Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude

Summary

The Bulwark Podcast: Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil on "The Trend Toward Solitude"

Released on January 9, 2025

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I. Introduction

In this enlightening episode of The Bulwark Podcast, host Tim Miller engages in a profound conversation with Derek Thompson and later with Liz Weil, delving into the pervasive trend of increasing solitude in America and the escalating wildfire crisis in California. This episode offers a comprehensive analysis of societal shifts, technological impacts, and environmental challenges, enriched with expert insights and compelling statistics.

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II. The Trend Toward Solitude with Derek Thompson

Timestamp: 00:41 – 37:46

A. Statistics and Historical Context

Derek Thompson opens the discussion by presenting a startling statistic: Americans are spending more time alone and less time in face-to-face social interactions than at any point in the past 60 to 150 years. He references Robert Putnam's seminal work, Bowling Alone, highlighting a 40% decline in socializing among teenagers and the poorest Americans over the last two decades.

"We have never in our lifetime spent this much time alone and this little time socializing with other people."
— Derek Thompson [01:27]

B. Technological Drivers

Thompson attributes this societal shift to three main technological developments:

1. The Automobile: Enabled suburban living and privatized leisure time.
2. Television: Shifted leisure towards passive consumption.
3. The Digital Revolution: Facilitated solitary activities via smartphones and digital platforms.

"Americans are spending more and more of their time and more of their choices are to privatize their leisure."
— Derek Thompson [07:34]

C. Social and Psychological Implications

Thompson discusses the psychological impact of increased solitude, noting that solitude does not equate to happiness. He cites research indicating that individuals who spend more time alone report lower life satisfaction.

"People who spend more time alone consistently say that they're less happy with their lives."
— Derek Thompson [10:18]

D. Dopamine and Digital Consumption

Exploring the biochemical effects of digital engagement, Thompson hypothesizes that excessive smartphone use may deplete dopamine levels, reducing the drive to engage in real-world social interactions.

"We have less drive to invest in actual social relationships because dopamine is flowing toward parasociality rather than actual sociality."
— Derek Thompson [19:04]

E. Political Consequences

The conversation shifts to the political ramifications of societal solitude. Thompson argues that isolation fosters political polarization and susceptibility to demagogues, as individuals become entrenched within echo chambers devoid of diverse perspectives.

"What seems to be politically moderating is what's atrophying—the middle ring of village."
— Derek Thompson [30:18]

F. Broader Societal Impacts

Thompson emphasizes the erosion of the "middle ring" of social interaction—the village—which historically acted as a moderating force in political discourse. The decline in communal engagement contributes to a fragmented society unable to bridge ideological divides.

"It's a central social tragedy of our time that we live in a world that allows us to pretend as if we are deep introverts."
— Derek Thompson [14:01]

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III. Additional Discussions with Derek Thompson

Timestamp: 37:46 – 45:27

A. Scientific Breakthroughs of 2024

Thompson highlights the development of a near-complete vaccine for HIV, which could revolutionize disease prevention by providing 98-100% protection with biannual doses. He underscores the importance of focusing on positive scientific advancements amidst prevalent negativity.

"It's extraordinary that we've developed this drug and if we can scale it like we scaled the COVID vaccines, we could take a day out of this disease."
— Derek Thompson [38:19]

B. Analysis of Political Trends: "How Trump Won Everywhere"

Thompson critiques Michael Potozer’s assertion that low Democratic turnout led to Harris’s loss, presenting data that suggests Donald Trump actually gained additional votes beyond the 2020 numbers. He points to significant vote shifts in metropolitan areas and questions why progressive governance in traditionally blue states led to increased support for Trump.

"We should be curious why in liberal states and cities, Donald Trump moved the electorate double-digit percentage points to the right."
— Derek Thompson [40:00]

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IV. Transition to California Fires with Liz Weil

Timestamp: 45:27 – 73:42

Following the in-depth discussion with Thompson, the podcast shifts focus to Liz Weil, a feature writer at New York Magazine, who brings expertise on the wildfire crisis in California. As recent fires devastate Los Angeles, Weil provides an urgent analysis of the factors exacerbating the situation.

