Factually! with Adam Conover - Watching Paradise Burn to the Ground with Lizzie Johnson

Episode Date: August 18, 2021

The California Camp Fire was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California's history. This week investigative reporter Lizzie Johnson is on the show to discuss her firsthand experience reporting on the fire and its destruction. You can check out her book, Paradise: One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire, at factuallypod.com/books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way I don't know what to think I don't know what to say Yeah, but that's alright Yeah, that's okay I don't know anything Hello everyone, welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Conover.

Thank you so much for joining me once again as I talk to an incredible expert about all the things that they know that you don't know, I almost definitely don't know. My mind is going to be blown. Your mind is going to be blown. We're going to have a great time together. Can't wait to get to this interview. But before we do, I have a little bit of housekeeping I want to do. A couple weeks back, I did an episode on ADHD where I spoke with Dr. Stephen Hinshaw. We talked about the history of the diagnosis. And most importantly, we talked about my own personal history with ADHD. I was diagnosed at a very young age and I struggled for many years

with whether medication was helping me or hurting me, whether I felt the diagnosis even applied to me. I have very complex feelings about the pharmaceutical industry's influence over the diagnosis and the explosion of it that we saw in the 90s. And I had a lot of questions for Dr. Stephen Henshaw about it as a result. And he answered a good deal of them. And I thought we had a really interesting conversation. And I'm very happy that we did the episode. And I heard from a lot of folks afterwards who, you know, were appreciative that we did it related to my experience and that it helped them think through their own issues with the diagnosis as well. But I also heard from some folks who felt that the episode did not reflect their experience.

Some folks wrote in who said, for instance, that they went undiagnosed as children and didn't realize until they were adults that they had ADHD until finally their lives were massively improved by medication. And even some folks who felt that this idea of, you know, is ADHD real or not? Is the medication helpful or harmful? That those sort of issues caused a stigma around the disorder that made their parents, their doctor, even themselves dismiss it for a long period until they finally realized as adults that it actually applied to them. And I just want to say, for the record, I want to be really clear about this. That is real. That is a real experience

that is valid. If that describes you, that's a valid experience that people have that is part of the tapestry of ADHD in this country and around the world. It happens to not be my experience. I fully admit that on that episode, it was such a personal topic to me that I took a much more self-focused view than I normally do on these episodes. Whenever I'm talking to an expert, I'm always asking the question that I have the most, right? I'm asking the burning questions that I have the most, right? I'm asking the burning questions that I need to know, because I feel like if I need to know, then the audience probably does too. That's my style as an interviewer. In this case, I have so much complex

life history with this diagnosis. That's the perspective that all my questions came from. It was very hard for me to divorce myself from that and ask the sort of more general, you know, general interest questions that I often do in other interviews. And, you know, I got to say, I'm happy that I did the interview that way, because I think that especially when talking about mental health issues, medical issues, it's critical that folks who have lived experience like me have the chance to, you know, ask the experts the questions that they have publicly so we can all work through these issues together. And, you know, it so happened that it took us an hour to explore

all my questions and all those perspectives. And we didn't have a chance to get to the other many different experiences that other folks have with this diagnosis. And, you know, honestly, I do regret that. I regret that people left the episode feeling unseen by it. And there are certainly plenty worthy aspects of ADHD that, you know, deserved more attention. For instance, we could have talked about the very real issues of medical bias that, you know, we talked a bit on the episode about how boys and especially boys of color can often go overdiagnosed, that behavior is labeled as acting out and, you know, people prescribe medication where none is needed. But there's also an issue of underdiagnosis among women where women are not particularly seen as being susceptible to ADHD. And, you know, for that reason, go many years without a diagnosis that could have helped them. Those are real issues. And I really want to do an episode in the future on medical bias. We've been looking for a guest about that topic. So I just want to end this by saying that, you know, one of the things I value most about this show is that it is not a monologue. It is a dialogue, right? I mean, first of all, it's quite literally a dialogue. It's me talking to an expert, but it's also a dialogue with you,

the audience. I really feel that we're on a journey here together of learning and understanding these issues. And so I really want to thank everyone who wrote in with their feedback on this episode. It caused a lot of discussion. I wrote back to a lot of folks on Twitter over email, and it sparked some really interesting conversations. And, you know, I just want to say, if you are listening to this show and I have a perspective on a topic and you have a different perspective, you are not shut out of this show. You are a part of this show.

You are a part of this show. I want you to write to me at factually at adamconover.net. I want you to tweet at me. I want you to send me an Instagram DM. I don't check those that often. They get kind of hairy, but you know, do you get in touch with me and let's have a conversation about it because that is what makes this journey of learning so fun and fascinating is when it's not just me, it's all of us doing it together. So once again, thank you to everybody who wrote in and let's get to this episode. So I don't know if you saw on the news this past week, but the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, came out with a huge big ass report in which they reviewed thousands of papers on climate change.

And they found, they only do these reports once every couple years, they found that the sea levels are rising, the polar ice sheets are melting, extreme weather is increasing to the point where we can say with great certainty that yes, this or that massive flood or that murderous drought or that hurricane that's barreling down on the Gulf Coast is in fact a product of climate change. The same climate change that is caused by our carbon emissions, and that all of this will require massive but very obvious and doable changes. It was a really landmark study. It caused an incredible amount of conversation. But here's the funny thing about it is that we almost don't need

it at this point, because the thing that is so stunning about climate change is how quickly it has overtaken us, how much we can suddenly see the effects all around us. For most of my life, climate change was always something that we were going to see in the future, that scientists were saying this stuff is going to happen and we need to watch out for it. And now over the past five years, it has really started feeling like it is happening. Like a really good example of this is a couple of years ago, we had the climate scientist, Michael Mann on Adam ruins everything for an episode called Adam ruins nature. And in that episode, he told us about how we're going to be facing more and bigger fires across the West as the result of climate change. That was just like four years ago or so. I remember

thinking when we made that episode, oh, that sounds like that'll be bad when that starts happening. And then over the last three years, it has started happening. I mean, we currently in California today had the largest fire in California history. The second largest was last year. And people now talk about fire season as though it's Christmas. Hey, fire season's coming around. Better get ready. My dad lives in Oregon where they also have very bad fires. And he literally decided this year not to go on a family trip because it was fire season and he wanted to be able to guard his house with a hose in case the fire's coming. Like this was not a reality just like five or six years ago. Now it is.

