So, a few weeks ago I had the unique experience of sitting in my own living room and watching my city burn down around me. The largest fires in the history of Los Angeles swept through the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, two beautiful neighborhoods that now simply are not there anymore. 80,000 people evacuated, a close friend of mine evacuated to my home, and I packed a go-bag. Oh by the way, let me just say if you ever are in a disastrous scenario, try to pack your go-bag early in the day. Don’t do what I did and wait until like 10 p.m. to stuff a T-shirt and a couple of hard drives into a knapsack. Like, get that done in time.
So we sat there, and we watched literal fire tornadoes rip through the sky. On the news the next day, when I woke up and the Sun was shining again, there was ash all over my driveway. The remains of tens of thousands of real people’s homes that burned to the ground. Some of my close friends lost everything in these fires, and now, all of us in LA, we’re trying to pick up the pieces. We’re donating to GoFundMes. We’re buying air purifiers. We’re dropping off clothes to donation centers that are telling us we don’t need any more clothes, please donate money instead. We’re doing our best, and we’re also all trying to figure out how the fuck did this happen and how do we stop it from happening again, and that’s been difficult because there’s a lot of bullshit out there right now.
As inspiring as it’s been to see my city pulled together and support each other, and it really has been, it has made me love Los Angeles deeply, it has also been beyond terrifying to watch the disinformation machine spin up in real-time and watch conspiracy theories and rumors and lies fly about these fires and what caused them. In a time of crisis like this, it’s essential that we get real information about what happened and how we can stop it from happening again, which is why it has been fucking disgusting to watch political hacks on the news use these fires that killed people and destroyed homes, for nothing more than attacking their enemies, the people in politics they don’t like.
Like, look at fucking Jesse Waters from Fox News, whose theory apparently is that LA burned down because of “woke.”
Waters (showing photo of LAFD chiefs, three women): “This right here ladies and gentlemen! This is the leadership of the LA Fire Department! I sure hope they know what they’re doing!”
Know what they’re doing? Jesse, lesbians are the most competent sexuality. That’s why they’re first in the acronym. They lead the way. I mean, when it’s life or death out there, is there anyone more qualified to command an army of squirters? And then there was our new President, who played the Flame Blame Game by pinning it on a helpless little fish.
Trump: “You’d have tremendous water up there they send it out to the Pacific because they’re trying to protect a tiny little fish which is in other areas by the way called the smelt.”
Oh I get it. Trump’s going with the classic smelt it dealt it explanation. Man, he really does think like a middle school bully doesn’t he? Well, unfortunately he’s also as dumb as one because there was no lack of water. In fact, California’s reservoirs were topped off after two years of rain. Aha! But then why, Elon Musk wants to know, were the fire hydrants not able to supply enough water? Elon’s theory is that this was because of the big bad government’s red tape. Yes, if only the Santa Ana winds had listened to laissez-faire economist Milton Friedman, the Palisades would still be standing. Elon was so excited to prove his theory that he asked a real-life firefighter about it.
Elon: “All right…what about…what about water availability?”
LA Fire Command: “So there was water. We have several reservoirs. Just an example, if we have one building burning…”
Elon: “Mmm hmm.”
LAFC: “…we could flow 1000 gallons a minute on that one building, so the amount of water we’re flowing…there really is no water system that’s going to keep that pace. So we have to bring in water tenders, which are these big water tanks that, you know, 2500, 3000-gallon trucks, and they’ll come in, and that’s what we have to do to overcome, to compensate. …DWTP did a great job. They brought in big water trucks for us and we used them as basically mobile hydrants. And then we have our own agency as well that has water tenders.”
Elon: “Am I saying is…that, like, along the, maybe correct me if I’m wrong, along in Malibu, along the coast, there was no shortage of water. In the Palisades, there was a shortage of water at a certain point. Or is that not accurate?”
LAFC: “Well, we were just…an amount of water that the system couldn’t…was just overbearing just because of how much water these firefighters were utilizing.”
Elon: “Okay. Alright. Sounds good. Thanks, guys.”
That’s right, Elon. The hydrants ran dry for the same reason your water pressure drops when someone starts the dish washer while you take a shower. The system only has so much throughput, and hydrants are built to fight one house on fire, not 500. That’s how water works. I guess it’s not surprising you don’t understand how shit works underground, though. You’re the guy who thought he could solve LA traffic by building infinity tunnels. Maybe you could ask a real-life traffic engineer how that one would work.
