← Hasan Minhaj Doesn't Know
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- [00:00]
Hassan Minhaj
Breaking News A cinnamon capuchin monkey named Chester trashed a pawn shop in what officials are calling a crime of opportunity. I read about Tennessee's smallest criminal on Ground News, which is Today's sponsor and HMDK's favorite independent news source. Ground News is a platform that shows a breakdown of publications reporting on a story, evaluating potential biases and factuality of these publishers. It's not about eliminating bias, you guys. It's about being a more informed consumer of the news. Thank God I used Ground News to research Chester. The first article I read about Chester reported that Chester crusaded a music store, but it turns out he was in fact targeting a pawn shop. Ground News had labeled that publication Low Factuality, which stopped me from spreading misinformation. I mean, imagine if that falsehood made it into my next stand up special. I would be destroyed in the press. Use the link in the description and go to groundnews.com hassan to get 40% off the ground News Vantage plan, the same one that I use, which makes it just $5 a month for unlimited access. That's groundnews.com Hussan for 40% off today. Thank you to Ground News. It's the new year so of course it's time to get unspeakably hot and really really healthy. My cheat code for wellness is going to Whole Foods looking for lean protein. I love grabbing the wild caught sockeye salmon at Whole Foods. All their proteins are always antibiotic and hormone free. Doing Dry January. Cool. Get on my level you fools. I am dry every month of the year and I love going to Whole Foods for something fun to sip on. They have so many options like Kombucha or probio sodas. We can have a little fun and meet our health goals. Okay, we all know this. The best part of Whole Foods is that I can trust their pre made food. Whether it's the hot bar, the365 ready to eat salad kits or ready to heat rice and beans to pair with my aforementioned lean proteins. Nothing is better for my wellness than having quick and easy options with trusted ingredients. Plus at Whole Foods they have big sales on supplements and vitamins. They have also got high quality protein powders and herbs. I don't know any other spot that does that. Shop all things wellness at Whole Foods Market.
- [01:59]
Jacob Soboroff
Lemonade.
- [02:03]
Hassan Minhaj
Do you feel like when progressives are now pulling out their iPhones and recording yeah, massed ice agents or for God's sakes teenagers and children and people getting just thrown into vans and whisked away to God knows Where are they doing the bidding of what the MAGA base actually wants? Are they uploading videos in some other part of the country? Someone seeing this on TikTok, and they're like, good, I think this is what we want.
- [02:29]
Jacob Soboroff
Yeah, it's a really good question. And I think that there are people within the administration certainly that want people to see this.
- [02:37]
Hassan Minhaj
Jacob Soboroff is a Senior Correspondent for Ms. Now. It used to be called MSNBC, but Ms. Now better reflects the urgency of our present moment, Ms. Now. It also reflects a corporate spinoff and desire to distance the channel's brand from NBC while also keeping some continuity, even though the Ms. Originally stood for Microsoft, which was part of a joint venture in 1996. Now, of course, Microsoft completely divested more than a decade ago, which made this the perfect opportunity to finally get rid of the Ms. And they didn't take it. Why? It makes no f ing sense. Just get rid of the Ms. Because you don't need it anymore. I've known Jacob for years. We're both Cali kids. And while he has the qualities of a great on camera news anchor, he's got the voice, the hair, the ability to laugh at Al Roker's jokes on cue. He also happens to be a really good person who genuinely cares about the people that he is reporting on, whether it's immigrants at the southern border who he spoke about in his 2021 book, Separated, or Victims of the LA Fires, the subject of his new book, Firestorm. So I sat down with Jacob to talk about his experience covering those fires.
- [03:33]
Jacob Soboroff
Watching my hometown burn down and my childhood memories sort of burn up before me.
- [03:38]
Hassan Minhaj
How the Trump administration is terrorizing immigrant communities and using the outrage as free advertising to the Trump base.
- [03:43]
Jacob Soboroff
They used us reporters in order to further their message of we're going to harm people and this is what it's going to look like.
- [03:49]
Hassan Minhaj
And to give my own deep analysis on all of these issues, well, that's depressing. That's all coming up next on mshmdk.
- [04:01]
Jacob Soboroff
Hurry right away. No delays. Make your daddy glad. You have had such a laugh.
- [04:11]
Hassan Minhaj
You were in Ukraine when the war started.
- [04:13]
Jacob Soboroff
Yeah.
- [04:13]
Hassan Minhaj
You were one of the first reporters to bring significant attention to Trump's family separation policy. You also have two amazing books, one on immigration, one on the firestorms that hit California. These are not light subjects.
- [04:25]
Jacob Soboroff
No.
- [04:26]
Hassan Minhaj
But I would say some of your finest work was when you were at the Today show. Let's take a look.
- [04:32]
Jacob Soboroff
Batteries? No, no batteries.
- [04:33]
Hassan Minhaj
Right here.
- [04:34]
Jacob Soboroff
You just.
- [04:36]
Hassan Minhaj
That's surprisingly quiet.
- [04:39]
Jacob Soboroff
Did you use it this morning. Yeah. Hold on one second. Oh, that's some power.
- [04:45]
Hassan Minhaj
This is the future. Do me.
- [04:47]
Jacob Soboroff
That'll always be on the Internet. Read. I am. It's my proudest work. As a matter of fact, actually, I.
- [04:55]
Hassan Minhaj
Have always wanted to ask someone who works at the Today show this question. What is morning news for?
- [05:02]
Jacob Soboroff
I don't know. I don't. I don't know.
- [05:06]
Hassan Minhaj
Like, for me, when I see the Today show, I know I'm at the dentist's office. Like, it's a geo. Geo tag for me of, like, I'm about to go see.
- [05:15]
Jacob Soboroff
Have a painful experience. Yeah.
- [05:17]
Hassan Minhaj
I'm gonna find out if I'm gonna have feelings or not. Yeah.
- [05:21]
Jacob Soboroff
What I will say is I did a lot of things in looking back that were enjoyable, like putting my feet in Crocs with shaving cream and blowing my face with a lawn blower. Yeah. But that's not the in depth reporting I think that was cited by the Cronkite committee when I received that award.
- [05:45]
Hassan Minhaj
Okay, I want to talk about the two books you've written, but let's start with the first.
- [05:49]
Jacob Soboroff
Okay.
- [05:51]
Hassan Minhaj
You were relentless in your reporting on Trump 1's child separation policy, which was a kind of cruelty that we've never seen before. Now we're seeing a whole different type of cruelty. But this time, the administration, they're not trying to hide it.
- [06:05]
Jacob Soboroff
No.
- [06:05]
Hassan Minhaj
It's out in the open. And I think there's been two things that have been quite shocking for me, which is they are very public about how they want to attack the immigration issue.
- [06:17]
Jacob Soboroff
Dude, mass deportation. Now, the signs. I was on the floor of the convention, they held up 11,000 people holding up signs, proudly saying they were gonna kick millions of people out of the country.
- [06:25]
Hassan Minhaj
I mean, there's also the social media trolling. Let's just go through the way the government offices, whether it's the White House or Stephen Miller's office, are communicating how they want to handle immigrants in this country.
- [06:39]
Jacob Soboroff
Okay.
- [06:40]
Hassan Minhaj
This is the game that they have come up with. This is kind of what I'm seeing. Number one, they make some horrible video of people being deported. And over the video, they'll play a Sabrina Carpenter song. They'll play, like, espresso.
- [06:49]
Jacob Soboroff
She did not love that.