Everyone is aware that fires are here and they're getting worse and worse every single year. And you know, a lot of times when we see these fires on the news, I'm as guilty of this as anyone. We say, oh, that's really awful. Climate change is really bad. And we forget the fact that, you know,

these are real people's homes. When they say 500 structures destroyed. That means 500 homes destroyed. And today on the show, we have a really stunning interview to connect us all the way from that big IPCC report to the actual changes that are being wrought in our communities. Today on the show, we have Lizzie Johnson. She's the author of a new book called Paradise, One Town Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire. And in this book, she writes about her experience as a reporter on the ground during the 2018 Camp Fire in California. This fire made massive news in California. It killed 85 people. It destroyed an entire town that is simply wiped off the map now. The devastation it caused

is not abstract. It's not something you need to read about in a white paper. It's very real. It's real people's lives that were destroyed in literally an afternoon. And God, I just cannot say enough about how much this interview bowled me over. You're going to be stunned by it. So without further ado, please welcome Lizzie Johnson. Lizzie, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. So I read a lot about the Camp Fire when it happened. It was in the news all over California. It was terrifying. You were there in person. Tell me what that was like and tell me more about the fire for our listeners who, you know, have a hazy memory of it or never heard about it in the first place. Right. Yeah. So if you think back to fall of 2018,

November 8th, a few weeks before Thanksgiving, this massive fire breaks out in Northern California, right outside of this town called Paradise. That's like three and a half hours northeast of San Francisco. And within a matter of hours, the entire town is just gone. That's 14,000 buildings, 500 businesses, everything that made up the lives of 26,500 people, if you can imagine that. So, yeah, I was there. I was a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle at the time. And my beat was wildfires. Porter for the San Francisco Chronicle at the time, and my beat was wildfires. So I got a call from my boss very early that morning, and he was like, hey, there's this fire, you should go.

I went not expecting it to be anything like what it ended up becoming. And just driving towards paradise, the entire sky just started to disappear. You know, it went from like a clear autumn blue to like this kind of pie crusted brown to just complete black. And so it was just all of these people's lives burning up into nothing. And then up in town, it was just block after block of leveled homes. All that was left were these fireplaces. I think the eeriest part was, you know, the fires don't burn things up completely. So there were these tiny pieces of paper that were flying around everywhere. And it was just like singed remains of family photos where you could only see one person's face or like a piece of a magazine where you could read maybe four sentences. And that was it.

Just total destruction. That's so eerie. But wait, I want to, because you've centered yourself so wonderfully in this, I'm like worried about you as you're telling me the story. You're driving towards the fire. I assume other people are driving away. When you arrived, had it already swept through? Were you ever in danger? And how do you report on something that is, you know, dangerous to your own body? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a fair bit of compartmentalization that happens where you just try not to think about the fact that you are driving into the deadliest wildfire in California history. And instead, you're like, okay, I just, I just have to go do my job today and not, you

know, think about what I'm breathing or think about that. These power lines I'm driving over might actually be live or think about that. Like, oh, maybe my car will burn up, too. You just go into your job. Wow. Because I would maybe be like, look, you're writing for the San Francisco Chronicle. I don't know what your salary is, but you're not you know, you're not making Hollywood money or anything like that there's no point at which you say

you know what fuck this job this is not worth it maybe not like that's some commitment or maybe you know I feel like journalists are all a little crazy because we have these really bizarre things that we care about that no one else cares about and so for me it's wildfires

I'm that like girl in the bar that's like, hey, do you want to know the temperature that aluminum melts at? So yeah, I like feel a great sense of purpose. And I think that is what really drives me to the point where, you know, you can drive into something like that and not get totally freaked out, right? My mission is to tell the story that matters, to get people to pay attention to this fire, to actually understand what it means, because it can be so abstract when you're like, oh yeah, 14,000 buildings. Right. And it's not until you realize that one of them is the house where a couple had just been painting the nursery for their brand new baby that it feels real. And so that's what I try and do. And that's why I do this job. And that's why it matters. Well, let's, let's talk about this town. I mean, I had the,

when I was reading about it, I sort of pictured like a little tiny mountain town, you know what I mean? Like, like a, I don't know, like a summer camp environment kind of thing, but that you giving me those numbers, 26,000 people, 14,000 businesses, that's like as large as the town I grew up in. That's a regular town. That's like where people are living and they're working and they're raising kids. And it has, I assume, a school district and all of that.

If you can imagine waking up at 8 a.m. and getting a phone call from someone saying, hey, I think there's a fire coming. And before lunch, everything that you know is gone. The elementary school where you went to first grade, you know, the church where you attended mass, the grocery store where you bought, you know, your frozen peas, your house, your neighbor's house, your teacher's house, your friend's house, your grandparents' house, all of it just gone. And that's what made this fire so stunning and why people still remember it to this day, because it was an entire town just wiped off the map in a matter of hours. Yeah. I mean, I remember, you know, as a kid, my mom grew up in, I'm sorry, I can't remember actually, this is Wisconsin or Michigan. She grew up in both states. There was a fire there called the Peshtigo fire that destroyed,

destroyed a town. And it was, you know, I'm going to as a child, like a memorial to it, a monument to it, you know, oh, here's the, and it happened what, 50 years prior or something like that. And this is that type of event. This was, this was like that type of cataclysm. Like there's going to be, you know, a marker, the very least a roadside marker, 200 years from now saying, Hey, this is where this fire happened. Right. Well, let me ask, were people able to get out of the, of the fire? Were people able to escape? So that's the really tragic part. There was so little warning that there were 85

people that ended up dying and thousands of people more that are just trapped in the trauma from that day who got stuck in their cars, unable to move. There were a lot of cars where it was so hot, the tires were actually deflating. So the people had to get out and start running and hope that they could find someone else to get off the mountain with. People who, you know, when the power goes out, you can't get your garage door open. So there were people that tried to go get in their car and leave and they couldn't, and they had to back through the garage door or they just couldn't leave at all. It was a very frenzied, hectic evacuation,

and that was something that the town faced criticism for after the fact, that they didn't have a really robust way to get everybody out at once. They had plans that got part of town out, assuming that the fire moved more slowly than what it did, but they weren't prepared for something of this magnitude. It's a hard thing to prepare for, to plan for an evacuation where the entire town is destroyed in a matter of hours. That's like hard to, it's hard to countenance. It's not what you picture when you're doing, even when you're doing your disaster preparedness.

