Journalist Jacob Soboroff on Family Separation, ICE Raids, and the LA Fires | The Hidden Third with Mariana van Zeller

Hey everybody, it's Theo Vaughn here, and I got a question. When it comes to soda, are you really picking a zero sugar cola that you actually prefer, or are you just settling for what you've always had? That's the question. And I'll say this, when it comes to taste, I find that nothing beats Pepsi Zero Sugar. But you don't just have to take my word for it, that would be ridiculous. Pepsi has been doing blind taste tests for years. No labels, no brand names, just taste. And last year, they brought back the Pepsi challenge and the results were clear. 66% of people agreed and said that Pepsi Zero Sugar tastes better than Coca-Cola Zero Sugar. In fact, Pepsi Zero Sugar won in every market they tested. So if you're grabbing a Zero Sugar soda, go with the one people keep choosing when taste is the only thing that matters. Go out and try Pepsi Zero Sugar today. Let your taste decide. Then I went into the epicenter of the separations, the McAllen Processing Center, which is where I saw the kids in cages on the floor, sleeping on the concrete and the linoleum and the Mylar blankets and supervised by security contractor in a watchtower. And honestly, I'm not a policymaker. I don't have all the solutions. But what I can tell you is whatever we're doing is not working. And it's cruel. And criminalizing people and hurting people. And the logical extension now is more extreme than ever. the Trump policies of today, indiscriminate mass deportations modeled after Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1954 program that deported a million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. Now they're killing immigrants and killing American citizens, Renee Nicole Good in Minnesota. This is what they had planned to do. Tom Homan said to me, people are going to die during this mass deportation campaign. Tom Homan is the border czar for Donald Trump, who was also one of the masterminds of the original family separation policy. And just to say, what's going on now is not family separation at the border, but it is family separation in the interior. These are all family separation policies. They're just happening by taking, instead of kids away from parents at the border, parents away from kids in their communities now all across the country. Way bigger, way more supersized. This is family separation on steroids, what they're doing right now. Three cups. You like my little... Did you make these? We did. Yeah, they're great. They were like holiday gifts one year. Okay. Are you ready? Hi. So this is a little different, this one. So Jacob, so we're off. It's different because it's the first on the podcast. You're a very good friend of mine. You're also not involved in any illegal business. As far as you know. That I know of. As far as you know. You do like to smoke your weed once in a while. Are you allowed to say this publicly? My mom knows. My mom knows that. Okay. We live in California. But I wanted to have you on because you're a correspondent on MSNOW, formerly MSNBC. You're an amazing journalist. I love your work, as you know. And you're an incredible book author as well. Thank you. So very accomplished. And you have reported on subject matters that matter a lot to me, including America's immigration policies, which we will talk about today. And you just released a new book on the L.A. fires and your experience covering them firsthand, particularly as a person who grew up in L.A. and who saw the Palisades Fire, the neighborhood you grew up in, burn in front of your eyes. I want to talk about that, too. So welcome on The Hidden Third. Thank you. Can I say before we start this? I mean, I know we already started. It's the Mutual Admiration Society. And you're like my role model. No, I'm serious. The best and most fearless and most badass journalist I know. And when we first met, I was a red carpet correspondent for the AMC channel. And I have never been more insecure than meeting you and Darren at Molo, Mexican restaurant here. That's right. That doesn't exist. With my wife, Nicole, who probably was just my girlfriend at the time. Yep. Rolling up in a pair of shorts and a shirt and a tie. I don't know what I was doing, but I was so intimidated because I watched you on Current and I watched, it was probably Oxycontin Express at that time. Yep, yep, that's right. Um, and I was in awe of you then and I remain in awe of you now. So I'm like pinching myself that I'm a guest on your podcast and I will engage in some shady shit below the surface so that we can make this the real deal. We're going to talk about all of that. Uh, but, uh, this is why I wanted to have you on because I knew you would say great things about me too. Okay. Jake, uh, I know you very well, but I don't, there's a bunch of things that I don't know about you. And one of the things is I don't know much about, which is how I start with a lot of questions, people on the podcast. What was it like growing up in L.A.? How was your childhood like? I was so blessed to obviously be a child of privilege, you know, me and my family, and that we grew up in a really comfortable environment in Pacific Palisades, affluent, coastal enclave in L.A. that sadly burned down and I read about in Firestorm. But I was also really blessed to have two parents that were really engaged in like civic life in L.A. And particularly my mom's from Minnesota. My dad's from Chicago. They're like Midwestern, great values, amazing people. My mom's parents owned a deli and my grandfather was a taxi driver for a time. My grandmother moved out here and was in the desert and was around all the time. Just like total salt of the earth, amazing people. And big family too, right? Yeah, huge. My parents both had two siblings and I have four siblings. I'm the eldest and the youngest is 10 years younger than me. Jacob, Miles, Molly, Hannah, Leah. My dad's from Chicago and my dad's parents owned a linen store, a retail store, and they moved it to Beverly Hills. And my dad, you know, eventually in his civic life became a leader here in L.A. And I got to go all around the city all the time because I had a parent who was like in the arena. He wanted to be involved. And so I followed him everywhere. And he was like the parks, a parks commissioner and a harbor commissioner and worked on the school system in L.A. and was working with big brothers for many years. And so I got to go to and experience and see places and people that I never would have otherwise known or met. And I think that's why I do what I do, because I watched him take us to places that were not home all the time. And it was so normal. And so that's what it was like growing up for me. Exposure to a lot of nice, fancy, privileged things, but also to have a parent who took us out of that comfort zone, not in a way where it was like, hey, buddy, we're going to do this to make a point of it. But like, that's just what we did all the time. Tell me about the shuttle experience with your dad. I remember you telling me that story. That's right. He was the, gosh, when was it, 2013 or 2012 or something around then? He was part of the team that brought the Space Shuttle Endeavor to LA. And it's now at the California Science Center. And it's going to be positioned vertically there in a really cool exhibit. But yeah, he's such a dork like me. Like, he loves geeky stuff. And so when he had the opportunity to be involved in bringing the Space Shuttle for kids to visit at the Science Center in perpetuity, like he put himself in the middle of that thing. Right. And it was so cool. I remember around the time I had you on HuffPost Live when I was doing HuffPost Live. That's right. After the red carpet, right? Yeah, exactly. HuffPost Live was post red carpet. Yes. Around the time I did. By the way, I will say red carpet hosting is humbling and sometimes humiliating. I am sure. But it's also a great training for like bird dogging people, for chasing people who don't want to talk to you. Because no celebrity, when Mariana Vanzelar walks by me on the red carpet, she's like, doesn't want to listen to what I have to say. And I'm like, Mariana, Mariana. Who was your most memorable red carpet interview? The first person I ever interviewed on red carpet was Tandy Newton at the Toronto Film Festival. And I was so fucking nervous. You've seen me sweat when I get nervous. Dripping, dripping, dripping in sweat. She made me take my jacket off, my shirt, my... Wait, she said it? She realized you were sweating? She could find the video. My nipples are sweaty. Like, my whole body is dripping in sweat. And she's like, are you all right? I'm like, do I fucking look all right? Is what I'm thinking. No, I'm not all right, lady. Like, God damn it. But yeah, anyway, it taught me how to chase people. So like when I chased Donald Trump Jr. on the floor of the Republican convention or Richard Grinnell, the former acting director of national intelligence, when I chased him into a van after the 2020 election and said, where's your evidence of voter fraud? That is my red carpet host brain. That's really good. Translating to my journalist life. I never, did you go to journalism? You did, you went to Columbia. I did, I went to Columbia. I never went to journalism school ever, no. In fact, you wanted to be an actor at one point in your life, right? That's how I went to NYU. I went to NYU to be an actor. And 9-11 was my seventh day of school. You were there too. Yeah. 9-11 was like my fourth week of school. I was just a little older. I was in grad school in the first year of college. You're very young. Just a little. Yeah, I had just started college. And it was my seventh day of freshman year at NYU. And actually, I read about it in the book that I had total PTSD when I saw the scenes in the Palisades. of people running through the streets, carrying their suitcases and pushing people in wheelchairs and the trees and shit are on fire and people are running behind them. It reminded me of what that day was like in New York. And so I switched out the acting program. I went to the politics department. Why? Because I wasn't getting any. No, I was going to say I wasn't getting any parts. I was getting parts. Were you good? I mean, I'm a humble person, but yes, I think I was a pretty good actor. I auditioned. I had an audition to get into college. Oh, you did? There's an audition, of course. I think I auditioned using a monologue from Eugene O'Neill, Long Day's Journey Into Night. I don't remember it anymore, but I could go back and find it. We'll do that on the next one. And NYU is a really good school for acting, right? Yeah, I was lucky. My college counselor told me I was the luckiest bastard to ever get into college because my grades were not good. Because my senior year in high school, my dad was involved in the mayor's race in LA running for mayor and he lost, but he came pretty close. And I just totally ignored my schoolwork. And I love because I loved it. I loved the practical, real-life experience of, like I said, going places and meeting people. Oh, so you were sort of trailing or going with your dad to places at the time? All the time, my senior year, yeah. Was he concerned about your grades at all? Probably more concerned with me smoking weed while trailing him on the campaign trail. But no, my parents were cool about grades. They didn't really care. How old were you when you started smoking weed? 16 or something. I remember one time I went back to school. I've never told these stories publicly. I went back to school super high and wearing sunglasses from an off-campus journey and was stuffing my face with Reese's Pea and Butter Cups. And one of my teachers comes up to me and he had a very deep voice and he goes, how are you doing, Jacob? And I was like, oh, he knows. I'm never doing this again, ever again, and never, ever again. And it wasn't the last time I did it. No, it was not. I know, but it definitely put the fear of God into me about smoking pot. I hope you tell me a lot more stories that you've never told. I will. I promise. You're the only one I would tell them to because I feel like I'm just sitting in your house. I know. And then when my bosses see this, it'll be my last day at MS now. It's been a great ride, everybody. You can come and go host the podcast. I would. I would. We should have some alcohol with us, which would make it even more. I would. I would like to have it. But actually, we drank a lot last night. We did. It's the book launch, the opening, the party for your book launch show. We should probably not be drinking right now. And we got to do a big Q&A tonight. We do. Wait, so I went, I was an actor, I did this whole thing, and I liked it. But then the primary election day, 9-11 was primary election day. 9-11, 2001 was a Tuesday. That's right. I remember it. And Mark Green was running for mayor in New York, and everybody thought he was going to be the mayor. And they postponed the election, and ultimately Mike Bloomberg won. Yeah. And so I harassed him, and I wanted to go work in City Hall because I loved politics. And finally, they invited me to be an intern in the scheduling department. So I would sit in the basement of City Hall, where Mayor Mom Donnie is now. and respond to people's no request, like no, I would answer no to people who weren't, the mayor wasn't going to come. So be like, I'm sorry, the mayor can't come to your bar mitzvah, mazel tov, but he told me to tell you what's up. He'd be like, oh, thank you so much. And there were stacks and stacks and stacks of no's, but it started my thing of like having to be personable with people. And then they said, oh, you're pretty good at this. You want to be an advanced guy, meaning