- [06:50]
Hassan Minhaj
Right. Which then leads to Sabrina Carpenter, one of America's biggest pop stars, getting mad and saying, stop using my song. This is dehumanizing to people. I condemn this. This is bad. Stop using my song. They then shit on Sabrina Carpenter. Like, they pull a shut up and dribble they're like, shut up, Sabrina. We are going to use your song and we're going to double back and also include Marcelo Hernandez in the video for some reason, because all of that just brings more attention to their base. And to show their base, hey, we're deporting people and we're going to somehow put light pop music behind this horrible, dehumanizing thing. Do you think this basking in the cruelty, hard line approach is ever going to backfire on them? Or does MAGA just love watching shackled immigrants getting deported to Please, please, please.
- [07:36]
Jacob Soboroff
I think that Stephen Miller may very well feel that way. But, yeah, I do think it'll backfire, and I think we have evidence that it's backfired because it did. In the first Trump term, family separation was a uniquely cruel policy. 5,500 kids deliberately taken away from their parents for no other reason than to harm them. I mean, that was the stated goal. And in my reporting and in the film I made with Errol Morris, officials that were inside at the time say this was what we had intended to do. On Valentine's Day 2017. They literally all got in a meeting in the Ronald Reagan Room in Washington. Washington, Ronald Reagan building in Washington, D.C. and celebrated the idea of ripping children apart from their parents in order to stop other people from coming to the country. But. And 5,500 kids is 5,500 too many. Stephen Miller wanted to separate 25,000 using a process called administrative separations. And because hundreds of thousands of people went out to the streets in a, in a universal way, not even a bipartisan way, the Pope spoke out. Millions of people, I think, all over the world. It was the one time Trump stopped a policy of that nature during the first administration. And he said, he didn't say, oh, my God, I'm morally opposed to what we're doing. This is awful. He said, I didn't like the sight and the feeling of the families being separated, meaning he didn't like what he was seeing on tv, didn't like people in the streets. So I don't know if it's Sabrina Carpenter or if it's no Kings Day protest or whatever, but I do think that there's, you know, I think that there's documented evidence that they back down in the face of public opposition. That's starting to happen again.
- [09:04]
Hassan Minhaj
Do you think Donald Trump will bring back the child separation policy from Trump 1. Or do you think, like you were saying, these protests, these peaceful ICE protests, do you think that will change his perception here or Will he have to double down?
- [09:18]
Jacob Soboroff
I think he's already bringing back a family separation policy. Because what is mass deportation? Mass deportation is family separation just by another name. Mass deportation is not family separation inside the detention centers at the border, but it's family separation in the interior of the country. And I've seen them do it to people like this young woman, Ani, who was a Babson College student, 19 years old, trying to go home for freaking Thanksgiving to surprise her parents. And she was deported to Honduras when she got to the airport, Logan Airport, a week before Thanksgiving. That is family separation by another name. It's not. It's in the interior. It's taking parents away from their children. It's ripping parents children away from their parents and deporting them to their home country. It's playing out every day all over the country, I think, actually in a scale that's much bigger than was happening down on the border at the time.
- [10:04]
Hassan Minhaj
Why would this backfire if his base loves this?
- [10:07]
Jacob Soboroff
Because I actually think that, like we saw during the first term, it's not what they were sold. They're not deporting the worst of the worst. And that's what they continue to say every day. Sure, they're deporting ordinary people. They're deporting Nori Santay Ramos, an honor student from Miguel Contrera's learning complex in la. Track star AP student who was sent back to Guatemala after a routine immigration check in with her mom in la, only to have her mother die when she got back to Guatemala because ice, they say, didn't send her medication with her. And those stories are happening all across the country. I've seen it play out in la. I was in Chicago when I watched it play out. I was in Charlotte a couple weeks ago. But the thing that I continue to see, also including in a place like Charlotte, is hundreds of people show up at a church on a Monday night to know your rights. The mayor elect here of New York just put out a huge video about what to do if ICE comes knocking at your door.
- [11:03]
Hassan Minhaj
ICE cannot enter into private spaces like your home, school, or private area of your workplace without a judicial warrant signed by a judge that looks like this.
- [11:12]
Jacob Soboroff
And I think people are just starting to wake up to say, we don't have to accept this. And I do think that, though, I mean, there's a reason Greg Bovino bounced from LA and then went to Chicago and then went to Charlotte. I think he has realized he has not been welcome in those places.
- [11:27]
Hassan Minhaj
What shaped my view of immigration as A California kid was twofold. Number one, I'm a child of immigrants, and so I see immigration and citizenship as a byproduct of essentially luck. You don't get to control where you're born or who you're born to. So I feel incredibly lucky to have this privilege to live in this amazing country. And I have a ton of empathy for people that are trying to come to this country because I feel lucky myself. But then there's another kind of POV on immigration, which is this almost like this cruel varsity basketball coach approach, which is like, listen, we got five spots and you better fucking bring it if you want to be one of those five. And you know what? I may shut down the whole team. I don't want any of you guys because I don't want any brown people on my basketball team. For some reason, that's kind of the POV and position.
- [12:17]
Jacob Soboroff
Look what Trump's saying about Somalia. Yeah, totally.
- [12:20]
Hassan Minhaj
Somali immigrants as well. You know what shaped your perspective on immigration? As a kid who grew up in California and who grew up in the.
- [12:29]
Jacob Soboroff
Palisades, I. Yeah, exactly. A Palisades where I grew up as a. As a, was a relatively white, affluent neighborhood. And we'll talk about the fire that burned it down in la, but I grew up also in a civic minded family where I spent a lot of time all over the city. And LA is one of the most diverse cities, not only in the country, but in the world. It is a. I don't even like this moniker, but a majority minority city at this point. There are more Latinos in LA than any other demographic. And that is an unavoidable fact and reality about living in Los Angeles. And so when I went from, like you said, we've known each other for a long time, and you became very famous, and I became Ron Burgundy working in the news when. When I went from being a red carpet correspondent to working at. At MSNBC in 2015, Trump. It was the ascension of Trump. And he was saying things like, Mexicans are rapists and criminals and murderers as he came down the gold elevator at the beginning of his campaign. And none of that resonated with me. This guy sounded crazy, the way he was talking about this stuff, knowing what I. I mean, just knowing the community that I grew up in and around. And so at first what I wanted to do was fact check is like ridiculous claims, but. But the honest truth is I didn't really have a full understanding of how deeply rooted in both parties the immigration system really was in terms of being punitive and criminalizing people who just want to come here for, for a better life. And so I started doing all these fact checks about like, is Ms. 13 really here? And the numbers that they are or are drugs coming across in legal ports of entry or in between, or are kids, you know, is the border really a war zone? Because none of that rang true to me. I knew that I grew up in this beautiful, wonderful, multicultural city, Los Angeles, that sounded nothing like what this guy was describing who was running to be the president, United States. And so when he ultimately ran, those were the kind of fact checky stories that I did because they didn't align with what I knew as a kid that grew up in Southern California. But what I didn't know is that the family separation policy and these really, truly cruel, these, these. I mean, it was torture, in the words of Physicians for Human Rights, government sanctioned child abuse, in the words of American Academy of Pediatrics. That they were being developed under the surface. And that candidly came as a surprise to me and maybe because of where I came from and who I am that I was, that I didn't live this every day like so many other people. And that's the truth.
- [14:53]
Hassan Minhaj
Well, you and I grew up. We're roughly the same age too, so we kind of grew up as children in the optimism of the Clinton era of the 90s. But I'd love to ask you as you write this book, and I say this with anyone who's an author, I know how much work goes into the book. So I wanted to ask you this because I haven't seen you answer this in a ton of interviews and I'd love for you to wax poetic here. What has America's position been on immigration, irrespective of partisanship, over the past, let's call it 25 to 35 years.