Right. And so that's the really interesting thing because, you know, climate change is really changing the way natural disasters are happening. It's taking these things where, you know, the town prepared for every fire that they had seen before, but, you know, they hadn't prepared for the worst case scenario. And we are living in a world where the worst case scenario is increasingly just becoming the most likely scenario. where the worst case scenario is increasingly just becoming the most likely scenario. Yeah. It's amazing how quickly, you know, here in, I've only lived in California since 2014, 2015. And it's amazing how quickly the conversation around fire has changed. Already people are like, oh, now it's fire season. And like, gotta watch out, buy an air purifier. Like we're already changing our habits. My folks live in Oregon, same thing there. So you've seen fires, you've seen them too. You know what it's like? Well, I've seen them from far away. I've been like in my own neighborhood and seen, you know, smoke in the air. Right. I haven't, I haven't personally been threatened. My, my folks were miles away from the, the, they were frightened by the fires in Oregon, but they weren't personally, personally impacted.

But they expect to be in the future now. Like we're already, what is normal is changing so, so quickly. Right. But let me ask, how did this particular fire start though? So this fire started because of an electrical line that failed. There's this company called the Pacific Gas and Electric Company. It is one of the largest power utilities in the country. It only serves California,

but because the number of people it serves are so great, it actually ends up being one in 20 Americans. And so there was this high-voltage transmission tower near Paradise, and that morning it was really windy, and the hook that was holding up this really powerful line snapped. And when it fell, it created this huge bolt of electricity, similar to like a lightning bolt. And the hot metal fell onto the grass, the grass lit on fire. And then within hours, it had already reached Paradise.

Wow. But what were the conditions that caused, I mean, that's a spark, right? Like it's a bad spark. It's a bad beginning of a fire. But then what made it move so quickly, so much more quickly than, you know, the town had anticipated? Right. So that's a great question. So the thing with climate change and these natural disasters, climate scientists talk

about it as a threat multiplier, right? So in previous years, if that tower had failed on November 8th, as it did, you know, the rain probably already would have come. So the fire wouldn't have taken off. But this is November. This is pretty late. Yeah, it's like not quite the rainy season in California, but like it's not we're not talking August 1st. Right. It's a few weeks to Thanksgiving, if you think about that. Yeah. And so for people that don't live in California, it is it was for a very long time pretty uncommon to have fires, you know, in November, in December. That's not true anymore. We're seeing them later and later into the year.

But because it hadn't rained, because those rains were so far behind, everything was super dry. And so when the sparks fell, it just went up like a tinderbox. It was the perfect storm of events. Wow. And so how culpable is this power company? I mean, I'm like, if a windy day, your power line snaps, this is like exactly the power company should be prepared for that to not happen. That seems pretty straightforward. Right. You have to remember, though, that the power company is a big utility. And for a very

long time, they were super focused on putting profit over safety. This has come out time and time and again in court hearings and other massive fatality events that PG&E has been involved with. So basically this power line that failed, that hook, it had been installed in 1919. It cost 22 cents at the time. That hook outlived every single man who put it up. Replacing it in 2018 would have only cost 19 but because yeah 19 probably would have averted this tragedy which is super just so sad to think

about it but because pg and he wasn't doing inspections the way that it should because it was trying to save money they never caught the fact that this hook was slowly degrading until it snapped and started the fire then Then they realized, oh, shoot, like that probably could have been averted. Well, cause they have tens of thousands of hooks all over the state and you know, why, Hey, why upgrade all of our infrastructure? Why do a whole infrastructure overhaul when we're already making money? Like, ah, we don't need to do that this year. No one's knocking, no one's banging down our doors asking us to replace all the hooks

on all the power lines or whatever. But yeah, I mean, the results were disastrous. Right, and so that's the thing too about, like I was saying, the threat multiplier, right? Like, didn't have to replace the hooks because the conditions weren't changing. And then they started changing. And so things that would have been tiny fires in the past suddenly became these huge fires. And now all of a sudden,

PG&E is really having to rethink about how to harden its infrastructure and what comes next. This summer, they came out and said that they were going to underground 10,000 miles of power line. To give you perspective, that's about halfway around the globe, right? It's just a massive amount of infrastructure that, you know, hasn't been hardened for climate change and these disasters. Obviously, power lines in California need to be underground at this point. But OK, I want to come back to the electrical company later because I want to really foreground more about the experience of the people who lived there. So tell me a little bit about your driving in to the town. As you said, you're like, hey, I'm a woman on a mission. Right. I'm an intrepid journalist. What were the conditions when you arrived? You said it became black. Like, what did you see

when you got there? Yeah. So, I talk about this in my book, but, you know, I had been covering fires for a few years at that point and had already seen a fair number of really bad fires a few years before that you had the 2017 wine country wildfires which if you remember just like ripped through Sonoma County decimated all of these really fabled vineyards and so you know when I showed up in paradise after the campfire I think some part of me was like oh oh, it can't be worse than what I've already seen, right? Like, I had spent years covering these communities that were just really struggling to get back up on their feet after devastation unlike anything we'd seen

before. You know, it's really eerie. It looked like a war zone. It looked like those apocalypse movies that I've seen before where, you know know you see power poles that are burning from the ground up and so they're just swinging in the air and making this eerie noise wait they're like they're like hanging they're burned from the ground up so they're like what hanging from the lines yeah so you know maybe there's two poles that are still standing there but all the poles in between them have burnt from the ground up, but they're still attached to the line. And so they're just swinging back and forth. And again, making that really eerie, like creak, creak, creak noise. Wow. And I really hope me or someone else isn't underneath them when they fall. So you have that.

And then, you know, just the way fire moves, I think that a lot of people assume that, you know, when fire rips through, everything gets destroyed. But, you know, you'll be walking down a street and you walk up to a house. Everything is gone. And then sitting on the front steps, perfectly untouched, is like a jack-o'-lantern. Right? Yeah. And you're like, how did the jack-o'-lantern survive and everything else didn't? Yeah. You know, in one trailer park, all the trailers were gone, but the gardens out front were still somehow untouched.

