I would be on consistently, whatever. But I try not to be on. I mean, people know my politics. But I don't, I mean, there's enough people out there saying, you know, Trump is horrible. I try to bring my subject matter expertise influenced by, you know, knowing something

and knowing why often what he does is wrong. But I would say, you know, things that I'm booked for start to get canceled much faster now because Donald Trump has inserted himself in a way that makes it a political story, which isn't, I'm not useful for that. And I think that's, it's for me, it's just sort of telling this is a way. And, you know, part of it is cable news, but part of it is just he's inserting himself in us, them. I hate Los Angeles, I hate North Carolina, these people are horrible in a way that you just never saw a president do before in disaster. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I just think it made me thinking now of the sort of iconic images after Hurricane Sandy,

remember with Obama and then governor, you know, Chris Christie, which of course got Christie all kinds of grief on the right about it. Yeah, whatever happened to that guy. Yeah. No, and then you compare that with the paper towels in Hurricane Maria. Right. That Donald Trump throwing paper towels, it's a, it's a, it's a, you know, sense of himself as the benefactor rather than, you know, in charge of a government that has vast resources to help people when they, I always say this, like, this is when you need government to work. Like, like you can have every theory of government. But then, you know, most people, as I say, most people still love their children. They want their children to survive. And I have never seen. anything like this in terms of the politics of this stuff, entering so early. Even gun violence, you know, I'm not, you know, as they're still picking up the bodies, I'm not talking about,

you know, gun control. Even gun violence, you had a little bit of bandwidth, but not now. Yeah, yeah. Kind of a related question, which is so much of disaster response. I mean, our everyday lives, obviously, but in a disaster, especially communications, getting information out is so important. And we are all on social media now and text chains and everything. And it just seems so, there's so much, it feels like there's just so much more misinformation. It's so hard to know who to trust. Do you think about that, like in terms of, you know, how to get reliable information out in this era when there's so much misinformation? What can we do? Right. So, and I do think it's been really interesting the Doge thing, because just to remind people where we were, so there's a big

attack on sort of the, what we call the situational awareness apparatus for disaster management, National Weather Service, NOAA, a lot of these alert systems that were giving, buying people time. Now, people put that in the context of attacks on science. I viewed it as attacks on disaster management because think about what those they're part of the runway that those entities are giving you more time they um i don't know if you picked up on this news this week i think they began to realize they don't even have basic capacity the trump administration realized they don't have basic capacity on things like well because weather impacts say aviation right it impacts uh who can fly and where and big industries uh that they are now rehiring the 480 national

Weather Service, people that they had fired. I mean, what a freaking waste of everyone's time. But I viewed that as an attack on reality. In other words, the misinformation that the Trump White House sort of throws into the system, you know, everyone's a taker and immigrants or taking all of your disaster relief money or undocumented immigrants. And glad to see them reinstating it because it is something that will help save lives. The misinformation is really challenging. FEMA under the Biden administration was getting a little bit more sophisticated in terms of outreach, getting other communicators.

So if you were in a conservative community, you would, you know, have validators saying, yes, this is in fact an evacuation or, you know, you need to talk to FEMA if you want your relief funds. You know, FEMA's not taking your home. This administration sort of throws a lot into this, a lot of noise, into the, system and FEMA was pretty good at sort of controlling the rumors or trying to control the rumors. I don't know what that's going to look like, say, at a big disaster in a blue state because I do believe that Trump views disasters differently depending on what state. Trump behaved relatively well during the flooding in Texas. But I wonder like a big wildfire, another big

wildfire under his watch in California. That's going to just be. be very ugly and they'll put a lot of stuff into the system. Outside of government, you know, it's the deep fakes that are really worrisome. They'll replicate 911 dispatchers. They'll do lots of horrible, horrible people, you know, will do a deep fake picture and then try to raise money off of it. People will remember that another iconic picture out of North Carolina flooding earlier this year. There was a girl with a dog. a canoe and it went viral and look at her sad face. Well, it ended up being AI and some jerk was raising money off of it. So that is going to be a persistent challenge. But, you know,

well, you've experienced weather disasters. You know, when you're in the middle of it, your capacity to process all that noise is pretty limited. I've just got back from Oklahoma in terms of tornadoes and tornado warnings. People are less online than you and I. So I think a lot of that background noise is part of the political debate, but isn't really impacting operations where we need people to be pretty aggressive. I'm going to get you out of here in a minute, but two other things. First of all, immigration. I was reading the other day. They're,

you know, retasking some FEMA folks to deal with ICA. How is immigration affecting our state of readiness? Yeah. I mean, there's a couple things around this. So one is just like the Department of Homeland Security has, well, you remember the history. It came out of 9-11. It was very focused on counterterrorism. It had the same course correction that I did that after Hurricane Katrina, it really focused on all hazards, though all hazard threats because the homeland is going to have cyber, it's going to have weather, it's going to have terrorism. And it's, you know, it's a distributor of money. So lots of Homeland Security grants go to state and locals. I've been a state Homeland Security Advisor. And then at the department, it really, the goal.

is sort of to integrate capacity. That's a complete shift now, 180 degrees, where Trump and Stephen Miller and Nome and the borders are home and are just focused on a singular threat. They're going to regret it. There's no question in my mind because, but the singular threat is not just border enforcement, it's interior enforcement. So as everyone now knows, the big, beautiful bill has now made ICE the largest federal law enforcement agency in the world now, I'm bigger than the FBI. They are clamoring to hire. I believe a lot of that money is going to construction of Trump's friends. You know, this White House is so corrupt. No one's keeping track of the money. In fact, one of the big, one of the big contracts already, I think it was a DHS one,

went to, like, you know, some firm that had been created two days before. Like, you know, it's like, God knows where all this money is going. So there's going to be a focus on immigration, which is going to take away from both the capacity, the nurturing of FEMA, and the bodies that are willing to stay there. It's very hard. I talked to my friends in the Coast Guard. It's just, you know, they're pretty much left alone. They've been pretty safe.