the job that goes out ahead of a politician and briefs them when they show up. And that's how I really learned to be a reporter, I think, because I would have to go out and vacuum up all the information at different places. Christmas tree lighting in Woodside, Queens on Long Island, a firefighter's funeral. I'm down in the pit at 9-11 on the anniversary, on the first anniversary, all kinds of stuff. Lupus fundraiser, all these weird events I would go to are coming back. And then I would tell Mike Bloomberg, the first thing he ever said to me is, nice to meet you, Jake. Don't fuck it up because it's a high stakes job. And it's like, if you screw him up and give him the wrong info, then it's make or break for him. And diplomats and politicians and presidents and mayors, they all have these jobs, advanced people. And for me, being a reporter is like being an advanced guy but instead of telling the mayor i'm telling the camera i'm like okay i got here this is what i learned right and this is what you need to know and it's all about for me the commonality is like it's like uh facts on the ground as a guy we know mitch cost producer used to say all the time like it's just about figuring out what's happening there and i'm giving that and turn around and finding a way to communicate that yeah but you You have an exceptional talent for communicating those facts on the ground. You're so good. You come out. I told you when you started doing more of your live reporting, and I watch a lot of your work, obviously, and seeing you, you just come. You're so natural at what you do. You're so authentic. And it's you. It's not a person on camera. It's the same person that's talking to me now. It's the same person that was at a party with me last night. And it's very authentic. And you're very talented at it. Thank you. If only people really knew what an asshole I was. wait i'm about to tell them today exactly no um thanks so yeah go oh just one real quick thing if anybody wants to look him up my idol the guy that i emulate is this guy huelhauser yeah he was like a legendary public television um presence in southern california he died about 10 years ago maybe more a few years more and had a and like a pub it wasn't public access but it was pbs and he would go places and he would do like 30 minute show in 30 minutes and walk around with a stick microphone and literally just talk to anybody and everybody and treat everybody with respect and no matter the circumstance, it could have been very serious. Like I read about in the book, a firefighter training for female inmates or talking to a dog that's eating an avocado or going to Pink's Hot Dogs or at the milk bottling factory or whatever. This dude was effervescent in his personality, but deep down he had like a reverence for other people and other humans. And when I would watch him, I would say, my God, dude, this guy is interacting with people in such an authentic, real way. I feel like I know who Hugh Heuser is. And so when I finally did get to know Hugh Heuser, and realized it was the same guy off camera as it was on camera. I was like, okay, I think I can do this. And so I started just making my own videos. That's great. So what is it that you try to emulate from him? Is it that respect that he gives people or that happiness that you see he has when he interviews, he's interviewing people, which I also see in you. Yeah, I think I overdid it on the happiness in the early days. I think I was like a little too excited, but that's because I was green. I was new to this business and I was entering all these worlds that I had never been in. And I was like legitimately very excited. And I think I still do that now. I love my job. It's the best, best, best job. Same here. Sometimes I have directors actually telling me when I'm interviewing the bad guys with my wife is like, can you be a little less happy? So the cocaine. Exactly. Do you love it? No, but I'm the same way. I'm the same way. Nicole, my wife, who you obviously are very dear friends with, will tell me, like, you're a little smiley today. It was a little smiley in this report. But that's so much better than those reporters out there that take themselves too seriously. And I know sometimes when I fill in as an anchor, I can see myself with an anchor face, a serious face. I can feel my jaw clench up. And the people in the control will be like, dude, just relax. Be yourself. Be the person who's yourself in the field. If I ever find a way to be on the anchor desk and do a show, I have to find a way. And I'm not sure I've cracked the case to like capture what it feels like to be in the field when you're sitting at a desk. Honestly, this feels good. Like, can I steal the set if I ever got a show and like do it? This is it's got to be different. TV news is so weird. And it's so easy to become like Ron Burgundy. Like I'm, I'm, I'm reading the teleprompter. And I'm so important. The job I do is so important. Even like wearing a suit. Like if you're listening, you're not seeing me, but like, I would rather wear this, what I'm wearing, like a shirt jacket or whatever, sitting at the desk than a, than a suit. I feel uncomfortable. I get sweaty and weird. And second reference to how sweaty I get. Yeah. Second. Jake, you should see, uh, I, you know, I never, I don't usually do love reports at all. Uh, and like, I did the eclipse. I did the eclipse. You remember how I was. I was literally yelling at the camera because I was so excited. I was so nervous. I was so excited. All of it. And I'm yelling. I was like. Well, why do you get nervous? I was like me last night when I was giving my toast. You go into the most insanely dangerous places and talk to the most gnarly people that could kill you in two seconds. That doesn't make me nervous at all. Why? Because I don't fear those people. And I always think I can rationalize with them and get out of sticky situations. and I've been in many sticky situations, but I think there's something. I'm deathly afraid of big animals, for example, sharks and bears and whatnot. That I'm afraid because I'm not going to be able to rationalize. That's hilarious. And then I'm afraid. I don't like public speaking. If it's like a room, I love going to parties and talking to everybody. That I'm fine. No social anxiety whatsoever. But talking to a group of people looking at me, particularly on live television that I have no experience, that scares the shit out of me. The opposite is so funny. I love that. Sometimes I tell my therapist, it's like in a one-on-one setting at a bar, talking to somebody if i feel like i shouldn't be there i am so nervous but if i'm looking into a camera and talking to a camera i feel like in my flow state calm no problem like really i will i hope if i ever do this ever again which i hope i won't that i feel that way because because i don't but but then again you were saying how sometimes in public speaking you feel hate it right hate it what are the consequences of getting on europe's bad side the rationale is more like those guys. How is stealth wealth changing retail? You can have taste and sell by jupes. What does a 6.2 million dollar banana have to do with any of us? People don't like the attribution of serious financial value to comedy. Join me, Felix Salmon, and my co-hosts Emily Peck and Elizabeth Spires as we talk about the most important and obscure stories in business and finance. Follow Slate Money wherever you like to listen. But you know what my... flow status is to not plan. When I'm on live television, I tell the producers, we have a mutual friend, Sean Killebrew, who you've worked with before. We reported together on the night of Prop 50 election, and he's new to MS now. And we were talking about sort of how I work in the field. And he was asking me, like, do you want to go interview some people ahead of time so we can like throw to the tape? Oh, definitely not. Well, yeah, but it's not, and it's nothing again, Sean, he just hadn't worked with me before. And I said, no, it's like, actually my absolute no way, never do that because the spontaneity of not knowing what's going to happen if you're reporting live is the beauty of being on live television. What's the point of being live if you want to put something on tape? 100%. You know, it's the thing that I do as well. Even in the interviews that I do, the majority of every interview, one of the biggest mistakes you can, I think, is prepare and write questions ahead of time. If it's going to be more of like a confrontational interview, yes, you sort of need to prepare and accountability. Think about where they're going to come from. Yeah, of course. But in situations where it's more about the discovery where I'm going into these drug dens or you're going around the neighborhood and asking people questions. Preparing ahead of time takes out all the spontaneity. And that's the beauty of it. And people can see that. People can see that. Then it's work for you. You're not there actually curious as a human being. You're there because you're paid to go there. We also share to somebody who gave us this lesson, Errol Morris, because when you interviewed Errol on Current and when I worked with Errol, when he made the movie based on my first book, Separated, I sat in the little black box. It was like this where he sits and through the Interatron, through the teleprompter machine that he created, interviews people. And the dude doesn't have a piece of paper, doesn't, doesn't, I'm not saying he doesn't prepare. He's like the most well-read person I know, smartest guy I know, plays the cello. I mean, it's like a true genius, true genius, but has no interest in, in having preparation and the task in a row because he just wants to see where the conversation goes. I learned it from him too. I remember interviewing him when I was, I don't know, very early on, I was like, just started at Current TV and had a list of questions in front of me. And I asked him, I said, you're one of the best interviewers in the world. What's your number one advice for people like me that are just starting this business? And he said, well, don't do what you're doing right now, which is never have a list of questions in front of me. I would have thrown up. I've been so nervous. But it was great advice. And I don't think I followed it immediately, but eventually I realized that he was absolutely right. And nowadays, when I work with directors, they sometimes come up to me and they ask me, like Sean, he asked me when we worked together for the first time, he said, Do you want you were going to interview this person, this victim? Do you want questions ahead of time? I was like, absolutely not. It just throws you off your game completely. So it's the beauty of it. It's the spontaneity of it. And it's it's not knowing where things are going to to leave. Yeah. Which is what happened in the which was what happened when I covered the fires, which happens when I cover anything. It's like you cannot you have to expect unexpected. You can't you have no idea what's going to happen. And if you try to plan it out too much, it's going to suck, actually. Yeah. And people will know and people can see. I think people are have really good x-ray vision and they can tell when you're sort of full of shit. Yeah, absolutely. And there are lots of good people who do it differently and in different ways. It's just I know where I'm comfortable and where I'm after doing this for 11 years at MS. I think that I I think I get it. I know what I like to do. Well, I'm going to take it back to 9-11. That experience basically changed you in a way and made you want to get into politics. Is that right? And then eventually into journalism. Exactly. And so hanging around in City Hall, I got to meet a lot of journalists, especially people actually who ended up being – there were a lot of the City Hall beat journalists like Maggie Haberman from the New York Times who ended up being huge Trump-era – Correspondent – Reporters. Reporters, exactly. And so I got to know a lot of these people as like a very junior advanced person in City Hall, maybe not by name. I don't even know that they would – now we know each other, but back then, like, would she even remember me? I don't know, but I watched them up close. and I thought, man, this is so fucking cool. And then one thing led to the next thing led to the next thing. I wanted to always be on MTV News. That was like the cool journalism job for me. Was MTV still big then? It wasn't like as big as it was in the Kurt Loder, Serena Altshul Hay Day, but Gideon Diego and Suchin Pak and some of the other correspondents were there and I wanted to do that post 9-11 and I auditioned and I actually did in 2012 get to do a short little stint with them And I interviewed Mitt Romney at a presidential campaign stop. It's funny. That's where I met Ashley Parker, who was then at The Washington Post and is now at The Atlantic. And Philip Rucker, who was also a colleague at first at The Washington Post and is now at CNN. I just got to know all these people from being like this. So I did this Why Tuesday project and I was running around asking people, why do we vote on Tuesday? I wanted to change Election Day to the weekend. And that's because it would give people a lot more opportunities to vote. It would bring a lot more voters. And that's where the MTV people noticed me. That's how MSNBC noticed me because I was going out and harassing politicians and they really loved it. And that's kind of still what I do. Like when I'm not talking to everyday people, I like to chase politicians around and figure out if I can, you know. It's so interesting that only recently, but only I think, I mean, we've talked about this before, but I somehow forgotten it. And only when I was