Like, there were roses growing and lemons growing on the trees. There were roses growing and lemons growing on the trees. It's just like a very weird world of contrast where, you know, it's like there are enough things that remain that it looks normal. You can recognize that it used to be a town. It used to be a neighborhood. And yet all of the basics are just missing, right? Like people's lives are gone and you can suddenly see into their homes. Oftentimes all you can really make out or you're like, okay, that was the washer dryer. That was the oven. That kind of looks like an exercise bike. And like, maybe that's a safe

and the rest is just like ash. And so, you know, maybe you might recognize something else, like, I don't know, a Bible, but you touch it and it just disintegrates under your fingertips. Like a bunch of little snowflakes and it just wafts up into the air. Wow. For that to happen to people's lives, like, I mean, I don't know, it's strange because on the one hand, it's like, well, those are just things. Those are just people's things. And I'm sure everyone who was able to leave would, you know, say, well, I'm very happy I got out alive. But those are also the things of people's lives. It represents the lives that they had there.

I know you profiled some of the residents in the book. Would you tell us some of those stories? Yeah. Some of the residents in the book, would you tell us some of those stories? Yeah. So one of the first people that I met up in Paradise was this woman named Rochelle. She had had a C-section 12 hours before the fire hit town. Wow.

And was in the hospital, you know, had a surgical incision, couldn't really move, had her 12-hour-old son, and she got separated from her husband and shoved into some strange guy's car. And they're trying to get out of town, and it doesn't look like they're going to make it. It doesn't seem like they're going to be able to get out at all. And she just looks to him and is like, you know, I can't move. So if it gets worse, please just like take my baby and run. Like, just leave me here. I'd rather my son live. There's another man that I wrote about in my book who was a bus driver for the school district of Paradise. He had worked a career for a really long time. And then after his dad died of cancer, he realized he wanted to actually do something he was passionate about. So he was driving the

school bus while he went back to college to get his teaching degree. And on the morning the fire hit, he got stuck with 22 little kids who came from more low-income families. You know, their parents were bartenders. They owned, you know, tiny little businesses. They couldn't get back to pick up their kids from school because they aren't working the kind of jobs you can just walk away from. And so he's trying to get these 22 kids out and there is no water on the bus. The kids start falling asleep because it's so hot and because the carbon monoxide is so intense from the smoke. And he thinks that the kids are going to start dying on him. Another set of people I write about in the book was a father and his young daughter and they get separated and they're running away from the car and he just doesn't know

if he's going to see her again. Like, can you imagine that being stuck in a fire and losing your seven-year-old? Yeah. Just like losing track of them. Like you don't know where they went. Yeah. I mean, I, I hate that. I hate that. My, my thought thought is this is this is like a movie

right but because that's how this is my experience of of seeing scenes like this uh is because it's not like a it's not like a movie it's like real life this really happened to people um it like somehow seems to flatten experience when you say it's like a movie, but also these, these are like stories that if I saw them in a movie, I'd be like, this is a little too written. What you just told me, you know, this is like,

this story is a little too good. Like the person who just had a baby and then is, you know, thrust into a, to a car, uh, is my God. I don't have words to react to this.

Okay. And so you were asking me why, you know, I go do this, why I go drive in the middle of fires, because, you know, you go to find stories like that that make people understand and really feel what it means when a fire hits and you lose everything. Yeah. You know, like it doesn't feel real until you put yourself in those shoes

where you're like, oh, shoot, what if I was sitting in a car with my brand new baby faced with the decision of, you know, what if the fire comes close? Like, do I save my baby's life or do I try and save my life too? Yeah. What kind of decision is that? I'm not, oh, man. It's so much. Did those people that you mentioned, the stories that you told, were those people able to leave the town?

You know, I could tell you or I could tell you to read the book. No, no, no, no. You can't do that. You can't do that to us. I will tell you, Adam, the baby is okay. The mom is okay. They just celebrated his second birthday last year. He's super cute. So I hope that helps you

go to sleep at night. It does. It does. But I will tell you, not everyone obviously survives. So just emotionally prepare yourself for that. Okay. I mean, tell me a little bit more about the evacuation itself that you said that people

are like, what is happening on the roads that people are experiencing when they hear about that? Just on a town level, people, how is the information distributed that, hey, we need to leave, right? And what then happens on the roads that causes all this chaos? question. Basically, there's a state firefighting agency named CAL FIRE, and they're in charge of giving information to the town of Paradise. So CAL FIRE will say, hey, there's a fire and it's about to hit Paradise, so you should start evacuating people, right? But because the fire was moving so fast, CAL FIRE couldn't really say where the fire was at, and they didn't realize until it was too late that the fire was basically already in town. And so the town just kept sending out evacuation alerts way too late. So there's that, along with the fact that cell towers were burning. So people just couldn't get a hold of each other. Not to mention that, you know, everyone in this town is checking Facebook. They're calling their

parents. They're calling their neighbors, trying to figure out what's happening. And so the few cell towers that are still up are completely overloaded. Information just wasn't getting through. There was one 911 call that I listened to where there was a woman in Paradise and she had heard that CAL FIRE was issuing an evacuation alert for the town. So she calls 911 and says, Hey, I hear that there is an evacuation alert for the town of paradise. Is that true? The 911 dispatcher tells her, don't worry. The fire is really far away. Like don't leave your house. It's totally fine because no one had called to tell her yet that an evacuation order had been issued. Oh my God. No one, the 911 operator didn't know the evacuation or had been issued. And the 911 operator didn't know. The evacuation order had been issued and the 911 operator didn't know.

She didn't know. No one had told her yet. Yeah. That's just such a basic breakdown of communications in the agency that is where there should not be one or the group of agencies. Right. Right. Yeah, it was just chaos, a mix of, you know, people not understanding where the fire was at, not being able to get a hold of each other. People were in charge of making decisions who weren't prepared to make those decisions. And so left on the limb were all of the people who really needed to know whether to leave or not. And so the really unfortunate thing is that a lot of the 85 people who died were older. They had disabilities.

All people who really needed that extra time to figure out how to get out of town or find someone to pick them up. There was a woman, this just like haunts me. There was a woman who was 99 years old. She was about to have her 100th birthday. And she got stuck on her front porch in her wheelchair and couldn't get out. And that's how she died. Oh my God. Um, so the, sorry, I feel like I'm really depressing you. No, no, no, no, no, this is, no, this is important. It's important. It's important. And the, and you know, the, the personalization of it is, you know, we're not doing this just to upset people. It's like to put a face on this issue, to like, you know, help us like really put ourselves there and like understand what a big fucking deal this is.

