The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz - South Beach Sessions - Jacob Soboroff

Episode Date: January 8, 2026

"Anybody who sees trauma in life or has experienced it... those things stay with you. And I think that they make us the present version of who we are on whatever journey we're on." One year ago in Los Angeles, Jacob Soboroff watched his childhood home turn to ash amongst the thousands of others in one of the most destructive wildfires in history. But, before he was on the front lines covering the devastation of the Palisades and Eaton fires that killed 31 people and destroyed more than 13,000 homes and properties, he was a young student with absolutely no interest in journalism. Jacob talks to Dan about his journey, from theater student to political staffer to journalist. He shares his experiences finding connection, humanity, and hope in the most hopeless of times - in the aftermath of natural disasters, the horror of watching family separation during the first Trump administration... and his concerns about the administration's current anti-immigration efforts seen in ICE raids terrorizing communities across the country. Jacob's book, "Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America’s New Age of Disaster", is available now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to Draft Kings Network. the West Coast to get the most interesting people. Jacob Soberoff, I'm sorry I'm doing this with the circle, but he represents a lot of the things that I'm interested in, not just journalism that he does for MS now, formerly MSNBC, the book he's written about the destruction of his childhood home and how he ties it to climate change. You guys know I'm interested in climate change. And the very important work, you're doing fact gathering in what is the border war where you have more information than most, and it's information that's a bit personal to. me because I don't understand what's happening in America.

I don't understand what's happening in America either, so maybe we'll figure it out. So thank you for joining us, and we'll talk about your book in a second. It had to be a very personal, emotional thing to see your childhood home destroyed in the Palisades fires and then to decide to explore the depths of all of that emotion. So I look forward to talking about the book, which comes out soon. I will tell you the title in a moment because I don't want to read my notes right now. And the title of the book is a little bit, it's a bit depressing. because it's not just the great L.A. fires, but it's impending disasters that are on the horizon everywhere.

I'll do it for you. Firestorm, the great Los Angeles fires in America's New Age of Disaster, but I will say we'll talk about it a little bit. And thank you so much for inviting me to do this. I wanted to do this for a long time and spend time with you. And I think it's so cool what you're doing. And I love that you're interested in all of this stuff. But I do think that the story of the fires, as much as it is, a story about climate change and about the politics of the moment and really awful, awful stuff that took place in L. a year ago, it's a story about people and it's a story about hope and it's a story about optimism. So it won't all be depressing. So people should stay tuned to the end of our conversation. Well, I also imagine that it probably represents in some ways your entire journey through

journalism and all of the things that you have learned and this moment in America that seems so perilous with attacks from all sides that go from the border to fire natural disasters and disasters of our own making. Yeah, there was a guy who, was an icon in public television here in Los Angeles when I was growing up. His name was Hewel Hauser. And he probably did thousands of episodes of a local public television show called California's Gold, and he had a couple other sort of offshoot shows. And what Hewle always did, and it inspired me to get into this line of work, was treat every person in every place he went, no matter the circumstance. And he was a jovial, sort of quirky guy with the utmost respect.

And it might have been, I mean, there's some, you should look up the clip. or see the Simpson spoof of him, but it might be a dog eating an avocado or it might be female firefighting inmates learning how to put down a fire as they were incarcerated. But this man taught me about, not only about journalism, but about connecting with other people. And that's the beautiful thing about my job, is that I get to do that every day, no matter the circumstance, no matter where I am. And so, yeah, of course, I always look for hope and optimism and interpersonal connections about growth and about ourselves and everything I do. And that's, I that's the best that's the best part of this job hands down no question well explain to me because

you clearly love it but can you explain to me how it is that you got into it where were the starting points on you following this as a career path i grew up here in l.a and i was like i was a theater kid and so i loved i loved performing and sort of being out front i was a horrible student but i did have parents who were involved in civic life here in l.a and so i was around politics and i was loved politics and i loved the news i was at the television news on in our house while we were eating dinner. The TV was on way more than we allow it for our kids in our house now. And I went off to college and 9-11 was my seventh day of school at NYU. And so I was in acting class when they told us that the towers were falling down. And I left and I quickly

switched my area of study from acting to politics. And I went to intern for Mayor Michael Bloomberg when he was mayor in New York. And my jobs in politics led me to meet a lot of people in journalism. And I realized that there were a lot of similarities between being out there and performing and turning us, telling a story, put it that way, whether it was fiction or real life. And so then I start to pursue odd jobs in media. And I started making my own YouTube channel. And I started with an election reform video blog called Why Tuesday about moving election day of the weekend so more people could vote. And one thing led to the next. And I worked at the Huffington Post.

Good idea that one, by the way. Right? Do you know why we vote on Tuesday? I don't know why we don't vote on Tuesday. Absolutely no good reason whatsoever. It was about farmers in 1845 so that they could get to the county seat to vote and get back and have time for them. It makes much more sense to put it on a Saturday or Sunday so people don't have to

ask for more. Or allow people to have mail in voting if it's safe and secure, which it is. And as a total side note, yeah, during COVID, we got to have that experiment. And of course, the voter turnout went up and more people participated. So I did an election reform video blog and I got odd jobs. I was working at NPR. I worked for HuffPost when we started the streaming network, HuffPost Live in 2013. I worked at Pivot, short-lived cable news channel.

Sorry, a cable television channel that was owned by participant media, the movie company. And I worked for YouTube. I did a show for DreamWorks called YouTube Nation that was like a clip show. It was like TRL for YouTube videos. And of course, now we know nobody cares about what some person is telling them to watch on YouTube. if they go and find exactly what they're looking for. And that's how MSNBC found me. They said, can you do what you did for Why Tuesday and all these other outlets on the real news?

And that was over 10 years ago. That was almost 11 years ago now. But hold on for the uninitiated. When you say I quickly went from theater major after the towers fell to deciding on something else, an inspired moral choice instantaneously. You see towers fall and you're like, I need a new career? No, it's a good question. I think I spent the semester, maybe the better part of a year, in the acting program at NYU.

And I had wanted to be an actor. And I think that what I was witnessing happening around me and understanding the world and being away from home for the first time made me want to ask my own questions and learn more. And so I took, I think, if I remember correctly, I took my first semester of my sophomore year off from acting and went to arts and sciences. and that's when I sort of started bird-dogging Michael Bloomberg's office because he had won the election saying I wanted to come and work for him. And I got hired at first as an intern in the scheduling department. So I would open mail and I would call people back. The invitations were ridiculous. So many different, you know, they get thousands of invitations a day.

And you don't have many qualifications, correct? I had any qualifications. But the things I would call people to say, Mazel tov, the mayor says a bunch of bar mitzv, but he's so sorry that he can't make it, you know. But that was, and now that I think about it, I haven't ever actually articulated it this way. My job was to call people and make a connection with people so that they felt meaningful that someone from Mayor Bloomberg's team was calling them back. Little did they know, I literally sat in the basement of New York City Hall at a tiny desk in the corner as far away from the action as anybody possibly could. You're basically the AI is formed by human beings doing the most menial of work on manipulating people. You are the original AI.