reading your book did I realize it. I remember again that you were in New York and 9-11 when I was there too. We were both in New York. It was the craziest thing. Yeah. I was reporting live, actually. It was my first live ever. Portuguese television? Portuguese television yeah Rooftop of a building midtown surrounded by my heroes all my journalist heroes I was so nervous I was sweating as well I was shaking I don sweat actually but I was shaking I remember looking at my hands and shaking And I was wearing this sort of nylon top, which looked awful on camera. And I had way too much blue eyeshadow. And now looking back at that footage, what were you thinking? But I was so nervous. But then for me, it was also a day that changed my life because walking down to the streets and starting to see the first people walking around with the first sort of signs, posters that they'd made looking for their loved ones. Oh, man. And I'll never forget that day and that week. And that changed me, too. And that's when I decided that I wanted to do sort of more investigative journalism and long-form journalism, too. And you were like, didn't you go to Afghanistan right after that? No, I went to Syria. Syria, that's right. I'm sorry. A year after I graduated from Columbia University, I moved to Syria because I knew Iraq and the Middle East was going to be the center of action for news. What the hell is wrong with you? It's crazy. It's like, you're just like, okay, let's go to Syria. I was like, let me go to a red carpet after 9-11 and see what happens on the red carpet. No, that's not true. You went to work for Bloomberg. What was Bloomberg like, by the way? Really cool and a very tough boss, but a guy who I think delegated, no matter what you think of his policies, like delegated to people that he trusted. And so they put a lot of faith in me. They gave me a car with lights and sirens. I was driving a car with lights and sirens around New York. It was called Baxter. That was the nickname of the car. It was a white Ford Explorer. And why did they trust me with a car with lights and sirens? I would drive on the shoulder in the snow going to events. And it was amazing. I got to know and love New York City in a way because of the, this sounds cheesy, but like the power that they invested in me in that job as a young guy. It's not cheesy at all. Yeah. And I remember the day I gave my badge back when I left City Hall. It felt like I lost my superpowers, you know. There were days I would ride the subway with the podium, like bringing it back from an event, I think at the Grand Central Station. Like that job exposed me to New York City in a way that taught me what it was like to have the skills needed to be a reporter. I was on the phone with our friend, mutual friend, also Christina. Yeah. And she was asking me today. She's a big fan of yours, just like I am. And she was asking me, she was saying, like, why isn't Jake running for some sort of office? Weed. We already talked about this. Weed. Weed. Is that why? Because, OK, did you ever think at the time when you were working for Bloomberg, your first real job? I don't think so. I like dressing up and wearing suits. And like, I was into like the cosplay part of the mayor's office stuff. Like it felt like I was in the show Spin City or something. And I've always been that way. I liked the uniform when I was in T-ball, like, but I didn't really love playing the sport. I've always kind of like, liked the idea of that kind of stuff. Even when I would do the Today Show, like the idea of dressing up and filling in on the Today Show was so cool. But now that I'm back at MS Now and NBC and MS Now have split up, I realized like this is what I always wanted to do. It's not about something that projects like a stature or whatever. I love the people, the understated parts of this. Yeah. Like just going places and spending time with people and not being on camera talking to people. I talked to the woman whose house was my house, my childhood house that burned down today for the first time, the daughter of the woman for 30 minutes. And it was a hard conversation because it's been hard for her to see me talking about the house that they lived in for 35 years. Right. So this was the house you grew up in. You moved out only when you were six years old. When you were six years old, all your siblings, except for one, were born in this house. Were born there, exactly. A lot of sentimental value for you, for your parents in particular. It's just like my formative place. And so when I showed up during the fire coverage, I saw it burn down and I did a report for the nightly news on NBC. And you called your mom. I called my mom and it was really sad. And like, I have so many formative memories from that house, but it's also really hard for the family that's lived there for 35 years since we lived there to see their house talked about as my house, I think. and I guess now I'm talking about it publicly but we had a private conversation earlier it's like I love spending time I think the common thing between me and you is uh I have learned from you and watching you talk to quote-unquote bad people all around the world that really what you're doing is using empathy to connect with them and understand where they're coming from and why they do what they do and uh I don't have some superpower but I do love when someone else will let you into their world and allow you to um share their feelings you know and it's a form of therapy. It's like, I have enough therapists. I go to couples therapy, individual therapy, but my job is therapy because, because we get to meet people who are either a judge for doing what they do or in their worst moments ever at their lowest point. And they give us the privilege of, of sharing that with them, whether or not they're really like consciously deciding to do that. Yeah. And that, that is, um, that is a unique privilege that very few, uh, professions get to do. And I think that you can't do it. You can't show the respect that those people deserve without doing it, trying to be empathetic. Yeah, I could not agree more. It's the privilege of a lifetime. It's I always say it's my favorite part of the job. One hundred percent is like I would never have the opportunity to meet, you know, with the mothers in Mexico that are digging to try and find their loved ones who've gone missing and they think they've been killed and they're somewhere underground or, you know, with a kid who's backpacking, backpack full of cocaine through the mountains of Peru because he wants to save money to become a dentist one day. And Trump might want to, if he was on a boat in Venezuela, drop a bomb on that person, you know. And that's where looking at people as statistics or numbers on a bar graph or whatever. I always say this about the immigration policy under Democrats and Republicans is so such a fool's errand because, yeah, yes, dehumanizing is what it is. My colleague, Nicole Wallace on MS Now is always talking about rehumanizing people. And I think the only way you can do that is by trying to put yourself in their shoes or empathize with them. Yeah, it's interesting because I do believe it's one of the most important jobs that journalists have is to be able to create connections between the viewers and the people that they're reporting about or interviewing. We're just the megaphone that we're holding up in front of them in order for them to share whatever it is that they're going through, I think. And being able to, yeah, again, humanize the people and create connections with people that you think that you have nothing in common. But through our storytelling and our interviews and our time spent with people really showing, yeah, there's it's not a statistic. There's a person here. And if it's a cocaine, you know, guy carrying cocaine on his back or a fisherman and whatever it is. Why do you think are you ever self-conscious that like do you ask yourself the question, why am I the person to be able to do this? Or you just think I know this is my what my calling is. I was going to ask you that question, too, is like, when did you decide what was I calling like for you? But I'll answer first. I was 12 years old when I decided I wanted to be a journalist. And I was pretty sure this is what I wanted to do. In my case, it was because I used to watch anchors on Portuguese television. Me too. I was my same formative experience, yeah. But for me, it was more about the knowledge they had because I didn't know they were reading from a teleprompter. So they just had – they were talking about everything that was happening around the world. And I just thought these are the smartest human beings on Earth. And you know how they say that particularly for daughters, their biggest goal in life is to impress their dads. My dad has always been – Eduardo. Obviously, Eduardo, which you know well. He lives with us. He's a very knowledgeable man, and he's always admired people who read books and read newspapers and who have a lot of knowledge about everything. My dad to this day knows more about pop culture than I do. And he's always said, like, read everything. If it's the back of a medicine package or whatever – Cereal box. Cereal box. Exactly. That's the expression. I always fuck up every American expression. I'm here for you. I got your back. He's always said that in Portuguese, whatever the version of that is in Portuguese. And so I always wanted to impress him. So when I realized, wait, there is a job where your whole time is spent gaining knowledge and also traveling around the world. I was like, sign me up. This is what I want to do. I was – I actually made – I remember I made like – I liked editing photos on the computer. I love computers when I was young, just like Noah, my son now. and uh i like inserted myself into like a broadcast news thing and i was when you were a kid manifesting like seeing myself doing that yeah it was like local news channel seven printed out on glossy paper i think my dad had a frame for a long time oh that is so cute i don't know where it is i don't know but yeah i saw myself doing that too yeah i don't know why maybe that too was part of the cosplay thing but then you grow into it it's like in life uh in relationships you start somewhere and and you grow together i've grown in my job i've grown in my life i've grown in my marriage grown in my friendships as a mother as a father you as all of it all of it you find your way together and i think i knew what i wanted in all these departments but as i've gotten older what it means to be in relationship to those things has changed and i've tried to understand them better and and not be so judgmental of myself and what it's supposed to be right i'll be honest i have a bit of a shopping addiction i love clothes i love fashion i love shoes i love scarves which if you've seen me in the field you know and the truth is before rocket money i had no idea how much i was actually overspending on clothing it turns out i needed help getting my finances under control badly and don't even get me started with all the money i was spending on subscriptions that I didn't even know I was paying for. 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Are you judgmental of yourself? Yeah. How so? Sometimes I'm very self-conscious about why am I the right person to tell a particular story. Yeah, you are. You know, one thing you, I remember what you did a story about opiates a few years ago. I was so self-conscious because of your award-winning amazing reporting. And immediately you were texting me several times, me and Darren, you were texting us saying, hey guys, I'm so sorry, I'm doing this story. And we're like, dude. I was talking about, I even talked about you on the air. I was like, thank God for the trailblazing journalism of Marianna Van Zeller and Darren Foster. Please check out the Oxycontin Express. I'm on MSNBC. People are like, dude, slow down. Like what? But I've always been this way. In this book, you'll read the names in the epilogue of Firestorm of so many journalists. You do. I know. That have been doing investigative work and local journalism on the ground and separated. I credited all these people, Caitlin Dickerson and Lomi Creel and Julia Ainsley and Ginger Thompson from Publica because I respect people that come before me. I'm just the guy who finds myself in these places at a moment in time after other people have been there and done things. and I don't want the credit in that way because I don't deserve the credit in that way. And so I feel whatever I bring to it, I'm going to bring to it and you can like it or not like it or whatever. That's very special about you. That's not something that most people have. I know this about you. And I even yesterday when you were at the book launch party and you were crediting and your whole speech was about making sure that everybody in that room had a place, had a space in your room that you thanked everybody in that room, the people that, you know, contributed to your book. You make everybody feel like they have a place in the sort of work that you're doing now. And that's really special. I think that- You credit everybody. I think it's important and I really mean it. And as it relates to the firestorm, I really needed all those people to explore myself and our city and our planet in the aftermath of something that like, how could I possibly comprehend what it's like to watch your hometown burn down while you're reporting live on national television? And the answer is, it's not possible. Right. And the only way to explore that for me was to write this book and to tell my story, but tell the stories of so many other people, including the people you met last night. Eric Mendoza from Fire Station 