Right. Because this is not like something that just happened in one random town. It'll never happen anywhere else. This is going to be happening more and more across the country. To people who we all know or to ourselves. Exactly. And so I think the thing, too, in my reporting and trying to find these people is that it can be very hard to understand what it means unless you hear someone's story um i think back last week so there's a new fire in

butte county not far from paradise called the dixie fire and it's so big that the smoke came all the way to the east coast i just moved to washington dc and i walked out of my apartment and smelled smoke and was like how am i smelling smoke when I am now living across the entire country? And I, you know, leashed my dog. We walked to the dog park, and people there were, you know, joking about the fires, about how, oh, you know, the smoke will make things cooler in D.C. And that kind of made my stomach hurt, where I was like, the smoke is people's lives, like all the ash from people's lives. And so maybe if you hear one of these stories, you'll understand, you know, even if you aren't living in California,

even if you aren't immediately impacted, you'll realize that this is really important. And this is just the trajectory that we're on as climate change worsens. Yeah. Okay. Well, we're going to take a really quick break. When we come back, we're going to take a really quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk, we're going to try to talk about what we can do to prevent disasters like this in the future. At least that's one of the things I want to talk to you about. I have a lot more questions about this. We'll be right back with with Lizzie Johnson. It was a very stark first half of the interview, I thought. Yeah, you know, it was pretty dark. Stark and dark.

We covered a lot of ground. Stark and Dark, we covered a lot of ground. What, if anything, has California, has our emergency services preparedness teams, whatever they might be called, right? What has the state learned from this? Like, obviously, there's so many failures here. There's the failure of the electrical grid and the electrical company specifically, the for-profit utility. There's the failure of CAL FIRE, which is a state agency, I assume. There's the failure of the town itself to have a preparedness strategy. There's interlocking failures.

And there's climate change more broadly. more broadly. Have any of these various agencies or companies been whipped into shape by this most horrible of all disasters so that this doesn't happen again? Yeah, I mean, they're trying, right? I think we're at the point where it's definitely been a wake-up call, the fact that these fires are getting worse and they aren't going to go away. So the state is trying to implement a way to make evacuations more routine, getting communities to really think about what sending alerts look like, making them practice, making sure that those alerts are more Amber Alert style, you know, where they show up in everybody's phones in the area. CAL FIRE is trying to be better at doing

more preventative work. So burning places that will probably just like go up like a tinderbox before fire season gets there, right? Because then if the fire starts, everything's already burned away. It's safe. It's black. But we still have a really long way to go. Even, you know, the Dixie Fire burning in Butte County right now, Um, even, you know, the Dixie fire burning in Butte County right now, already the 13th largest fire in state history. PG&E has admitted that it might have been the reason why that fire started. Right. So again, again, again. Yeah. Um, so all of these entities are trying, but you know, we're still at the beginning. And so it's going to take time to really get things to change. I mean, there's just so much work to be done. I mean, even just thinking about, you know, the way my own town, city, Los Angeles handles, you know, COVID-19 alerts, right? That like the use of cell phone alerts, right? And the way that they're informing folks seems so spotty to me that, you know, occasionally there'll be some cell phone alert,

but it's like, oh, it was way too late. And, you know, and that's like a slow moving disaster that they have been planning for and dealing with for a year and a half. I like shudder to think if there was to actually be, you know, a fast moving fire going through, you know, a populated part of, you know, a heavily populated part of Los Angeles County. I know it has already happened, but, you know, like what would, you know, like when that sort of disaster hits, I shudder to think what the response would be because it seems like already so dysfunctional. what the response would be, because it seems like already so dysfunctional. And I'm shocked to hear that PG&E is again at fault for another fire, like a couple of years later. Possibly, possibly. They haven't proved it yet, but it seems likely.

Yeah. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm still like, you know, I'm still a new enough resident that like local news, I'm still sometimes confused by, but I feel like in the wake of the campfire, like there was news for months about how PG&E, because like the liabilities were so immense that they needed to be like bailed out by the state and stuff like that. Just because like the fact that the fact that they're responsible for so much destruction means that like they owe a lot of people money.

Am I right about that? Yeah, they ended up filing for bankruptcy. Campfire ended up being the costliest natural disaster in the world that year. That was $16.5 billion in damages. So yeah, PG&E owed a lot of people money for that one. a lot of people money for that one. And I mean, it's kind of a bad thing if your electrical utility files for bankruptcy because all the other people in California

still need power. But I remember the response, you know, from the state being kind of like, I mean, the state could just like nationalize the electrical utility and say, we're going to do this now. And like, you know, put, you know, the needs of citizens above profit. But it seems that there's a ret're going to do this now and like, you know, put, put, you know, the needs of

citizens above profit. But it seems that there's a reticence to do that. Like, and so maybe we're stuck in the same position. Yeah. You know, it just feels like we're going around in a circle because the state could take it over, but why would they really want to do that? Then they'll be saddled with this electrical grid that needs to be hardened. And, you know, they'll be at fault if a wildfire happens. They also can't just, you know, take away PG&E's operating license because people need power. They need electricity to cook their food. So there's really like only so much you can do. Right. Like, I think people are struggling to figure out what the answer to this is. this is yeah uh i mean but we're gonna see let's talk about you know how this fire is the harbinger of things to come in a way like should we expect to see more events like this like you said this moved faster than anyone and i mean that town had been there for a long time yeah there have been other fires in the area.

I assume this is a place where people were like pretty fire aware, but this blew past all their expectations. Is that what we should be expecting now in places across America? I wish I had a different answer for you. But yeah, that's what we have to expect i think i think for a long time climate change has seemed like this really distant thing something that we can worry about in the future but the fact of the matter is that it's here now we're living now you know with these heat waves with flooding with hurricanes with these fires and we can't just pretend like it's going to go away we have to actually start thinking about how we're living on this earth and the ways that we can do our part to make things better.

