The LA Fires and the Home Insurance Crisis

Discussion post for January 14, 2025

Sarah and Beth discuss the fires in Los Angeles and the implications of Climate Crisis for homeowners insurance, and how we want to give to good causes in the new year.

Topics Discussed:

• Los Angeles Fires

• Home Insurance Crisis

• Outside of Politics: Magnificent Giving

Pantsuit Politics Resources:

• To search past episodes of the main show or our Premium content, check out our content archive.

• Want more Pantsuit Politics? Subscribe to ensure you never miss an episode and get access to our premium shows and community.

This podcast and every episode of it are wholly owned by Pantsuit Politics LLC and are protected by US and international copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. We hope you'll listen to it, love it, and share it with other people, but not with large language models or machines and not for commercial purposes. Thanks for keeping it nuanced with us.

Episode Resources:

LA WILDFIRES

• Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster by Mike Davis (Bookshop.org)

• Inconvenient truths about the fires burning in Los Angeles from two fire experts (Los Angeles Times)

• The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet by John Green (Bookshop.org)

• LA Wildfires Insurance Cost Estimates Spike to $30 Billion - Bloomberg

• Zero to One by Peter Thiel (Bookshop.org)

CLIMATE CHANGE - DRIVEN INSURANCE CRISIS

• New Data Reveal Climate Change-Driven Insurance Crisis is Spreading (U.S. Senate Committee On The Budget)

• Risky Business: Why Insurance Markets Fail and What to Do About It by Liran Einav et. al (Bookshop.org)

• The California FAIR Plan

• Map: New data shows how many Americans are going without homeowners insurance (NBC News)

• Housing in America with Jerusalem Demsas (Pantsuit Politics)

MAGNIFICENT GIVING

• What if Charity Shouldn’t Be Optimized? - The New York Times

• The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong and How to Fix It. by Amy Schiller

• SoCal Fire Fund (EIF Foundation)

• CAA, Sean Penn’s CORE and LAUSD Launch Fund to Aid Wildfire Recovery (Hollywood Reporter)

Episode Transcript

Sarah [00:00:07] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

Beth [00:00:09] This is Beth Silvers.

Sarah [00:00:10] You're listening to Pantsuit Politics.

Beth [00:00:12] Where we take a different approach to the news.

[00:00:14] Music Interlude.

[00:00:29] Thank you for joining us today. We're talking about the Los Angeles fires and what insurance looks like in a world where every disaster is preceded by the word unprecedented. Outside of Politics, we're going to talk about charitable donations and the idea of magnificent giving. And this week, confirmation hearings are beginning for the incoming cabinet. We'll discuss those hearings on Friday and we'll talk about how the criminal cases against President elect Trump are wrapping up on our spicy bonus episode for premium subscribers on Thursday. If you haven't joined us on Substack yet, we hope you'll meet us in a fantastic community of people there this week.

Sarah [00:01:01] And just a quick reminder to save the date for our Cincinnati live show on Saturday, July 19th. On Saturday, July 19th in Cincinnati, we are going to celebrate ten years of Pantsuit Politics. We are so excited about really an entire weekend that we're planning in Beth's home area network. We're making an expansive geographic area. We're going to have lots of activities, lots of meet ups for listeners to join and participate in, and of course, culminating in a big live show Saturday, July 19th. Again, that is Saturday, July 19th. We hope to see all of you there.

Beth [00:01:47] We still don't know what caused the L.A. fires. We do know that the Santa Ana winds are making fighting those fires extremely difficult. Los Angeles has brought in firefighters from around the country and the military, Canada, and Mexico. And they are working around the clock to contain fires and evacuate residents. So far, more than 40,000 acres have burned. That's an area of land bigger than Paris. And Sarah, I've just spent a lot of time this week trying to get my arms around the scale of what has unfolded here.

Sarah [00:02:14] Yeah, it's really difficult. Look, a lot of you know I spent every summer of my childhood in California. And many of those summers in Southern California flying in and out of Los Angeles. I've gone to Los Angeles last year and the year before. It's a city that I have very much grown to love and enjoy. And I can't even as a person who's been there a lot and knows the city, knows the area, understands the different neighborhoods-- because Los Angeles is huge. Los Angeles County is huge and it's really as many big cities are this conglomeration of neighborhoods and towns. And you hear that in the reporting when you hear the descriptions of the Pacific Palisades and Altadena and how different they were and how they were really joined as communities. And so even as a person who understands the geography, loves the city, has a working knowledge of it, I can't quite put the pieces together. It's just a thing you don't understand until you're there. Mayfield is tiny, the town near where I live in Paducah that was devastated by a tornado several years ago. It's a tiny town. So it wasn't like I couldn't understand what had happened when the tornadoes hit and still until I went there. Until you stand in the wreckage, you just can't comprehend it. You just can't. It's a thing that you have to physically feel. Even if it's a place you have a lot of experience and love for, it is really, really difficult to, like you said, wrap your arms around this scale of devastation.