69, Nick Schur from Cal Fire, Holly Bender from NASA, who was there last night and I flew with on a plane as they were studying fire from the sky. Lloyda Wilson, who was there, who's a UPS employee and her daughter, Ashley, lost her home on McNally Avenue. All of these people have given me the privilege of being able to tell some part of their story. And so they deserve the credit. The book is as much theirs as it is mine, because these are their stories, too. That's what I do. That's what we signed up to do. Yeah. I want to get to the fires and your coverage of it in a second. But I also wanted to. Yeah. You just mentioned something. I mean, yes, it's amazing that you credit so many people. I think we all suffer a little bit, or at least I do. And I think you do to some extent is the imposter syndrome, right? Imposter syndrome, for sure. Which is huge. And that's why I get so nervous when I'm doing certain things, not when I'm doing my reporting in the field or talking. Because nobody does it like you do. And you have to think it's your, because I've been doing it for so long. I was just talking about this, sorry for the name drop with Dave Chang and the chef Dave Chang. Yeah. And I was saying my brother and I talk about this all the time. The flow state. What is your flow state? You get into a flow state. Yeah. Kobe Bryant used to talk about this where you see nothing else and you're locked in and it doesn't matter. My brother told it, used to tell me a great story where this sounds so obnoxious, but I'm going to be totally transparent about it. He somehow got to sit courtside one time at a Laker game and he got a seat right next to the bench. and my brother was a teenager probably and uh kobe was sitting down next to him and whatever he was being nice to my brother and so what's your name and my brother said miles kobe said nice to meet you miles got up goes into the games playing i can't remember if it was a buzzer beater or the end of the game or some super super high pressure part of the game kobe scores i don't remember the lakers win or they go ahead but like the entire staple center is on fire people are going absolutely nuts what does kobe do the whole crowd's on their feet screaming high-fiving whatever kobe comes back sits down at the bench. He looks over to the side of my brother and he goes, what'd you think about that, Miles? And my brother said, this was a guy who, and then went, my brother went and studied it, gets in a flow state and he sees nothing else and remembers nothing else, but the things that he wants to and thrives on them. And it's like, I see you in that state when you're out in the field. Yeah. But there, but like, I don't know what Kobe's insecurities were. I'm sure he had them or yours are like, we all have them. And that's just the reality is like, if you don't acknowledge that you have them, you're doomed to have anxiety and panic and freak out. All things I struggle with too, because for the longest time I wanted to pretend like it should be easy and it should come naturally. And the fact of the matter is nothing is like that unless you're in your flow state. And this can be very narrow for people. Yeah. And experience really helps. Obviously you get better at it, right? The first time I ever spoke on camera was with Darren. We were in Syria. We were doing the story about the foreign fighters that were crossing into Iraq to fight against the Americans. And we had sold the story to Channel 4 in the UK, and they wanted somebody on camera. And I remember, Darren, we had bought this little camcorder on the border with Lebanon tax-free. And we were filling this freelance journalist. No, freelance journalist. And we bought that camera with part of the money that I was making by selling carpets. I would ship Syrian carpets to my mom in Portugal. She would have these tea parties sell the carpets and then send me the money to survive in Syria. And then anyway, Darren came to visit. We were boyfriend and girlfriend at the time. Bought the camera. We were doing the story and freelance journalist. And somebody needed to be on camera. And Darren was like, it's not going to be me. And I had no intentions of being an on-camera journalist. By the way, let me just say, Inside Secret America, Darren Foster was great on camera. Shut up. You're not allowed to mention that series. Guys, everybody look up Inside Secret America. It's streaming now. Marianne and Darren together. It was romantic. Everybody watch. Are you sure you want to do this? basically for our listeners and viewers it is a series that i did for net geo many years ago and it's a little awkward it was a classic okay sorry so you're in syria they wanted to have me and just explain they wanted to have me and darren on camera as me doing my work as a journalist darren they're also doing his work but essentially they wanted the background of my relationship with darren it's like a behind the scenes yeah it's like imagine traffic but then you're coming home talking to your husband. That's exactly it. It was so awkward. It didn't work out. We've all been there. Not your flow state. Not your flow state. Not my flow state. And not our idea either. But in Syria. Yeah. And I remember. So Darren picks up the camera and we were filming in a market and people realized that we were that Darren's American. I was I wasn't American at the time. And they started yelling and chasing us. So then I had to go on camera and sort of explain what had just happened on camera. And I could not put two words together. I was so nervous. I just didn't. It doesn't come naturally. And I remember Darren saying, like, what is so difficult about saying we were just traced out of this market? I was like, I don't know. And then I realized it's because I was trying to be Christiana Manpour, which she was my hero growing up. I mean, I watched her reports from Iraq, and she was the reason I wanted to be a journalist. And it wasn't until that sort of broke that I realized that and thought, OK, just be yourself. Be yourself. Everybody else has already taken that I started being more in the flow. You have to. But it takes time. and you have to understand that. Yeah. And I don't think it comes in, I mean, maybe it does to everybody, but it certainly didn't come to me either. Not to me either. Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about your immigration policy coverage, which was amazing. It was one of my favorite books and I loved your reporting on it. And it was very emotional for me, a subject matter that I care deeply about. It was the first story I ever did for an American, for Current TV, was about the death train. Yeah. That carries immigrants from Central America all the way up to the border with the United States. And I did it with Darren. And this was just before we got married. And tell people what it is. People are losing limbs or falling off the train. Yeah, it's a cargo train where people who want to get to the United States, they want to cross Mexico faster and also more safely. So they would take these trains thinking it was safe. These cargo trains, they would jump onto the train and hang on for days and days and nights on end and fall asleep on the train. A lot of them, because they were tired or they fell asleep, would fall off and lose their limbs and it was like what the Darien Gap was in the last two or three years like that's right like the most dangerous way to get to the United States basically to get yeah and uh and it was amazing and and with our characters I will never forget them I was Maria uh who was a woman who had I think two or three kids back in Honduras and she was doing the journey with a group of friends they had heard of all these rapes so it was her and like three or four other female three male friends. And then it was a kid called Guillermo who had already lost an arm on the train and we'd met him at an amputee shelter and he became a big part of our film. And then the two of them, we were there to follow Maria on the train. We actually took the train for a little bit and suddenly Maria, Guillermo shows up as well and is going to try again. And so the two of them became friends and they did the journey together. So our film was a little bit about that. Maria made it to the United States and Guillermo never did. He was apprehended at the time and flown back. Amazing. Do you keep in touch with these kind of folks? We did with Guillermo for a long time, not with Maria. She changed her phone. We never spoke to her again, but Guillermo actually reached out several times and he was still trying to make it to the United States. That's another privilege of it. It's a tricky part of it all, but to be able to be in touch with people that you've met along the way and over the years, I feel like that's so central to what you're doing on traffic. These are your sources forever and ever and ever. That's what I'm saying. This is not a show. This This is real life. These are real relationships that you have. Yeah, and more than sources. They become sort of your friends. I used to say when I started doing this work and I started realizing how much I loved it and talking to Darren, I would say, it's a little strange, but I fall a little bit in love with everybody I interview, right? Because you're really, you're there, you're engaged, you're in the flow, you're placing yourself in their shoes, you're seeing them and they're trusting you. That's what it is. It's very intimate. It becomes very intimate in a way that obviously non-sexual intimacy, like non-romantic intimacy, But like that is intimacy to let someone into your life and to and to be there in such a open way. I think creates lasting bonds. Yeah, it does. It really does. I'm surprised. Honestly, I will talk about immigration, but like you in the fire book, too. I just always have these worries that like somebody is going to come up to me after I've written the story and I've taken the transcript of all these hours of interviews I've done with them. And they're going to be like, that was not what I wanted you to say. Yeah, like that's not what my story was, you know, but it's like, no, I think if you treat it with respect and sensitivity, like you're going to get it right. And you don't have to be nervous about. Yeah. You know, people ask me a lot whether I've always I've ever been contacted by people who are on traffic who didn't like the way that they were portrayed. But like you said, we always portray people with respect, you know, with accuracy, obviously, raising awareness, accountability. I can imagine people might sometimes regret doing it or something because we've had situations where people ask us they don't anymore after we film them. We don't use it. But like, yeah, but if they say what they say, they're not. You know what I mean? It's like unless they're coming on, they're total liars. Or if you've had something like that happen where somebody comes on and they're like just totally full of it. Yeah, I think there are situations where people at least exaggerate their role or exaggerate the amount of drugs. And we're very open and transparent about it on traffic where we talk about that. But yeah, that happens sometimes. But not often. I'd say the majority of times it really is, like you said, they trust you. And if you treat people with respect and trust, they will trust back and respect you back generally, not always. Okay, so tell me about Separated and how that all started. You're reporting on that. And from the beginning, what was the first day that you realized that that happened? I was always interested in immigration. When I came back from college, I showed up at the protests in 2005 or 2006 for comprehensive immigration reform. Like a million people marched down. My friend Kaylee, who you know, we marched down Worcester Boulevard 2005 or 2006. I was born in 1983. Has anybody got a math here? Anyway, you do the math at home. We showed up. Journalists, not got a math. 727? Something like that. Yeah. And these were the people that I grew up around. This is a, I hate the expression, majority minority city, but it's like there are more Latinos in LA have been, you know, in some regard for most of my life here. And the idea that people were coming out in support of that community to me was exciting. And so I came and I marched and I wasn't a journalist yet. And the first time that I did any story at all about immigration was when I was working at Pivot, which was the television network of participant. and Mitch Cost, this producer that you and I both know that you worked at Current with, said to me, we should go down to Tijuana so you can see the reality of who the Trump, sorry, Obama is the deporter in chief. He's deporting more people than anybody ever. And so we went down to Tijuana and I met all these people that spoke perfect English, that they were from Long Beach and from LA and had been deported and were stuck on the other side of the border, but basically were as American as anybody that I had ever met. And like, that was, I was like, whoa, like I had never experienced that before. Again, sort of embarrassed to say, but I just didn't fully realize that. And so when I got to MSNBC in 2015, I recreated that story. And I said, if you want to understand what Trump's deportations are going to look like, just go back and look at Obama's because he did it too. And then the executives at NBC and MSNBC were like, oh, we like that. Can you do more reality check, fact check type stuff on Trump's immigration policy? Because he was saying Mexicans are murderers and rapists and criminals when he was coming down the gold elevator escalator. And we I started doing stories about MS-13 is actually from Koreatown. You know, it's not some foreign gang that's coming here. And they were born at the 7 down the street from where we are now You know drugs are not coming across the desert They coming through the legal ports of entry like San Yosidro world largest border crossing or at least in the hemisphere So many students cross back and forth across the border every day. You could go to Juarez and El Paso and just watch kids in uniforms that live in Mexico and come to the U.S. People have families on both sides of the border, and they cross it every day. These are not criminals. These are not war zones. These are peaceful, some of the most peaceful cities in the United States. But I missed the family separation policy. So we were doing more of like a fact check. Here's the reality of what Trump's not really telling you. And in the middle of all that, this family separation policy sort of exploded onto the scene. And I, again, admittedly had no idea that they were doing anything like this. But because I was doing a dateline and interviewing Kirsten Nielsen, the secretary of Homeland Security, Katie Waldman, who became Katie Miller, Stephen Miller's wife, who's actually a character in Firestorm, too, invited me to go into the detention centers to see the separations for myself. Why do you think she invited you to go in? As many of you know, I've been covering black markets for over 20 years. It's safe to say I have a pretty high tolerance for risk. I'm not your typical cautious gal. But one thing I'm adamant about is life insurance. My husband Darren and I both have it. I've had mine for a long, long time, and it's something I genuinely don't regret. It's also way cheaper than most people think. And the younger you are, the cheaper it usually is. If you're new to life insurance, you're not alone. Thankfully, I found SelectQuote. 