And they just, you know, you're just in an agency that's just like completely focused on something that they're not interested in what you're doing that can be good. But it can also be really frustrating. So you're going to see that focus on ICE. I mean, the other thing I do worry about is, of course, people, all people need government, our government's help in a disaster. And, you know, it's no shock. And we see this in the numbers in L.A. that, you know, there's a whole whole communities. even if lawful, that have gone into hiding. And that's a really, you want people to be engaged. You want them to be aware. You want them to respond to government when it tells them to do something. And you want them not to be afraid to access government help should they need it in a disaster. I think all of that is clearly going to be impacted. I mean, that's the other thing is after these things happen, if you can't hire immigrants

and then sometimes, you know, seasonal immigrants, you know, who rebuilds Joplin after it's destroyed in a tornado? Yeah, guess what? Yeah. So, I mean, it's just, it's all of this is going to stretch a little bit, I think, when the, when, as we're seeing the numbers of, what is it, two million now out of the workforce, that's a lot of people that aren't getting replaced by American workers. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I guess we'll, we'll find out what these consequences are down the road. And so I, you know, I was going to say, in like a lot of these conversations I'm having lately, pretty bleak, I mean, and things are bad. But you got to, there's always, I like to, I mean, there's always some hopeful stuff out there. What makes you hopeful? I mean, anything. And, you know, when you look at, you know, readiness, disaster. I think the American public is much more sophisticated than, than the way they present themselves. So I travel throughout the United States. And I, I, I, I, I, I, I, you know, do writing and I do a documentary series around recovery. So I've been to places, you know, I, you know, I've lived in California, Massachusetts most of my life. So yes, it's true. I'm a coastal elite. But I, you know, as someone who has traveled throughout the United States and continues to do so, people get it. And they get that they, they, need that there needs to be solutions to this problem. But in some places, just don't call it

climate change. You know, just don't, just don't. And so like this perfect example, I was in Oklahoma, reddest of all red states. And there's a community there called Moore that got leveled in, I think it was this, until this last season, it was like the last EF5. It got pummeled, like about 10 years ago. Do you remember when those like fourth graders died, they literally drowned in the school? So they regroup and don't call climate change, don't call it whatever, but they basically passed regulations that require a more resilient home building. And there was debates about it then, but it's, and these aren't like complicated, you know, these are, these are abundance friendly regulations. Right. They're like literally like, okay, put your nails, you know,

nails used to be 10 inches apart, put them six inches apart. These were very rational things that increased the price of a home, maybe like $1,800. Well, it turns out people will buy protections for their kids, right? You say, well, this house will survive a EF5. It turns out insurance companies are willing to come back. It turns out that more 10 years later is ending a housing boom. And the only reason why it's ending is because there's no more space to build stuff. So you can see how communities are relating to the harms that they are facing in really important ways.

And they're ahead of, in many ways, the federal government. Both, as I said, both under the Biden administration, which I think was too slow, sometimes behind blue states. I think our insurance schemes can be a little bit too consumer friendly, and we have to listen to what the insurance market is telling us, and the private sector and I think individual behavior will fill that gap that this administration is willing to, you know, pretend like nothing bad is happening. And I think insurance, you know, I have, I think, is one of the most interesting areas right now as a policy wonk. I wrote a big piece. I wrote a big piece for the Atlantic. I wrote a big piece for the Atlantic on insurance. And I went into it and climate. I went into it like, I hate insurance companies and they're horrible, whatever. And like by the end of it, I was like the Wall Street Journal editorial page. I was like, we need to listen to these people. Like California is crazy. They haven't raised their rates in forever. And I was like, we need to listen to these. people. So I think the market might be wise in this sense. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I do health care,

and so I deal a lot with insurance also. And whatever you think of the insurance industry, and it's a whole other debate, the people who crunch the numbers for the insurance industry, they know what they're talking about. They know what they're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. And when they say, you know, and once again, like we make things so hard, right? Like, how can you, I was in Paradise for my work, Paradise After the Fire is Paradise, California, lost over 100 people in a single fire on almost all of them on a single lane. So to make it safer is not as hard as I think. I mean, it's 2025. Like insurance actually is testing materials that would survive a fire. Like you can survive a wildfire, right? As long as you're not in a car on a single

Lane Street, which is what happened in paradise. And just thinking about ways that we can, you know, I want to mitigate climate change, but also we could adapt to it. I'm not, I'm hopeful in that, in that regard to. Yeah, yeah. Well, Juliet, thanks for spending this time, sharing your wisdom. Please don't take this the wrong way, but I hope I don't see you a lot. I know, I know. I know. I'm that way too. I am. But no, it's great. And as I said, I'm a huge fan. I was so glad to hear that you moved over and keep doing what you're doing. I really mean it.

I'm still hopeful. All right. Thanks, everybody. See you next time.