Beth [00:04:01] I grew up on a farm where we talked about acres all the time, and I still had to think, okay, in terms of a city, what does an acre look like? How do I conceptualize that? I found one comparison that said think about 75% of an American football field, that's an acre. That helps me a little bit. I've been reading a lot of commentary from fire experts, and this morning I read where someone said there's a level of fire and a level of wind where you're not a fighter anymore, you're an observer. You just cannot control the fire. You just have to wait it out. You have to try to contain it as much as you can using whatever you've got, but it's going to burn until it runs out of fuel and there's just not much you can do about it. And I cannot imagine what it would feel like to have spent your life and career preparing for an event like this and then for it to come and be so out of control at such an enormous scale for reasons that you have no influence over whatsoever, that you do just have to settle on let me save as many lives as possible here.

Sarah [00:05:01] It's like philosophically-- I told you last week I've been reading Paradise Lost, and I thought while we always describe hell as fire, we don't describe hell as floods or tornadoes or hurricanes. We describe hell as fire. I have also been totally consumed with fire experts. I read this really great piece in the L.A. Times about two experts, one who's a scientific expert on fire and one who was a cultural historian of fire. And he said, "We've always had fire as a companion and it's been our best friend. And now because we're not minding the relationship, it's become our worst enemy." And I thought, yeah, isn't that so true? It's this very shadow and light energy we have with fire as humans, something that furthered our development as a species but is so dangerous. And I think this one in particular, because it is in this urban area, both of us have read pieces about how predictable this was. There's this book going around Mike Davies's Ecology of Fear from the 90s where he wrote out exactly this. So this is what's going to happen. Let me describe it to you. And it is so affecting to feel like this place in Los Angeles and California is just is a place that occupies every single American citizen’s imagination, whether they want to admit it to themselves or not.

[00:06:34] The state as a whole, because it is big, because it is vast, because its economy affects every single one of us, and particularly Los Angeles, because of the entertainment industry. And so it's this economy, this place of dreams and imagination that occupies so many of us in this place that is dangerous because of its ecology. It just is this what makes it great? Again, that sort of tension between the light and the dark. The same you find in fire, the same you find in this place that is not surprisingly very, very vulnerable to fire. The mountains and the wildlife and the urban and the ocean, all of these things that make it special, make it vulnerable. So often that is true. And so I just think that it's just holding so much- this particular disaster. It is spiritual, it is philosophical, and then it is just bodily to people who have nowhere to go. So it's tiny, it's massive, it's all consuming; a word that seems appropriate.

Beth [00:07:41] And it stretches our capacity for ambiguity because we don't know what started these fires. We may not have one consistent answer for each fire. What we know is that the conditions of climate change, the conditions of weather, the conditions of these winds made it worse. But there isn't clarity. There's no one really to blame. So we're trying to blame people with whatever we can come up with. What's the budget? What's the mayor doing in Africa? We're just looking, looking, looking and we're rushing to get to the next phase. How can we rebuild quickly? How can we make it easier to rebuild? What are we going to do about insurance? We want to donate all the money. We want to send all the things. But the fires are still burning. I think this is stretching for us because it's not like the hurricane came and it's gone, the tornadoes blew through and it's over and now we've got the wreckage and we have to deal with it. It's still burning and we don't know when it's going to stop burning. And so you have layers of trauma for people involved here, people who are having to evacuate, people who are on a bubble, should we or shouldn't we? That's a horrible place to be. The first responders. This is a real psychological test for everybody who's even marginally impacted by it.

Sarah [00:09:02] And there's so many layers here. I think to what you said about the psychological test, I remember hearing a survivor of the camp fire fires saying to people in Maui you're just going to sleep. You just need so much sleep to recover from a trauma like this. And I never stop thinking about that. I don't know why that impacted me so strongly.

Beth [00:09:21] It feels right.

Sarah [00:09:22] Yeah, it does feel right because I think you want to rush to action. I am an over performer in moments of strife or trauma or danger disasters. Imma click in, let's do what we need to do. And her saying like you're just going to have to give yourself a lot of time to sleep this through made so much sense to me. And also I heard on NPR this morning that they actually haven't found a lot of evidence that people get really impactful PTSD; people get anxiety. They get really intense anxiety because of that bodily sensation of being on that teeter totter of should I or shouldn't I. And to the experts of it all, what was so interesting to me is you read enough about fire and fire experts, you get a conversation between these two. Like Mike Davis who died in 2022, wrote this book in 1998. He was really consumed with this wild urban interface that if you've been down the rabbit holes about this fire in Los Angeles, you have most certainly encountered this idea that you have development in areas. He had a chapter that was called Let Malibu Burn that people are talking a lot about right now as Malibu did burn that when you push development into these areas, it changes the soil. It changes the wild and it just makes everything more vulnerable.