You know, we can't just sit around and be like, oh, I'm not going to get renter's insurance. I'm not going to have a go bag of my important stuff by the front door. I'm going to live up a canyon on a winding road because a fire will never come. Like, it's just delusional at this point. You know, this is what we're stuck with. We have made our bed and this is the bed we're stuck sleeping in. Yeah. I mean, people have this fantasy often of, I feel like, oh, well, hey, when climate change gets really bad, I'll go somewhere else. Like people literally used to say, I think, I used to hear people say, I'll go to the Pacific Northwest. It's like kind of cool up there. You know what I mean? It's like a little chilly.

Except that it'll be hot there too. Yeah. I mean, the heat wave in Portland this year and the fact, I mean, Oregon had worse fires than California last year, or at least extremely, extremely, extremely destructive fires. Yeah. And it's not like there's a safe spot in America where, you know, you can go and not be affected by these things at this point. Exactly.

Go to Florida, there's flooding. Go to the Northeast, there's humid heat waves. Go to, I mean, it doesn't matter where you are. Yeah. It's just, you know, yeah. Yeah. These fires out West, they don't exist in a chamber all of their own, right? Like everything influences the others.

Yeah. Well, so in terms of like, let's talk about what states, towns, and people can do. We'll end with people. So we end on a positive note about what we can individually do. But let's work our way there. Okay. Okay. Let's problem solve this. What do towns like, you know, there's plenty of other towns in California that are like

paradise, right? What is like, I don't know, Idlewild, right? Another mountain community in California in a different part of the state. But what do places like that need to do? I mean, is it possible for people to live in places like that safely anymore? To have the little, you know, mountain town up in the woods, you know, is that a place that we can reasonably expect to be anymore? Or is there something that we can do to make those communities safer? safer? It's a good question. You know, I personally would not want to live in one of those towns, but I have also seen way too many fires to ever be comfortable living in the forest. It's tough because you have to remember that these places are people's homes. These are affordable places in the state of California where people can, you know, buy a house and have

a backyard and raise their children. People used to joke Paradise was a town of the newlywed and the nearly dead, because there were a lot of, you know, retirement-aged folks and people there starting families. So, it just is very unfeeling to say, no, you can't go live in these mountain towns, because... It's unfair to say that to a person who is living, they're living where they need to live in order to have a life. And you can't be like, oh, anyone who lives there deserved it. That's a horrible perspective to have. Exactly.

And so often you hear that from, you know, us who live in the cities and are living on earthquake fault lines and in tsunami wave zones. But there are ways I think to be aware of the risk. us who live in the cities and are living on earthquake fault lines and in tsunami wave zones. But there are ways, I think, to be aware of the risk. There's a, like, for example, a town near Paradise that started showing fire preparedness trailers before movies at the local cinema. Getting people to really think about what their plan would be, right? I think just knowing, okay, what would you do if you had to leave your house right now? What would you grab? What would you take with you? Are you making

sure you are making your house as fire safe as possible? You know, getting rid of dead trees and dead brush and, you know, not just leaving junk sitting around the front yard so that the fire does come, your house won't catch on fire. Again, just really thinking that through. I had a moment a couple of months ago where I was like, oh, I guess I've never actually thought that through for myself, but someone pulled the fire alarm in my building at 2 a.m. and I just left my apartment and didn't take anything. And I was standing on the sidewalk and I was like, shoot, I could have grabbed my journals. I could have grabbed like, I'd walk and I was like, shoot, I could have grabbed my journals. I could have grabbed like, you know, my laptop or something.

But it was the middle of the night and I was like, oh, it's probably not a real fire. And I was like, this is exactly what everyone in paradise went through that morning when they didn't. They thought they would just be going back home again. Right. So like forcing yourself to think through that and be like, OK, what if the worst case scenario actually does happen? Forcing yourself to think through that and be like, okay, what if the worst case scenario actually does happen? And I think that's something that, you know, on a state level, legislators can do in local towns. And also you as like an individual living in a fire prone place or a place that, you know, is susceptible to flooding or hurricanes or earthquakes, all of those things. Like, what would you do if the worst case scenario happened? Would you be prepared?

Could you take care of yourself? Because no one else is going to take care of you or make sure you're okay. But that's, it's weirdly hard for us to prepare ourselves for that. I mean, like you say, you're a, you're a fire reporter, Lizzie, you do this for a living. And yet you found yourself on your sidewalk without a go bag right if anybody should have you're telling me earlier in this interview oh you should have a go bag and i'm like i don't have a go bag i have a bunch of water for if there's an earthquake and i've got like a flashlight and some stuff like that like we had we we got scared by earthquakes a couple years ago we had an earthquake man come and and do a whole bunch of earthquake stuff you know and the most important thing was he gave us a big water supply that's in our garage that's's great. But, but so, so I thought I was well prepared,

but that's a couple of years ago. I don't really remember half the shit he taught me. And you were like, you should have a go bag. I'm like, I don't have a go bag by the door. I should make a go bag. And then here you are telling me you don't have a go bag. That's why it makes this so hard, right? It's like, it's so uncomfortable to think about that. Your brain almost doesn't let you until you're standing on the sidewalk at 2am and you're like, shoot, I wish I had at least grabbed a coat. It's freezing out here. It's San Francisco and it's foggy, you know, but that's like the best starting place that you can have doing something constructive, making that go back. So if the worst case scenario happens, you know, you don't lose everything. Yeah. Like, what would you put in your go bag?

Well, I don't know. What would you put in your go bag? Some shoes? But here's the problem. Half the stuff you want to put in there is stuff that you're using the rest of your time, like your laptop. I won't put my laptop in my go bag because I'm using that the rest of the day. That's true. That's true. That's true. But then there are other things like, I saw so many people in paradise. If you talk about compounding trauma, they lost everything and then had to go spend hours at like the DMV and the social security administration,

getting a new social security card and like a birth certificate to even prove that they were who they said they were so that they could get insurance payouts or book a hotel room. Even little things like that. Put some of your important documents in a bag and leave that near the front door somewhere. I'm sorry, I'm off the track that I said I want to be on about what we can do. We'll get back on to it. But a question that I want to ask is about what we can do. We'll get back on to it. But a question that I want to ask is, like, what happened to these folks?

I mean, you said over 80 people were killed, but for those who left, you said 25,000 people were there and escaped. Where did they go? I mean, that's a huge number of, you know, fire refugees. And where are they now? Is there a town being rebuilt there or is it still nothing? Yeah, so that's really interesting.