- [15:23]
Jacob Soboroff
Harm, harm to immigrants has been the point and that is in Democratic and Republican administrations. And it's why I say that in my first book and Separated, I called it Inside An American Tragedy because it is uniquely American. We'll remember that chapter of American history. Don't take it from me. Take it from the Republican appointed Judge Dana Sabraw, who stopped the family separation policy. He said it was one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country. But it was just a chapter and it will fit in with Native American genocide and slavery and the incarceration of Japanese Americans and the turning around of the St. Louis and sending Jews back to the Holocaust. This is what we have done to immigrants in this country. Not just for the last 25 years, but for, and by the way, forced migration and non, for the whole history of the country. But in our lifetimes, Democratic and Republican presidents have used deterrence based, punitive based, arguably cruel policies to scare people from coming to this country because migrants were looked at as numbers on a chart or on a bar graph, not as fellow human beings. And so in the modern era, Bill Clinton instituted a policy called prevention through deterrence, where they built the first wave of border walls to try to force people to go around them into more dangerous and deadly areas, knowing people would die coming into the country. And then George W. Bush, post 9 11, exponentially increased the size of the Border patrol deported people en masse using a thing called Operation Streamline. Barack Obama deported more people than any president in the history of the country. It's why they called him the deporter in chief. And that's why Donald Trump, like that, could separate 5,500 kids from their parents. And Joe Biden, by the way, continued many of these deterrence based policies, even though he said he wanted a fair and safe and humane and orderly immigration system.
- [17:09]
Hassan Minhaj
When Kamala Harris also said, if you're coming here, don't, don't come, do not.
- [17:13]
Jacob Soboroff
Come.
- [17:16]
Hassan Minhaj
Do not come. For you as a reporter and for you as a journalist, when you now see the historical pattern and then you see both the, the use of media and then actual physical deterrence on the ground, how do you look at this? Do you look at this from a partisan lens? Do you look at this from a sense of, do you feel ashamed of America? How do you look at it?
- [17:33]
Jacob Soboroff
I think it's just those are the facts on the ground, and that's how we've dealt with this for so long. And as a reporter, you know, I heard Joe Biden say he. I will never forget the final presidential debate when 545 kids had still remained separated from their parents and he went up against Donald Trump. And Kristen Welker had asked both of them about what they would do. And Biden basically stood on this issue, the cruelty of the issue as his closing message in the campaign. But when you look at the Biden administration in retrospect, you know, you said, I went to Ukraine, but when I came back, they were letting Ukrainians in, but not Asian people, black or brown people waiting on the other side of the border who had traveled to Tijuana trying to come into San Diego and seek asylum or seek refuge. He deported, I went to Haiti, deported a record number of people back to Haiti to almost certain, certainly danger, but maybe death as well, in one of the most violent countries in our. In our hemisphere. And so how do I look at it? I look at it as it's been sort of part and parcel of American policy for too long. The last person to have a radical departure from the system was Ronald Reagan, who gave amnesty to people who had lived here for a certain amount of time and met certain criteria, and in his eyes, were contributors to American society. That, as Colbert actually said to me when I was on his show, is a radical departure. That is courage, whether you like it or not. That is a departure from the system that we have today. I'm not advocating for it, but I'm saying that's different than the way that Democrats and Republicans have done it for so long.
- [19:04]
Hassan Minhaj
I have seen that perception is a big part of how the American public looks at immigration.
- [19:10]
Jacob Soboroff
Yeah.
- [19:12]
Hassan Minhaj
Border crossings have plummeted because migrants are afraid to come over. Is this true?
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Jacob Soboroff
Yeah.
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Hassan Minhaj
Okay. And the surge during Biden was because they also perceived him as weak on immigration. Is that true?
- [19:23]
Jacob Soboroff
I think there's a lot of factors that push people here. Okay, so, yes, perhaps. I mean, he had a softer tone. But there are millions of people on the move at any given time all over the world, and there are many factors, including climate change, including persecution, including violence, you name it.
- [19:40]
Hassan Minhaj
Right. This is going to feel a little counterintuitive, but walk me through this. Do you feel like when progressives are now pulling out their iPhones and recording.
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Jacob Soboroff
Yeah.
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Hassan Minhaj
Massed ICE agents, or for God's sakes, teenagers and children and people getting just thrown into vans and whisked away to God knows where? Are they doing the bidding of what the MAGA base actually wants? Are they uploading videos in some other part of the country, someone saying this on TikTok? And they're like, good. This is what we want.
- [20:11]
Jacob Soboroff
Yeah, it's a really good question. And I think that there are people within the administration, certainly, that want people to see this. And I can tell you that firsthand, because that's why Katie Miller, Stephen Miller's wife, then Katie Waldman, invited me into the detention centers at the height of the family separation policy. They wanted people to see what it looked like on the inside. They wanted our description because they wanted us through it. And in a way, we were. We were. We were tools. I mean, Errol Morris asked me in our movie, you know, was I a tool of the administration? And I did say bigly. In. In a certain way. I think that they used us reporters in order to further their message of we're going to harm people, and this is what it's going to look like. But as it relates to people on the streets today documenting there are, you know, alleged human rights abuses going on in the streets of America today, with massed armed federal agents doing this to people. Narciso Barranco, that landscaper from Santa Ana who was after literally cutting bushes outside an IHOP and was taken down, has three Marine Corps sons. One of his sons, Alejandro, said to me, if what wasn't recorded was recorded, he wouldn't have been able to describe what he saw as a war crime. He said, I'm a former Marine. I'm a Marine. Once a Marine, always a Marine. If I would have treated a detainee in Afghanistan when I was there, the way those dudes treated my dad, I'd be court martialed for a war crime. And so I think there's a little of both. But I do think that the videos on the street are what's mobilizing people to stand up and push back.
- [21:39]
Hassan Minhaj
One of the things that you've shown and you've been reporting on, for example, is community organizing. Yeah, we're seeing communities pushing back against ICE in Chicago. They're actually distributing whistles amongst people in the community. So they will blow the whistle if they see an ICE agent coming. They're not, you know, coaching rec league basketball. They're not just like refereeing on the side. They're refereeing.
- [22:02]
Jacob Soboroff
There is a shortage for rec league basketball.
- [22:04]
Hassan Minhaj
There is a shortage. By the way, I am a rec league basketball coach. But, but, but they are referees in the sense that they're blowing the whistle on this bullshit and they're trying to rally the community to go, hey, let's protect one another.
- [22:16]
Jacob Soboroff
It works.
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Hassan Minhaj
How successful are these grassroots.
- [22:18]
Jacob Soboroff
It works. It works. I talked to a lady in Charlotte, North Carolina, who literally said, we were at this Monday night at a. At a Methodist church in, in Charlotte where 300 people came out and this lady, I think her name was Jenny, she was the teacher, she said she had been in one of these trainings before, these Know youw Rights trainings, and, and she had gone out and was documenting ICE in the early days of Border Patrol and all them being out on the streets of Charlotte and they had been able to stop, through the blowing of the whistles, them detaining a particular individual. And they sort of backed off and this person went free. And so that's one anecdotal story, but literally last weekend, a thousand people showed up in a church in New York to train this weekend. I think, I think I read there's dozens of trainings here in the city because when the mayor elected, sworn in, you know, who knows what the President's going to do? Is Greg Bevino going to show up here in New York? I think. I think people are ready and I think that they've realized that these tactics do. They do work. That's what I'm saying. That's why I think Greg Bevino has left la, left Chicago, went on to Charlotte, now is in New Orleans. They can't stay in one place for too long because people understand their tactics and are organizing against them.
