LA Fires Breakdown (Emergency Pod)

0:00Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today we're breaking down the Palisades fire. I am without a co-host today. Jordy has had to evacuate Malibu. I had to evacuate Pasadena last night, but I was still able to make it to downtown and record and do a little breakdown of what people are saying about the fire. It's a really crazy story. It's a really crazy event. It feels, I mean, it's a natural disaster. It feels really weird. There's smoke all over Los Angeles. Just walking around is pretty disgusting. And it happened really, really fast. I mean, I'm looking at some data here.

0:37The fire started at, it was first reported at 10.30 a.m. Pacific time yesterday, January 7th, covering around 10 acres. I think we hit record at 10.30. And then if you listen to the show yesterday, it was an hour and a half. By noon, 12.30, Jordy got a text message. Hey, that 10-acre fire is now 200 acres. You got to come home. A lot of other people are leaving Malibu. So he had to get out of here. We wrapped up and everyone in LA has been in complete chaos, especially if you're in Pasadena where the Eaton fire has been really bad or out in the Palisades, which has been by far the most insane video.

1:16I'm sure you've seen a ton of it. We'll go through some of it here on this show. But it's so far one of the four, the largest of four wildfires being driven by extremely powerful Santa Ana wind event. According to reports from CNN, it's already possibly the costliest wildfire in U.S. history. It's definitely the most destructive fire in Los Angeles history, surpassing a fire that happened in 2008. As I mentioned, within 20 minutes, the fire grew from 20 acres to 200 acres, and the blaze had reached more than 700 acres by 2 p.m., which is kind of when Jordy was driving home yesterday. With over 250 firefighters tackling it, it started to reach homes out in the Palisades.

2:02They don't even have water coming out of the fire hydrants. It's a complete disaster. And I'm sure you saw a ton of crazy video of whole areas of houses just being burned to the ground and a lot of people struggling to get out and then deal with what this means for their homes. And they really can't do anything. It's really, really sad. And so there have been a big part of what's driving this is this concurrent windstorm at night that forced the grounding of firefighting aircraft. So they couldn't drop huge buckets of water on a lot of this stuff because it was too windy. I mean, in Pasadena, the winds were getting up to 70, 80 miles an hour and they were blowing over trees.

2:39So you couldn't even drive around the city because you would drive and then a whole street would just be blocked by some massive tree. And they, there's no way that they can remove all the trees because every single street has a tree falling down on it. And there's just leaves and, and twigs like everywhere. It's complete chaos. Today, January 8th, the Cal Fire status reports that the fire had grown to 2 ,921 acres. Hours later, 1 ,400 firefighters had been assigned to the fire, which continued to grow as several injuries were reported, including a 25-year-old firefighter with a serious head injury.

3:13Several beachfront properties in Malibu were destroyed by the wildfire, which if you, you will pull up a map, but Malibu is not particularly close to the Palisades. I mean, it's somewhat adjacent, but the fire is really just spreading all over the place. And we'll go into some of the ideas and theories for how this happened. So there's been massive evacuations going on over the last day. I got an evacuation notice in Pasadena because of a separate fire, but related in Eden Canyon. And as we were driving out on the freeway, you could just see this massive, the whole mountainside is just on fire.

3:49It's crazy. And I think we unfortunately know some people whose homes were burned and some friends of friends and relatives of friends have all had to evacuate. It's been really, really rough. So the mayor of Los Angeles has declared a state of emergency and amid the evacuations, large amounts of traffic quickly built up as flames moved closer to roads. People left their cars and bulldozers had to move almost 200 abandoned vehicles as they blocked evacuation routes. The LAPD sent about 140 officers to assist with evacuations and gridlock. And everywhere you go in LA, there's just blaring sirens because cops, ambulances, fire trucks are just driving all over LA trying to help with the response here.

4:31The fire department issued an emergency alert system message, which was relayed to the National Weather Service to notify residences of the evacuation. So fortunately, everyone has a pretty strong warning system in place and everyone kind of knows to get out at the right time. And we'll get into some of the other things that people are doing to adapt and understand what's going on. But it is extremely rough. We barely know the full impact, but it's already destroyed at least a thousand structures. Really, really crazy. And a bunch of really iconic buildings. The Getty Villa has been threatened, although the, and the grounds caught fire, but I don't think it's burned down yet.

5:12But if you look at the, the poly market, we are in the middle of this. The poly market has a, a market on will the Palisades wildfire be contained by Friday? And there's just a 3 % chance of that. And they're using as the Oracle, the, the Cal Fire website, which they're trying to contain this fire. But I mean, that just seems like that's days away. And there's only a 3 % chance that they actually contain it by then. It's always crazy when this stuff happens. And we'll get into some of the backlash and some of the political aspects, as well as some people having fun and just kind of, you know, trying to make the most out of it and keep their chin up in a really hard situation.