There is no doubt that that job is being handled by artificial intelligence today. And I got asked to be an advance man, a part-time advance man, which is, I think, the most important job in politics you've probably never heard of, which is I think it's so consequential because it can make or break the careers of the most powerful people in the world. You go ahead of them, you set up their events, you brief them when they get there, but you're in the shadows the entire time. They have to trust you. you have to trust them. And so I advanced Mayor Bloomberg at all kinds of stuff, including down in the pit at Ground Zero on the first anniversary of 9-11, at firefighter funerals, at Christmas tree lightings, you name it.

And so that job was the thing that connected me really to the world of journalism for the first time. And so that was my journey from 9-11 to seeing journalists up close and being in the blue room with them in City Hall. But you're actively consciously craving connection. here somewhere? Yeah, I've got to be fucked up. Excuse me, I don't know how to say that on the pod, but there's got to be something with me deep down

where I, there's something about connecting with other people, whether it's people close to me in my life or people I don't know, walking on polling place lines on Election Day. I love it. It's one of my favorite things I do. In my job, I've had all forms of it. I've got to meet people at the border or in the war in Ukraine or, in countries around the world or on the plaza at the Today Show when I would fill in.

But what do you love about it? Just the connective tissue of humans living big lives presently? I think so, looking in someone else's eyes and telling them that I'm happy to be here and I'm happy to be listening to you and makes me happy that you're enjoying the same. And in my line of work, oftentimes it's in people's absolute worst, most horrible moments. I meet them on their worst day, kind of like a policeman might or a firefighter might. And there's a privilege to that, too, that you're getting to learn from them as much as they're getting to learn from you. And so the experiences have run the gamut and the places I've been have and the types of people that I've met.

But they all to me, it's all to me unified by a shared humanity that we have. Well, hold on a second, though. Are you somebody who's following journalism because you care about the tenets of journalism? No, I can answer that question easily. So you're seeking experiences. I never went to journalism school. I don't know anything about it. I don't know the first thing about what any of these folks are doing in the podcast back here,

what it takes to run a television broadcast. what it was like to be a newspaper reporter. I never wrote anything of substance until I wrote my first book about the family separation crisis. I was a TV news guy, and I didn't really consider myself one of much substance. I thought, like you said, I was an experiential get out there and see the world kind of guy. A Hewell-Hauser, Jr., poor mans Hewielhouser, so I thought of myself. And when I stumbled upon through this job at MSNBC in particular, but even

earlier than that, I got to work with and meet a guy named Mitch Koss, who was a producer at Channel 1 in the early days for Anderson Cooper and Lisa Ling, and then later at Current TV, and he came with me to MSNBC when I met him about what making television really is in my line of work. And it's not about B-roll, a term in our business or interviews. It's about finding yourself in scenarios and scenes and having conversations with people. And if you think about it in the sort of more technical way of, here's the rules of journalism, I find you never really, you never really get to the emotional truth of connecting with other people. And that's what, that's what I was worried, honestly, about even covering the fires,

is that I didn't, and I read about it in the book, I didn't want to be a coverage reporter, which is you sit at a desk and you wait for whatever shit's going to hit the fan today to happen. And then the bureau chief sends you out and you go do it. it. And for a long time, I didn't have that job. But eventually when I was working more for the NBC side of the operation than the MSNBC side, I had a boss that said, we're going to put you in the coverage rotation. And I was really bummed, pissed, actually. But the best thing that ever happened to me that I was called to duty on the day of the fires because it was one of these experiences, just like with family separation, which I covered in 2018, and ended up making

a movie with Errol Morris about based on the book. I had a lot of questions still. That's what's cool about this gig is that you end up doing stuff and you're out in the field and you meet people and then you go back afterwards and you say, wait a minute, like, what I just experience or now have an opportunity to learn more about that person? And it's a, I think it's a real, I have been given a real gift to have this job and be in this line of work. So if I ask you, what are you?

adventure, storyteller, journalist, like what author? I used to be really self-conscious about saying that I was a journalist, especially when I started, but now I can unequivocally say that's how I see the work that I do. And I mean that in the way that like in military or diplomacy, there's a phrase, facts on the ground, and people go out and they collect information and they make a decision about what to do with that information. And as an advanced person, when I was in college, that was my job, too. Literally, like, hoover up all the info.

And you're Mike Bloomberg and I would say, okay, mayor, like, here's what's happening. I remember the first time I had an event for him. I think it was a fundraiser. And I told him just the most mundane, ridiculous pieces of information that I'd learned about what was happening inside. I think he looked at me and it was like too much, you know. But now that's my job still to this day. And I, instead of tell it to a politician,

I turn around and I say it directly to the camera. So there's been a consistency in that for me. But that is journalism. And that's why I think that's why I think what people are doing on the streets of L.A. and Chicago and Portland and have been from the summer all the way through the end of this year is journalism, even if they're not trained journalists monitoring ice or the raids or whatever. We all can tell a story and doesn't mean that it's the version of the

story. I don't believe there's any story that has one version and one version only. That's, I think that that's a thing in journalism today that I find really challenging is that there is, sure, there's objectivity, but there will always be multiple versions of what people see. And the question is, are you being fair in how you describe it? Are you giving as much information as possible? So that no matter what I believe, the truth is, people that are Taking my information can make up their own minds. I'm not sure there's objectivity because I just don't think that objectivity is human. I think many trusted journalists aspire to objectivity, and it's become harder and harder to see or separate or be discerning about what those things are.

You think the role of a journalist is what beyond the dissemination of information? I think that the role of a journalist is to do what Walter Cronkite once said, and I'm paraphrasing, I hope I don't mess it up. but to hold a mirror back up to society so we can see ourselves. And we can take a good, hard look in the mirror of what's happening around us and at who we are and use that to make decisions about how we want to live our lives. One of the things that I wanted to talk to you about, you mentioned that it's the emphasis in your first book, but also just your fact gathering at the border that I think what it is that you've disseminated as information that if most reasoned, people just saw what you were presenting to them and saw these are the facts. This is what would be happening. I think most of them would say this is not America and this feels very

wrong. Especially around, thank you for saying that, especially around the family separation policy. Because the truth of matter is, border policy in America has been pretty consistent for the better part of a generation. And it's always been based on deterrence and punishment, whether it was Bill Clinton creating the first wave of border walls knowing people would die trying to come into the country or George W. Bush exponentially increasing the size of the border patrol in the wake of 9-11 or Barack Obama deporting more people than any president in the history of the U.S. That's why it was so easy like that for Donald Trump to deliberately and systematically separate 5,500 children from their parents. And when that happened, it was so obvious what they were doing and it was so clear that. it was based on intentional cruelty to scare other people from coming to the country

that it became like an X-ray vision for the people of America and the people of the world. And it was not a bipartisan condemnation. It was like a universal condemnation. The Pope spoke out. There were hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people in the streets all over the world saying this is not okay.

This is a basic connection point between human beings. You take children from their parents that in no way feels like freedom. Correct. There has to be justification for that. And you have to treat that with care. And that was so obvious to anybody and everybody that was watching that at the time.