- [23:19]
Hassan Minhaj
I want to talk to you about something that I saw recently at the kind of the New York Times dealbook summit where Gavin Newsom was kind of talking about the way Democrats need to communicate. We have to be more culturally normal. We have to be a little less judgmental. We have to have be a party that understands the importance and power of the border substantively and politically. What is the central idea or message around coming to this country, quote, unquote, the right way?
- [23:50]
Jacob Soboroff
There is no line that people who show up down at the border can get into. And I think that that's sort of the misunderstanding fundamentally of the conversation around this. The system has been broken for so long, and asylum is a legal right. You know, you can come to the United States and seek asylum, but for some reason and in some way, because we treat immigration and immigrants as, like I said, points on a chart, bar graphs. We talk about immigrants like they're part of a weather system, the flow or it's almost.
- [24:23]
Hassan Minhaj
It's almost like a stat line.
- [24:24]
Jacob Soboroff
Yeah. Yes. That's what it feels like.
- [24:26]
Hassan Minhaj
Yeah.
- [24:26]
Jacob Soboroff
And not as human beings that come from countries all over the world in order to flee all these things that we were talking about and to seek a better life and to protect their children, in a lot of cases, to survive. It has become a bipartisan political liability in the eyes, I think, of both of these political parties.
- [24:44]
Hassan Minhaj
Why do you see it as like a human interest story? I'm really fascinated by this. We haven't talked about this. Your father worked in law enforcement, right?
- [24:50]
Jacob Soboroff
Yeah. He was a civilian on the Civilian Oversight committee of the LAPD for 10 years.
- [24:54]
Hassan Minhaj
How do you look at this issue from a humanistic POV when a lot of people would think, hey, this guy is the son of someone who worked in the lapd? Obviously the lapd, not a great rep when it comes to immigration or working with black and brown People.
- [25:08]
Jacob Soboroff
So I've heard. Yeah.
- [25:10]
Hassan Minhaj
So I've seen as well.
- [25:11]
Jacob Soboroff
Yeah.
- [25:11]
Hassan Minhaj
What shaped your POV here?
- [25:14]
Jacob Soboroff
I think that the biggest blessing in the job that I have is that I get to meet people oftentimes in their worst moments. And that extends to people experiencing homelessness, living on the street. It extends to people who are users of drugs and find themselves in sort of destitute situations, people who are on the other end of the affordability crisis that we have in this country. And people let me into their lives in all kinds of moments where the only tool to understand is empathy and to try to connect and to have the privilege of being let into other people's lives in those kind of moments. You know, I've met with students that go to LA public schools that live in RVs, or people literally have let me watch them shoot up using fentanyl or heroin. And to be able to be with somebody down on the border as they're trying to get into this country because they are desperate to protect the lives of their children, they're desperate to, frankly, to survive is a particular privilege. And I really don't take it lightly. I think that it's the sort of the job that we have as journalists is to report the facts on the ground as we see them. And for me to not show up to something, to pretend like there's two sides to a story of somebody who is having the worst day of their life. And so that's what I want to communicate. What about when I meet people in any of these circumstances? And I think that really extends to immigration and why I've spent so much time trying to focus on personal stories rather than big narratives. And they're, you know, I'm following in the footsteps of many, many people who've done this for much longer. But this is why I'm not why I left NBC and the Today show and that world and came back to Ms. Now, because these are where I can tell stories like this. And. And it is a unique opportunity and privilege to be able to do it.
- [27:05]
Hassan Minhaj
I hope what you're saying is true. You know, obviously, the journalism that you're doing, but then the citizen journalism that's happening right now, obviously those things can be tools of misinformation. But I hope, as you mentioned before, whether it was Japanese internment or other horrific stains on America's history and legacy, one thing that I've heard that's very common right now in regards to the conversation around immigration or the United States involvement in Gaza is we cannot unsee what we've seen.
- [27:35]
Jacob Soboroff
Yeah.
- [27:36]
Hassan Minhaj
And I hope there's a change coming out of this. Do you feel that way?
- [27:39]
Jacob Soboroff
I hope so. I often find it and extends to the fire too. For me, when you go into these big consequential events as a reporter, it gives you almost X ray vision into what's really going on in society. And to watch any of that play out particularly firsthand, like given the opportunity to do it firsthand in the places that I've reported on, I see very clearly the fissures and who's left behind and who is the victim of the cruelty. And so I do hope that through the eyes of people that do what I do and there are many people who do it better than I can. Yeah, the way you're describing is the case that there is no turning back.
- [28:18]
Hassan Minhaj
I want protein to be a priority in my life. Not as high as family, but higher than sports highlights. That is why I started using the High Protein Starter Kit from Huel. It comes with 5 bottles of black edition ready to drink plus the black edition Chocolate powder Huel just launched in Target Nationwide. So you can grab Ready to Drink bottles straight off the shelf right now. Now on days that I'm running out the door or heading to the gym, I just grab a Black Edition Ready to Drink. It's a complete meal. You got 35 grams of protein, 27 essential vitamins and minerals, no artificial sweeteners. And here's the kicker, it actually tastes good. Then on days when I'm home or I'm just feeling a little bit fancy, I use the Black Edition powder. I will make a smoothie with it and I like to add some bananas and blueberries and almond butter if I'm feeling really crazy. Having convenience but optionality keeps me from falling off of my routine. Get Huels full High Protein Starter Kit online with my code Hasson for 20% off@huel.com Hussan new customers only. And thank you to Huel for partnering and supporting hmdk. It's the new year so of course it's time to get unspeakably hot and really, really healthy. My cheat code for wellness is going to Whole Foods looking for lean protein. I love grabbing the Wild caught Sockeye salmon at Whole Foods. All their proteins are always antibiotic and hormone free. Doing Dry January. Cool. Get on my level you fools. I am dry every month of the year and I love going to Whole Foods for something fun to sip on. They have so many options like Kombucha or probiotic sodas. We can have a little fun and meet our health goals. Okay, we all know this. The best part of Whole Foods is that I can trust their pre made food. Whether it's the hot bar, the365 ready to eat salad kits or ready to heat rice and beans to pair with my aforementioned lean proteins, nothing is better for my wellness than having quick and easy options with trusted ingredients. Plus at Whole Foods they have big sales on supplements and vitamins. They have also got high quality protein powders and herbs. I don't know any other spot that does that. Shop all things wellness at Whole Foods Market. This episode of HMDK is brought to you by booking.com I love to travel, but I can't say that it's easy. My family has never been described is low maintenance. We all have different ideas of relaxing. What is fun for my 70 year old parents is the opposite of what is fun for my younger cousins. Thankfully, booking.com offers a wide array of hotels and vacation rentals across the United States. So there is something for everyone, even those who are impossible to please. I'm talking about you dad. Whether you're booking for yourself or your picky parents or da boys group chat, you can find exactly what you are booking for. For example, my number one request at a hotel or a rental is a sauna. Now I will settle for a steam room, but I gotta sweat out my demons. Speaking of, my kids appreciate a touch of whimsy. A cute window seat to read on, A water slide in the pool. A massive pile of construction dirt next door. They're not picky. Dare I say if we can find our Perfect stay on booking.com anyone can find exactly what you are booking for@booking.com booking yeah, book today on the site or in the app as we're talking about perception and the way in which it influences elections and politics. Immigration was a huge reason why Democrats allegedly lost in 2024. It was a. It was a big talking point. There was that famous quote from David Frum. I don't know if you remember this quote. If liberals won't enforce borders, fascists will. And that's what we're seeing. If Democrats take back the White House in 2028. What do you think their approach to the border should be?