[00:10:43] Because those Santa Ana winds come in, it's like a hurricane of fire. They just push the embers. They push the fire. And you can't combat it with our tools that we think about. You can't fire a helicopter in 100 mile per hour winds. You can't spray water in a 60 mile per hour wind; it just turns into mist. All these different components of it. And like that makes a lot of sense to me. But then I would read another expert that said we have to stop thinking about it like that. These aren't wild urban fires. These are just urban fires, and there's lots we can do to harden the environment. That's what we did after the great fire that burned down Chicago. Especially as we were developing these bigger and bigger urban areas, we were like, we have to do something. We have to harden our environment. That's how we got fire departments for the love of God. And he's like we kind of stopped paying attention to it. It's like a pandemic or polio. We have another outbreak because we stopped paying attention to vaccine rights. It was inevitable. We rested on our laurels, particularly with fire in an urban environment, and especially in a place like Los Angeles. And it's time to reinvest. I am sensitive to not blaming people, but I do think Karen Bass and the silence and the constantly sitting the press conference to other people, I think people especially in Los Angeles now she doesn't have a ton of power. It really rests with the legislative bodies. But still you have to talk. You have to be caring. You have to say things. You have to be up front. And I think people are really feeling the absence of that political leadership as they both deal with this personal exhaustion and these really big questions about what comes next and how we protect ourselves in this new reality where wildfire isn't seasonal. It's all the time.

Beth [00:12:34] Our longtime listener and executive producer, Christina, reminded me a couple of weeks ago of this lesson that John Green describes in his book about chaplaincy school where they taught him don't just do something, stand there- as a phrase. And I think that that's what's missing with the mayor. She is standing there, but she needs to stand there in a more emotionally available way. That's what feels like the problem to me here. I don't doubt that behind the scenes she's coordinating. I don't doubt that on that military plane back from Ghana she was doing everything that she could do. I don't doubt her intentions. I think that she is a dedicated, longtime public service who probably has a lot of relationships that are going to be extremely helpful in the aftermath of this. What is missing, I think, is what I got from Andy Beshear during the pandemic. He couldn't do a lot about the spread of Covid 19, but he stood there and emotionally lead us through it and said, "This is awful. I feel it. We care. This is devastating." And she's done some of that, but I think that it's not breaking through the way that you would hope it would.

Sarah [00:13:44] I think this is really hard. Karen Bass, the reporting is that everybody got alerts on their phone, what, Monday morning? And she still left. But like we both said, the warnings about this type of disaster have been present in Los Angeles for decades. So what part of her is a lightning rod of ignoring the warnings? It's a manifestation of what we all feel if we love Los Angeles and California. That we're ignoring the warnings. And I think that happens a lot with political leadership. And I don't feel sorry for her. That's inevitable if you're in a position of public service that you will become the manifestation of bigger problems or bigger areas of neglect. And so I think that's the really, really hard part with her. I think that it is at this point almost certain she would not win re-election if she even makes it that far. I think people will be so angry she could be facing a recall and we'll just have to see. But, again, it's never only about one thing; it's always a manifestation of a bigger issue. There's a reason this book is going around everywhere. You can't buy a copy right now. I think everybody is asking themselves what did we ignore and what could we face in hard and expensive ways to make sure we don't make that mistake again.

Beth [00:15:21] And this is tough because the fires are still burning. And so asking all of America to watch the fires still burning and at the same time engage in this analysis of all of the warnings that we're ignoring, or all of the warnings that we're not ignoring, but we aren't really leaning into to do as much about as we can. Environmental activists have been sounding these alarms for such a long time in increasingly dire terms. And we all find it very obnoxious. And we often vote in ways that say that's not our priority. And that kind of introspection, recrimination, finger pointing, blame, stakes raising in the midst of tragedy is really tough. We do this same kind of thing around gun violence. When's the right time to lean into those tough questions? If it's not now, when is it? So I don't know what is the right tone to strike in this particular moment other than to say we see how challenging this is. We see how many issues it raises. We see how many layers there are here. How can we contribute? How can we contribute at the right moment. How can we be okay with waiting until we know how to contribute? It's just that psychological test that I keep going back to because there is such an impulse to control something. When you look at a fire and realize how small and insignificant we really are in the face of nature, you want to control something. And here I think that blame is just a manifestation of how much we want to control something right now.

Sarah [00:17:05] And I think with fire it's so wrapped up in our ideas around real estate, especially in a place like California, and our stuff. I had a conversation with a friend whose childhood home burned. And so she doesn't have so much childhood photos, childhood memorabilia, and that contrast with another conversation I had about being buried in a grandparent's hoard. There's a tension here between how we want to acknowledge the loss because the stuff really does matter. And also you hear people evacuate and I was so struck by Laura Tremaine saying like, "When I was looking at what to take, I realized how much I really didn't care about." So there's all that tied up in it. I think for me what I'm really focusing on and controlling what I can. Yesterday, I had a conversation with the U.S. correspondent in France. He's in Paducah on a cross-country reporting trip. We had a long lunch and it was really lovely. And he was saying at one point in our conversation, you might be surprised or maybe you wouldn't by how many people I talked to who think New York just burned down in 2020 and there's nothing left there. Or I went to Chicago recently and my dad was like, well, there was a riot there, did you hear? and I'm like, Dad, there was not a riot when I was there. It was completely safe. I don't know what you're talking about.