And it's why it was the number one most significant, if not the only major, major policy reversal by that administration by President Trump in his first term. He said, but he didn't say, I have a moral opposition to this. Oh, boy, what have I done? It's wrong. He said, I don't like the sight and the feeling of the families being separated. He didn't like the videos that were coming out. He didn't like the reporting that reporters like myself and other people were doing. many other amazing, incredible reporters.

And he didn't like the audio that ProPublica got from Ginger Thompson when she obtained that audio of the children crying in the Border Patrol Center and the Border Patrol agent saying, oh, we have an orchestra here, mocking the kids. And he was forced to retreat in that moment. And I think things have gotten a lot more complicated since then, despite the fact that he promised during the convention, which I reported from the floor in 24, you know, mass deportation now, signs being waved around. I don't think people fully understood what it would be. And I think in the summer of 2025, everybody saw it very, very clearly, and it's been this ongoing project that they promised. But I do think that the moral clarity of the moment of family separation was unlike anything I've ever seen or covered, even now, even though the operations are bigger and mass deportation is family separation, just by another name. It's not taking kids away from their parents down at the border. I mean, I've watched the video today,

taking parents away from their children in the interior of the country, in Home Depot parking lots and at flower stands and outside of schools and walking down streets in Chicago or whatever. It's still happening, but I think it's harder for people. The X-ray vision has sort of faded a little bit. And as I say, at the end of the movie that I made with Errol Morris, I think people want to know less. I think there's a lot going on in people's lives

and I think that people are only have a certain amount of bandwidth to take in other people's pain and that's why I think I like to do this job I do it so that I can share not people's pain but what I'm seeing with other people and what I choose to go try and find In sports championships aren't one alone

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Only available with Intuit Toboltax full service experts. Real-time updates only in iOS mobile app. These particular traumas and injustices that your customers, covering. Can you get them off you? Is it, is it emotionally haunting? I mean, I'll never forget what I saw in McCallon, Texas, or in Brownsville, Texas, inside a 250,000 square foot former Walmart, you know, over a thousand young boys sent there for no other reason than they were taken away from their parents watching Moana in a loading dock. I mean, I could close my eyes and I can remember it exactly. getting their hair cut at a barber shop inside this place and sleeping five to a room instead of four because it was overcrowded and only being allowed outside a couple hours a day, not because they came unaccompanied, which is the purpose of that facility, but because they were stolen from their moms and dads. And I have sort of, I think, similar experiences about a lot of places that I've been and have seen. when I went to Haiti, as Joe Biden was deporting people back in record numbers,

to almost certain danger, if not death. Same thing for seeing refugees in Ukraine when I was there at the beginning of the war. Yeah, how do you forget that stuff? But I think for me, that's the point. I'm trying to, there's nothing special about that. Anybody who sees trauma in life or has experienced it, I think, as we all have in some form. in our own lives, those things stay with you. And I think that they make us the present version of who we are on whatever journey we're on.

Sorry to be deep about it, but like, I don't know where this thing's headed for me. But what I do know is all of these things, I wouldn't purge them from my brain if I had the opportunity to, even though sometimes they're really hard to reckon with. Because you need the reminders? Because I think that I think it's reality. And it's so easy to like get on Instagram and this shit that I look at every day. It's like so mindless, you know, that it's not about like infliction of pain on self. That's not why I want to go to the fire either.

And it's not why I wanted to explore what I had seen there. It's about it's about feeling connected with the world around us. And it is so easy to feel disconnected. from even our neighbors and our closest friends. And so this job is an opportunity for me to remind myself that we're all in it together. And everything I've seen other people have gone through and they're sitting with the stuff that they've been through. Like, for instance, the 5,500 children that were separated deliberately for no other reason than to harm them. And physicians for human rights called it government-sanctioned child abuse.

They won a Nobel Peace Prize. and American Academy of Pediatrics said it was, forgive me, I'm reversing them, American Academy of Pediatrist, government sanctioned child abuse, physicians for human rights said it met the definition of torture from the United Nations. That's something I don't want to forget, you know?

And I think it's something that we shouldn't forget. You saying that people don't want the truth. I mean, that sort of makes what you're doing, if not hopeless, pretty close to helpless, if you think they're actively rejecting facts because they're too hard to swallow. The facts of your work. Yeah, I think a lot of people that are out there

do want the facts. And that's why people watch us every night and why we have the support that we do and why I feel so blessed to have the community that's developed around not just this network, but our reporting and the books and the work and the movies and all that stuff. And I think that while there are a lot of people who probably try to tune this stuff out,

there's just as many people who are interested in it. They just have to find it and know where to look. What are you seeing on the border? What can you tell people that they don't know? People who are actively trying to avoid the truth. Your life experience tells you what, even as you're diluting whatever partisan appraisal of this there can be, saying, look, we've always been bad at the border, but now there's an element that's also additionally cruel and purposeful.

I think that... Do you mind if I take this off real quick? No, please. I think that... Just give me one second. That's okay. A real beefcake situation here. The first undressing in the history of South Beach sessions is it just warm?

You're just warm. You're just overheated from all the lights. Okay. All right, but you don't, you don't look sweaty. Nobody would have known that you were hot in any way. Nobody would have known, now we've just got a beefcake situation. We've got our first. The first time I've ever been described as a beefcake.

Sorry, remind me, go back to... You're seeing on the front lines an assortment of facts, an assortment of things... What's happening at the border today? That aren't, that you're not politicizing. You're saying we've always... been bad at the border. Oh, there's no doubt about that. And I think that what Donald Trump is modeling his policies on now, at the stated goal of the policy, is to do what Dwight D. Eisenhower did in 1954. I had an operation with a name so racist. I'm not going to say it to you

right now, but it deported a million Mexicans and some Mexican Americans. And like, let that sink in. Mexican Americans as well, who many of whom the undocumented folks came as illegal parts of the Broussero program to work in the 50s. that's the model. And I think the only real significant deviation from that is Ronald Reagan, who gave amnesty to people who were here for a certain duration of time and met certain criteria and who he felt and politicians at the time, including Republicans, felt, contributed to society. And that's courage. I'm not saying that's what we need to do today. But what's happening at the border right now? Nobody's showing up because they are terrified about what Donald Trump

is doing to immigrants in the interior of the country. But if you think that what he's doing will prevent people from continuing to come to this country, you know, you're wrong. What he is doing is temporarily stopping people from making their way here from dangerous situations around the globe, whether they're violence or persecution or climate change or other forms of injustice, and eventually they'll come again, especially if he's bombing Venezuela, you know, or interfering in other country's affairs in ways that he hasn't, and we haven't before. There are millions of people, tens of millions of people on the move at any given time in

all parts of the globe, no matter the hemisphere. And there will be those people coming to the United States again from all over the world. And the idea that some deterrence-based, punitive-based policy, whether it's at the border and the interior, will stop that. There's just no basis, in fact, it never has worked. If it had, people wouldn't continue to come to the United States and they wouldn't have come during Donald Trump's first term.

What is the truth of what you're seeing for those, for the uninitiated, for the people who don't want to see it, one of the reasons that I wanted to talk to you is because you are seeing things and feeling things that are true and there's not a dilution from your perspective. It's not coming through a television screen. It's not far away. You're seeing the horrors of the scream of children screaming because they don't know when they're going to see their parents. I said it before and I'll say it again. Mass deportation. The policy. that this administration is carrying out right now is family separation, and it's family separation supersized. It's bigger. It's more damaging. And it's in every part of every community all across this country, even if those federal agents are not marching down the street in tactical gear like I've seen with my own eyes here in L.A.