You know, you think about internal displacement, all of these people that get forced out of their homes in the United States because of natural disasters. There was an effort by the local university to actually track where some of these people went. And I remember looking at this interactive map and there were pins all across the country. People in Paradise ended up all over the country. Weirdly enough, a lot of them ended up in Idaho. There's like a huge expat community of Paradisians in Idaho. Some are trying to rebuild in Paradise, but the rebuilding there is just so slow that it's only a fraction of the people that were there before. A year after the campfire, it was only

like 3,000 people to the point where the governor reclassified Paradise, not as a town, but as a rural area and not allowed them to get more funding. Wow. Yeah, even the people that want to come back, it's really hard to rebuild, to have the money. And then, you know, the past two years, fires have nearly clobbered paradise again. And there's that compounding of trauma where, you know, you want to go back to the town because it's what you knew, but it's not the town that you knew anymore.

And it will probably burn down again at some point. Yeah. That's just like the way these things go. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure there are people who, who have that feeling of like, no, I'm not, I'm, that's my home and I want to go back and I love it there and et cetera. But that place is just not there. And it's, and it's, yeah, it's going to happen again.

Yeah. I was talking to someone yesterday on the phone who is in my book. She's a school teacher, the local district. And she was telling me that, you know, her house survived the fire, but it's so empty there now that a bear tried to break into her house the other day. And she was like, I don't think I can live here anymore like my neighbors are gone i feel really kind of lonely and scared living out here right like fire both literally and metaphorically changes the landscape of a place yeah such that the i mean that i feel bad for the bear the bear must be hungry he's trying to break into a house right that's why the bear would hey, there's no fucking food out here. All right.

Everything is burnt down. You must have some fish in there of some kind. I know you have some canned tuna. My God. Were these people offered any assistance by the state or by any other agency? Yeah. I mean, a lot of them are waiting for insurance payouts or money from pg&e but it just takes so much time and bureaucracy and forms and you know it's not like you snap

your fingers a week after the fire and you're like okay i would like money to rebuild my life again i would like you to fix everything that has been broken just doesn't work like that yeah yeah no that kind of that kind of restitution is like, we have, there's almost this like imaginary theory that, Hey, something happens to you. Oh, you got insurance. You know what I mean? Like that's the idea of insurance is that like, Hey, well then it can't be that bad. I got insurance, you know, but in reality, well, it's going to take time.

And like something is going to be destroyed that you can't, that you can't replace. Even if you receive the full monetary value of whatever it was, you know, if your house is gone, you're, you're, you've been harmed like irreparably in a way. Yeah. Like think about how hard it is. Like my packages get stolen all the time, how hard it is to get a replacement from like Amazon. But then imagine that, but your entire life where

you're trying to replace your entire life and it's been stolen from you. Yeah. Well, is there something that like these, you know, just to repeat an earlier question I have that like communities like paradise can do, you said burning, you know, people can like, uh, you know, make like clear brush and stuff like that, but like on a city and state level, like are these communities wising up and are there steps that they can be taking to, you know, when this, so when the fire comes, it's, there's less of a panic. There's an actual evacuation, like what can be done? Yeah. So just making sure that alert systems actually function, that people are signed up for it. Strangely enough, a lot of people just forget

that you can sign up for alerts. And oftentimes these smaller municipalities don't have access to Amber Alert. So if you aren't signed up, you won't get the alert. So it's a very simple thing. Make sure you have an alert system. Make sure people are signed up for it. Make sure people are aware of the evacuation effort. You know, practice it in your head. That makes it a lot easier if it does come down to it because, you know, when the panic is kicking in, you at least have done it before and you're like, okay, I know that I need to go here and turn here and that's how I get out of town. Make sure you know your neighbors and help each other. I think that was one of the most beautiful things I actually saw in the campfire was how people really stepped up to help each other both during the fire and after the fact.

It was a really strong community and that persisted and still persists today. So just take care of each other. And then again, I think on a state level, just making sure that people are thinking about how they're building their houses, thinking about where we're putting these communities and hardening electrical infrastructure. Realizing again that climate change is here. We have to adapt to it. And there are some solutions we can take. They aren't easy. They're hard, but it's to it. And there are some solutions we can take. They aren't easy. They're hard,

but it's worth it. It saves lives and protects the way of life of the people left behind. Yeah. I mean, if anyone is culpable for a disaster like this, I don't know how old Paradise was as a community, but there are still city officials, county officials, and developers who are making choices about where to put new residential communities, you know, and whether they should be way out in, because, you know, people still have this fantasy of, oh, I'm going to live way out in the California wilderness. And not only are those areas more vulnerable to fires, they also contribute to climate change

because then those people are commuting long distances to work. Is that something that we can change and say, Hey, like, we just can't be building new, new communities. We out in the forested Hills. That's good. It's gotta be a nice place to visit. Can't be a place we can live. Absolutely. And we've seen that happen to in places like San Diego County. You know, you have to remember that more rural counties,

they want the income that comes from taxes with new development and just really being on it and saying, no, it's probably not a good idea to build those apartment complexes on top of a big hill in a fire-prone area. I've seen it happen a few times where that development has actually gotten stopped because people are paying attention to the meetings and they're like, no, that's a really bad idea, right? So paying attention to just being like, no, don't build there. That's not a good idea, right? You can't do much about places that already exist, but it is not wise to continue to build in really fire-prone areas knowing that they will likely burn.

Yeah. I mean, even where I, in LA, there's parts that are like, you know, there's, there's windy roads up in the hills where there's a whole lot of, you know, brush around. And then, you know, I, I am often very thankful. I'm like, okay, I live in like the low lying area. I kind of wish there were more trees on my street, but I'm also glad that there aren't, you know what I mean? Like it's, it is a choice that we can, that we can make when we're figuring out where we're going to, where we're going to live to like, just have in mind what's fire prone and what isn't to some extent. Right. Yeah. Just being aware, educate yourself. I think that is the best starting place

is understanding the risk and then you can start making decisions. is understanding the risk and then you can start making decisions. But when we think about climate change, right? Like it is really startling how fast the change has been. Like, you know, on my show a couple of years ago, we did a segment about climate change and we said, hey, one of the results of that is there's going to be more wildfires. And at the time I still thought of that as something in the future. And I didn't think of it as something that would start happening. There's probably a year before the campfire that we did that episode. And now it's like, we already feel like we're in a different reality. And the worst part about it is that climate change is like a lagging indicator, right? Like, if we stop all,

we stop all emissions, we cut emissions as much as we need to this year, right? If everyone, you know, we suddenly could poof, we've got public transit, electrified transit everywhere, and we're not driving to work anymore. Temperatures are still going to keep going up for a little while because of all the carbon we've already put in the atmosphere. And that means that this problem is going to continue to get worse over our lifetimes, no matter what we do. And that can be a really hopeless thing.