[00:18:33] And so I'm so worried that we spend a lot of time talking about how the elites on the coast and the big cities need to spend more time listening to middle America. And that is true. That's true. And also middle America is very provincial. And it always surprises me how often I will encounter someone in Paducah who's never been to Chicago, who's never been to New York City, who's certainly never been to Los Angeles. And so I don't want these images to feed the caricature of Los Angeles that it's just this dead and dying place. It is a lively and vibrant and beautiful city. And so, that's what breaks my heart. I just know people are going to see these images of burned out cars. And it's going to feed this terrible caricature they have about L.A. and feed the fear they have about cities. Because that's what drives all this. It's just a fear. And, look, they're big. They got big energy. They're unwieldy. That's what I love about cities, particularly what I love about Los Angeles. And so in my conversations with people, I just try to keep that love center like this is an alive place that has suffered an injury, but it is alive. It is a big, beautiful city and it deserves our love and it deserves so much more than the way we talk about it, and the way we especially in other parts of the country let it become this caricature. Because what you see in moments like this is the beating heart of the city. You see the people who make it up-- not the stories we tell about it, but the actual people.

Beth [00:20:14] I'm very frustrated by comments from some House Republicans about tying disaster relief to other measures to extract some price from Democrats to do federal disaster relief in Los Angeles. And I think that that's because of the caricature. I felt this a little bit when news reports focus on celebrities who've lost their homes. Not that I am unsympathetic to celebrities who've lost their homes. Anyone losing a home is a difficult personal grief. But I always wish they would kind of circle around to the fact that Los Angeles is both extraordinary and ordinary. There are just regular people living regular lives. They're doing regular jobs, even if they work in the film industry. A lot more people are on the crew and doing hair and makeup and cleaning up and providing lunch than are the stars of those movies. We know the trend right now is to talk about re-industrialization in the United States economy. I remember 20 years ago sitting in an Arby's with my law school friends, Blaine and Sarah, talking about how the United States doesn't really make much that we sell to the rest of the world except movies. So this has been around a long time. And the economic impact for the entire country of Los Angeles County is enormous. And that means that a lot of ordinary people are there suffering in the course of this tragedy and should not be afforded a different level of dignity or respect or care or access to public funds than they would be if this had happened in Kansas.

Sarah [00:21:52] Now, that is a particularly gross form of politics and it's not surprising. We're not going to see any compassionate leadership coming from the Trump administration in the face of any natural disasters for the next four years. We're just not. Even in places that vote to support him, he does not have that capacity. He just doesn't. And so I don't expect that from him. I expect that every turn he will make it worse. And the Republican Party that follows his lead will make it worse.

Beth [00:22:21] Sometimes I wish we could get some upsides of demagoguery from him. I was thinking about how he's a builder, right? That's how he wants to be seen. He wants to be seen as a builder, as this dynamic person who increases the economy. So I wish he would stop being a blamer and be a builder on the other side of this and come out and announce that we're going to make Los Angeles the beautiful city that it once was, restore it to its glory before these fires. Look at all these donations pouring in for my inauguration. We're going to take half of that and immediately funnel it to disaster relief. I don't need it to necessarily come from compassion. I just want him to do the right thing and I want him to be a leader around this. And so I'm trying to hold space in my heart for how that could look, even though it is not going to be the way that the I would personally be inspired by.

Sarah [00:23:12] Well, you have to have a vision to be like that, though. He doesn't have a vision. He has a desire. He has a present day focus, but he doesn't have a vision. I'm reading Peter Thiel book Zero to One and he talks about the indefinite optimism that's not really focused on a goal or a vision. What are we trying to build? He wants to make America great again. He wants America to win, but I don't see a vision for what America should look like in 2035 from Donald Trump. Except for him and his family and his cronies richer.

Beth [00:23:45] Well, speaking of richer, there is a giant economic impact of what's happening in Los Angeles. And we really wanted to talk today about insurance broadly because the risk environment across the country is changing. Every natural disaster we have discussed over the past year, we've discussed in apocalyptic terms. And so we want to take a quick break and come back and discuss what that means for insurance and the ability to rebuild and our capacity to buy homes in the first place. I thought the AP put it perfectly this morning. Experts and policymakers agree climate change is upending the way that homes are insured in the United States. We've seen that over the past couple of years. We're going to see it even more on the other side of these fires.

Sarah [00:24:35] Well, what's crazy is that the Senate Budget Committee literally put out a big old report on the coming catastrophe with home insurance and climate in December. Just put it out. It's clearly something everybody's been thinking about. I think that's why the cultural historian on fire really spoke to me just the way he was like we were just sputtering along on how things worked in the 20th century. I feel that so often. I feel like we're just like with duct tape and maybe some pipe cleaners, we're just trying to hold the car together. That's like actually in 1964 and that's not going to make it on this current journey. We need a new car because home insurance just feels like is really built on this mid-century idea. Definitely on the idea around wildfires as seasonal, hurricanes as a certain type of seasonal event. You can just see all these pieces that are old. I don't have to say it any other way. They are on an old understanding of our climate, our economy and our world.

Beth [00:25:49] Just at the end of 2024, California's Department of Insurance passed new regulations that had been heavily negotiated with insurers where they said, hey, history is not working as we set our rates. The insurers were begging, please allow us to project forward to model based on climate as we set our rates instead of having to justify them solely on historic events. And that compromise was reached and that the pressure on insurers then was to write more policies in California. And that just happened at the end of last year before these fires. So you have this really complicated, precarious landscape of homeowner's insurance in California anyway. And into the middle of that drops this loss at such a scale that it's just too soon to even speculate about the numbers, but it is going to be the costliest fire in U.S. history.