And also in Chicago and in other cities, and in New York, in the hallways of immigration court where people are showing up to do the right thing. and they're coming after them. And so family separation continues. And so if you hate it in 2018, open your eyes and see what's going on all around us right now. It is not the worst of the worst, which is what they promised.

It is mothers and fathers and neighbors and coworkers and fellow parishioners. Well, you can't get to millions with just worst of the worst, right? Bingo. That's exactly right. And so I think what they've wanted to do all along, I don't think I know. I mean, we've reported Stephen Miller didn't want to separate 5,500 kids from his parents. He wanted to separate 25,000 using a practice called administrative separations.

And now they're trying to go after thousands every day, every day. Who is that helping? I ask us a rhetorical question, but who is it helping? it's it's traumatizing and tearing apart fan not just families but communities you know you live in miami i live in los angeles the idea that you could extract the immigrants you know the grocers the gardeners people who are human beings that others know and have relationships with and know not to be criminals yeah exactly it is it is preposterous to think that you could take that part of american life today they may be undocumented but there are

are our fellow citizens. And I mean that in the sense of local government, local life, day-to-day and legally American citizens. And in some cases, American citizens, definitely family members of American citizens. There are millions of undocumented people who have U.S. citizen family members. And so that's what they're doing. That is the truth that I see. And you don't have to believe me, you watch my reporting, watch the videos, go out there and talk to people yourself, because that's how you'll ultimately really understand what's happening in the

ramifications of policies like that. So how is it as you do some of this work and get dismayed, wherever it is that you get dismayed, inspired, wherever it is you get inspired? You started, basically during the Obama administration. If I'd gone back there and told you, listen, you're not going to believe this, but here's what it's going to look like in 2025. could you have even imagined this version of America? I don't think I had the intellectual capacity to understand that what was happening under Obama was a logic.

What happened after Obama was a logical extension of what he had done. Back then, I wouldn't have understood it. Today I do. It was easy for Donald Trump to do what he did in 2018. And it was not a surprise to me that Joe Biden, despite promising a fair, safe, humane, orderly process, didn't really depart from the most punitive policies of the Trump administration at all other than not having a deliberate family separation policy. And so now Trump's back and he's doing all this stuff.

Would I have known during Obama that we'd be here? No. But would I have known during Trump one that would happen under Biden and Trump two would happen? I would say, yeah, most definitely. So you got smart quick then. Our film with Errol Morris was all about this. It was about the fact that, I mean, it was the story of families and it was the story of

the dedicated career civil servants who stood up to attempt to stop the policy, but it was also a story about how Congress cowardly has not done anything to change the legality of taking children away from their parents deliberately, or that the American immigration system is still one of deterrence and punishment and harm deliberately. Nothing has changed in that regard. 1325, the law that's on the books, and again, I'm not advocating, but there was a conversation on should we have it or should we not to make this civil violation when you cross the border or a crime.

And nobody has any courage to say I'm going to talk about any of this stuff because it all becomes about politics. And so there has been nothing really significant that has changed that is putting this country in a different trajectory when it comes to how we treat immigrants who live amongst us. Do you have any understanding of why it is? that America seems to have such a high level of disdain for either journalists or the idea of journalism that perhaps they don't care about the way that you care about it.

I wonder what you think is the reason. Well, I've been alarmed. I would say that I'm naive and over the last 20 years I've been taken aback, okay, especially because it's particularly this president and this officially that he's able to take a half. hatchet to principles that I care about by simply saying fake news and not needing to say anything else. There is a confirmation bias among people that he's speaking to that's absolutely reaching them because they think we're liars. And I just know the amount of care that goes into work like yours, the amount of vetting, the amount of importance that there is to accuracy,

that it bothers me, that that would get sideswipe, that the credibility of it and the effort that it requires to get it on air responsibly and professionally can be sideswiped so easily by just telling the American people, you know this is all bullshit, right? You know he's all bullshit. He's biased. He's whatever he is. I didn't think that that should work on people who are working that hard on something as important as credibility. I think that certainly he has had a major outsized role to play, but I also think that the fractured nature of the media environment, how easy it is to just lean into your confirmation bias and find a source, whether it's online or on television or on the radio. South Florida is an amazing example of those

stories, but everywhere is. And isn't that what talk radio was in some way all along? And in some ways, South Florida has been 20 and 40 years ahead of the globe in that Spanish language radio was not regulated. And so people found the bubbles where it is that their version of the facts were being espoused. And that's everywhere today. You can go on YouTube, you can go down the rabbit hole, you can go anywhere you want,

and believe whatever it is that you want. And so that's why organizations, I think, like ours, MS now, really matter because we do have standards and practices and legal vetting and systems in place so that the people who watch us know what we show our,

our work. And you understand what it is that we do. And there will always be people who choose to watch something else or seek out something else or believe what their favorite personality is going to say. But that's just why it's important we keep doing what we do. But your theory is just that there are bubbles, like that you understand that people are fine, that everything is so fractured that you understand how the credibility of media as the macro has been undermined. I think that that's almost undoubtedly one of the main drivers. I think that obviously when people so distrust in the media and our precedent has been the prime example of that, it doesn't help. But I do think that there aren't just three channels anymore.

And you're not just watching the nightly news and look at the viewership numbers of those broadcasts. It's part of the reason I chose to come to MS now instead of stay over at NBC News is that legacy news media has a declining audience. And so given the choice, I wanted to be at a place where I felt like I could do the most effective version of the work that I do with the formats, most importantly, that I think are conducive to telling those stories. And so nightly news, to have a minute and a half story or a two-minute story maximum or be on a morning show where they don't want to talk about any of this stuff, It doesn't serve my interest as a journalist in order to be out there in the world to tell these types of stories. And so, yeah, I found a home. It was my original home when I came into this company. But when the two companies split NBC and formerly MSNBC, it was very clear to me that the idea of an independent original journalism outfit was something that I think that people would want to seek out.

And I think that our audience and the dedication of our audience and the engagement level of our audience. is proof of that. And it's indisputable proof of it for that segment. But when I'm talking about the disconnect between how the American people generally feel about media, the disconnect to me is your work, unimpeachable, fact-based work that's not, I mean, you may have your justice that you're seeking, but you're not actively sitting here bias. You're forming your opinion based on the information that you're gathering.

And most of the people who meet you probably would not have an ill opinion. of that experience with you as a media member. So the two things don't fit, right? You're a credible person who reports facts and is aspiring to some form of journalistic objectivity, even though you say, you know, nothing of journalism and don't care about journalism's principles necessarily. But you're trying to be fair and decent and just and fact-based. So nobody would have an objection to you or your work, but what you represent is objectionable.

Yeah, and there's nothing I can do about that, actually, other than put my head down and go to work. And, you know, one of the ways that I try to stay in touch with what other people might be thinking is try to watch other sources, you know, and I don't think enough people, I don't think enough people are interested in that, unfortunately, see what other people are saying and what they believe. I used to be so drawn into the comments online about what people who didn't agree with or didn't watch would say when they would see the work that we would put out. And then I would want to argue with them and I would want to pick a fight or I'd want to prove to them that, hey, no, this is really the way that it is.