- [31:45]
Jacob Soboroff
You know, I'm not a political strategist and I'm not going to give the Democrats any advice. But I think one thing that as a journalist or as a filmmaker, when I worked with Errol Morris to make the film Version Separated, what we would always say is nobody's against Having borders and the idea that somehow Democrats, who, by the way, when Joe Biden was president, as I told you, there was this narrative of open borders. And yes, there were many people who came in to seek asylum, actually in numbers that we hadn't seen in a very long time. But they were turning around plenty of people back to horrible, horrible circumstances in the same deterrence based ways that other administrations had been doing Biden. His final talking points at the end of the campaign were that they had put forward one of the most conservative border bills in a generation and Donald Trump had torpedoed that bill. That's been sort of their line, you know, certainly for the last four or five years that they, during the Biden administration, they wanted to move back towards the sort of deterrence based, punitive based policies of the Trump administration. I think always lead with empathy. And again, it's not advice for them, but for me, an understanding of who we are and what's actually happening on the streets is the message that I'm trying to tell as a journalist. And whether or not they want to tell it as Democrats or Republicans who are opposed to what we're seeing on the streets is the story to tell. There are massed armed federal agents running around cities all over the country. It's not just an immigration issue any longer. This is an issue about democracy, about our freedoms as civilians and citizens of the United States of America and whether or not we're going to have a free and fair election in 2026 or in 2028. J.B. pritzker, the governor of Illinois, when I was there in Chicago, said to me he wouldn't be surprised if there are National Guard troops stationed outside polling places during the midterm elections. And immigration is not just about immigration today. The way that they're approaching it is about our freedoms as American people. And I think that that's a part of the story that needs more telling.
- [33:40]
Hassan Minhaj
There was three particular moments when it comes to Trump and immigration that I could kind of see the tea leaves the way he described Somali immigrants.
- [33:51]
Jacob Soboroff
They come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch. We don't want them in our country.
- [34:00]
Hassan Minhaj
Obviously, the child separation policy stuff. And then most recently, he has flip flopped on the H1B visa position. Some of the best and brightest that come from Southeast Asia, that in contrast to the asylum he's offering to white Africans.
- [34:22]
Jacob Soboroff
Yeah.
- [34:22]
Hassan Minhaj
Or as you mentioned, people at the border from Ukraine being able to come in. What I am seeing in both the rhetoric, but the ultimate results is, oh, immigration is for A particular type of person with a particular type of melanin. Their humanity, their story and their human rights are valued in a way that they are not valued for other people.
- [34:45]
Jacob Soboroff
And I don't think you have to look very hard to see that. And it's been documented back into the first administration shithole countries. In the campaign, Haitians are eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. He doesn't make it a secret how he feels about people that don't look like that. He does or I do. And it's all evidence in the policies too. They're not chasing white folks through the streets of the United States today. They're chasing, in my hometown, largely Latino people. Here in New York right now, there's a story of a Chinese father and son who were separated. 26 Federal Plaza. Six year old boy and his father who came here to seek asylum. And they have been separated multiple times and will probably be deported back to their country together soon. But they're keeping them apart in order for them to be forced to leave the country again.
- [35:37]
Hassan Minhaj
I mean, I've always struggled with this. Again, I'm 40 years old now and I think about this deeply. What matters more in regards to these issues, semantics or the results? Are they both linked? What do you think?
- [35:53]
Jacob Soboroff
At the end of the day, what I see happening is exactly what they promised. The facts on the ground, I guess the results in the way that you're talking about it. My colleague Rachel Mattows says watch what they do, not what they say. And what they're doing is exactly what they had promised the days that I stood on the floor of the Republican convention as they held up those mass Deportation now signs. You know what it's modeled after is DWIGHT D. Eisenhower's 1954 program with the name so racist I'm not going to say it here. You can look it up. That deported a million Mexicans and Mexican Americans, many of whom obviously Mexican Americans were here as citizens. But many of the Mexicans had come here under the Bracero program to legally work during the administration. And that's what Stephen Miller is modeling his program after. A program with a racist name that deported a million people and American citizens at the same time. It's very clear what they're doing because all you have to do is, is now, like you said, turn on the television every day or go on Tick Tock or go on social media and see videos. I don't know how many you're being fed, but I see it every day. Multiple videos from multiple cities every single day.
- [37:01]
Hassan Minhaj
Yeah, I Mean, I went to Disneyland recently with my family and I saw, I saw ICE agents around Anaheim, in Anaheim. And I'm like, God damn, the happiest place on earth.
- [37:12]
Jacob Soboroff
Yep.
- [37:13]
Hassan Minhaj
You're really gonna. With people that are trying to get great Vietnamese food and, or go see Mickey. Jesus.
- [37:18]
Jacob Soboroff
That's exactly where they go. I interviewed Tom Holman in Long beach on the second or third day of the operation in la.
- [37:25]
Hassan Minhaj
Yeah.
- [37:26]
Jacob Soboroff
And he told me then that some form of this was going to continue every day. And he was right. He told me that someone was gonna get hurt or maybe die. And he was right. And this is just the very beginning of all of this. And so watch what they do. As Rachel says, not what they say, because they're doing it.
- [37:48]
Hassan Minhaj
Let's talk about your second book. This is Firestorm, the Great Los Angeles Fires and America's New Age of Disaster. Again, another important story for both you and I as California kids. But it is the story of America and these things are going to continue to happen. First of all, I want to just say your, your childhood home in the Pacific Palisades burned down.
- [38:11]
Jacob Soboroff
It did.
- [38:12]
Hassan Minhaj
Yeah. And I'm, I just want to say I'm so sorry.
- [38:14]
Jacob Soboroff
Thank you.
- [38:14]
Hassan Minhaj
You and your family had to go through that.
- [38:15]
Jacob Soboroff
Thanks. My. And I should just say my parents, they didn't live there any longer, but yeah, it was traumatizing and, and very sad to see it.
- [38:21]
Hassan Minhaj
Are your parents okay? Are your family and friends?
- [38:24]
Jacob Soboroff
Everybody's okay. My brother lost the house that he was living in with my sister in law, but they're okay. Everybody's okay. Thank God.
- [38:31]
Hassan Minhaj
But let's talk about your. Obviously you take an incredible amount of pride in the journalism and the work that you do on the ground. Tell us, what type of picture were you trying to paint in this book?
- [38:43]
Jacob Soboroff
Like family separation. When I was in the middle of the, of the great Los Angeles fires, the costliest wildfire event in the history of the United States. Couldn't wrap my head around it. You know, I, by the way, there was nothing I wanted to do less than to cover fires. I hated the idea of covering fires. And in fact, in the months before this fire, I had talked with my then boss about how the last thing I wanted to do was go out in those silly Nomex jackets and cosplay as a firefighter and stand out there in the middle of. And you've seen in Northern California, it happens all the time. And I mean no disrespect to the reporters who are very good at covering wildfires, because I think they do a definitionally a public service. But I was of the belief that it was sort of sensationalized and that it was ridiculous at times to watch reporters out as close as they could to the licking flames up on the back of their neck. But this, I think, is the most important assignment I've ever done and I think some of the most important writing and reporting that I've ever done because it taught me a lot about. About many things I couldn't comprehend what it meant to watch your own community carbonize before your eyes in real time. All my friends had left. My family had left. I was alone with first responders and other reporters in the middle of the fire. I walked into the bureau chief's office that day and said, polly, I'm from the Palisades. I need to go. And so I drove out there that night, on Tuesday night. And I was out there for the better part of a couple of weeks almost every single day. And what I learned is that what I experienced was not just watching my hometown burn down and my childhood memories sort of burn up before me, some form of time travel almost into my past and. And sort of a look at the future. But yeah, what I experienced was the fire of the future. And when I say that, I mean several things. Obviously, climate change played a big part in it changes in the way that we live. Thousand electric car batteries exploded during the fire. A lot of them around me when I was in the middle of all of this. Our infrastructure is falling apart. But maybe most importantly, misinformation and disinformation have affected the way that not only we respond to fires, but the politics around them and in the aftermath, how people recover from them. And so I think that that's what makes these great LA fires not unique, but sort of a harbinger of what's to come. Not just with fires, but with floods and tornadoes and hurricanes and natural disasters in the United States and all around the world.