Sarah [00:26:41] I think it will probably be the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history. They were writing new policies and also dropping policy. State Farm dropped nearly 70% of its policy in the Pacific Palisades last year. Oh my God. If you've been following this, I had that new change in California in my little feature shows folder along with Florida, which made a lot of changes to its insurance as last resort. Because those are coming up more and more which to me seems like a red flag. So if you've been reading about this or following this at all, you've seen fare plans come up with just fair access to insurance requirements. This came in after federal legislation-- and wait for it, what decade do you think, Beth?

Beth [00:27:27] It's the '60s.

Sarah [00:27:28] It was the '60s, guys. Surprise. After the riots they were like insurers were fleeing. So the federal government incentivized states to set up these prop programs. But you get into this even a little bit it's so confusing because you have a little over half of states having these fair insurance plans, these catastrophic and these are last resorts. Like they'll cover your house, but not your belongings. They're expensive. Then you have the National Flood Program, which really runs through the federal government, it isn't put out through all these state programs. Then you have Florida's new version it just invented for it-- because everybody realizes what a mess. What are we doing? This is a mess. All these different half federal programs, have state programs where some states are trying new things, what are we doing, everybody?

Beth [00:28:20] We've always been gambling in insurance.

Sarah [00:28:23] True.

Beth [00:28:23] As much as we want to put math around it and justify it-- and it does work often, but we've always been gambling with insurance. I think the truth is the risk environment is such that even all of the data that we can assemble does not lead us to a place where we have risk pools large enough to respond to disasters of this scale, which means always the government is going to be the insurer of last resort. And we've got to figure out a mechanism for that that is at all sustainable and that isn't subject to political whims, where you have one party trying to extract concessions from the other just to do the basic function of government in providing some kind of backstop when things like this happen. If you look at the United States government right now, I just read this book called Risky Business by three economists talking about why insurance markets fail and what we can do about it. And that book really focuses on the problem of selection. That the challenge with insurance is always that the person buying it knows more about why they need it than the insurer. And so every kind of insurance has that risk. People who buy insurance plans with annuities live longer than people who don't like. They have some private information about themselves that leads them to choose the annuity instead of the payout. And that's just true across every kind of insurance. But in that book, they talk about if you look at the U.S. government today, it is basically a massive insurer with a side gig in defense. Because all of our biggest programs are about coming in to backstop what people cannot get anywhere else and to provide some level of safety when everything else fails. And I think that's the proper function of government, probably especially in 2025. California has experimented with how to have that backstop, but to keep the exposure on the backs of private companies instead of on taxpayers. And that to me is the test for the fair plan right now. Can you continue to have private insurance companies in California if you are forcing them by virtue of writing any property policies into participating in this syndicate that is going to be on the hook for so much damage?

Sarah [00:30:44] Yeah, because that's how the fair plan works. Any private insurer that gets a license to issue policies in the state of California contributes to the fair plan. So it's the government, but sort of. And also, I think what gets a little bit lost when we talk about this. You can talk about one approach, even if it's just politically from the federal government. But when you talk about all these fair plans or different approaches across the states, you're talking about a massive spectrum of approaches. The New York Times had this great piece about how what often happens is states, usually Republican led states, take a very hands off approach to premium hikes. So any hike you want to put through, they rubberstamp it. They're like, sure, sounds great. Whereas, a state like California, primarily Democrat states, are very aggressive. You can't just hike the premium. So that's why they were coming to that agreement with the insurers because they were like give us a break; we have got to raise rates.

[00:31:49] What you see, even though, of course, the national insurers like State Farm will tell you we don't do that, is to make up for what their hands being tied and blue states they raise rates precipitously in red states. My rates are about 20% higher nationally than they should be in Kentucky. They did a big part of this piece on Oklahoma. Because Oklahoma you can go up to the border and you can see that obviously the risk of some areas that are touching Kansas they have very similar risk rates. But clearly, Kansas takes a more aggressive approach. And so they'll pay like twice what somebody 10 miles over the border will pay. And so I think that's part of the problem, too. And I don't know if nationalizing, centralizing it is the answer. I know that nothing's working. I just see this quilt that we're trying to stitch together and it's not covering anyone. Feels like it's like a giant bed where everybody's always jerking the covers and someone's feet are always sticking out the ends.

Beth [00:32:54] Yeah, I read that California legislators are trying to shore up the fair plan on an emergent basis by issuing some catastrophic bonds. Well, I just read this piece about how bond investors are very skittish right now. They're looking at governments across the world thinking, I don't know that this bond thing is going to continue to work. We just keep issuing more and more and more bonds. There is a place where the bill comes due somehow. Somebody has got to have the cash to figure out what to do next.

Sarah [00:33:23] Yeah. And, look, the hard part is these costs are rising. If you don't have large [inaudible] the country that they're dropped completely. They can't find coverage. There was a guy affected in Altadena who was like, I'd always been covered. They dropped me. I thought it's never happened here. So he had no insurance at all. And even if you have insurance, the estimates can be anywhere from like 60 to 80% of Americans don't have enough home insurance. After the tornadoes in Mayfield like it spread through my community, like so many people were under insured in Mayfield. And so we raised our rates. There's a part of me that as we all are so in that space, especially far reaches of the country, that we don't feel in control, we feel heartbroken about what's going on in California, like there's a part of me that's like the best thing you can do is you make sure you're fully insured. Just call up your home insurance and say, "I want to make sure that I'm fully covered." Because if so many of us aren't, that's a part of the hole in the quilt. That's not great to begin with.