But now I just observe and I see what people are saying and not in a hopeless way, but just in a from the vantage point of the realization that I'm not going to win everybody over. But what I can control is what I can control. And I'm not going to, you know, I don't think they're putting the genie back in the bottle. I don't think we're going to have a day where everybody is tuning into the Jacob Soberoff nightly news. to get the world's version of the truth. But I'm here if they want it. The book is called Firestorm, the Great L.A.

fires, and as we said, America's New Age of Disaster, which that last part seems foreboding and also accurate, because what are you tackling here beyond the idea that your childhood home was burned down? And then you decide to immerse yourself for however long in the painstaking and painful process of book writing. You made this choice how and where emotionally to dedicate, okay, I'm going to spend all of this time really rummaging around in the efforts required for a book, which is an all-consuming thing. The answer is that it ties directly into the last topic of conversation that we were having, which is misinformation and disinformation has made natural disasters which are getting worse due to factors like climate change and the degradation of our infrastructure and changes in the way that we live in calculates.

worse. And I'm not pointing a finger solely at Donald Trump, nor Elon Musk, nor Katie and Stephen Miller, who were all characters in this book, because they weren't even in office yet. But what they were doing around the Los Angeles fires, if you go back and look, there's no question in my mind that had fanned the flames of hurt, of, as I said, misinformation and disinformation, and of people's ability to reckon with these disasters in an honest way. And so when you've got politicians using natural disasters for political gain, which is not new, but to the degree in which we saw it around the Los Angeles fires, and there's plenty of stuff to talk about the causes of the fires, this is not a book about investigating the cause of the fires. The Justice Department has done that. They've charged a guy with arson and the Palisades that lit a fire that became later the Palisades fire seven days after the initial ignition.

This is a book about people. This is a book about an exploration of what it's like to live amongst some of the worst natural disasters this planet has ever seen. This is the most costly wildfire event in the history of the United States of America. And what happens when that has a confluence with the political moment that we are living in? And that's what I want to explore. Because really when I was out there in real time, I watched my childhood neighborhood, Pacific Palisades, It's carbonized in front of my own eyeballs, vanish, literally wiped off the map. Basically, nobody's living there anymore.

And I live equidistant, if not a little closer to Aldadena on the other side of Los Angeles County where thousands of people lost their homes. 31 people died total in Los Angeles. And there's never been a natural, I mean, we talk about the big one here in L.A. This wasn't some measure the biggest one we've had so far, and it wasn't an earthquake. It was a wildfire. And I think we all have to reckon with what we experienced together. So just like I reckon with family separation and separated in my first book,

Firestorm is about understanding what it's like to go through something like this, not in an abstract way, because that's the experience that I had in real time. I watched the palisades burn. I saw all the hallmarks of my childhood, not just my home, burned down. But to understand what it means. and where we go from here, and how, if we don't reckon with it, we can expect a hell of a lot more of this and probably a lot worse. Where do you find that your anger or your outrage gets strongest on some of this subject matter? Is it the idea of a suspect deliberately setting fire to the area?

Is it politicians over literally the ashes of your childhood memory doing it for political gain? or is it other? No, I think it's some form of the latter. Arsonists are awful people, you know, and whatever the, or let me phrase it another way. I don't know who this person is, but the act which he allegedly committed was awful if it led to the deaths of people and the destruction of thousands of homes. In Altadena, the prevailing theory is that it was power lines that were dormant and were electrified by the unprecedented. and windstorm that happened and the conduction of electricity between the two. Where my anger resides, I think, is that so many people suffered so much pain. And while that pain was ongoing, I mean,

in the book, there's a story about Stephen Miller's wife, Katie Miller, who I got to know during family separation because she was one of the spokespeople for the Department of Homeland Security. and we had an adversarial journalist government official relationship because she didn't like my reporting even though we worked together calling me during the fires and asking me to go look and check

on Stephen Miller's parents' house which was in the palisades and it had burned down and they didn't know and so I did and I went over there and I looked at the home and I told her and I thought between us that it was like an olive branch for our relationship that maybe this was a moment of connection

was someone who, I don't know, that I had had a tough go with covering a very awful chapter of our history. And almost on cue, not only did her boss, Elon Musk, amplify the lies of Donald Trump, who wasn't president yet but was sitting there armchair quarterback in the response to the fires, amplified Donald Trump's ridiculous claims about how or why the fire could have been prevented or stopped. Later on, she made her own snarky comments about what the causes of the fire were and made judgments and assumptions about, I think, what people might be going through

in so doing. And that, to me, was the most painful part. That's the thing that angered me the most is that as I covered these fires, as I watched as I watched so many people go through so much, as I tried. as they tried to understand how that this could happen in Los Angeles, in an urban conflagration, unlike one we've seen in modern times, that there were people out there who could be using the internet and their megaphones as government officials fanning the flames of pain to a degree that they did. And that bothers me. And you know what bothered other people too? And I don't absolve any

politician from, you know, could we have done things differently? Should there have been more fire trucks out on the line? Should there have been firefighters prepositioned? Should Karen Bass, the mayor of L.A. been back here during the beginning of the fire? Of course, all those questions are important to ask. And they're ones that should be investigated and people should be accountable if there was human error involved in the cause of the fires in this destruction. But I also think we have a lot to learn from all of these politicians as well. Gavin Newsom I sat and talked with quite a bit for the book. And I get into his relationship with Donald Trump and what it was like to have Donald Trump come out here and to try to recover

in an age and an era when the goal is not actually to mitigate or to help recover or to help prevent the next one. It's to score political points. And that's what you see in the wake of the fires too. This president now that he's been in office has done things to decimate the career civil servants in NOAA, in the National Weather Service, the same people that predicted that the fires would happen. In NASA has been on the chopping block as they studied the future of fires and how to fight fires like it in the future. The list goes on and on and on, the billion dollar disaster registry, they stopped keeping

it entirely, and that was information critical to figuring out how to stop other fires like this from happening. And all that stuff is gone now. And so if we want to figure out how to not have another great Los Angeles. is fire. If we want to figure out how to save lives, how to create community, there has to be a baseline understanding that we have to be in these things together. And that's not what happened in Los Angeles at all. And I think that was the most painful part for me, not standing there and watching my childhood homeburn down, but realizing that we weren't all on the same page

about moving forward from it. And I think this book is a real lesson, a dissection of that. And it's also a story of hope. It's a story of how people stood up in the face of that type of pressure, in the face of that type of confusion and misinformation, and decided to fight back. And that might mean day laborers on the corner in Altadena who are under the microscope of the immigration raids of the Trump administration, standing up to rebuild the community. It might be workers from NIOSH, the National Occupation of National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in Morgantown, West Virginia, pushing back against cuts the firefighter safety programs under this administration. It might be those scientists on a plane from NASA that I went and flew over Georgia with as they studied the future of fire. everybody has a part in sort of figuring out the next chapter. And like I told you about Hewel Hauser or being on The Plaza at the Today Show or whatever,