5:57So in terms of theories, we'll get into some of the theories. But the The current one that I'm seeing going out, this one just went out last night. The LA fire captain said on local news that this started as a very small fire in the backyard. And so there's a lot of people throwing around a bunch of different theories. We'll get into some of those, but that's kind of the current one that's taken hold in the narrative. And we'll see how that shifts over the time, over the next few days. So let's go to some of the crazy videos and we'll pull these up on the video. uh sia cordistani says uh this is by far the craziest video from the fire in los angeles this guy is filming huge walls of fire surrounding a house they're in and there's another person and a dog i have no idea why they didn't evacuate or what happened to them let's hope they're okay i mean there's a bunch of reasons why someone would um want to kind of stand their ground and maybe hope for the best but it's extremely rough and this video is insane i mean just walls of fire everywhere extremely terrifying you got to get out in that situation uh benny johnson says malibu is unrecognizable beachfront homes along Pacific Coast Highway have been completely destroyed.

7:01This is always crazy because you're so close to the ocean. You just want to pull the water in and solve the problem. Mike Solana put together kind of the master thread on the defining kind of news tracker since X has a few different tools for finding tracking stories. And of course, you know, this story took over the timeline, but he called upon people to put everything in one thread. So least share footage of what you're seeing in the comments here. I think it would be good to have a single easy thread to read to help people understand how bad it is right now. And hilariously, he got some pushback for this.

7:35Oh, you're just like farming, you know, monetization or whatever. And it's like, no, like this thread, I mean, it did very well. 7 million views, 43 ,000 likes. Clearly people wanted this and they enjoyed it. But, you know, we all know that the X payout from that is not going to be super significant. And it is extremely beneficial. So board Elon Musk shares some ring or nest footage saying, last thing I saw before our home cameras went out, not optimistic about what we find tomorrow. And it's just some insane footage of fire encroaching upon their house. Mary says the Palisades fire from a flight arriving at LAX.

8:19There are some really crazy videos of people flying into LAX. Fortunately, LAX is unaffected, and so people are getting in and out, and some crazy footage is coming from folks who are on planes and can see the footage from the sky. I was, if I had, I don't know, was more of like a gonzo journalist, I'd be out there with a drone. I'm surprised I haven't seen more drone footage of people flying drones around, getting footage of the wreckage, but it probably interferes with a lot of the planes that are putting out, you know, dumping water on the fire. So you don't want to interfere with any of that.

8:52But I personally want to get a better lay of the land and understand the wreckage because you see people driving around, you see people show, you know, rows and rows of burnt out houses, but it's hard to fully illustrate. I want to see the Google Maps view essentially. And that's what I'm sure we'll get with a drone in the next few days. And so Solana, another replies from Wes Nichols. He says, I just left the hellscape formerly known as the Pacific Palisades where I lived for 26 years. I'm mad at what I saw. Our politicians have failed us. Unprepared, unimaginative, understaffed, now overwhelmed.

9:26Heads must roll for this disaster. I personally saw 100 plus homes fully engulfed in flames, I presume. And yeah, we'll go into some of the political backlash here. It's fascinating. So sunrise from Santa Monica Beach, and this is all over LA, no matter which way you look. It was particularly crazy. I was in Toluca Lake, like Studio City area last night. And if you look to the east you see the eden fire that just just engulfed the sky and then if you look to the west you see the palisades fire which has engulfed that part of the sky and so it's just like this crazy black purple smoke closing in on you from every direction uh fortunately molly o'shea got out of here she says decided to leave la to wait this out a bit very eerie all smoke lax is operating fine if you're considering it it was pretty seamless grateful for amazing sf friends for offering to take me in.

10:12So yeah, I mean, if you don't want to run the risk of having to dodge around town and you have friends in another city, why not get out? I love it. Lincoln III says, before and after, I lost my dream home in Malibu. LAFD didn't tell us anything. Zero notice, zero warnings in person, nothing. LAPDHQ did the same, nothing. Obviously very, very upset. And wow, what a crazy, crazy sight. Really, really sad. So there are some theories. somebody was asking me uh i was talking to balaji and he was saying like what's going on because he's not uh in california and just probably woke up and saw the timeline erupting with chaos in los angeles and uh it was kind of like what's going on so i tried to think about like what are all the factors that people might want to trace through and understand the weightings of and so i came up with kind of eight bullet points here that i sent into our group chat and uh i said number one it's been a very dry year and that was something that was confirmed i guess it was the driest year on record.