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V. California Fires: Causes and Management with Liz Weil

Timestamp: 48:59 – 71:39

A. Wildfires and Santa Ana Winds

Weil explains the critical role of Santa Ana winds in igniting and spreading wildfires in Los Angeles. These strong, dry winds carry embers over long distances, making fires unpredictable and extraordinarily difficult to control.

"Santa Anas are a huge part of what's going on in LA right now."
— Liz Weil [50:47]

B. Fire Management Policies

Despite bipartisan agreement on the necessity of forest management, practical implementation falters due to local resistance and policy misalignments. Weil notes that while theoretical support exists, actualized forest management strategies are inconsistently applied, leading to uncontrolled fuel loads.

"At the local level, people are very, very nervous and understandably."
— Liz Weil [56:13]

C. Coordination Challenges

Weil highlights the fragmented nature of firefighting resources across federal, state, and local agencies. Funding shortages, personnel constraints, and seasonal workforce issues hinder effective wildfire management and response.

"There's a political mess of what exactly to do and who's the boss."
— Liz Weil [57:40]

D. Impact of Climate Change

Climate change intensifies wildfire conditions by creating hotter, drier environments and lowering rainfall, thereby increasing vegetation dryness and fire susceptibility. Weil connects the current crises to long-term climatic trends.

"Climate change impacts are making fires worse, and we have control over how much worse it gets."
— Liz Weil [64:42]

E. Community Responses and Rebuilding

Weil discusses the challenges communities face in rebuilding post-fire, emphasizing the emotional and logistical difficulties in relocating or adopting fire-safe building practices. Insurance complexities further complicate recovery efforts.

"Are we going to have planned retreats or rebuild in a fire-prone way?"
— Liz Weil [60:00]

F. Policy Recommendations

Weil advocates for proactive community planning, including creating defensible spaces around homes and adopting fire-resistant construction materials. She underscores the necessity of integrating climate considerations into urban planning to mitigate future wildfire risks.

"We need to make civic choices like where to live and how to build to create a saner future."
— Liz Weil [64:42]

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VI. Liz Weil’s Other Works and Sam Altman Profile

Timestamp: 71:39 – End

Towards the episode’s conclusion, Weil discusses her investigative profiling of Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. She reveals familial tensions and the stark contrast between Altman's immense wealth and his sister Annie’s struggles, posing critical questions about power dynamics and personal responsibility.

"Annie is living in her car while Sam is running OpenAI."
— Liz Weil [68:03]

Weil's profile sheds light on the ethical considerations of wielding significant technological power without addressing personal and familial vulnerabilities, offering a microcosmic view of broader societal imbalances.

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VII. Conclusion

This episode of The Bulwark Podcast masterfully intertwines discussions on societal solitude and environmental crises, providing listeners with a nuanced understanding of the intricate challenges facing modern America. Through compelling statistics, expert interviews, and thoughtful analysis, Derek Thompson and Liz Weil illuminate the profound shifts in social behavior and environmental management, urging proactive solutions and deeper societal engagement.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• "We have never in our lifetime spent this much time alone and this little time socializing with other people."
  — Derek Thompson [01:27]

• "Americans are spending more and more of their time and more of their choices are to privatize their leisure."
  — Derek Thompson [07:34]

• "What seems to be politically moderating is what's atrophying—the middle ring of village."
  — Derek Thompson [30:18]

• "Climate change impacts are making fires worse, and we have control over how much worse it gets."
  — Liz Weil [64:42]

• "Annie is living in her car while Sam is running OpenAI."
  — Liz Weil [68:03]

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Resources Mentioned:

• Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam
• Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
• Palaces for the People by Eric Klinenberg
• Strangers in Her Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild
• Dopamine Nation (Author not specified)

For more insights and to support victims of the California fires, visit the show notes for vetted resources.

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Produced by Katie Cooper | Audio Engineering: Jason Brown

Transcript

[Unknown Speaker]

Foreign.

[Tim Miller]

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We got a doubleheader today. The news out of Los Angeles is just so horrifying. We've added Liz Weil, who's been reporting on California fires for years, to segment two, so stick around for that. But first, he's a staff writer at the Atlantic, author of the Work in Progress newsletter, host to one of my favorite pods, Plain English. You can go subscribe to that now. And he's got an upcoming book with Ezra Klein called Abundance. You can pre order now. Maybe we'll have a three way that was unintentional when that book comes out, but you never know. It's Derek Thompson. How you doing, brother?