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That was the first real experience as a quote unquote journalist where my boss has said to me, just go out there and do what you feel. And you are being affected. We can tell you're being affected. And I want you to be honest about the way that you feel in there. We know you have Noah was little, my son, and it was extremely, extremely difficult. Tell me about that day. So you land. I get to Brownsville, Texas, and it was all sticky and sweaty. And I get off the plane and I go to this former Walmart, 250,000 square feet in Brownsville called Casa Padre. And there was a shelter ostensibly, but really the kids were incarcerated. There was like 1,100 kids in the shelter, 10 to 17 boys. Most of them were there because they had been separated from their parents. And you go inside and the bedrooms are overcrowded. They had a variance from the state. There were too many. So there were kids sleeping on the floors? They were not in this facility, but in the next one I went to. In this facility, they were just jammed tight in beds. They were watching a movie, Moana, in the loading dock of the Walmart. They were getting their hair cut. They were going to classes. They were allowed outside for like two hours a day, if I remember correctly. It was effectively an incarceration-type setting for these kids who were only there, not because they arrived unaccompanied like so many were, but because they were rendered, taken away from their parents, and made unaccompanied by the separation policy, as Chris Hayes, my colleague, always says. and from that moment i walked outside and i told the story of what it felt like and that was when i realized on that day june 13th 2018 that being a journalist was not about being neutral or quote-unquote objective yeah it was about um being fair and honest and just reporting the facts on the ground and that's what i did and my bosses also said you know if you're feeling emotional about this like yeah be careful but we understand and that's how the nation felt and that's why I think that reporting stuck. And so then I went into the epicenter of the separations, the McAllen Processing Center, which is where I saw the kids in cages on the floor, sleeping on the concrete and the linoleum and the Mylar blankets and supervised by security contractor in a watch tower. And it was clear to me then in that moment, you know, that what was happening was going to become part of one of the most shameful chapters in the history of the country. But like with Firestorm, I didn't understand the full picture and how we got there. And that's what writing separated did for me, that this was the logical, even though it was cruel, extension of decades of bipartisan, deterrence-based, punitive-based immigration policy that was meant to harm people who came here for a better life, Democrats and Republicans. Clinton started the border wall. The new people would die trying to get around it. Bush created DHS after 9-11 and supersized the border patrol and Operation Streamline deported all these people. Obama's the deporter-in-chief. If Trump like that is able to separate all his families, Biden continues punitive policies, despite saying he wants to have a departure. Right. Fair, safe, orderly, humane. But really, I went to Haiti. He deported record number of people to Haiti, knowing that the last two years of his time in office. Right. Wasn't that the first two years he was much more lax? I mean, was it throughout a lot of people got in, but a lot of people didn't get in. And it was the incongruity of it was pretty stark. Yes, they let a lot of people in in the beginning. Yes, the messaging was such that people felt like they could come in greater numbers, but they weren't letting everybody in. And at a certain point after I went to Ukraine, they're letting in white Ukrainians, but not Latinos, not Asians that have been waiting there, not black people that have been coming from places like Haiti. So people who have a real problem with our immigration and who sort of agree with Trump on his immigration policy, I guess, would listen to you talk right now and would say, but should we let everybody in? I mean, why do we why should we allow everybody to get in? I don't think anybody is saying that we shouldn't have borders. I don't feel like we shouldn't have borders. Everybody. I mean, I'm not like abolish the borders. And honestly, I'm not a policymaker. I don't have all the solutions. But what I can tell you is whatever we're doing is not working. And it's cruel. And criminalizing people and hurting people. And the logical extension now is more extreme than ever. the Trump policies of today, indiscriminate mass deportations modeled after Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1954 program that deported a million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. Now they're killing immigrants and killing American citizens, Renee Nicole Good in Minnesota. This is what they had planned to do. Tom Homan said to me, people are going to die during this mass deportation campaign. Tom Homan is the border czar for Donald Trump, who was also one of the masterminds of the original family separation policy. And what I think is that we've got to try something different. And it was actually Colbert that said to me the last time I was on Colbert's show, the last person to do anything in terms of a radical departure was Ronald Reagan, who granted amnesty to people who had been here for a certain period of time and made certain contributions to society and felt like they made America a better place for their contributions here. Nobody's come anywhere close to that because everyone's so afraid of the politics of immigration. And they look at people as graphs and charts and data rather than as empathetic politicians who are looking at other human beings. Do I know what the solution is? No, I'm not sure I do know what the solution is. Yeah, but you don't think that it should be open borders and we should just let everybody... No, of course not. I've been to Guatemala. I see how climate change has affected what's going on there. There are ways... And how our economic policies affect other countries as well and how they create immigration and how our deportations actually... We did a story about gangs, and part of the story was sort of this. We exported gang culture to Central America. We did, and then we created violence there, and then that led to a lot of people wanting to flee that violence to protect their kids and their families. Come to the United States. They arrive. A lot of times they're put in some of the poorest neighborhoods. Of course, they don't have a job. They're not given the opportunities that so many of us have. MS-13 and 18th Street Gang are L.A. street gangs that were exported to Central America that then resulted in people fleeing to come here. So what's the solution? I don't know what the solution is, but I do know there's a lot of of quote unquote problems. If you look at people coming as a problem that could be mitigated by policy. But in this administration, they're defunding USAID that mitigates the impact of climate change in Central America. They're taking away food distribution programs where food insecurity is a major driver of people leaving around the world. Millions and millions and millions of people are on the move in any hemisphere, in any part of the world at any given time. Migration is a fact of life and part of planet Earth forever. And in many ways, sort of turning your back on the rest of the world is just going to create a bigger problem, right? Because more people want to come for survival are going to want to come here. Bombing fishing boats with a dude with a bag of cocaine in it or maybe not is not going to solve migration. I just wish these politicians would have a better understanding of the facts on the ground. I do totally empathize with people who feel like, man, I'm seeing a lot of people come into my community. And is it a strain on the resources here for my municipality? is going to affect the police department's response time or the ambulance response time, or are there kids in school that weren't there last week or last month or last year? Like, those are all fair questions to ask. And how are our local governments going to deal with these things? Or are some of them bringing violence? Yeah. Is it a drug trafficking involved? Of course, all of that. Just as if somebody moves into your neighborhood as an American citizen who is involved in drug trafficking or gangs or whatever. Like, yeah, but that's not what they're not going after the worst of the worst. They're going after dudes that are working at Home Depot in the parking lot, chasing them across the freeway. And in the case of one guy here on the 210, they die, you know? Yeah. Let's get to the raids in a second, because I know you've reported on that too. Tell me, just go back to McAllen. What were the kids like? Were they crying? What was the state of the kids when you walked in? I haven't stopped to like really take myself there in a long time, but it was, I think, eerily quiet. The rustling of the blankets is something I remember, like those space blankets I remember hearing. Was it bright lights? Very, very, very bright lights. Just a cold environment generally, but it was South Texas and in the summer, so it wasn't freezing. I wasn't there when they were ripping families apart. I was there after it had happened or with families who were still together who were about to get separated. And it was the fear I think was more palpable than anything, which is why I think it felt so quiet in there. And I will never forget those feelings of just looking around and seeing people and like their future is like hanging the balance in the next couple of hours, maybe in these sort of way stations before they're separate. And the parents sent to ICE and the kids sent to the Walmart. And then, you know, they never know if they're going to get back together ever again. Yeah. And these are kids. I mean, thousands of kids and having no idea if they're going to see their mom as young as infants and toddlers breastfeeding babies were taken during that policy. And, and just to say what's going on now is not family separation at the border, but it is family separation in the interior. Absolutely. Read Dr. William Lopez, who wrote a book also called Separated, about interior immigration enforcement, or a new book about raising the heartland as well. These are all family separation policies. They're just happening by taking, instead of kids away from parents at the border, parents away from kids in their communities now, all across the country, way bigger, way more supersized. This is family separation on steroids, what they're doing right now. Okay. So then let's go to the rates. We can go back because you were talking about it. We could go back to reporting on your reporting on family separation in a second. But you reported, just because I remember this, which was such a good story, that you did on the mother and daughter who were deported to Guatemala, right? Yeah, Nori Santay Ramos and her mother, Estella. Yeah, tell me that story. These are the kind of people. Which I mentioned on the Joe Rogan podcast. I know. Thank you for doing that. Thank you for doing that. Which is the exact audience that should be hearing this. And by the way, he's been pretty impressive. Very anti these ways. Yeah. Very public. Nori Santay Ramos was an honor student at the Miguel Contreras Learning Complex, track star, star student, and went to a routine immigration check-in with her mother. And when they went to the routine immigration check-in, they detained and deported both of them and took the mother of Stella's medication, Nori says, in ICE custody. Life that she needed to survive. She had cirrhosis of the liver and had stopped drinking, but had a drinking problem because of the violence she had faced, which was the reason she