Beth [00:34:33] And these problems compound on themselves. So even if you are insured, let's say you're insured through the fair plan, that insurer of last resort in California is the option that you had. No one else would write a policy for you. So you have it. The average home price in the Palisades area is $3.5 million. Now, that is unfathomable to me based on where I live. But I also understand that if you picked up my house and set it down somewhere in California, it is going to have a value that is exponentially the value that I put on it here. Okay. The third plan only covers $3 million. If your house was valued at $3.5 million before this, that doesn't necessarily mean that that's the cost to rebuild exactly the house that you had because everything is more expensive right now. The raw materials are more expensive, the labor is more expensive. It is more expensive to get a loan. You have to have insurance to be able to get a loan. So we have a big question about who is going to finance this recovery? Who is going to put up the insurance for people to rebuild? And then can you integrate the lessons of this fire as you rebuild? Can we rebuild in a way that is more resilient knowing what could come again?

Sarah [00:35:43] Well, listen, the hardening is real. We've all seen the pictures from Los Angeles, from Maui, the people with the metal roofs, and it's like the only house still standing. So the hardening is real and it does work. And I do think that under all of this, though, is a really difficult conversation about America in the way it uses the home as the center of a family's wealth. I always hear Jerusalem Demsas in my head talking about that. You can't get mad at people when they're so protective around zoning. They're so angry about insurance rates. When we've basically built a system that you build your wealth on your home. I was talking about how It's a Wonderful Life is like some real home ownership propaganda, but it's about the home. You watch that movie the message is then you have a place, not an investment strategy for the rest of your life. A place to be with your family that is not dependent on a landlord. So you have safety and literal shelter. We've made it so much more than that.

[00:36:56] Nicholas and I were talking about that anti-social century. And I'm like, well, yeah, people want to be home. We've made our home so nice, like we've made them everything: the center of our lives, the center of our investment strategy, the center of everything. Not just shelter, everything. And when the reality is that is a mirage in a way. Every single one of us is on the precipice more than we want to admit of being a refugee. And even that book, the book about the ecology of fear, he talks about how this moment that in which Los Angeles was built, basically. He says it occurred during one of the most unusual episodes of climactic and seismic benignity since the inception of the Holocene. And I just think that's true in a lot of ways. It's not just true via climate. It's true via our economy. It's true via our political stability. I feel that in so many ways this sense of like we thought this moment-- I mean, stability is a word you've been using a lot too. That we thought this moment of stability was our right, that we were entitled to it. And so we built our lives in a way, our economy in a way, and our cities in a way that let us forget that we're always on the precipice. I know that's dark, but to me understanding that I come from thousands of years of human history, that that was their reality, It feels connective in a way. It feels like I'm not the first one to realize this or face this really, really hard truth that stability is I don't want to say a myth, but it's not permanent.

Beth [00:39:15] It's relative.

Sarah [00:39:15] It's relative. It's always relative.

Beth [00:39:17] I had my feature problem solving team here on Saturday to get ready. They compete this week and their topic is rising sea levels. So I spent three hours on Saturday with 13, 14-year-olds talking about the fact that the glacier that forms part of the border between Switzerland and Italy is melting and they're having to rethink that border. And we talked a lot about the ice sheet in Greenland melting and how that opens up access to mining rare earth minerals that had been left there before. And it opens new shipping lanes, but also it's going to cause a lot of disasters. We talked about the coast of New Jersey, about Louisiana literally sinking, the Florida coastline. So we're in it. And my daughter at the end of practice said, "So where can we live to get away from all of this?" And I said, "Well, we're probably in the best spot that we can be in for now. But that doesn't mean that we are isolated from the effects of any of this. Look out the window. We do not typically have 14in of snow just hanging around. And that's where we are right now." It is all connected and that can be really depressing. You look at a group of 13 and 14-year-olds and think, this is not your fault. You can go down that guilt spiral about generations.

[00:40:46] What I hope is that they take this and decide to ask better questions, to ask bigger questions. So I think in the wake of this fire, it's easy. And I understand why the governor immediately signs an executive order lowering those environmental review standards for rebuilding, try to rebuild faster. I get it. I get that drive. But I also think that there is importance in the pause to say, what questions do we need to ask before we rebuild and what kind of rebuilding makes sense given everything that we know? And what can we do for people in the meantime? And what do people need? And how can we cope with this on all of the levels of impact that we discussed at the very top of the show? I think that that pause is what I hope I'm teaching my students about confronting these lessons and what I hope I can find the maturity for in myself as I want to rush to make meaning on the other side of this.