[Derek Thompson]

Tim, what a generous open. Thank you so much. It's great to be here, brother.

[Tim Miller]

I don't blow smoke. And so it's a generous intro because it's true. It's a great pod, but we got a lot to get to. You have a cover story that we're here to talk about in the Atlantic magazine about solitude. And so I want to spend a bunch of time on that and then a few other things you've been writing about lately. I had this exclamation point in my notes as I was reading it. You wrote studies show Americans spent even more time alone in 2023 than they did in 2021, when we didn't even have the vaccine all of 2021. And we were forcibly at home in 2021, many of us, for at least a few months. That is a pretty alarming stat in an article that is filled with alarming stats. So talk to us just about the biggest picture trajectory and what you are.

[Derek Thompson]

Reporting on the big picture here is that this is a long, long, long article that really pivots around one simple statistic, just one fact. And that fact is that Americans spend more time alone and less time in face to face socializing than we ever have going back at least 60 years in official government data and maybe going back 100, 150 years, given how social the first half of the 20th century was. We have never in our lifetime spent this much time alone and this little time socializing with other people. And I think that statistic needed an anchoring, it needed a naming, it needed a big picture treatment because the way we spend our minutes is the way we spend our lives. And if we're spending our minutes alone, well, that has huge implications for the economy. We can talk about that for our politics. I hope we talk about that and really for our personalities. I think that our personalities change when we spend less and less time around other people with every passing year. So the most important fact in the article is that according to a famous book by Robert Putnam called Bowling alone, between the 1960s and 1990s, Americans participated in associations and clubs, you know, bowling leagues and union clubs, less and less and less. And when the book came out in 2000, it caused a huge debate. Was Robert Putnam just less lying with statistics? Did he have this all wrong? Was America really at the beginning of a golden age of hanging out? But in the last 20 years, socializing has declined another 20% for all Americans and more than 40%, or roughly 40% for teenagers and the poorest Americans. We're in a social depression. And it has enormous implications, I think, for just about every station of human life.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, I look at that Putnam book, Bowling Alone and Postman Amusing Ourselves to Death. Like, you go back and look at the years, it's like, wait, Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to death in 1985, when there are only three networked news channels.

[Derek Thompson]

Fox News didn't exist.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, right. I mean, barely. Was Rush even on in 85. Like, just the whole thing is crazy. No Howard Stern yet or very proto. And then this, you know, in 2000, just like the dramatic change. You didn't feel it in 2000, I guess. Right? I don't know. At least I was, what, in high school in 2000. And I did not like, there wasn't this sense that this was a big problem. I think living day to day lives for most people. But the trajectory was happening and the observation, not to undermine the value of your article, but it feels almost mundane now. The interesting thing about your article is just, it's maybe even more dramatic than we realize living through it.

[Derek Thompson]

And I really wanted this piece to be very specific about the thing I was talking about. So Robert Putton was famous and in some quarters controversial for talking about a concept that he called social capital. So the idea was that people have literal capital. They have financial capital, where you can just look at someone's W2 or tax returns and you can say, all right, well, you know, Michael is rich and Nathan is poor. But there's also something that you can call social capital. Are you rich in relationships? Are you rich in friendship? Are you rich in the kind of community networks that you live in? And that's what Putnam was really scrutinizing is, is social capital for Americans declining? Can we say that social capital is declining for America the same way that we could say In a recession, that income is declining for America. I'm trying to identify and pinpoint an even more specific and objective statistic. The American Time Use Survey, which is run by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is a government survey that every year asks Americans, how much time do you spend doing all the stuff you do? How much time do you spend eating dinner? How much time do you spend sleeping? How much time do you spend like, filling out greeting cards? And they also ask, how much time do you spend alone? And how much time do you spend in Face to Face socializing? And those numbers are at their respective historic points, right? We've never spent so little time socializing face to face. We've never spent so much time alone. So what I felt I had here was an absolutely objective fact that I wanted to sort of dig into. What else can I discover that's truly historic about this moment? And I mean, Tim, like, the statistics are just unbelievable. I mean, like, the amount, for example, that people spend hosting dinner parties, for example, has declined by 30% in the last 20 years. I mean, it's just remarkable, though.