11:09It was a nine month drought to get here. There's very high winds all of a sudden. This is the Santa Ana's. This happens all the time, but it's particularly bad this year. I've never seen 70 mile an hour winds in Pasadena before, but it's been really, really bad and it's really, really crazy. And so obviously it's literally fanning the flames and it's also blowing around small embers. So you have some small backyard fire, bonfire, or even just house the caught fire. Those embers are going to fly all over, light up everything. And so number three, the government has been terrible about brush management because of environmental concerns.

11:41We can go into this a little bit more in the future. Number four, there's lots of homeless encampments in LA and a lot of those run on open flames. And so there's been previous fires. This one hasn't been confirmed, but there's been previous fires where a homeless encampment has had a fire going and one of the sparks goes and lights some brush and then that grows and grows and grows into a massive wildfire. So that's a big problem. Number five, the above ground power lines sometimes aren't maintained properly. And so they blow around in the wind and then they explode. And there's some crazy videos out there of power lines just sparking, sparking, sparking right next to trees.

12:17And so obviously that's going to start a fire and then the fire gets blown around. Number six, once fires are burning, this is an interesting theory, pyromaniacs get inspired to go start more fires and it's easier to get away with it. So if you are obsessed with fires and you're pyromaniac and you love fires, this is the best day to go light a fire and get away with it because everyone's going to be, oh, it just blew from the Palisades fire over here. And there's a couple structure fires that came up like a single house caught fire all of a sudden somewhere in LA, kind of far away from Palisades or Eton.

12:53And everyone's wondering like, why did this particular house go up? And it might be somebody just saying, hey, tonight's the night I'm going to go torch my enemy's house or something like that. A little bit of a conspiracy theory, but possible, possible. Number seven, wind continues to literally fan the flames. We talked about this. The wind has not stopped. So even after the fire has blown from one place to another, lit the house on fire, started the brush fire somewhere else, well, then the wind just keeps the fire going and just really, really amps it up. And that's how we got from 20 acres to 200 acres to 2 ,000 acres like that.

13:27And then lastly, number eight, all firefighting services are way over capacity. There's no option but to let the areas burn. And we heard a bunch of weird things where private firefighters weren't allowed to get into places. The police weren't letting them go in. If you wanted to have private firefighters defend your home, that was not an option. And so it just seems like it's a lot of chaos, not a lot of drills or dry runs for something like this. And just an overall chaotic moment for Los Angeles. and um and then i kind of closed out with like look i have these eight you know things that are going on but some of these have higher weightings than others like you know there's there's no real evidence right now that the pyromaniacs have anything to do with this um but uh you know so so you but everyone kind of agrees that like the high winds are really important here and then uh and also the dry dry brush um and then some of these are extremely major lightning rods for culture war issues.

14:19Obviously, homelessness is a big culture war issue, a big political issue. Same thing with how the government manages brush, and we'll go into that. And so I think the narrative on both the left and the right is still taking shape. You could see it last night on X. Most people were just saying, you know, thoughts and prayers. Thank you to the firefighters. This is really important. We hope everyone's safe. But now that we're, you know, 12, 24 hours out from the fire starting, people are starting to say, how does this fit into my political philosophy? how does this fit in with my ideology? How does this narrative take place and how do we get here?

14:56And are the politicians to blame? If so, which politicians are to blame? And so back to what caused this. Obviously, we have the main theory being espoused by the fire department, which is just started as a backyard fire, grew from there, very bad. But I asked Chachapiti to pull some historical base rate probabilities for how fires like this get started to give me just some overall, you know, historical context, because these can come from both nature and man-made. And so the first cause of fire, lightning strikes. Historically, that's been about 5 % of all wildfires. And obviously there's nature caused that.

15:36Not really much you can do about that, except protect the brush and make sure that there isn't tinder for the lightning to strike. But we haven't had a lot of lightning in LA, so that's probably not the reason for this. Power lines and electrical infrastructure, this was a big thing up in SF a few years ago. About 20 % wading towards that from ChatGPT, and obviously that's human-caused. And there's a lot of questions about do the electrical companies have the right incentives to do all the maintenance and proper work on their electrical lines to prevent force fires? Are they incentivized where if they start a fire, that that externality will be internalized by the company and they actually have the right shareholder alignment and economic incentives to really do the work?