fled in the first place. according to Nori. And when they got to Guatemala, she didn't have the medication. And within, I think, two weeks of me going there to visit them, her mother died. Because she didn't have her medication. No medication. Woke up one day saying she was feeling sick. And by the time Nori was able to check on her, she was gone. These are the people that they're deporting. Just like Annie Lucía Lopez-Belosa, that 19-year-old who went to Babson College, who was trying to go down to San Antonio to visit her mom and dad for freaking Thanksgiving to surprise them. And instead, agents picked her up at the airport and sent her to Honduras. Or how about Narciso Barranco, the landscaper, cutting the bushes in Santa Ana at an IHOP, three Marine Corps sons. The son Alejandro says to me, if I would have treated a detainee in Afghanistan when I was in the Marines the way that those dudes treated my dad, I would have been court-martialed for a war crime. Or a woman on the street in Chicago, Marcel, I think her name was, who was walking down the street to buy ingredients for a stew to make dinner for her daughter. And yet these dudes roll up, masked, armed, kitted up, take her to Puerto, New Mexico. Her daughter, Samantha, is stuck in Chicago now without her mom. These are the people that they're going after. When I mentioned the Stella Nori case on Joe Rogan's podcast, I mean, my whole conversation about immigration with him did not go well with a large audience. There were a lot of comments of people who hated what I had to say and who disagreed with me. And one of the things I remember, one comment was, for example, that I am so sorry for Estelle and Norrie, but their case, their immigration requests had been denied. What were they still doing in this country? And plus, she was an alcoholic as if that had anything. She died because she was an alcoholic, which is, yeah, exactly. It's all judgment, you know. And again, I don't fault people for having a worldview because it came from somewhere and they were taught it by somebody. But do we want to treat each other as humans or do we want to treat each other as political talking points or enemies, perceived enemies? What did Nori and Estella ever do to those people? You know, I'll tell you what they did to LA, made it a better place, made her classmates love her and they miss her dearly. And talking about people that we were in touch with, I heard from Nori the other day, you know, and she's still in Guatemala, desperate to come home. You know, this is I mean, she's been here since she was a senior. She's been here for 11 or 12 years since she was a little kid, you know, and all she wants to do is graduate and go to college and and and work in fashion and have a career and like contribute to society. Also, this is not what people voted for, right? When they voted for Trump. Well, I will say it is what they voted for. Trump advertised, as I reported from the floor of the conventions, as people held up mass deportation now signs, thousands and thousands and thousands of signs that said mass deportation. And now this is what they were always planning on doing, yet they led with the words worst of the worst, which was bullshit. And so people might have believed it's not what they voted for, but I believe it always is what they voted for. People just didn't want to pay enough attention, which is what I say at the end of separated the film that Errol made. People wanted to know less once Biden was in office. They didn't want to pay attention. They wanted to pretend like everything was going to be okay, that that horrible family separation thing was done. We'd never have anything like that again. This is 10 times worse, 20 times worse. You think so? Definitely. definitely definitely the amount of people that are being i mean by the way nothing is worse to one family than the separation i'm not trying to say no no no yeah but in terms of numbers and in terms of uh scale impact for sure that was 5 500 families um how many families have been separated now i don't know the answer but i know that thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people have been taking stephen miller and his quotas of what is it 3 000 uh a day or i can't It was a day or a month, but we can look it up. I think it was a day. Okay, actually, let's do it. Let's do that. I have a perplexity is the AI company we use that gives us all the facts. They're also sponsors of the show. Matt, can you do that search for me real quick? Matt actually helps me with the search. Mariana is just pretending. I'm not AI savvy. No, I'm just kidding. She's just pretending. I'm just pretending. She's just typing. She doesn't even use the QWERTY keyboard. She's on some Portuguese weird keyboard. I don't know what she's doing right now. I think she's playing Among Us. Why Among Us? I don't know. I don't even know what that is. I just hear my kid talking about it. So, yeah, it's in the mid-2025, Miller said on Fox News that the Trump administration's goal was for ICE to detain about 3,000 people per day. Per day across the country. Yeah, that makes sense. A level that would exceed a million arrests in a year sustained. Which is, again, Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1954 program. You can ask perplexity. It has a name so racist, I won't say it now. But this is what they're basing everything they're doing after, a program that deported a million Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and now they are aiming to deport as many. But also people are dying. And it's not just immigrants, not that that makes it any better at all, but American citizens as well. Yeah, it's horrendous. I mean, and it's people we know, particularly if we're living in L.A., we are surrounded by people. Yesterday when we were together last night at that bar, people were coming up to me saying, do you know that ICE was in – and for people that are not familiar with this area, but like the areas around where we are right now again today. The numbers now are as high as they've been, maybe even higher than during the summer at the height of the raids. It's not stopping. It's not stopping. And actually there's something really interesting that you said in your book, Firestorm, which we will get there, but it's about the second responders, right? Yeah. Which is the people – who are the people who are building – rebuilding LA after the fires? And it's the same people in many cases, right? We're being the primary targets of the raids. Pablo Alvarado from the National Day Labor Organizing Network was there last night. And he's a character in the book and actually in the video that we all made together for the book trailer. And he has said to me, day laborers, the people that stand at the Home Depot parking lot or the big home improvement stores looking for an honest day's work, show up after every big natural disaster. disaster. They went to the Northeast after Sandy. They went to New Orleans after Katrina. They went to Florida after Hurricane Andrew. And now they're here in L.A. after the costliest wildfire event in American history. And they are the target of a federal immigration policy that is slow. Not only is obviously cruel in the eyes of the people who are critical of it, but it's slowing the response from the fires that he says he's leading the way on on helping. Right. It's impeding Americans from getting back in their homes. Yeah. Apart from it being incredibly dehumanizing and cruel. Yes. Perplexity also says that ICE's own report shows that at the fiscal year of 2024, it carried out about 271,484 removals, the highest number in nearly a decade. That was Biden, by the way. But what I'm saying is they've been doing it. It's not new. And Trump wants to supersize it. You know what I mean? Oh, wow. So Biden deported. OK, so Biden deported more people. Not as high as Obama. But that was actually it was very much you would know better than me. But it wasn't because in many ways he was getting really attacked. Hammered. And they thought it was a big perceived political issue that they needed to be more. And you wanted to win reelection. And you thought this was the way that he put forward one of the most conservative immigration bills in a generation. the democrats and biden did and they keep saying oh trump torpedoed it as if that was some like thing to be proud of because they don't want to give biden the w the win but biden just went back to the same policies of the other administrations of of of looking at people through the lens of deterrence and punishment and criminality rather than migration there were i mean he reunited the separated families they tried to do um ways of of having people apply to come to the united states from their home country. And so there were progressive thinkers within the administration, but the ones who were more conservative won out on immigration than the Biden administration. Yeah, I mean, what's sad and what I've said before is that again and again with every single administration, immigrants are used as political pawns. Every time. Every single time. And, yeah, again, it's cruel. It's dehumanizing. It's horrible for people, particularly people like us that report on this issue that I've met so many of these people that I know that these are wonderful, wonderful people and who don't deserve this. No, they don't deserve it. What they deserve is love and empathy and respect. Even people who you might like what I used to say about family separation is let's say somebody committed a quote unquote crime. I don't know what it is outside of a violent crime or something that would endanger their children. Who deserves to have their kid taken away from them? Even if they were a drug dealer, smoke pot or whatever, who deserves cruelty? I understand that it is important to deport people who are actual criminals, and I am all for that. Of course. If you're breaking the laws, if you're a violent criminal, if you are part of the quote-unquote worst of the worst, that's what the system is designed to do. That is what the system is designed to do. But this is not who they are deporting, and that's what's the important crucial distinction here. But by the way, just to be – I mean we're going to tease about it, but like if you go through a lengthy prison sentence and you come out and you find a way to redeem yourself, I think that there's a lot of people who have done a lot of very, very bad things. I'm not saying they should stay in the country if they're undocumented necessarily. But I'm just saying I believe in forgiveness and redemption. Yeah, so do I. I don't think it's – I don't think there's any categorical answer to that question. Right. And I said that the prison system doesn't really reform anyone. And I say this, but I've also had incredible people on the podcast to talk about how their lives change and how they did the work themselves. They did the work themselves. The system isn't helping them in itself. So, okay, so you then decided you were witnessing all of this, this cruel separation policy, and you decided you wanted to write a book about it. What did that do? What was that process like for you emotionally as well? That one was much more of a reported process. process. I was very deep in documents. And as part of my reporting at NBC at the time, I had a partner in Julia Ainsley where we were doing a lot of the reporting for the network. And I just tried to dive deeper on a lot of that stuff. And so then once I started to write the book, I did have sources come forward and give me documents about how the policy was considered and what was ultimately implemented. I spent a lot of time talking to people on background, officials who were involved in the policy. I think that they knew how awful it was and wanted to exonerate themselves largely. And there were people like Commander Jonathan White, who you could read about in the book and in the film, and actually in Firestorm as well, because he crosses over into that story, that wanted to stand up and resist and stop the policy. He's a hero. He is a hero. And I believe, I mean, government officials generally, I'm not talking about government, quote-unquote high-level officials, but government employees who dedicate their lives to the career civil service are as important as any first responder on any front line. They are dedicating themselves, probably not for very much pay for long, grueling hours in very, very intense circumstances to other people. And he's one of them. So I spent a lot of time talking to people, people in DHS, CBP, Border Patrol, ICE, current, former, all that stuff. That's when I became sort of a source based reporter for the first time. I had never really done anything like that. I mean, literally notepad writing. I wish I would have recorded a lot of those interviews and transcribe them, which is what I did for Firestorm. Back then I only did it by hand It was so stupid I had my notebooks and they were filled with just handwritten notes It was impossible I can read one thing that I wrote down And so it was a lot of that And it was a lot of back and forth and a lot of phone calls Drove down to the border to look at where I wanted Jose, the father and son in the story, across the border. I wanted to see those things for myself. I went to Guatemala to learn about what it was like for people who came just like them from Guatemala and why they came. If not put myself in their shoes, I owed it to the story to go understand better. I'm not a fluent Spanish speaker. Like I, you know, these are my own insecurities, but like I wanted to do as much as I could, like an advanced man would to soak up all the information I could possibly understand and regurgitate it in a book form to people. And I guess I did