Third up in the Dumbass Billionaire Talking Out of His Ass Club was LA Times owner Patrick Sun Shong who said that the fires were caused because LA Mayor Karen Bass cut $23 million from the LA fire department’s budget, and in this case, even Patrick’s own fucking newspaper said that he was full of shit. The boring truth, if you’re interested in the details of municipal budgets, is that, yes, some vacant personnel positions were cut, but the overall LAFD budget actually went up because the Mayor gave all of the existing firefighters raises. Now, you can argue about whether or not that’s good budgetary policy. The Commissioner of the LAFD thinks it isn’t, but the truth is that, cuts or not, the amount of money devoted to fighting fire in Los Angeles and Southern California more generally is so massive that these cuts would barely be a drop in the bucket. The Los Angeles Fire Department has nearly 4,000 employees and a budget of 850 million bucks, but they’re just one small part of California’s firefighting force. There’s the LA County Fire Department with a staff of 5,000 and a budget of $1.4 billion. On top of that, there’s the California State firefighting agency CalFire, which has a staff of nearly 13,000 and a budget of $4 billion, and that budget has doubled in recent years. It’s basically an entire firefighting army. The money we spent on forest management, by the way, has also gone up more than 10 times in the same period, and this isn’t even counting the firefighting forces from other parts of California, other states, and even Mexico who arrived to help through mutual aid agreements. That means that California literally has the largest firefighting force on the planet.
So the state was prepared. We did see the fire coming. We threw everything we had at it, and we were still no match for it. So again, we have to ask the question: why and who is to blame?
Well, the answer isn’t some easy bullshit like a fish or a fraction of funding. It’s that the people who run our society, our city, our state, and our country built it in such a way as to make fires exactly like these inevitable and unstoppable. And that means that, yes, you should be angry at our politicians but not for the reasons the idiot talking Heads say you should be. Angry because these people upheld a status quo that has slow-walked us into disaster rather than leading us to the fundamental changes we need to make to save our city. And in this video I’m going to explain exactly what those changes are. We’re going to talk about why LA is constantly on fire according to the actual scientists who know, and we’re going to talk about what we can actually do about it.
But first, I’d like to ask you to support the victims of these fires. If you go to givedirectly.org/lafires you can send cash directly to low-income residents of the fire zones that need your help. Donating to individual fundraisers like GoFundMes is great but there are a lot of folks out there who need help and can’t access that kind of fundraiser because they don’t have the network that some of those other people do. These funds will help those people specifically, so I really hope you’ll send some support to families in need. Head to givedirectly.org/lafires. By the way, if you want to cut through the partisan misinformation and get actual information about this, you know, huge disaster that hurt people, I really suggest you check out our sponsor, Ground News. They rate every single news source by how biased it is on the left and the right and you can use that to see that the two different sides are having completely different conversations about these fires. The right is blaming completely different people from the left. On the right it’s all Newsom, Newsom, Newsom. On the left it’s all budget cuts, budget cuts, budget cuts. But you can also use Ground News to see which sources have the highest factuality rating to make sure that you are always getting the real news and getting rid of the spin. So, if that sounds good, if you like that idea, head to groundnews.com/factually. You can get 40% off.
So the really difficult truth about these fires is that they were so intense, the winds were so strong on that day, that almost no amount of preparation would have made them survivable. You know, we like to have this belief about the world that there is always somebody in power who can come and rescue us, and sometimes that is just not the case, and that’s terrifying, but it’s true. The most effective way to fight wildfires like these is by dropping water from the air. But on that day, LA was hit by hurricane-force winds that made takeoff impossible for planes that had to fly at that low of an altitude. Climate scientist Daniel Swain told me that the wind on that day was so powerful that there is footage of the fire spreading hundreds of feet in just 5 or 10 minutes. Faster than humans can reach the fire. It almost looked like a flow of lava heading down the side of a mountain, and once that flow reached the city below, it became a literal firestorm, almost a blizzard of embers in every direction that set fire to every structure in the affected area almost simultaneously. That means that even if LA had had hundreds of additional water-dropping planes and thousands of additional fire engines pre-positioned just so, it’s not clear that it would have done much good on that particular day because the fire was simply that fast, that intense, and that omnipresent.