those are the stories that emerged to me actually is not, anger is not the prevailing feeling I walk away with or sadness or grief. It's actually hope that in crisis, stories of people like the ones that I met during the fires emerge. and it makes digesting the actions of the politicians not better or more desirable or easier, but it puts it in perspective that that's not the only way. So you were surprised by the strength of people? What are some of the things that surprised you in your own book about the reporting in your own book? Like some of the stuff that caught you off guard because I don't know what you imagined when you started it was going to be,

but I imagine that that's not where you ended up. There's a lot. I spent a lot of time with firefighters, a lot of time from Station 69 and the Palisades, which is the first in. Their first in is the neighborhood that they have responsibility for. The neighborhood in the heart of the village that burned down or 23s, which was down sort of where the origin of the fire was, or on the other side of town in Altadena, the county fire departments. These people don't do it for any other reason that they want to help people. And to get to know and to meet them, to understand what it's like to be coughing up black shit, as they say, after laying on the pavement literally in the middle of the road with their hose open full bore and being able to do absolutely nothing about the fires, it teaches you something about humanity and about people and about the ability to, it's not just courage, it's pure, unadulterated selflessness. And I admired them so much, not just the firefighters, but local journalists who were on the ground here. The local NBC network, KNBC, was on the, I think was on there for 60 hours or something straight. So you're moved by the amount of caring. Of course. Of course.

And I think you see that. That is one thing that I've seen in my career. I've covered a lot of disasters as a journalist. Hurricane Irma, Matthew, shooting, school shootings, all that stuff. And I talk about this in the book. What always ends up emerging in the depths of the despair is hope and helpers. And there are so many of them in the story of what happened in Los Angeles. And in Altadena, a historically less affluent, more diverse community, the way in which people have come together, not even to rebuild because nobody's there yet.

You know, Governor Newsom promised a Marshall Plan 2.0 for the rebuilding of Los Angeles. And I think at the time I'm talking to you, there have been out of the tens of thousands of structures that have been destroyed, I think a thousand permits that have been issued to rebuild. This is not a quick, fast process. There is a, there are accountability issues with who's to blame for how this happened and why and why we haven't been able to jump back on our feet fast enough. There's also the reality that this was a unprecedented, unmitigated natural disaster driven by climate change. and in the face of it people are trying to figure out what to do next and that's what I loved immersing myself in in the stories in the book is how everybody was able to do it

and how this is a project that's still ongoing right now this book is coming out on the one-year anniversary of the fires we're a long way away from these communities being back up and running like they used to be if they ever will if people would ever move back is it's still burnt down I've only been in one situation like this journalistically it's not even close to comparison but it's the only place where I can identify. After Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa's home run chase,

Sammy Sosa went back to the Dominican, and in the Dominican it had been ravaged by a hurricane, and the places that I went there and the amount of desperation that I saw made me feel overwhelmingly hopeless. When you've got people trying to get in over the walls of Sammy Sosa's mansion because they want milk and you're in a hospital that's filled with flies and is not in any way sanitary, because nothing there is equipped to deal with the disaster that has arrived.

And that was a long time ago. The disasters are getting worse. And to me, it's nice to hear that this is a book of hope. It just seems hard to imagine that in the title and in the facts that there would be a lot of hope in there. But I see it in everything I do and everywhere I go and the fires were no exception. And in a way, I wanted nothing less than to cover a fire in California in my job. I thought it was the work that I thought it was the work of sensationalism

and I thought it was the work of making stories on TV seem bigger than they were in real life and when I realized was there is no more human story than being at the center of something like this as a reporter and as somebody who has gone through it in a personal way my child had owned down the house my brother lived in burned down

the houses of so many friends of mine burned down in all parts of Los Angeles County. And so there is hope. I mean, we all do feel, I think people will walk away saying this is extremely complicated in a complex situation. And I saw this happen on television and I didn't fully understand the extent to which this was driven by a confluence of causes and made worse by sort of the political moment that we are living in, but, and I think that this is the most important, but there are people

out there who have decided in the wake of this to make it their life's mission to try to do to make sure nothing like this ever happens again, I'm talking about individuals, I'm talking about store owners, I'm talking about firefighters, I'm talking about scientists, I'm talking about wildlife biologists, meteorologists, and people, there are two people in the book who have decided to run for office in the wake of the fires who were directly affected by, one, a career civil servant in the Department of Health and Human Services is running for Congress in Maryland and another Jake Levine who's running for Congress here in Los Angeles after his mother's home burned down, not because he wants to point a finger at anybody, but because you don't understand

what it's like to go through this until you've gone through it. And I don't think in power, people in power, people in my line of work, we go to these places, we see these things, but you don't know what it's like to experience them until you're in them. So the answer to my question on where it is that you were surprised by your own book is that you went in thinking what and then arrived at hope or you arrived at an assortment of people who inspired you that hope was possible that the fires the fires themselves were devastating um but in the aftermath of the fires and in the six or so months i spent um researching and writing and interviewing and traveling back and forth across the county and going to other parts of the united states to learn more

about firefighting and about the science of fire, I became very hopeful. Not that this won't happen again, but that there are people out there who want to prevent the type of destruction that happened both during the fires and then the aftermath of them. And I really do believe that when you pick up this book

and you read it, there's almost like an allegory in the book about how, I think on the third morning of the fires, I was back on the Palisades and I heard a very, very familiar screech of a parakeet. Here in L.A., we have, they call them, I guess they're ferald, but they're free-flying parrots and parakeets. And they were, I didn't know this, but in research in the book,

I learned that they were, many of them were originally released from their topiaries during the 1961 Bel Air Fire. They were Mexican parrots that were brought here as pets, and they came out into the wilderness, and they're everywhere. ubiquitous. Some people hate them. They can't see on the noise. They're shitting everywhere. They're in your trees. They're whatever. And other people think they're beautiful. They're green. They have yellow chevrons that glide down their back. And it's sort of an extraordinary thing to see. And on that third morning of the fire, as I stood there looking over the, what should be a sunrise, but it was

dark in the palisades over the haze. I heard the familiar screech of the parakeet, one of the cousins of the parrot. And I couldn't believe it. That there was nobody there. Nobody there. No life anywhere in sight, but these birds had come back. And to me, it's, it encapsulates sort of how I feel about the fires as a whole. It made me feel resilient. It made me feel proud to be an Angelino. The book, I think, is a love letter to Los Angeles as much as it is, anything else. And it made me realize that, like I've said about all of this stuff, that we share our humanity with each other, and that we can come back from things like this. if we choose to look closely at them.

But if we don't, they will only happen again. And so I even went to Occidental College and I opened the drawer of all the stuff, parakeets that they had there to learn more about what it was and how they make their way back. And I think that it's, there's something about Angelinos that reminds me of the parakeets or the parrot or the vice versa. We're resilient. We're a resilient bunch here in L.A. And I've never been prouder to be to be an Angelino. That's why I dedicated the book to my fellow Angelinos.