I feel bad even saying that. Some climate communicators might say, feel bad even saying that some climate communicators might say, don't even say that. Cause it's going to like worry people too much. It's going to cause people to lose hope and they're not going to do anything about it. How do you feel about, about that fact? Like how, how do you maintain your emotional equilibrium about it? Knowing as much as you do about fires. There's a climate scientist that I like to follow on Twitter. And the other week she was posting something about how she was done doing emotional labor for people who wanted reassurance

that climate change was going to get better or to give them hope. And, you know, I kind of feel that, right? Like if we just allow ourselves to push it off and be like, oh, this feels bad and I don't want to think about it. So like maybe it'll get better. That'll stop us from doing anything. So I think all I can tell you is that, yeah, it's bad and yeah, it's going to get worse. And it is hard even for me to have hope sometimes having seen all of these fires and all of these places that I've just burnt down to nothing and how hard it is for the people, you know, like my first big fire I covered was in 2017

and now it's what, almost five years later and those people have not gone back to normal. That's just the reality that we're living in and to try and avoid that is doing a disservice to ourselves and to the world. Like we have to realize that this is real and it's here now. And like the fires are going to get worse. And unless we do something, the planet's going to get warmer and it's just going to keep getting harder. But it can't be like, I agree with you that we can't, we can't do the emotional labor of, Hey, it's all going to be fine. Cause that's misleading, but we also can't go. I know so many people who have a honest view of climate change and are in California,

you know, feel threatened by this or people in Florida, things like that. And they're saying, it's going to keep getting worse. There's nothing we can do about it. And like, we need to, like as communicators, I feel like we need to be like, things are bad, but we can fucking do it. We need to fix it. We're going to sack up and we're going to, sorry for the language,

we're going to, you know, we're going to get in gear and we're going to fix this thing. And we need to do it and we can do it. Like, I feel like that has to be our perspective. And I think it's true. Yeah. So that's the second part, right? You realize that we have a problem and you don't push it away. And the second part is being like, okay, what can we do about it? Because there are things that we can do every day instead of just pretending it's not there. Like, how can we help each other? How can we help ourselves?

How can we advocate in our state legislatures and our local communities to make things better? Even just thinking about that and starting those conversations is something. But for a lot of people, you have to realize that it's here to stay first. And that kind of kicks you in the butt and you're like, okay, I need to do something about this. We all need to stay first. And that kind of kicks you in the butt and you're like, okay, I need to do something about this. Yeah. We all need to do something. I mean, does it, does it ever seem to you like this story?

Obviously incredible devastation. People died and an entire community destroyed, but like as a kick in the fucking ass, like it's pretty effective, right. As a thing to like, let people know, Hey, this is, this is real and it's happening. Like there's a little bit of a silver lining in that, like, it's an unignorable event and that there are more and more unignorable climate events happening. They're happening sooner than I expected them to, but that is perhaps spurring a bit more, spurring a bit more change.

Yeah, that does give me hope, you know, that people are talking about it and not just ignoring it anymore. Yeah. Man, well, I don't know. Is there anything else we can talk about about this story? We've covered so much ground. This is an incredible story, and it's been stunning to talk to you about it and to get the communion of your firsthand experience with the fire is like, yeah, it's mind blowing. I mean, it's the kind of thing where I know that the, I'm aware of the problem theoretically, I read the paper, right? But to speak to you as someone who saw it makes it really direct for me in a way that I haven't really experienced before.

Thank you. Yeah, I guess, I don't know, just realizing that, yeah, a big reason why I wrote this book is I was a daily newspaper reporter covering fires for so long. And I felt like people had a very limited attention span where they would follow the fire for maybe a few weeks and then stop paying attention and assume that people's lives went back to normal. And, you know, one of the long-term effects, I think, of things like these fires, any type of climate change fuel disasters, it really changes a community and it changes a person's life forever and it never totally goes back to normal. And so if anything, I would just urge people to pay attention and to understand that this isn't a discrete event. It continues.

And you have to see it and acknowledge it and be like, oh, man, this is so real. And then start taking steps in your life and pushing others to think about it, too. And then maybe there's something we can do to save ourselves. Amen. Thank you. I hope everybody listening heard that. Tell us the name of the book uh and when it comes out and when people yeah where people can get it so my book is called paradise one town struggle to survive an american wildfire it comes out august 17th and you can get it at any major bookseller um support your local

independent bookshops um You can also get it on Amazon, but if there's a local business that you like to support, do that first. Do that as well. Or if you want to order it online, you don't want to support Amazon, you can get it at our special bookstore at factuallypod.com slash books. Factuallypod.com slash books supports this show and your local bookstore, but also go to your local bookstore in person and buy it. If, if you are able to as well,

Lizzie Johnson, thank you so much for coming on the show. Can't thank you enough. So much, Adam. It was a pleasure talking with you and I hope you make your go bag. I will. I will make a go bag.

I'm absolutely going to leave this interview right now and go talk to Lisa and say, we have to make a go bag. We're going to do it this weekend. And she's going to be on board with that because she is terrified of every disaster. So we're going to do it. Thanks to you. I'm curious to know what you put in it. Well, thank you once again to Lizzie Johnson for coming on the show.

If you want to pick up a copy of her book, Paradise, One Town Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire, you can get it at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. And just as a reminder, when you shop there, you will be supporting not just this show, but also your local bookstore. I want to thank our producers, Chelsea Jacobson and Sam Roudman, our engineer, Ryan Connor, Andrew WK for our theme song, the fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible custom gaming PC that I'm recording this very episode for you on. You can find me online at Adam Conover, wherever you get your social media,

or adamconover.net. You can send me an email at factually at adamconover.net. And until next week, thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next week on Factually.