16:19Because obviously it's expensive to trim all the trees around every power line. There's another question about like, can't the power lines just be underground? But then that costs a lot of money to put them underground. But obviously they wouldn't start fires then. And there's a lot of other stuff going on. Then arson, the deliberate setting of fires, that's 10 % by ChatGPT. Homeless encampments, 10%. equipment use, mowing, welding, construction, 15%, recreational slash negligent activities like campfires, fireworks, cigarettes, 15%, vehicle accidents, car fires, or sparks from brakes, that's 5%, and then other unknown is 20%.

16:50And I don't even know if that adds up to 100%, but it gives you an idea of some of the different places that a big fire like this could come from. And then in this group chat, there was an interesting post from a friend who said, This feels like it could be an October 7th level moment in terms of political shifts in Los Angeles and California. A bunch of the most influential folks in Los Angeles slash California just experienced, one, a fire that at minimum was significantly exacerbated by terrible forest management and some probability traced back to homeless encampments or similar. Two, a state-level insurer that will be completely wiped out after this.

17:28California Fair Plan has$5.9 billion of exposure in the Palisades and$200 million on the balance sheet, plus$2.5 billion in statewide reinsurance, resulting in, at best, a protracted process for their claims to be settled, and at worst, claims going unpaid, and perhaps a state or federal bailout to avoid that. And so, yeah, I mean, if they if they if six billion worth of homes burn and then they all those people show up asking for their insurance claims and they say, hey, we only have 200 million on the balance sheet and we only have 2.5 from the state. Yeah, you're going to get 50 cents on the dollar at best.

18:04And maybe there's a, you know, a state or federal bailout. Maybe they raise more money, issue more debt to fund those. But it's going to be rough for everyone involved. and then third a local far left government response that will inevitably be ripe for valid criticism and so this is going to be a a major political hot button issue for the next uh few weeks at least i i imagine and so a lot gill broke down the uh the uh the situation in a great thread where does this start um i don't know if i have the start but he said very sad to see this current fire in Los Angeles and worried for friends in the area hope the county, state, and country realize that they should put their citizens first in more ways, including fire management, public safety, et cetera.

18:49So California had a$97 billion surplus in a single year. There was money to be proactive on these problems, particularly given the large fires in California in the same timeframe as the surplus. And that is a crazy stat. I think that was driven a lot by the IPO market and a lot of liquidity coming into California tech employees and founders and then being taxed. But it seems like the money didn't get to the right hands. Massive fires in highly populated areas are preventable. It's policy decisions that allow them to happen. California continues to put citizens' lives and property at risk for no good reason.

19:26Historical strategies include controlled burns, removal of fallen wood, clearing dense areas, aging water reservoir our infrastructure, all our policy choices. No, it's not just climate change. And there's a lot of focus on the Los Angeles mayor right now. Here's a quote from Newsweek. Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass has been criticized after it emerged that she was out of the country attending a presidential inauguration in Ghana as northern and western suburbs of her city were hit by devastating wildfires fanned by high winds. And yeah, it's got to be tough being a politician and taking any vacation because if something breaks out and you're like in some embarrassing place, uh, you're never going to hear the end of it.

20:09But at the same time, like you got to travel for business sometimes. Um, so I don't know how big of a narrative that will be going forward, but, um, certainly rough right now. I think the main thing is, uh, if you're the mayor, Karen Bass, you got to put out a statement immediately, hop on a plane, get back, really show that you're on top of this show that you're being aggressive, that you're moving, that this is your number one priority. I don't think anyone really fault you for just taking a business trip and then a freak accident, you know, natural disaster happens. But if you stay there for a couple extra days and you're not talking and you're not in the loop and you're not, you know, pulling out all the stops to get on the ground and have an impact, that's going to be a problem.

20:47And so he also shares LA had just cut its fire department budget and shows some of the department budget, original operational budget increases and decreases. And so fire was one of the few to actually get cut. Police went way up, library went up, housing went up, but fire and sanitation went down. And so I'm sure a lot of people will be upset about that. Brian Johnson shared a video showing the fire destruction in LA is surreal. The scale of the destruction was preventable. We need societal systems built that we can trust. That is a good point. You know, you pay all the these taxes. You want to count on the government to step up and prevent things.

21:32It's like being a defensive back in the NFL. You don't know how the fire department is working until something like this shows up. And then the training all comes out. And so a lot of people are going to a clip from Donald Trump on Joe Rogan, where Donald Trump was mocked for sounding the alarm on California water slash fire crisis during his interview with Joe Rogan. Turns out he was right. Trump spent nearly seven minutes ranting about the issue, blasting Newsom for doing nothing to fix the problem. Trump specifically discussed the Californian Delta smelt controversy where rainwater is being wasted by being directed into the Pacific Ocean to protect a tiny fish species.