an okay job because Errol Morris read the book and called me and said, I want to make a film about it. Not even like that. Actually, the story goes, to correct myself, he tweeted about the book and I said, I couldn't believe it. Errol Morris, by the way, one of the best documentary filmmakers of our time. He was an Academy Award-winning director of The Fog of War and made Thin Blue Line and just so many amazing films. And a genuinely, genuinely, genuinely great human being. He tweeted, and I called Diane Weirman, the late, great Diane Weirman, a prolific film producer at Participant who I knew, and said, Errol tweeted, I know you guys made the film about Abu Ghraib, Standard Operating Procedure. Such a good movie. And do you think he'd ever speak to me? I want to just say thank you to him for tweeting. And she said, probably not, but like you can call his office. So I called his office. Turns out he called me right back. And I said, I don't want to be presumptuous, but like if I ever did make a film, I would never ask that. I said, do you have any advice? And he said, do you want to make a film with me? And I said, yes. And he goes, okay, go find the money. I said, oh, great. So I called NBC. NBC gave me half the money. The great Noah Oppenheim, who's now a film producer, made Zero Day and House of Dynamite. and the other half came from Participant and Diane and that began a four-year process of making that movie which came out at the Venice Film Festival before the 2024 election. It's such a good movie and the book too and the book was a New York Times bestseller. Yeah. And it was such a wonderful and needed necessary account of this time period, right? It's such a first person account, witness account. One day I hope just like with Firestorm that all the families separated will have the opportunity like the Shoah Foundation for Holocaust survivors to tell their own story. Again, maybe that's my own insecurity. But this is my draft. This is my version of the story. These are the people that I met and the way that I framed it. And if you can take it for what it is and and and hopefully it'll help people understand again, like what not what I said, but what the Republican appointed judge who stopped the policy called one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country. Yeah, it was fantastic. And tell me about sorry, I got distracted because I was obviously reading. which I shouldn't have done, which is exactly what I should be. Errol Morris, paging Errol Morris. Mariana is reading her note cards. I am. Sorry, because I know we have to get out of here because we have something that we have to go to. So I was trying to figure out how to get this passed out. Mariana, ladies and gentlemen, to listeners of the Hidden Third podcast and video YouTube show, is moderating the book Q&A tonight with me at Writer's Block in Los Angeles. And I'm actually kind of nervous because it's a stage thing and I hate doing stage stuff. But let's go to the fires. So tell me about your experience with the fires. And actually, your book sort of starts with a scene, which was New Year's Eve or around New Year's Eve, where you were sitting around the fire not far from L.A. with friends. And what happened then? I said to a friend of mine, Sam Falls, he said, what do you want to do next year? And I had just had a conversation with my boss at the time at NBC News. It was like, you're going to become a coverage correspondent, which means you're just going to respond to whatever story is happening on any given day. That was never what I did. But they wanted me to do that. And I didn't really have a choice. I was like, OK. and I said to Sam, the last thing I want to do is put on that stupid yellow jacket and cover wildfires because I thought it was so sensational and so ridiculous and I had done it before. And that's what correspondents do in the LA Bureau. And literally 10 days later, probably, I'm sitting at my desk in the LA Bureau and my brother texts on our group chat and says, huge Palisades fire, we're going to evacuate. He lived up in the mountains there. That's the first you heard of it? Yes. From your brother? On a group chat. And I looked up at the monitor on the screen and I turned on the local news and I saw the streets that I grew up on on fire. And I got up and I went to the bureau chief's office, poly pal, great human. And I said, I got to go. I grew up there. And so she worked it out so that I could go to the Palisades. And that started almost two weeks of reporting around the clock, watching my childhood neighborhood and the neighborhood that I spend so much time now in Altadena, where Noah had his ninth birthday at a restaurant called Side Pie, pizza place that burned down, watching all these things that are so familiar, but especially the Palisades just, you know, carbonize, as I said, incinerate in front of my eyes and try to figure out, You know, I did the advance man thing. I said what I was seeing, but I couldn't emotionally process it, which is what this book is. It was my attempt at understanding the number one, the costliest wildfire in American history that killed 31 people, maybe 400. If you look at excess mortality over three times the size of Manhattan, 16,000 structures. But like, how did it happen? Why did it happen? Will it happen again? Who's responsible? What's to blame? What the hell was this? how could it happen that two entire neighborhoods in the most populous county in America were virtually entirely wiped off the map? And what I've realized is I thought in looking back, I was looking at my childhood burn up. And as I write, fire is a remarkable time machine. And it did take me back into my past. But really what I learned about was that this was the fire of the future that we will all be experiencing soon in some form, whether it's a fire or another form of natural disaster. The book reads like a sci-fi thriller, but really what it is is a minute by minute account of being in the middle of a natural disaster that we're all going to experience some form of at some point. Right. Our future, right? Yeah. And what was that for you? Because we tell all these stories, but very rarely is the situation become as personal as this one did for you. Unbelievable. What was that like? I remember you say you didn't emotionally process it, But I remember one shot of you on camera crying, right? You have tears streaming down your eyes. And I'm not like that. And I think you're next to your home, right? Yeah, the home I grew up in, yeah. It's like, look, I didn't get caught in Niger, but I would imagine that when you were there, a lot of personal things flashed through your brain. 100%. And for me, to be in the Palisades, I wanted to be there to do my job, but I couldn't help but think of the personal. And mine was not life or death. I didn't know if I was not going to get out. Well, in some regard, I was worried at some point about that. But not like where you were facing a potential violent death or something like that at the hands of people with guns. But I was thinking about my family, my parents, the things that, you know, as I used to drive through that neighborhood, days before I drove through the neighborhood and went to the public park with my sister Hannah and her baby Izzy, who was just born days before, and Nicole and some of my other nephews. I was thinking about so many things, and there was not enough space in my brain for it. It was impossible. It was really impossible to be there. And so what I just decided to do is I'm going to focus on just doing my job right now, responding to as many calls as I can from my family and my friends and people I knew to go check on their houses. Right. Yeah. That's what you were getting calls. I remember you saying this. You were getting calls from, and it's in the book as well, but you were getting calls from all sorts of people asking you to go check on their houses because no, people couldn't get into this area. You were there because you were a journalist, but most people didn't know if their houses had burned out. My brother, I've never told this story either, but like some celebrities and I'm not going see who they were, but like all kinds of people were calling me. Like people were calling me from everything from, can you get property out of my house to, can you go by and drive and check? And I did it for my high school carpool mate. I did it for my brother. I did it for Katie Miller. Stephen Miller's wife called me and said, Stephen Miller's parents live in the Palisades. The ultimate irony. Like after all this family separation reporting, she cut off contact with me and I went and she wasn't happy with the book that she hated it. Um, and she just said, Hey, need you to go check on this house. And you didn't know at the time that it was Stephen Miller-Brown tells me. Once I looked at my text after she called me, I realized that it was. And I did it because as I wrote to her on the text, it's Palisades Above Politics. And I gave her a red heart emoji. But the reason I include that story in this book, and you can read about it, is part of the fire of the future is misinformation and disinformation. It was Jonathan White, who we talked about, who went from protesting family separation from inside the government to becoming a senior career emergency management official within HHS. And he went to every mass casualty fire declared by the federal government in the U.S. over the last five years. He said, Jacob, what you experienced was not a trip into your past, but the fire of the future. And that is because the global climate emergency changes in the way we live, like electric car batteries exploding and firefighters getting cancer as they're standing out there fighting the fires. Our infrastructure is falling apart and there was an empty reservoir and the steel towers in Altadena. These are part of the story of both of these different fires and the misinformation and disinformation that's coming from local and Washington. How does a misinformation and disinformation affect the fires? The irony of Katie Miller and Stephen Miller, you know, having their parents there and me going to check on the house while they're very bosses. President-elect Trump at the time and Elon Musk, her future boss at Doge, tweeting conspiracy theories about the lack of water, where it was coming from, the fact that FEMA had no money in their words when Biden signed a disaster declaration giving 100% of the reimbursements to the local government for six months. Musk talking with firefighters about the water pressure and why it wasn't there. And again, pushing conspiracy theories. And the conspiracy theory that was being pushed at the time, where the idea was that Trump kept insisting that there was all this water that could be flowing to LA. Flow down from the Pacific Northwest on a mystical tap. And instead, all he did was he became president. No, of course not. He flooded fields with two and a half billion gallons of water in the Central Valley, did nothing to help the people of LA or the fires of LA. What they were doing was pouring rhetorical fuel on the real flames of the L.A. fire and making it more confusing for people who were having a hard enough time getting accurate information from local officials. That's why people were using WatchDuty app and people died in West Altadena because they weren't getting emergency alerts. It was confusing on the ground. And to have this person, the president-elect and Elon Musk, who literally went to the ground in L.A. and is spreading all this misinformation, While Katie Miller and Stephen Miller's in-laws, Stephen Miller's parents, are some of the very victims of the fire, that just says all you need to know about America's new age of disaster. That's what's happening today. Look at Argentina. Is it Argentina? Argentina right now where the wildfires are? There's conspiracy theories about the Jews setting the wildfires or Israelis or something. It's like it's part of our everyday political life now, and it's seeping into natural disasters. And it's making our recovering from, mitigating, preventing these types of disasters more difficult. Right. It's it's insane. And you're that's it's so the end of your book is all about this part. And yeah, it's yeah. And what were the four? I know, Captain John White did that. Climate change, infrastructure, the way we live and misinformation and disinformation. Those are the politics of blame, basically. And instead of blaming, you know, why can't we all agree that this is that this is an age where, especially when it comes to wildfires, like in Los Angeles, we've moved into the wildland urban interface. We live in a place that is designed for disaster, as a famous documentary made in the 60s by the L.A. Fire Department said about L.A. None of this is new. It's just with our climate changing and these events happening and L.A. being a tinderbox and fires happening from New Jersey to the Carolinas to Lahaina and people jumping in the in the fucking ocean running for their lives. When you layer misinformation and disinformation on top of it, it makes nothing, nothing better. So when was a moment for you emotionally covering that? I mean, yes, you didn't lose your own home, but you lost the neighborhood you grew up in. And in many ways, it was sort of a safe haven for you, right? You'd go back with your kids all the time. Did we ever go to the – you came to my parents' house when they were still living in the Palisades. Absolutely. And we went out to one of the restaurants that you mentioned in the book. And it was a place – yeah, it was a great place, the safe haven. It was also a place with so many memories for you. What was the point that you allowed that to sort of – that you sort of came