What was the hardest part about writing it? What were the hardest spaces to visit emotionally? I think family. You know, I grew up in the Palisades. I'm one of five kids. My parents moved away from the Palisades a couple years before the fire. And in a way, it was going home. And it was reckoning with who I was and how I got to this point

and why I chose the life that I did and what it was like to see the hallmarks of my youth go up in flames all around me when no one else was there. My friends were gone, not because they weren't living there anymore, but they had no choice but to evacuate. The only people that were there were firefighters in a mutual aid effort, not just from around California, but literally from around the world. Mexico flew and specialized firefighters for this. And it made me, nostalgic is not the right word. It made me very reflective about obviously life. I was fortunate enough.

My family was fortunate enough not to lose anybody to death in the fires, but my brother lost everything he owned. I lost all my memories. They're still up here, but they burned up with everything else. And that's true of everybody in Altadena, too. And so it's grief. It's whether or not you knew someone that died, there's a piece of all of us here in Los Angeles. that died on January 7th, 2025, and for the week or two that followed. And so now I think this is a grieving process.

And so, yeah, maybe the book was cathartic for me as well to get through it, to understand it, to see what the future portends. That was probably the hardest part. In a way, it was like, I haven't talked about this as my therapist, maybe I will. It was like some therapy for myself to go and do this and to excavate my own. my own memories and put them face to face with, I mean, I haven't really said this, but I was reporting in real time around the clock for the better part of that week and I have time to process any of this stuff. And so that's what this book is for me. It's a, it's an understanding,

I think, of who I am. And the book is as much about my experience as a journalist having to cover something like this as it is about the victims of the fire and the firefighters and the heroes, and I think, if you want to call them villains, the people who exacerbated the problem. I've never understood sort of the philosophy or until recently had a real understanding of the growth involved in not moving around pain but going through it. Something in here with the death of my brother is something that I couldn't avoid it anymore. And so I end up feeling it deeply. When you talk about this being therapeutic, it sounds like whatever your calling was as a journalist combined with mortality, combined with wherever your childhood memories reside

that make you make the correction on, well, this isn't nostalgia I'm doing, but pieces of me went up in flames that I have them in my memory, but I can't drive past them anymore and just see that's the first place I kissed someone or that's where I hit a home wrong. There's a fucking plaque at the park that's still there from 1986. My mom and dad raised money. to rebuild the children's playground at the Palisades Recreation Center and everything burned down except for that plaque and I want to cry

when I went to see it it was just crazy it's like you're looking back in time and there's no way to sort of intellectualize it it's a pure raw emotional feeling and I think right in this book allowed me to sort of excavate those feelings to the best of my ability

and to share them this book's a gift to my family as much as it is a gift to myself and a piece of journalism I will hope many many people will read something that didn't burn down exactly you're just you're you're you're taking it all and trying to keep it alive as part of the grieving process and the grieving process summons you to go straight through the pain like when I was trying to get at why did you decide to do this like the making the writing of a book can be a tortured process tell me about the decision to make the commitment to it without knowing. It's a blank page without knowing what the sprawling thing

is going to be choosing the pain of that. You made a choice and somewhere like you may not have realized that it was going to be therapeutic, but something about this was calling you to do this as therapy. There's no doubt. And trust me, it's not a sexy topic. It wasn't, I mean, it was a headline in the news, but it wasn't a political flashpoint. It wasn't something that's a guaranteed bestseller. It's not something that people are going to race necessarily. I hope people pick it up and read it to the stores to say, what happened with that fire in LA that happened a year ago? I remember seeing that on TV. But for me, there were so many questions left unanswered. What does this mean for Los Angeles? What does it mean for the future of natural disasters? What

is it that I just experienced that I witnessed hub caps melting on the side of vehicles because the temperatures were so hot and heard electric car batteries exploding all around me for four or five days. that firefighters are worried now, they're all going to have cancer because they were in the middle of a fire like this. And then, yeah, what does it mean for me? How can I grow from this? What can I learn about myself? What can I learn about my city? What can I learn about the work that I do as a journalist to be different or better or more reflective? And I think that is exactly what this project was for me now that I look back on it. When I was in it, it was a research project um i talked to people for dozens of hours recorded conversations experts

politicians as i told you scientists um firefighters countless residents the amount when i said that was going to write the book the amount of people that were messaging me about the stories that they had just like with family separation there will never be a definitive story of the great los angeles fires just like there won't be 55 you know i hope one day 5500 kids will be able to tell their story, like the show of foundation did for victims of the Holocaust, for family separation, but the fires, everyone has a story. And this is my version of the story with the people I came into contact with and was able to learn from. And my hope is that in the way that I've learned about what I experienced, other people can learn from it too.

Aspirationalally, you weren't considering the starting point of this therapy, right? No, I don't think so. I'm in plenty of therapy, but that wasn't what this was. I mean, it was sheer exhaustion where I didn't have time to process the experience as I went and so when you get to the end of something like that I was feeling

like shit to be honest with you just bearing yourself in the research reporting the work your patterns how it is that you do all of this stuff I felt awful I mean I think I covered the fires for two weeks straight and by the end I was eating fucking crap all day long

my head was pounding I too was breathing in all that shit for days and days and days. I got to go home and sleep in my bed and then come back to the fire zone. The firefighters were all there and I'm going to live with this for the rest of their lives. There's a story of a firefighter Eric Mendoza in the book who even after three days fighting the blaze in the heart of the palisades went back to his house and act in California here and collapsed when he crossed the threshold of his home and immediately had to go get on a blood oxygen monitor and have corticosteroids and he doesn't know just like the rest of them if he will one day die god forbid from the results of fighting that fire just like

the so many firefighters on the pile at 9-11 did and so i think about him all the time i think about nick schilder from cal fire all the time i think about jake torres and gunner alves from the county fire department i think about um i think about tim larsen from 23s who was up there was a hot shot firefighter in his youth and then went to work for L.A. City in the Palisades, which was like a coveted assignment. You're deciding to do the firefighters, even though, you know, technically, most people are looking at that saying they didn't succeed, right? They didn't, they gave their care and possibly their lives. There was nothing they could have done. And what he, Tim Larson tells a story in the book where he told a woman about defending her home, ma'am, I'm not going to die

fighting this fire at your house, but I will do just about everything up until dying to save your home. I don't think they let themselves go to that place. These guys and women are, like I said, literally laying on the pavement in the middle of thousand plus degree heat, doing everything they can to protect any structure they can at any time. And, you know, much has been made about the reservoir being empty in the palisades and the water pressure, you know, being low or non-existent in certain places and in Altadena, similar things happening. The reality was this thing was incredibly massive. And there was nothing once it got going that anybody could have done to stop it.

Am I saying that if that reservoir was full, maybe there was more water pressure and they could have saved some more homes. It's possible. But that's not really what the firefighters say when you talk to them. And that's why, God, they're heroes to me that in the face of it, in the face of being in their literal waking worst nightmare. None of them stopped. They just kept going and they didn't even live there, right?

Like most of the firefighters are not living in the communities that they work in. Yet they did everything they could as long as they could to save people's lives and really to save people's homes and to save structures. And to me, there's something about humanity and that as well, about how deep they were able to dig, about how hard they were able to go. And about how they didn't, I mean, I think you'll see in the book, but at certain times, they say to themselves, am I going to get cancer being out here? What's going to, you know, when am I going to be able to close my eyes? How am I going to feel? But that's not their prevailing emotions. Their prevailing emotions are let's go.