[Tim Miller]

I wrote this note down because that 30% in the last 20 years feels like a lot. But when Putnam wrote his book, it had declined 45% already from the 70s to 2000. Right. So it declined an additional 32% on top of that. It's not even close to Mad Men era as far as hosting people over for dinner parties.

[Derek Thompson]

It's exactly right. It's an accumulating story, and there's a way to tell the story. You mentioned Postman and Putnam. There's a way to tell the story that's a technological story. And I don't think this is the only way to tell it, but I think it's a compelling way to tell it. You say, you know, the first half of the 20th century was really remarkably social. Marriage rates were up. Fertility went up, Union rates were up. The amount of time that people spent socializing between the 19, early 1900s and about 1950 was just up, up, up across the board. What happened then in the 1960s, 1970s? And the technological answer is that first we got the car. And cars are wonderful. Our family has two cars, right? I'm not criticizing cars as a product, but one thing they allow you to do is to move away from other people. It allows people to move to the suburbs. They can privatize their leisure time, spend more time alone in their own backyards, less time around other people. Okay, maybe not a huge, enormous crisis, but then comes the television set. And when you add the car and the television set. Then the following thing happens. Between the 1960s and 1990s, the average American adds about six hours of leisure time per week. We work a little bit less.

[Tim Miller]

Awesome.

[Derek Thompson]

Which is awesome.

[Tim Miller]

Think about one of the things you could do at that time.

[Derek Thompson]

So what could you do at that time? You could learn, you know, a new language. You could read books, you could go out with friends more. You could watch more movies in movie theaters. You could learn how to play, you know, play pick up basketball with your friends more.

[Tim Miller]

Instead, what do we do instead?

[Derek Thompson]

We devoted basically all that time to TV. I think something like 90% of that time was spent just watching TV. It was almost as if we invented a technology that tapped into human beings latent desire to become audience members. As if underneath everything that there is in a human being at the very bottom of it is we just want entertainment. I mean, I guess we're just going to keep plagiarizing Neil Postman here. We just want to be entertained. And so the television just served this enormous need for the typical American to relax into their leisure time, to have sedentary rather than active leisure time. So you have this force of the car followed by the force of the television set. And then in many ways, I think the digital revolution, for all of its wonders, and there are true wonders, many of them that it has, it made it even easier for us to choose, select the conveniences of solitude. I could go out to dinner with friends, or, let's be honest, I could order in. I could go out to a movie with friends, or, let's be honest, I could watch Netflix. And there's nothing wrong with DoorDash, and there's nothing wrong with Netflix. But scaled over time and throughout the country, decision by decision, Americans are spending more and more of their time and more of their choices are too privatize their leisure. And that's brought us to this point, this mountain of forces with the car and then the television set and then the digital revolution.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah. So let's talk about some of the costs of this, because you do write there's some difference between solitude and loneliness. Some people really enjoy solitude. And this is maybe disaggregated somewhat from another trend that people have been watching, the epidemic of loneliness. What exactly are you positing are some of the problems? Let's actually just save the political part of this for the very end, because we can dedicate a bunch of time to that, but just the social problems.

[Derek Thompson]

Let me break it into two, and I'll start with a Preamble. There's nothing wrong with people being introverted. I am introverted. There's nothing wrong with enjoying a moment's quiet. I love quiet time. I mean, I think I say in the article, I'm the father to a 17 month old who is wonderful and extremely loud. So I know firsthand that there is nothing closer to heaven than a glass of wine at a hotel bar in a city that is not my home.

[Tim Miller]

But you're a public at a hotel bar. What about a glass of wine alone in your hotel room?