22:14You know, in Los Angeles, you can't get proper amounts of water. In order to protect a tiny little fish, the water up north gets routed into the Pacific Ocean. Millions and millions of gallons of water get poured into the Pacific. I got it all done. Nobody could believe me. It was all done. I got it. We'll just play the clip. But you get the idea. Every time I go to California, I say, you have so much water. They don't know it. I'm telling you, people living in Beverly Hills, they turn off the water. Same thing with the electric. And so a little bit of a I told you so Cassandra moment for Trump.

22:46Here's Elon Musk sharing a post from Truth Social that Donald Trump posted during the fire just today, this morning, says Governor Gavin Newsom, he has a name for everything, refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water from excess rain and snow melt from the north to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way. He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt by giving it less water. It didn't work, but didn't care about the people of California.

23:25Now the ultimate price is being paid. I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to flow into California. He is the blame for this. On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes, a true disaster. Yeah, it's a really good point. A lot of this is like, yes, when you turn on the tap water in LA, like, yes, you can get water. Like there's the, the water's not gone. Uh, obviously the fire hydrants are a bigger thing because they need a reservoir for that. But also there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a culture in Los Angeles where you shouldn't water your lawn that often.

23:56And we don't just soak the ground with water constantly. And all of that changes what types of plants you grow. A lot of people have like dirt with cactus in their gardens instead of, you know, grass, because it's, uh, it's, it's more drought tolerant and it uses less water and there's this conservation mindset. But the flip side of that is that if you don't have a lot of groundwater everywhere and the land around Los Angeles and in California is not just moist all the time, well then it's prone to fire. And so there's a trade-off there that I think people maybe aren't really considering because you are thinking about, well, you know, we should use less water every single day and this will add up, but then you get the one big fire and it resets all the progress you made and like this fire is probably way worse for the environmental uh considerations than uh than just using a little bit of extra water and rerouting it from the ocean or whatever um here's mike solana again saying global warming ate my homework it doesn't work anymore literally every single politician in california responsible for the catastrophic failure to prepare for this from water management to control burns to the fire departments is a democrat and he's uh he's sharing a post from Bernie Sanders who said 80 ,000 people told to evacuate blazes 0 % contained eight months since the area has seen rain the scale of this damage and loss is unmanageable climate change is real not a hoax Donald Trump must treat this like the existential crisis it is so yeah you can see the political battle lines forming is it climate change or is it government mismanagement and and this is going to be something that we're fighting about for weeks um james woods here says uh the most the most important task ahead is not to be bitter but and shares a post from uh la mayor karen bass cut fire department's budget by 17.6 million months before wildfires turn the city into a hellscape and so a lot of criticism on karen bass for cutting budgets uh this is an interesting thing i think we should shift into kind of like what should you do if you're here what are the recommendations obviously there's a bunch of really interesting things so Sean McGuire shares this he says I live in Los Angeles this is the view from my office in the pal as the Palisades fire starts to move east towards Brentwood the fiber internet at my house went out but we have Starlink so my wife is still online it's a life-saving product I couldn't agree more we talked about this on the show everyone should by a Starlink.

26:23And they're still available in LA. I picked one up just today from Best Buy. And it's very interesting whenever these chaotic moments happen. This is the same thing that happened with COVID where if you're just like, obviously moments like this, everyone's like, oh, I should have been the prepper. I should have had the thousand gallons of water and the gas generator and the electric generator and just been completely set up for this and had an extra house and a bug out bag and all this stuff. And yeah, this is a good wake up call. Maybe you want to do that. And maybe this is the thing that you hopefully carry that energy and that reminder through over the next 12 months and build out your plan for the next big fire.

27:03But even just being on X and monitoring the situation and being on these apps and really understanding what's going on, you can just be ahead of the curve by a little bit. I bet Starlinks are going to be sold out in a day or by Friday, because if the internet really does go out, seriously, people are going to be swarming for those. And, but if you just get one today, you'll be great. Uh, and you'll be one, one that has them. And, uh, it was the same thing with like when people wanted to stock up on masks or stock up on food or toilet paper, like if you were just a little bit ahead of the curve, like you were at the front of the line and they had, they had it in stock.

27:35Uh, and so, uh, yeah, uh, highly recommend Starlink. Uh, Ryan Peterson says friends in LA download the watch duty app to track the fire in real time. It's the official wildfire app being used by the firemen in California with very granular real-time updates, video feeds, and evacuation maps. Stay safe. You have no concept of how fast a fire can spread until you've been through one. I survived a house fire 24 years ago. Wow, you must have been really young. And we'll never forget the speed. Get as far away as you can with your loved ones. Forget your possessions. They don't matter. And yeah, this is a great recommendation.