- [40:56]
Hassan Minhaj
Do you mind getting into specifics? Because for me growing up in Northern California, I appreciate you including us in this. Turning on KCRA 3.
- [41:03]
Jacob Soboroff
Yep.
- [41:04]
Hassan Minhaj
It felt like every two and a half months there is a reporter with the jacket. He is brush that is on fire is behind him. Obviously in Northern California we had the horrible PG and E fires as well. It just felt like it was in every. Every quarter part of my life.
- [41:23]
Jacob Soboroff
Yeah.
- [41:23]
Hassan Minhaj
And it was never going to change. What was so unique where you said you described this as the fire of the future, why are the Pacific Palisades fires and the Altadena fires a part of the fire of the future.
- [41:39]
Jacob Soboroff
I think in the same way that the Lahaina fire in Maui was a couple years earlier and in Northern California, the campfire in paradise was. These are urban conflagrations is what they're called. And I'm not a firefighter or a wildfire expert, but I spoke to a lot of these people for the book. And I should say, just as an aside, the book is as much about the people as it is about the science or the politics or anything else that contributed to this moment. The people that I met in the aftermath of the fire, both in Altadena and in the Palisades, I'll never forget. And to the point of meeting people in their lowest moments. It's a hopeful story too. It's a bummer. And it was crazy to watch my hometown burn down and millions of people will eventually have a story like I did about what it was like to experience it on group text or whatever. But it's a story about the people. I think that what made it unique was several factors. It was predicted in advance. The National Weather Service alerted a particularly dangerous situation warning that said that if there was an ignition with the hurricane force Santa Ana winds, basically that this would happen. And it did. And I'm not absolving anybody. I think that there's a lot of investigative reporting about who's to blame and what could have been done differently. And why was the Santa Ynez Reservoir and the Palisades empty? 117 million gallons. And why did the electrical equipment and Altadena catch fire and create the eaton fire? And 31 people are dead and thousands and thousands of structures are destroyed and people's entire lives are turned upside down. But it was the confluence of the, the climate, the warnings, what had happened, the fact that we live in this wildland urban interface. Santa Monica Mountains and the Palisades, the San Gabriel Mountains, over the San Gabriel Valley and Altadena, and the inability, I think, for all of us at the same time to understand that this was real and this was going to happen. I evacuated as a kid. I don't know if you ever did, but I evacuated as a kid. And I was always like a false alarm boy who cried wolf. But now these are here and they're happening more often and more frequently. And so I think to me it was just the fact that it's the new age of disaster. It's the fire of the future. It's. It's here and it's happening right now.
- [43:50]
Hassan Minhaj
And it will Continue to happen. I think that was an important detail that you mentioned in the book. There is a lot of. Well, that's the last time.
- [43:57]
Jacob Soboroff
Yep.
- [43:57]
Hassan Minhaj
In Hindi we say ugly barod. Next time don't do this. But for you to say there will be an ugly bar, there's going to be a next time, no doubt. I wanted to ask you, is California ready for that? Are these communities ready for that? Are bureaucrats and politicians in, in society in both Northern California and Southern California ready for this?
- [44:15]
Jacob Soboroff
I don't think so. And you know.
- [44:17]
Hassan Minhaj
Well, that's depressing.
- [44:18]
Jacob Soboroff
Yeah, yeah. The best, the best speech I heard about this in the wake of the fires was Anthony Moroney, who's the chief of the LA County Fire Department, who got up in front of a synagogue congregation. I think it's the last chapter of the book before the epilogue, and talked about how native communities used to use, you know, the first people, the Tongva, the original residents of the LA Basin Palisades, would use prescribed burns and fire to control fire. And we think as humans so cockily that, that we can control what happens, that we can build and the fires won't encroach upon us, that we can create communities within this wildland urban interface and these things won't happen. But what he has said is, and what he says in this speech is that it's almost inevitable unless we back up and look at how we got here and to understand that it probably will happen again. And I think that, I think that in some ways there's no way to stop something like this happening because of the ways in which we live today. The reality is, I think as Jonathan White, a senior level HHS person who I met with in the wake of this, said to me is Republicans are denying that climate change is a factor and that this is an influence on fires like this. Democrats are saying that this is happening in the future, not that this is happening, it's going to happen more in the future, that it's not happening now. And we're here. You don't have to look very hard to see that this is happening all over the place. In North Carolina, Hurricane Helene, the floods that have happened. And the thing that particularly gets me in the wake of it, that also makes it the new age of disaster, is how under this administration, but also others, sort of some of the mechanisms that could allow us to have the firefighters of the future, like NASA scientists studying it from above and mapping to send down to people below to figure out how to fight fires better, or these meteorologists at The National Weather Service or. Or people at Noah keeping the billion dollar disaster registry to track and to learn how to better mitigate and fight and have insurance markets that deal with what happens in the aftermath are being dismantled by. By Donald Trump's administration, by Doge at the beginning, Elon Musk. And that's as big a part of all of this, I think, as the fires themselves, how we understand what we're experiencing and how we react to them in the aftermath.
- [46:36]
Hassan Minhaj
I'd love your thoughts on this. As a journalist. I'm going to take us through three buckets that I saw that I got to witness and take me through this. While the fires were happening, I witnessed three things. Cruelty, information and misinformation. And then let's get to the politicization of it later. The cruelty that I saw, the conversation around, you know what? Screw these people in the Palisades. Let the Palisades burn.
- [47:00]
Jacob Soboroff
Yeah.
- [47:01]
Hassan Minhaj
As if real human beings aren't there. And then as it spread to Altadena, it's like, do you know that the. The communities and the people and the stories that are happening there. Then I saw the misinformation. One thing I love to do is no matter where I visit, as a touring comedian, I always try to take an Uber or taxi, because your Uber driver or your taxi taxi driver will tell you what is everything. And there are two consistencies that I see all the time. Number one, the rent is too damn high.
- [47:25]
Jacob Soboroff
Always.
- [47:25]
Hassan Minhaj
Okay, the rent is too damn high. Whether you're in Los Angeles or Ames, Iowa.
- [47:29]
Jacob Soboroff
Yeah.
- [47:30]
Hassan Minhaj
So everybody that tells you, you're like, fuck California, fuck New York. Let me tell you something. I've been to Montana. And the Uber driver will tell you the rent is too damn.
- [47:36]
Jacob Soboroff
They always have a second job, too, right? Like, they always have something else going on because they can't afford their lives.
- [47:41]
Hassan Minhaj
Of course. So it's more systemic than you think. It's not just a state issue. The rent is too damn high. But number two, man, we don't really know what happened.
- [47:51]
Jacob Soboroff
Yeah.