[Derek Thompson]

There we go. Well, look, glass of wine in a hotel room can be wonderful. I prefer the sort of the swirling bustle around me, like that sort of buzz of anonymity that comes with being alone, drinking in a bar in a city that I don't live in. I find something lovely about that. But different strokes for different folks. And I do not want. And I really hope this comes across in the essay, and I can say it very explicitly here in the podcast, this is not the case against introversion. This is not the case against some solitude or the case against quiet. This is a realization of what happens when we lean too much into introversion, even agoraphobia, a refusal to leave our home. Too much quiet, too much solitude. What if the dose goes up and up and up? It's the same with any therapeutic Lots of drugs are good in short supply and very dangerous in large supply. So what are some of the bad things about this? Well, number one, researchers have found again and again that solitude does not correlate with life satisfaction. In fact, people who spend more time alone consistently say that they're less happy with their lives. This is partly because people who spend more time alone often tend to be lower income people. And income also seems to correlate with happiness. That's the first thing. Maybe the deeper and more complicated idea here is that I think that many people mistakenly seek too much solitude because they believe that it's good for them. So here's what I mean. There was a study that was done, one of my favorite studies in the piece by Nick Epley, who's a psychologist at the University of Chicago. And he did this fascinating study where he asked commuter train passengers to make a prediction. How would they feel if they were asked to spend the ride talking to a stranger? And like, you know, think to yourself, how would you feel?

[Tim Miller]

Well, hell, no.

[Derek Thompson]

F. No. A lot of people said, like, you know, no, wait, quiet. Solitude is going to make for a much better commute than having a long chat with someone. I Don't know. They might not be interested in me. They might be awkward and weird. I don't want to do it. So we ran an experiment, and some people were asked to keep to themselves. And some people were instructed to talk to a stranger. And they were told the longer the conversation, the better, the deeper the conversation, the better. And afterward, people filled out a questionnaire. How did they feel? And despite this strong assumption that the best commute is a silent one, two things were found. Number one, the people instructed to talk to strangers reported feeling significantly more positive than those that kept themselves. And maybe most importantly, that effect size was just as strong for introverts versus extroverts. And what Epley says the title of this paper is called Mistakenly Seeking Solitude, is that many people, especially in an economy that allows us to keep to ourselves, assume that we'll be happier keeping to ourselves. But in a weird way, if we were forced to by external forces, essentially, if you were forced to pretend as if we were a little bit more extroverted than we feel, we might be happier. And that might be the central social tragedy of our time, that we live in a world that allows us to pretend as if we are deep, deep introverts. But we might be happier if external forces forced us to pretend as if we were a little bit more extroverted than came naturally.

[Tim Miller]

I'm going to obsess over that study for a while because that's a great factoid about the train that everybody should refer. I'm an extrovert, and even I'm like, ugh, I wouldn't want to talk to a stranger on the train, but I can see why the result would come out like that. I think there's an element of this that's even a little worse than what you're saying. Also is that people think that they'll be happier being alone. But also with social media, particularly for certain generations, like our age and younger in particular, people are getting what they think is social interaction without having real deep social interaction. And so you gave an example in the article about a trend on TikTok of people doing videos about how relieved they are when a friend cancels plans and how much engagement they get. I'm going to do a quick preamble myself because I don't want to be offensive, because there could be plenty of reasons for this. But, you know, one of the influencers that I follow is a person who has, you know, 50,000 followers or something on Instagram and, like, gets a ton of engagement online. And just this weekend, like, Right before I read your article, they posted from their wedding and it was like, they don't have any friends. Actually, it was like a small group. Now that could have been a lot of things I go to. You know, it could have been money, it could have been. But it was like, no. The wedding had a photographer, it had drone, it had a lot of pictures of the couple, but not a lot of reveling. And I just use that not to pick on that person or whatever. But all of these things, we see all this, there are plenty of anecdotes of this, of people that it seems online they're getting sociability, but they don't actually socialize in the real world.