And the thing you really have to understand is that the Los Angeles area was designed by nature itself to do exactly this. Its ecology is literally built to burn and burn big every few decades. LA’s wild ecosystem is made up of shrublands called chaparral, which consists of these tough, woody, drought-resistant bushes. Chaparral is literally the most flammable vegetation in the United States. Some chaparral seeds only germinate in extreme heat, and, as a result, the plants contain resins and oils that actually encourage blazes. Isn’t that incredible? It means that these plants literally evolved to catch on fire. That’s how they fucking reproduce. And when they burn, they burn BIG. According to the California Chaparral Institute, infrequent, large, high-intensity wildfires are the natural condition of chaparral, and this stuff wants to burn in exactly the locations where it just did. So scientists did a study analyzing Southern California’s fire history, which areas burned and how often, and it turns out that the Santa Monica Mountains, which contains the Pacific Palisades in Malibu, burn more often than anywhere else, sometimes as often as once a decade. These places burn down, so when European settlers came West to California, we started this endless and fruitless campaign to suppress that fire to make sure that fires never happened, stupidly ignoring the fact that fire is just part of nature the same way rain is. Earth, wind, water, heart, fire. It’s Captain Planet shit.
So, in a sense, this fire is exactly what we should have expected to happen all along. But you know it’s not all Mother Nature because this fire would not have been so bad were it not for the climate change that we humans caused. See, a common misconception is that climate change is just making the Earth warmer, and it does that on average. But just as importantly it also makes the weather much more variable with rapid seesaws from one extreme to another, and that is exactly what happened in LA the previous two years. In Southern California, 2022 and 2023 were the wettest in recent memory. So wet that they ended Socal’s historic drought and left nearly all of California’s reservoirs at or above their historical averages. But you know what else loves that wet weather? The chaparral. These bushes slurped up the atmospheric rivers and grew like fucking crazy. But then, in 2024, the atmospheric rivers ran dry, and the wet weather stopped. From May of 2024 through New Year’s 2025, not a single drop of rain fell on LA. In 150 years of recordkeeping, this has been the second driest winter LA has ever experienced. So because of that record dryness, the chaparral dried up and turned into the perfect kindling for a historic fire.
But, while human-caused climate change supplied the fuel, it didn’t build thousands of homes right next to the tinder box. We did that. Los Angeles, like all of California, loves to build homes right up to the edge of nature. This area is called the Wildland Urban Interface and it’s a particularly dangerous place to live because it, you know, tends to catch on fire a lot. So why would we build there? Well, first of all, because it’s gorgeous. I mean, just LOOK at this shit. Beautiful. But a lot of people live there because they literally had nowhere else to go. See, when Los Angeles was sold to Americans back in the ’40s and ’50s, it was sold as a single-family paradise where every man could have a ranch home with an orange tree, two kids, and a wife who would quietly resent you because you made her quit the talkies to raise them. As a result, Los Angeles today is dominated by single-family zoning on almost 3/4 of residential land in LA. It is literally illegal to build an apartment building even if you wanted to.
Now this has a lot of bad effects. It makes housing more expensive because there’s less of it, and it also enforces race and class segregation. Segregation was, in fact, part of the point of this zoning because if poor people can’t afford to live near you, then you don’t have to live next to any poor people, do you? But set all those problems aside for a second right now. We’re talking about fire, and you better believe that single-family zoning makes that fucking worse, too, because it forces the population to expand outwards, taking up more land rather than upwards into denser housing. In other words, single-family zoning is the manspreading of Urban Design. It’s an inefficient use of space, and it ruins your commute.
So let’s take a look at Altadena, one of the two neighborhoods that burned down in these fires. It’s a middle-class town with a significant population of black homeowners. Why? Because nearby Pasadena was so redlined, so low density, and so expensive that Altadena was the most affordable neighborhood blacks had access to. And they built a beautiful community there. But, unfortunately, Altadena is so far outside the city center it backs up against the Angeles National Forest, which, once again, is a landscape designed to burn. And two weeks ago, that’s exactly what happened. The entire neighborhood was leveled, and tens of thousands of people lost their homes; people who were essentially pushed to live in that spot because of how the city was zoned. And it won’t be the last time this happens because there are 4.5 million California homes built on the edge of nature in the Wildland Urban Interface, the most of any state.
So let’s recap for a second. We took an area that was built by nature to burn, made it worse through climate change which we caused, and then instituted a system of zoning that basically forces people to live at the door of the furnace. That means that the politicians who plan development in this state have been practically begging for fire to fuck us up. It is insane. They’re like lifeguards telling us to swim towards the sharks, and they’ve known that they were doing it for decades.