Let's not stop. And that's exactly what they did. And so, yeah, I mean, of course I focused on them. And of course that they're heroes to me. I was just a journalist and a cosplaying a firefighter in a yellow jacket and going home at night. But they were there and they didn't, they never

left. The parts of the book that made you emotional while writing them that you realize this is therapeutic as it's happening? There's a story about a couple Herb and Lloyda Wilson who live in Altadena on a street called McNally Avenue. And I went back to McNally Avenue

because that's where I interviewed Governor Newsom for Meet the Press at the height of the fires. And I got to know a lot of the residence on McNally Avenue. Kate Hannigan, who's an engineer at JPL, their neighbor's Mike and Monique Bagby. But Lloyd and Herb met at UPS, and they've been married for a very long time. She's a native of El Salvador, but a U.S. citizen today. And they have children, particularly their daughter, Ashley, who came to pick them up. They were in Lahaina. They had a timeshare. He's retired now. And they had a timeshare where one of the other most destructive

of fires in recent memory happened. Also an incredibly lovely place burning down. Yeah, exactly. And so they have a, I think they were not in line of proper, but somewhere nearby in Maui. And that's where they were when the fire started. And they wanted so desperately to get back. You know, they saw the devastation in Maui because they had been there so many times. And all they wanted was to be back in their community.

And I think that learning about the one, that is the one time I cried right in the book, interviewing somebody, is that we sat across from each other at Bub and Graham. was as a deli in Eagle Rock here in L.A. And he was telling me Herb was about their dog, Rosie, 100-pound Akita, and about Ashley, how she picked them up from Burbank Airport when they flew back from Hawaii and literally flew over the fire after not having been able to get home to their street in Altadina, which they were almost sure had burned down. And he cried to me about the connection that he forged with his daughter. when he made it back to L.A. and was sleeping at her house in her bed and she sat on the couch.

Family, you know, the stories of families, the stories of people like Herb and Loida who went and searched through the ashes and found their UPS pins, but not their wedding rings. His prize possessions like a signed picture, I think, if I'm not mistaken, of Malcolm X, he was telling me. Seeing everything that they own, you know, incinerated on the ground, yet, I haven't hoped. He told me the story about the dog sitting on the front steps of the house. You could tell the dog was sad and crying. The way that people process this stuff to me is fascinating and the fact that they're still on their feet and that they're looking for a new life. And the fact that they allowed me the privilege of being a part of telling their story, I think that's more than my own story, more than dealing with my own family, more than learning about the heroes or being angry at the politicians. Having the privilege of getting to go inside other people's lives as they process this stuff, whoa, that is, it's heavy. And I don't want to say I loved it or love it, but it's a gift that has been given to me, has been given to me in this process. Yeah, when people trust you with their story, it's a great honor as a journalist.

And then when you do the work that honors their story, you've properly done your job. There's no truer, and I mean this is a husband and a father and a son, but also as a journalist. There is no pure form of love than trust, I think. And I have felt so loved right in this book by the people that I've met and by the connections that I have forged. And the fact that I'm able to share these stories with hopefully thousands and thousands and thousands of people who will one day read them. that's what frustrates me about the way people feel about journalists, that the ones who care like that absolutely treasure the nobility and are honored. You trust me with your story. I will show with great grace that I was worthy of that trust. To me, that's a high bar. And like to have

it hatcheted when I know people are out there who care like you doing the stories the right way that, you know, are meant to be fair and factual and then get undercut by. an assortment of things that make the media less credible. Those are the types of people that call me on social media a snowflake, but you know who the real snowflake is, the person who doesn't want to hear anything else about anybody else's pain or feelings or what real life is really like. Or truth, or truth. Exactly.

And so to me, now I brush that off. In the past, it would be very hurtful to me. But in a way, it's fuel. It's like, I'm talking about this to my brother all the time, the way Kobe would get in the flow state. because he would be, he loved the oppositional anger and trash talking of not just other teams, but the crowd. And in a way, there's some aspect of that in journalism today is like, I feel like I'm in my flow state when I know that there are people who questioning what we do and who want to give me a hard time for using empathy as a tool to tell other people's stories. You know that your cause is righteous. You feel, you have.

I don't know that I, what I'm doing is righteous or that the cause is. is, but I just believe in the power of human connection to lift us all up. And I'm not, I'm certainly not perfect. You'll read in the book about it. And I'm a flawed person too. But I get a lot out of these types of stories. And if somebody wants to, somebody wants to use it as fuel for some shit talk that they want to do, I hope it leads other people to pick up the book and buy it because they'll realize that

I think we've all got something to learn from the people that go through adversity like this. You object to be calling beef to being called beefcake, but you compare yourself to Kobe. I think there's some... You do not want to see my three-point shots. The last thing I wanted to get to with you because I would say that my audience is pretty tired of hearing about climate change, at least because it's just helpless. Telling people that doom is impending isn't particularly helpful, and there's not anything that much of anyone can do about it that does. feel helpless. But if you're of the belief that there is apocalyptic climate change that's going to ruin the earth, 100 years from now, a thousand years from now, 10,000 years from now, what do you think it looks like other than pockets of the palisades burning down? It's not the explosion of Earth. It's natural disasters unlike anything that we've seen that are more costly and have a larger human toll. And in, other instances that aren't like this one, exploit the vulnerable by percentages that are higher

than people with wealth. I mean, that's why so many people go on the move and have come to the southern border in the United States. I've been to Guatemala and I've watched how in Chikimul and Sakapa in the dry corridor and in the coffee producing regions, climate change has decimated the crops and people have no choice but to leave because they will literally starve to death that they don't make the money to survive. I went to Greenland and I watched 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle what sea level, what causes sea level rise, the melting of the glaciers and the melting of the sea ice in places like that. And then I've reported during hurricanes in South Florida about what that actually looks like when the storm surge hits places like Miami or I was in Naples or, you know, whatever. And in L.A., this was the latest example.

You don't have to look into the future. You have to look around you right now. And as Gavin Newsom says to me in the book when I sat in his office with him and on the scene of these fires, whatever you think of Gavin Newsom, he's not wrong. Wets are getting wetter, dries are getting drier, and these disasters are more extreme all around us every single day. You cannot argue with that. And so I don't think that as Jonathan White, one of the two people I said is going to run for Congress in the wake of this said to me, the career civil servant. And it's not that, you know, I think both the Democrats and Republicans have it wrong. Republicans say the climate change is not a threat, and Democrats say it's a future one.

It's here right now. And what this book is is a real world example of what it's like to witness the destructive nature of climate change being exacerbated by misinformation and disinformation in what I call America's New Age of Disaster, because it's here. And if you want to understand what the future looks like, pick up this book and read it. The name of the book, again, Firestorm, the Great Los Angeles Fires in America's New Age of Disaster. Forgive me for reading that instead of memorizing it. Just the new age of disaster thing was so ominous and scary that I... I wouldn't want to memorize it either. Just stick with Firestorm. Jacob, yeah, see, I should have done that. The name of the book is Firestorm. That's easy to remember.

Jacob, thank you for the time. Appreciate time and the work. I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you.