[Derek Thompson]

I have two things to say about this, and I also found this part of reporting incredibly interesting. I have to give a shout out to my wife because I am basically not on TikTok. And while I was deep in the weeds reporting out this essay, she says, do you know about this Trend where these 20 somethings or teens will celebrate in creative ways to music? When a friend cancels plans often because they're too tired or anxious to leave the house and it's them wrapping themselves in a huge comfy blanket and being like, oh thank God, my plans are canceled again. Just as with introversion, some sympathy is due here. Like, we've all been in the position of having a dramatically over scheduled week and then the friend cancels for Friday night and we're like, oh Jesus, I wanted to get to bed by 9:30pm this is fantastic. But the sheer number of these videos I think is a little bit alarming because this is statistically the most socially isolated generation in recorded history. And you see people responding to their isolation by celebrating, not hanging out. Like, what is that about? And in the piece I talk about how I think in many ways our smartphones have stunted our social development. But while I encourage people to read the piece, I actually want to work out a theory that's not in the piece but that I've thought about more with you as I'm reading a book called, okay, it's the big book about dopamine. I think it's called Dopamine Nation, but it's a book about the biochemical function of dopamine. And there's this thing where if you get a huge dopamine hit from something, you get a sort of blast of dopamine between your neurons and then it lowers what's called the tonic level of dopamine as if like, kind of like with a store, if Everyone rushes to the store and buys all of the Pottery Barn couches. There's less inventory, and so there's just less couches in the store. It can be the same with dopamine. A rush of dopamine can reduce the amount that's available to you. And I have the following biochemical theory of what our smartphones are doing to us that I'm just going to present to you. And maybe your biochemist listeners can tell me whether this is crazy or maybe on target. I think what's happening is something like this. I think people are sitting at home on couches and in bed looking at TikTok or Instagram or Twitter, and dopamine is being flushed out of their system. They're going hit, hit, hit, hit, and they're putting their phones away. And rather than feeling rejuvenated by what is definitionally leisure time, they're actually dopaminergically exhausted. So when their friends say, hey, do you want to come out? Do you want to hang out with me? They think, no. Hell no. That is like, I've been hanging out.

[Tim Miller]

With people all night.

[Derek Thompson]

I have to get dressed. I have to put on my makeup. I have to do my hair. I have to leave my house. I have to get in the car. I have to take the subway. That sounds like a bunch of potential misadventures. And I don't have the. What does dopamine do? Gives you drive. I don't have the available biochemical drive to hang out with you right now. So I'm going to say no. I'm actually going to feel great about saying no. And what am I going to do instead? Probably just hang out with my phone. So in a way, I worry that. And again, this is not fully tested. Or maybe it is. I hope people can flush it out. I wonder.

[Tim Miller]

We do have some biochemists listeners, and I have one person in mind. I'm waiting for their comment.

[Derek Thompson]

This is the hypothesis that I hope they respond to. I wonder if we are essentially donating our dopamine to our screens, donating dopamine to the parasocial relationships we have with people through our phone. And as a result, we have less drive to invest in the actual social relationships in our lives, that the dopamine is flowing toward parasociality rather than toward actual sociality.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, I never thought about it like this, but this kind of seems obviously true to me. Think about it from the social level of I'm just using TikTok or Instagram, particularly if you're a young person and you're scrolling through and it's like you're hearing about other people's drama. You're seeing people that are very pretty, that it's making you maybe self conscious or anxious. And you're spending time and sometimes you're laughing and there's some positive. Right. But you finish the scroll, you're like, oh, I'm sick of this. After you spend 20 minutes or 40 or however many you spent just moving your thumb and then that ends. I don't feel like you need a biochemist to be like, yeah, it makes sense that they're like, what do I need now? Time away from people. Right? Time away from people. Not time with people, but they didn't actually get anything interesting out of it. I don't know. Sometimes I feel like I'm unempathetic, like I'm such an extrovert and I love being. And like this is so obviously true for me. I do. I'm open to feedback that my priors do not match other people's life experience. But the one thing I want to challenge you on that I just noticed when I was reading the article is there's a lot of conversation about teens and teen isolation. And I feel like it's weird. Like in your world and kind of the social cultural analysis world, there are people that are like, teens are over scheduled. Teens have too much stuff that they're doing. The high achieving teens, parents are obsessed with getting them into Ivy League schools. And so they're doing too many extracurriculars and they're doing too much homework and they don't have enough time to be teens or kids. I don't understand how that social problem matches with the social problem of young people are spending too much time alone. Do you have any thoughts on that?