Nearly 30 years ago, the great writer Mike Davis wrote an article that pissed everyone off. It was called “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” and in it, he argued that it was stupid to keep building in areas that are guaranteed to burn down, and even stupider to have every taxpayer bail them out so they could rebuild larger than before and just as likely to go up in flames. Davis talks about how starting in the 1950s, the policy response to fires in Malibu was to actually subsidize rebuilding with loans and tax relief even though the area was guaranteed to burn down again, which is exactly what happened most recently this fucking year. So what is Governor Gavin Newsom’s bold and innovative response to these latest fires? Oh, he’s just going to make it easier to rebuild there at taxpayer expense yet fucking again.
You know what the hard truth is? We might need to accept that some spots maybe just shouldn’t have fucking homes on them. Take this strip of houses in Malibu right between the rising ocean and the constantly-on-fire wilderness. Maybe we shouldn’t rebuild them. Maybe we should buy those people out and just let it be a fucking beach. We can surf and swim, and then when it burns down, we can skedaddle back to our houses in the part of the city that isn’t on fucking fire all the time.
Now look. People have a right to build wherever they want. They need places to live, and I’m not going to criticize any individual homeowner who lost their home from wanting to rebuild the home they loved, but how about this? I think instead of making it impossible to build more affordable housing in safer places and incentivizing people to rebuild in fire prone areas, maybe the government could do the fucking opposite for once, and make it easier to build in places that don’t burn down once a decade. The state’s response to these neighborhoods going up like kindling cannot only be to replace the kindling just as it was, just where it was, as quickly as possible and at a taxpayer-funded discount. That is not bravery. That is not resilience. That is denial. Climate change is only going to make these fires more frequent, and we have a glaringly obvious solution to make California safer in the face of them. We could re-zone the city to allow more housing in areas that don’t border the fire zone. But that is a solution that our cowardly politicians refuse to try for fear of pissing off the homeowners who don’t like apartment buildings.
Like, okay, even before this fire, LA was in a housing crisis, but local politicians have seemingly done everything possible to avoid building more affordable housing, especially in, again, the three-quarters of Los Angeles that is restricted to single-family homes. Take Mayor Karen Bass. Her first week in office, she signed Executive Directive One, or ED1. This was a terrific measure. It was designed to speed the construction of 100% affordable housing developments, something the city desperately needs. But two years later, she gutted her own directive, amending it so that it couldn’t work in single-family home-zoned areas. Why? Not because it wasn’t successful at building affordable housing. No. Instead, she gutted it because it was so successful at what it was designed to do that wealthy homeowners complained. Even though the majority of Karen’s constituents are renters, she bent the knee to the wealthy homeowners because of their outsized political power in the city.
And you know what? The LA City Council did the same fucking thing. They had a vote this December on a proposal by councilwoman Nithia Raman that would have allowed some midsized apartment buildings in single-family zoned neighborhoods. Once again, something we desperately need. But this was voted down 10 to 5 in favor of plans to restrict new apartment buildings to the areas that are already dense, effectively keeping 3/4 of the city off-limits to new affordable housing, even though, again, we are in a fucking housing crisis. And the LA Zoning Commission unanimously voted on a development plan last year that would also leave single-family zones untouched. LA is already the second-most expensive place in the US to live, and, because of these fires, tens of thousands of people just lost their homes and will need to find new housing, putting even more pressure on the market as a result. We’ve already seen massive rent gouging, and a rise in homelessness is almost assured. It is fucking grim.
So the only solution is for us to use this moment to fundamentally rethink the urban shape of LA. Like, the worst happened. The disaster struck. The city was destroyed, but now we get to decide what kind of city we want to rebuild. Do we want to fight an endlessly losing battle against an unquenchable, ever-strengthening foe, or do we want to build a couple new apartment buildings in Santa Monica and Silver Lake? Do we want to keep subsidizing construction in the exact same areas just so they get burned down again, or do we want to subsidize the safe, affordable housing that we need? And, do we want to be a vibrant and diverse global city driven by a giant thriving middle class, or do we want to shrivel up into a decaying gated retirement community for the wealthy surrounded by a sea of flames?
So, to our politicians who run our city: I know that you did not create Los Angeles’s tinderbox ecology, our addiction to single-family homes, or the slow rise of climate change. But you did inherit all of those problems and all of those decisions. And now the bill for them has come due. The piper must be paid. I love Los Angeles. I know that you do too, and if you want to save it, you need to do something other than throw blame around and try to win the next election by maintaining the status quo and keeping the same few rich people happy. You need to actually save this city by finding the political courage to act.