Sarah [00:41:41] Well, and God save me, I think Peter Thiel's really gotten in my head about this. I'm ready for leadership that has a vision. I'm ready for vision generally. I think Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation gets to people because he has a vision of what he wants this to look like. I'm ready for people to have solutions and I don't want them to just be the AI guys. I want to hear people go, yeah, this approach to insurance is from the 20th century. This is what it should look like now. This is what the next phase looks like or this is what the new version looks like. It's not going to look anything like this. It's going to be completely different. That's what I'm ready for. I'm ready for people to present visions of what the next thing will be or what they want to try. I'm tired of the indefinite optimism. Let's just keep doing what we're doing, but maybe a little bit better. And I think in a way that's what the election results show, that most people are tired of that. That they're ready to shake things up and they're ready to try something new. And until there is a vision from the left-- and I think there is in places that can match the vision from the right, which I find shallow. And like I said, more of a present vibe than a future vision. But I'm ready for that and I want a competition. I want that future problem solving vibe. Like who has the solutions and how do we think they stack up against each other? And, look, I think that could come from a place like Los Angeles in California, a place that we started talking about as a place of imagination. And I hope that's what happens. I hope that's what comes from this.

Beth [00:43:31] I think it is really a reminder that that future vision has to have physical components. What has been so frustrating to me over the past few years is that most of the vision in our country has been obsessed with the digital world, not with the physical world. And I know that's not a binary that there are many people who think that the digital world can manifest in the physical world in really exciting ways. And I'm sure some of that's right.

Sarah [00:43:55] Yeah. But then some of them are Elizabeth Holmes.

Beth [00:43:58] But then some of them are Elizabeth Holmes and some of them truly and we've talked about this a little bit before, I think kind of worship data in a way that I don't think is going to get us anywhere. And that's what we're going to talk about next. Should our philanthropic giving be tied up in data, or is there something else at work?

Sarah [00:44:24] No, segment over it. We did it. Yay!

Beth [00:44:28] Emma Goldberg wrote a piece in December for The New York Times called What If Charity Shouldn't Be Optimized? And it talked about the philosophy of effective altruism, this idea that if you have money to give to alleviate suffering in the world, you need to maximize it. You need to look at the data and figure out where that money will do the absolute most good. And it is then your moral obligation to do the absolute most good with every single dollar that you're going to invest.

Sarah [00:44:58] Well, she talks a lot about Peter Singer. And, look, he has contributed to intellectual thought, but he's a bummer. That's the long and short of it. One of his arguments is basically they should not have rebuilt Notre Dame after it burned because that money would be more ethically applied in other places. So he would really hate me. [Inaudible] fly my ass to France just to see the rebuilt Notre Dame and it's not for me. And it should be because I'm an Enneagram one. So I should see this very black and white approach to giving, but it just was not for me. Not for me.

Beth [00:45:39] One of the most interesting critiques of a vector of altruism that I've seen is the idea that if you allow yourself to subscribe entirely to this philosophy, then you can justify making endless amounts of wealth for yourself in order to donate that wealth in this maximized way. It is again just about control. This is just about control. I have the dollars and I have the data and so I am now godlike. I understand where to put this. And I'm not trying to disparage people who ask hard questions about their wealth and where it can do the most good. That's great. I think if you are someone with the last name Gates and you've decided that mosquito nets or vaccines, whatever it is, is the best way you can spend that money, good for you. I also think it's worth asking, especially for those of us who are just regular people who don't amass giant fortunes, what does it mean to give our money? And what does it mean especially when a natural disaster has happened, something horrible has gone down in the world, that the first thing we do is look for links of where to give our money. I feel like we are stuck a little bit around this topic.

Sarah [00:46:59] Look, I'm here for the super wealthy doing some real effective altruism calculations, I guess. Because you also have you got Gates, but you also have Sackler’s that were putting their names on every museum from here to kingdom come in an attempt to clean up their image and to really buy status, because that's what the uber wealthy did with their donations for a long time and still do. It's how you got to the right event. It's how you got the right invitations, how you got on the right museum board. It's how you got the thing named after you with the right museum. That's not hard to see and to criticize. But I think you're right. I think just to think that one rule applies to everybody from the Gates Foundation to someone just trying to do the right thing in their community is kind of wild. That's why this article talks a lot about a woman named Amy Scholer and what she calls magnificent giving. She says we need charitable causes that make people's lives feel meaningful, radiant and sacred. And I think to what you were saying, the crossover to me where people are like butting up against just giving their money and where they want more, to me the Venn diagram of that is Jose Andre.

[00:48:20] That's why he comes up. That's why people want to give money to him. That's what they love him because he shows up with his body. And so people like one a piece of that. They like that aspect I think of the World Kitchen; that he is there feeding people. That it's like it's a physical impact because I think that is the magnificent giving. You get the overlap of impact and it obviously takes a lot of money. But he's showing up in people's lives and I think we all want that. And it's so hard in a moment like a natural disaster when the tornadoes hit Mayfield and they were needing volunteers. They were needing volunteers to sort their donations because you can't go out immediately and impact the physical environment. It's too dangerous. There's live lines and toxic chemicals and all these things. And so you're left just dealing with the mountains of water bottle or the crazy shit people send or whatever. It's hard. I was reading about a volunteer event in Los Angeles. They just had too many people show up. They had to shut it down. People want to give in moments of natural disaster and overall in ways that I think she names it beautifully, that feel meaningful. For me personally, just clicking a link on an Instagram story never feels meaningful to me. It just doesn't. Not to criticize people who that feels meaningful to. It just doesn't to me.