back? The first contact I made with anybody who was actually from the Palisades was I texted my siblings and I said, can you send me Albino Fuentes' number? Albino Fuentes was a server at, I'm going to get emotional in time with this, Cafe Vita, which is a restaurant in the Palisades. And he was a server at Mort's Deli, which was the deli in the Palisades before that. And this is a guy I've known for probably 35 years since I was a little kid, but I didn't really know him. I just knew him. He was like a happy, smiley face that made me feel warm and fuzzy when I would see him when I would go to the Palisades. And it occurred to me that like so much of the focus is on the residents in this coastal affluent enclave. But the workers are as important and make the Palisades neighborhood what it really is. And as much as the people who lay their head there. And so I called Albie. And just let me just say something is that I don't think most people realize. And I certainly didn't before I read your book, which is this idea that their lives are perhaps even more. They have less financial means destroyed. And they don't have the government help that protecting them. They don't have the insurance paying. That's for sure. Right. And they lost their jobs. They in many ways lost the communities that they spend the majority of their time in, even if it's not where they have their own home because they can't afford it. It has an enormous impact on all these people. So he came and he met me in the Palisades and we went to Cafe Vita together and we like hugged. And it was like the first human contact with someone who I was familiar with. I'm trying to remember if this was the fire started on Tuesday and Wednesday was the day I went to my house. I don't think I saw him maybe till Thursday, if I'm not mistaken. And it was like, oh, God, I needed that hug so bad. And it made me realize, like, okay, I need more of this. And that's when I started thinking about how can I dig my way mentally out of this. I wasn't even anywhere close. I didn't talk to Gavin Newsom until Saturday and for Meet the Press and Altadena. I continue to cover the fire for the better part of the two weeks. But after that, I started thinking to myself, especially once the ice rate started in the summer, too. But even before then, I started just, I need to understand fire and what happened and connect with people more. So I started on this journey. I called Peter Hubbard, who was my editor at HarperCollins for separated. And I said, what do you think? You know, this is another one of these events that like it was so big, much bigger than I could ever possibly comprehend in real time, like to dive deeper and explore it. And he said, it's a no brainer. Let's do it. Yeah. And so I started working on it. The weekend of the White House Correspondents Dinner in April when I was in Washington. And I started just reaching out to people. And that's where I got to know if I could just rattle off some of the names. And this is why I say it's a book about people and connection and humanity and empathy as much as it is about the politics and the climate. Eric Mendoza, Station 69, Nick Schur. Firefighter. Yeah. Cal Fire. All the people that I mentioned before, Herb and Lloyda, Kate Hennigan, Holly Bender from JPL. Tell me about the owners, the homeowners. The ones on McNally Avenue. Yeah, that's Herb and Lloyda Wilson. Yeah. What are they? I think she said last night, I always said they had worked at UPS for 30 years, but they worked there for 36 years. That was the only time I actually cried in the writing of the whole book. We went to Bob and Grandma's, the deli here, and they had been moving. And I think they've moved so far, I didn't even say it last night, 10 times since the fires because they're having trouble maintaining one place. But they told me the story of how their daughter, Ashley, picked them up and how it made them so proud to be a parent and to have raised wonderful children. And I started fucking bawling at the fucking deli, eating a pickle and a sandwich. Like it just made me realize how much of this is about human beings losing their sense of selves and finding it again. And I think it made me realize that I had gone through a similar thing. I needed it so badly. I needed the emotional intimacy that we're describing to rediscover myself and my community and my family, my immediate family. I'm more connected with my, as you know, with my wife and my kids and my own family today than I have been in a long time. And this book is definitely, definitely part of the reason. Part of that. Because I got to spend so much time looking inward and learning from other people who are looking inward also. That's, it's the greatest gift I've ever been given. And it's why I think it's the most important assignment I've ever undertaken. There's an amazing moment where Herb and Loida Wilson, you talk about in the book, how Loida basically when she was finally allowed to come and see her burnt house she would spend she would go there every single day right she was looking for her wedding ring and she never found never found them but she found she found a tile uh i was going to read this from i have the pdf of the book on my phone um they didn't find the wedding ring but they did find a little tile that had sat in the kitchen of their home it said god doesn't send you through troubled waters to drown you but to cleanse you. Loida told me about her reaction upon finding it. God, thank you for talking to me because I know you're here for us. That is crazy that that's the only thing they found. That's what survived. The stories of the stuff that came out of these houses, the things that, what was left, you know, it's all part of like the grieving process for everybody. And it's amazing how people find meaning in the different things that they found. And how they continue to live their lives and they're optimistic and they believe in this case. I remember you talking about them and how they still believe they're going to come back home. Other business owners that lost everything are still hopeful that they're going to open their businesses. And yet it's been a year and nothing is back to normal yet for many of these people. And part of it is the dysfunction of the government. And people should know they're listening. No one is absolved in the telling of the story when it comes to local leaders, not Democrats, not Republicans, not Trump, not Musk, not Basque. Not Newsom. None of them. Yeah, exactly. Not Newsom. Exactly. Bass was out of town in Ghana. There's all kinds of accountability related questions about this. Should firefighters have been pre-deployed? What happened with the reservoir? What happened in Altadena? Newsom promised Marshall Plan 2.0 to me. Where's the Marshall Plan 2.0 for the rebuilding? People can't afford to rebuild right now in LA. It's the most unaffordable city and the most unaffordable state in the country. 40% of the lots are being sold to corporate investors right now. I think I read something that said like 61% of the people who are on the verge of like being homeless who didn't, who lost their houses. That is insane. I don't know if that's, I got to double check that. The richest state, one of the richest states in the richest country in the world. And it's going to be a problem for Gavin Newsom when he runs for president. All of that is a part of this story. I always say the fissures in our society are laid bare in big mass casualty events like this. And so you read about immigrants being the most vulnerable. You read about people not being able to afford their life in a city like Los Angeles. That is part of the fire of the future, too, that it's happening in a place, in places where there's lots of structural inequalities under the surface. This is not a woke thing to say. if it happened in another place in America, it'd be unaffordable to rebuild as well. Life is hard in the United States of America. It's hard to afford. Anytime you're in an Uber, anywhere in the country, people have a second job or a third job and they're trying to get by. And so layer a fire like this on top of that, layer a natural disaster like this, and they're only getting worse and they're only getting more frequent. As Newsom said, there's no fire season anymore. It's just around the year fires, period. There was another amazing quote that you had in your book from Chief Anthony Maroney of the LA County Fire Department. Yes, he's amazing. Where he went, right, he went in the Palisades and he was talking to people who had all sorts of questions for him. Yeah, it was like a town hall at a synagogue of evacuated Palisades residents. And he apologized for not being able to save, he said, I'm so, right, he apologized for not being able to save your house, not being able to save a life, and not being able to save a business, and he listed it all, right? Yeah, the thing that he said is, yeah, go ahead. Well, yeah, tell me what he said, but also what How did that make people feel there and how did that make you feel? Because for me, it was very emotional. I think those guys feel horrible. Last night, Eric Mendoza, who was there at the book party, was just saying to my own brother, whose in-laws lost their house, that he was living in. He lost all his stuff. They feel terrible. But they are heroes, man. They're absolute fucking heroes. Just definitionally. Eric Mendoza, you will read about in the book, laid on his stomach, prone in the middle of the street because the concrete was the coolest place he could find. his temperatures around him approached 100 degrees, hubcaps and aluminum on automobiles was melting around him to open the hose, two and a half inch hose, the biggest hose they had, full bore, to try to put the fires out on these houses, any structures that they could find. And what Maroney is talking about here is like when they sign up for this, they don't want to lose one house, much less 16,000 structures. And these are guys that have sacrificed their lives. Then there's still medical issues that can arise after covering fires. I told you, Nick Schumer, he says, I could get cancer. I might get cancer being in this fire. Eric Mendoza got home, couldn't breathe. His wife took him to urgent care, put him on corticosteroids, gave him oxygen. Nobody knows what the future is going to be for any of these people. Real heroes. And yet his instinct is to go up there and apologize for something that is completely out of his hands, obviously, that he so bravely tried to save. And it just was a beautiful moment. I love the speech that he gave. And the end of the speech is one of my favorite parts because he puts it in context with the native people, the Tongva, who were the first inhabitants of the Palisades in L.A., and said that they weren't afraid of fire. They didn't try to fight it in terms of never have one. They lit their own fires in order to pay respect to the fire and to mitigate the potential damage for future ones. And we think we can control fire these days. And that is just another fool's errand that will result in more of this. In the fire of the future. Yeah. Jake, that was amazing. I have one last thing that I wanted to ask you about, which is, first, I wanted, if you could, to read out loud the last paragraph that you have on your book. Okay. which made me emotional too, because I know you personally and I know your family. Was it notes on sourcing? It was acknowledgments. Thank you most importantly. That last paragraph. I cried when I read the audio book. I cried when I was reading this. I haven't listened back to the audio book. I hope they didn't use the version where I cried. And thank you most importantly to my extraordinary family for whom Los Angeles is as much a part of our DNA as our genetics. My mom and dad, my brother and three sisters, in-laws, niece and nephews. And at the top of my list, my wife, Nicole, son, Noah, and daughter, Lucia. I want you to know how much I appreciate the amount you all sacrificed during the fires and after to enable me to go on this journey. This book is dedicated to my fellow Angelenos, including and especially you. I love you. That was beautiful. You can't do this job without family. Right. And that was, that's my last question for you is, what do you think is the toll that our jobs have on our families because I obviously think about this a lot. I worry about feelings of abandonment and resentment from our kids. I also believe it exposes them to things that are going to make them incredible, incredible human beings. Just like your dad did to you? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm grateful for the job. I'm grateful that I've gotten to learn from so many people that have friends like you and that we have a big community. That's what it's about, to surround ourselves with supportive people and to not do anything alone. I think that's the lesson that we're teaching our kids also. They may be alone at home or they may have somebody watching after them or they may not be there on every trip, but the community that we've tried to build I think is a model for learning the lessons of seeking out community in the wake of something like that. Yeah, and I think your kids are also learning decency and how you respect other people and how you, the bravery that you have and when you're reporting on these issues. And then I'm a sure-tempered psycho and don't like loud noises in my house. You're a great dad, I know. And I am grateful for you, Jake. So thank you so much for your reporting, incredible reporting and all the issues that matter so much to me. Thank you. And for being such a great friend. Sorry that I don't have a hidden underworld to talk about. Thanks, Em. Thank you for coming on, Jake. Thank you.