- [47:51]
Hassan Minhaj
And, man, oh, man, will I get some fucking theories about everything. I've had multiple guys, while they're driving me, pull out a Google map and go, how did the fire get from here to here? And I go, bro, Ahmed, drive. Please don't. Don't do this right now. Like, we can't crash. But I want to ask a journalist, how did the fires go from here to here?
- [48:12]
Jacob Soboroff
Well, first of all, LA county is the most populous county. Sorry, it's the largest county in the nation. There are something like 10 to 12 million people. You'll fact check me on it that live in LA County, LA City is a smaller part of LA county and the Palisades is in the city. That's Mayor Bass who was absent at the beginning of the fires and was in Ghana on a diplomatic mission for Joe Biden. And you know, she's getting a lot of flack for that. And I'm not saying that people shouldn't be angry about the fact that the mayor wasn't there. Altadena is on the other side, is an unincorporated part of LA County. I think it's 30, 40 miles away. I live about square in between the two.
- [48:47]
Hassan Minhaj
Yes.
- [48:47]
Jacob Soboroff
Right now. They didn't spread from one area to the other. There were two separate fires. The Palisades fire was the rekindling of another fire lockman which was intentionally set seven days earlier. And the root system burned up from underground and the Santa Ana wind surfaced. There are questions about whether firefighters could have done a better job of mopping up or stopping that fire. All valid questions. In Altadena, this was the prevailing theory is an electrical equipment malfunction that sparked and immediately because of the winds, the mountain wave winds that were warned of by the weather service poured down and pushed the fire into the community almost instantaneously. I have never seen anything. What I think people see in the book is, is really my real time experience. In addition to residents being in the fire, I've never ever experienced. I've covered fires before. I've been in hurricanes. I've seen horizontal embers flying past my face and being chucked miles down from the location that I was standing. And that's how the fire spread so rapidly. The winds were hurricane force winds. The fire ignited. You know, there'll be lots of investigations into why and how and could they have been stopped. But the fact of the matter is they did and once they started there was no, there was no stopping them. Could there have been firefighters pre positioned in different areas? Yes. Could there have been more firefighters on the street? Yes. Is there a way that there could have been more water flowing through the hydrants? Maybe. But a lot of firefighters say they were flowing so much water because there's so much was on fire that there just wasn't enough capacity or pressure to do that. And that story will be written too.
- [50:14]
Hassan Minhaj
Let's take a look at Donald Trump's visit to Los Angeles and the circumstances surrounding that. Let's take a look at this pull quote from Jacob's book. Asked whether Newsom's posture against the ICE raids might adversely influence federal funding. The President said bluntly. It could impact. You know, hatred is never a good thing in politics. When you don't like somebody, you don't respect somebody. It's harder for that person to get money if you're on top.
- [50:38]
Jacob Soboroff
Wow.
- [50:40]
Hassan Minhaj
What?
- [50:41]
Jacob Soboroff
Yeah. Donald Trump and Gavin Newsom first met. I believe one of the first times was at. In Northern California at the campfire in Paradise. Jerry Brown was still governor and Gavin Newsom was the governor elect. And Donald Trump has always been obsessed with this water project in the Central Valley, right around where you're from, to. To. To. That basically has some of his supporters interests at heart. Yes. I don't know if he's confused or disingenuous or doesn't understand at all, but he continually would say that the approval of that delta smelt project, which protects a small little fish, environmental regulation stuff, would have stopped or mitigated somehow the LA fire, that they could have flowed that water down. I laugh, Sorry. But flowed that water down to Southern California and prevented it. Water froze freely from the Pacific Northwest. Yeah.
- [51:29]
Hassan Minhaj
He does this a lot.
- [51:29]
Jacob Soboroff
He goes like flowing down. Yes. Flowing down. It doesn't. It doesn't flow like that. Okay. It doesn't. That's not how it works. Yeah.
- [51:37]
Hassan Minhaj
Why is he obsessed with that? He's also obsessed with water pressure at hotels. The way the shower. Water pressure.
- [51:42]
Jacob Soboroff
Yeah. He wanted to do away with the. Are they called governors? To adjust the level of water that comes through in the shower. Yeah. He's obsessed with water pressure. None of that would have solved or stopped or saved. And in fact, they released literally billions of gallons of water after the fires. Yeah. And flooded fields.
- [52:01]
Hassan Minhaj
Yeah.
- [52:01]
Jacob Soboroff
That did nothing to stop or slow or save people in la.
- [52:05]
Hassan Minhaj
He's the type of guy that. That really would love. You know how when you get into a car and you blast the ac.
- [52:11]
Jacob Soboroff
Yes.
- [52:12]
Hassan Minhaj
He loves. Let me just see what the full blast is like.
- [52:14]
Jacob Soboroff
Yeah.
- [52:15]
Hassan Minhaj
I think he's that type of person. There was also this very bizarre moment you described where Trump left Newsom a voicemail. Trump said Newsom needs to turn on, what, a mystical water tap.
- [52:23]
Jacob Soboroff
Yes. And let it flow open the taps.
- [52:28]
Hassan Minhaj
Yeah. So let's take a look at that. This is what Donald Trump said in this bizarre voice memo. It pours down naturally. It was for a million years. For a million years it pours down. You'll never run out, you'll never have shortages and you won't have things like this. And when you do, you'll have a lot of water to put it out. I really strongly recommend this seven years ago, and I think I'm just going to do it. Do you have any idea what he's talking about?
- [52:50]
Jacob Soboroff
No.
- [52:51]
Hassan Minhaj
Because no one knows what he's talking about.
- [52:53]
Jacob Soboroff
No, no, no. And we didn't during the fire. We didn't after the fire, and it didn't help. That's the bottom line. I don't think there's a person that would tell you that unleashing billions of gallons of water and flooding fields in the Central Valley made any of us in Southern California feel better or recover faster from the fires.
- [53:11]
Hassan Minhaj
That is what I don't understand. So just so people are aware, what makes even less sense is that Donald Trump authorized releasing over 1 billion gallons of water from two reservoirs, but they weren't in Southern California.
- [53:24]
Jacob Soboroff
Not even close.
- [53:25]
Hassan Minhaj
It was sent to random fields in the Central Valley.
- [53:29]
Jacob Soboroff
Yep.
- [53:31]
Hassan Minhaj
Water wasted. That could have covered enough water to supply as many as 7,000 California households for a year.
- [53:37]
Jacob Soboroff
For a year.
- [53:37]
Hassan Minhaj
What was that about?
- [53:39]
Jacob Soboroff
It was about Donald Trump wanting to seem like he was in charge. And when he was President elect, you know, remember the fires happened.
- [53:48]
Hassan Minhaj
Weren't there any aides? Being like, Fresno and Bakersfield is not, you would think.
- [53:52]
Jacob Soboroff
And Kevin McCarthy, you know, one of his big supporters is. Is from Bakersfield. I didn't get the sense that anybody was calling him to say, this is preposterous or this is ridiculous. And instead, he had Elon Musk down in Southern California talking with firefighters, had his own people like Rick Grinnell come out to the fires and be some kind of fire czar. And what do we get for it?
- [54:17]
Hassan Minhaj
I mean, one of the other things that we got for it was misinformation.
- [54:20]
Jacob Soboroff
Yes.
- [54:22]
Hassan Minhaj
You talk about Elon Musk in the book Spreading Misinformation on X. His favorite tool is to quickly look at Babylon Bee retweet and just do kind of thinky face.
- [54:33]
Jacob Soboroff
Thinky face is a common one.