Beth [00:49:50] I've been thinking a lot about this. What motivates my giving? I've learned a lot from my mom on this point. When I was a kid, any time someone would come to our door asking for donations or call asking for donations, or we'd see a commercial that was really compelling, my mom would say we've made a decision that we give our money to our church, and our church gives to a variety of ministries that help all over the world. And we have to trust that we're doing our part. And we give it whether something horrible has happened in the news or not. And we give it as consistently as we can give it because we want those organizations to be ready when something horrible does happen. And I just see the wisdom of that approach more and more as I get older. That you make your decisions about the organizations you're going to support knowing that they need to be well when things are not awful and they need to be ready to respond and they need to be not overwhelmed by the influx of giving when something awful happens. And so that's kind of the philosophy I've adopted in my own giving. Where do I want to give consistently? Where do I want to dig in? And then trust that I'm doing my part when something awful happens?

Sarah [00:51:04] Well, and I think it's the difference between giving and helping. I think there's your overall strategy to annual giving, let's say, and the desire to help. That's what's so tough in a moment like this. Who doesn't want to help when you see the suffering playing out across every screen you're in front of? Who doesn't want to help? We all want to help. And so I think that how to sort through the desire to help and where to give, I always try to reach out to people on the ground, friends who live in the city. Our beloved agent Caroline lives in Los Angeles and we'll put the links in the show notes to the agencies she suggested, and who the people in her lives are giving to. But it's like I want to just be there, but I can't. That's not helpful. My desire to help the people of Los Angeles is not helpful because I do not live in Los Angeles. No one needs me flying in right now. And so that's just what's so hard. That's what feels so impossibly hard. It's you want to help, but you're not of the community. You just love the community from afar.

Beth [00:52:15] And so I think redirecting to your community often is the right answer. I was thinking about all of the churches in Los Angeles that have sustained losses and are also trying to be helpful because it is their community and be right there. And I thought, I wonder what we would do? And then I thought, I don't wonder. I know what we would do because I just sat in a board meeting about my church's partnership with the American Red Cross. We are building to be ready for whatever our version of this could be if the universe knocks on our door in that direction. And I feel good about that. I don't feel in control. I don't feel super satisfied. It's not like a hero's journey to be doing that kind of community building when the story isn't here, when the cameras aren't right here. But it does feel like that magnificent giving philosophy to me that it makes my life feel more meaningful and more sacred to be consistently involved.

Sarah [00:53:14] Well, and there's just no way to connect to your fellow human beings and then get the sensation of checking it off a list. It's always going to feel hard. You think Jose Andre goes to bed at night and be like, I did enough today? No, I'm sure he's always torn up like everybody else. I wonder if I could do more. I wonder if I could do this. That's part and parcel of being a part of this magnificent community. That's just it. That's part of it. To love it here, to love the people here. Hurts always. Forever. But it's a beautiful hurt. It's a beautiful hurt. It's a joyful hurt. And so, I think always leaning into that and feeling that is part of the journey.

Beth [00:54:03] We are so grateful that you all are on the journey with us and we really appreciate your time and your thoughts. We are sending love and hope and prayers and all of the energy that we can to everyone in Los Angeles, and especially everyone who is there on the ground able to do good right now. We'll be back with you on Friday to talk about the incoming cabinet. Until then, have the best week available to you.

[00:54:26] Music Interlude.

Sarah: Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production.

Beth: Alise Napp is our Managing Director. Maggie Penton is our Director of Community Engagement.

Sarah: Xander Singh is the composer of our theme music with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.

Beth: Our show is listener-supported. Special thanks to our executive producers:

Ali Edwards, Nick and Alysa Vilelli, Amy & Derek Starr Redwine, Amy Whited, Anya Binsacca, Ashley Rene, Ashley Terry, Barry Kaufman, Becca Dorval, Beth Loy, Brandon & Jessica Krausse, Catherine Kniss, Chelsea Gaarder, Christi Matthews, Christian Campbell, Christie Johnson, Christina Quartararo, Connie Peruchietti, Crystal Kemp, The Adair Family, Ellen Burnes, Emily Holladay, Emily Helen Olson, Gabrielle McDonald and Wren, Genny Francis, The Charney Family, Heather Ericacae, Jacque Earp, Jan Feltz, Janice Elliott, Jeff Davis, Jen Ross, Jeremy Sequoia, Jessica Whitehead, Jessica Boro, Jill Bisignano, Julie Haller, Julie Hough, Karin True, Katherine Vollmer, Katie Johnson, Katy Stigers, Kimberley Ludwig, Kristen Redford Hydinger, Kristina Wener, Krysten Wendell, Laura Martin, Laurie LaDow, Lee Chaix McDonough, Leighanna Pillgram-Larsen, Lily McClure, Linda Daniel, Linsey Sauer, Bookshelf on Church, Martha Bronitsky, Megan Hart, Michelle Palacios, Michelle Wood, Morgan McHugh, Onica Ulveling, Paula Bremer, The Villanueva Family, Sabrina Drago, Samantha Chalmers, Sasha Egolf, Sarah Greenup, Sarah Ralph, Shannon Frawley, Stephanie Elms, Susanne Dickinson, The Lebo Family, The Munene Family, Tiffany Hassler, Tracey Puthoff, Veronica Samoulides, Vicki Jackman.