- [54:34]
Hassan Minhaj
Thinky face. And then, of course, his virtual beef with Gavin Newsom. How big of a role did misinformation play in the fires?
- [54:41]
Jacob Soboroff
Enormous. Enormous. Particularly this thing about why is there no water pressure and there's no money left in fema. FEMA was on the ground almost immediately. Joe Biden signed a major disaster declaration. And I'm not absolving Gavin Newsom. You know, he said to me, in the wake of the fires, there's going to be a Marshall Plan 2.0 for LA and we're going to rebuild California and we're a long way away from that. But. But he got the major disaster declaration signed by President Biden, 100% of the funding reimbursement for the recovery for six months immediately in the aftermath. And Trump's out there saying, there's no money in FEMA and it's all going to undocumented immigrants. They talked about the water, how it could have flowed from the Central Valley and it could have changed things. And his favorite thing to do is he went after a black female mayor in Karen Bass, just saying that she was incompetent and mismanaged the situation. And again, as I said, everybody's going to be angry at politicians when something like this happens. And I'm not saying that the local politicians in Los Angeles don't deserve scrutiny or scorn for the response to the fire, but Donald Trump, it was ad hominem, it was petty, it was personal, and none of these things did anything to help.
- [55:51]
Hassan Minhaj
It became this weird argument about dei. I'm like, how did we get here.
- [55:55]
Jacob Soboroff
About the fire chief in Los Angeles, Kristen Crowley, a woman leading the department, and whether or not she was suited to lead the department. Yeah, how did we get here? And I think that the answer is it's the same polarized political moment where Donald Trump and others feel like they can use natural disasters to further their political goals rather than to find a way to come together. That was so disappointing to me is that I thought that it could be an opportunity for us to find common ground. You don't know the amount of people that I heard from in the fires of all political spectrums that, you know, ask me, can I go check on their house? What can I do? How can I help? And I was happy to do it. And then, you know, we end up here.
- [56:36]
Hassan Minhaj
I want to talk about your X Men origin story. Everyone has an X Men origin story. This is my theory. And it either makes you Charles Xavier or Magneto. You grew up in the same hometown as Stephen Miller. Is this true?
- [56:51]
Jacob Soboroff
Yeah, we were adjacent. I was Palisades, he was Santa Monica. Like, literally side by side.
- [56:55]
Hassan Minhaj
You reported on the administration withholding aid as a punishment for ice. Was that Stephen Miller's idea?
- [57:04]
Jacob Soboroff
You know, I can't confirm that for sure, but I suspect that Stephen Miller had something to do with that.
- [57:09]
Hassan Minhaj
Okay, I want to talk about this very interesting story from the book and from your life. So there is this very bizarre moment from the fires where Katie Miller, Stephen Miller's wife, reaches out to you. Katie Miller is Stephen Miller's wife and former communications Director for Mike Pence. Just for context, for our viewers, Katie texts you because her in laws, Stephen Miller's parents lived in the Palisades and she wanted you to check on their place. Was that wild to you?
- [57:42]
Jacob Soboroff
I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe it because Katie and I were, I would say, adversarial in the journalist source sense because she had worked for the Department of Homeland Security during family separation, and she had invited me into the facilities, as I mentioned to you, and, you know, I obviously was harshly critical of that policy and of her and wrote about her in my first book.
- [58:06]
Hassan Minhaj
And this is the facility in Brownsville.
- [58:08]
Jacob Soboroff
Correct, In Brownsville and another one in McAllen, Texas. Exactly.
- [58:11]
Hassan Minhaj
And just for our viewers, just to paint a picture. And I always like to do this. Remember how we were watching the news and you would go inside of these Walmarts and they would give. Gave these poor people, like, these space blankets.
- [58:22]
Jacob Soboroff
Yep.
- [58:22]
Hassan Minhaj
They're just like, here's some tinfoil. Sleep underneath this.
- [58:24]
Jacob Soboroff
It's exactly what it was.
- [58:25]
Hassan Minhaj
This is in reference to that.
- [58:26]
Jacob Soboroff
That's exactly what it was.
- [58:27]
Hassan Minhaj
Correct. You report on that? Stephen Miller's wife, not a fan.
- [58:31]
Jacob Soboroff
They didn't. She didn't. Even though she invited us in, she. They. She didn't like the reporting that I was at the time. The coverage. Exactly.
- [58:37]
Hassan Minhaj
And she's like, we're wrapping these people up like burritos. They're totally warm and they're taken care of. And you're like, this is a prison.
- [58:44]
Jacob Soboroff
Inside of a Walmart. I said that. I've been inside. Yeah, I literally said that. I said I've been inside a lot of detention facilities. And these kids, they say it's a shelter. They're effectively incarcerated because they've been ripped away from their parents.
- [58:54]
Hassan Minhaj
And she's not a fan of that.
- [58:55]
Jacob Soboroff
Didn't like it.
- [58:56]
Hassan Minhaj
She's like, I gave you a plus one.
- [58:57]
Jacob Soboroff
Didn't like it. She gave me a plus one to get in and did not like the reporting.
- [59:00]
Hassan Minhaj
Yeah.
- [59:01]
Jacob Soboroff
When I wrote about that in the book, it sort of ended our relationship as source and reporter. And I was super surprised to be. I was getting ready for a special report with your fellow Northern Californian, Lester Holt. And I was standing there in the middle of the fire and my phone rang and it was Katie. And I read about this in the book. I picked up the phone and she said that she wanted to talk. And I told her how to call her back. And she texted me a series of text messages letting me know that Stephen Miller's Parents, I had no idea, actually. I knew he grew up in Santa Monica, but I didn't know that they lived in the Palisades, that they were living in the Palisades. And like many friends of mine, she asked, can I go check on their house to see. She said I was the only person that she knew that was there. And she asked me to go look, look, and I did. And their house burned down. And I let her know. And frankly, I felt awful for them and devastated and sad. And I thought, in a way, maybe this is going to be that olive branch that allows us to see these types of disasters and have a shared sense of humanity and to feel like we were in this together. But she had just been appointed to work for Elon Musk at Doge, and within, I think, hours, both Donald Trump and Elon Musk were tweeting misinformation and disinformation about the fires. And it did the opposite of have a thong effect with Katie. And in fact, in the long run, when it was an arsonist that was announced to have started the fire that became the Palisades fire, you know, she's tweeting cheekily about, oh, I thought it was climate change. It didn't do anything for all of us to see things in a common way. And instead, I don't know, I felt. I felt sad that in a time where we could come together around something, instead it didn't do anything.
- [60:42]
Hassan Minhaj
What do you make of that logic of like, yeah, we gotta own the libs, even if they're my in laws? Yeah, what an insane thing.
- [60:52]
Jacob Soboroff
Didn't make any sense to me, and it doesn't make any sense to me. And to see her continue to speak out about the fires and to use the fires in a political way is disappointing. I thought a lot about whether or not I should put that story in the book, because it's a personal tragedy for all of us who have lost something in the fires. But she's a public figure and so is Stephen. And so is what they're doing in the aftermath of the fire, including going after some of the same day laborers in places like Altadena who are undocumented and working to recover from the fire, rebuild the homes, clean up the communities. Those are the guys that are being literally targeted at Home Depot. They're rebuilding Chase around la, people are dying, running on freeways, running away from ice after they leave a Home Depot parking lot. Those are people being targeted by Stephen Miller in the aftermath of the same fire that his own parents lost their.
- [61:40]
Hassan Minhaj
House in Jacob Soboroff, ladies and gentlemen.
- [61:45]
Jacob Soboroff
Thank you for having me.
- [61:54]
Hassan Minhaj
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