[Derek Thompson]

I don't mean to keep saying to every prompt I have two thoughts, but I again have exactly two thoughts. The first thought is that we know for a fact that the amount of time that teens spend on their phones has gone from definitionally about something close to zero 30 years ago to today. About a third of their waking hour. Right. So the typical person, teenager, adult, is consciously awake for about a thousand minutes a day. That's kind of interesting. You can think to yourself like every 10 minutes that you spend is therefore 1% of your waking day. And you can say, how do I want to spend the next percent? Well over 300 minutes is how much the typical teen spends in front of a screen. So a third of their waking life, just mathematically it's inevitable. That if teens are going to be spending a third of their waking life in front of a screen, the vast majority of that screen time is alone and often at home. And so they're not spending that time with friends in person. Some people could argue that that activity is social after a fashion, you know, if they're texting with their friends or calling their friends. But you and I both know, and anyone who's a parent in this show knows a lot of that time is really just spent, as you said, using the thumb to flick, flick, flick, flick. The second thing I would say is that you've pointed out that children today, especially teenagers today, and especially, especially teenagers of middle and upper, middle and even upper class families, are over scheduled under intensive parenting in order to burnish extracurriculars that they can maximize their chances to get into a top 20 college. Those extracurricular activities are not necessarily or often not entirely social activities. If you ask teens, for example, as the Monitoring the Future study does, how much time do you spend actually going out with friends a week? Or what percent of say 12th graders go out with friends two or more times a week? In the 1980s, it was 75, 80% of boys and girls who were 17, 18 years old going out with friends two or more times A WEEK. Now it's closer to 50%, from 80% to 50%, an absolute collapse in going out with friends. So it's possible that what you see is attention, and I acknowledge that parts of it might be attention. Because if kids see their extracurricular activities as being highly social, well then maybe you're just getting, you know, you're killing two birds with one stone there. What you're actually seeing maybe is that intensive parenting is squeezing social time out of teenagers lives because they are so highly pressured to think of the 1000 minutes in every day as an exercise in maximizing their chance of getting into the best possible college rather than thinking about some of those 1,000 minutes as being about social leisure time, spending time, whether it's sedentary, you know, hanging out on the couch or active playing sports with friends in a social fashion.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, you made a very good distinguishing point there. A clarifying point on my question about really talking about middle and upper income teen kids when you're talking about the helicopter parenting issue. Right. Because you mentioned another issue in your article is that talking to low income teens and talking to parents of low income teens, the studies are showing that they see a problem of not they don't have anywhere to go to socialize. Right. That a Lot of the rec centers and the stuff that propped up in the middle of the 20th century, some of that stuff's still there, but it's hollowed out and there just aren't as many options.

[Derek Thompson]

I'm really glad you brought that up. Eric Klinenberg's a sociologist at New York University who's been incredibly influential, broadly, but specifically to me, and I leaned on him a lot for this article. And he made a point that I think is so, so important that as much as people like me want to focus on changes to the, let's call it internal world of screens and television and smartphones and dopamine dumping toward TikTok, a lot of this is about changes to the external world. It's about changes to the physical world. This is a theme of the book that I wrote with Ezra to a certain extent. But America built a lot of social infrastructure in the first half of the 20th century, not only through the New Deal, but also up through the 1950s. You know, we didn't just build roads and bridges, we built a lot of libraries. We built a lot of rec centers, we built a lot of community centers. We built physical places for people to go when they left their homes and, you know, weren't at work. And sometimes these are sometimes clichedly called third places. But it can be useful to think of that sort of third place outside of your one home and two office. We don't build these places anymore, especially in low income areas. And Eric's written a lovely book, Palaces for the People, about this precise phenomenon that America in particular has really gotten out of the habit of building public physical places for people to spend time in when they can't afford to spend time in multimillion dollar homes and multimillion dollar schools and multimillion dollar something else. And so it is really important to remember that these trends are worse for low income Americans, even though the fears of too much solitude sometimes seem like an upper middle class complaint. In a weird way, this is a lower middle and lower class problem. First and foremost. It is poor men, and poor single men in particular, poor young single men in particular who have the fastest growing rise in pure aloneness and solitude these days.

[Tim Miller]

This podcast is sponsored by Deleteme. Deleteme makes it easy, quick and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. This incoming administration has threatened to go after a lot of folks. I have been talking to some people that are on the Kash Patel enemies list. For example, one of the things that they are thinking about and they're recommending to me and others is just ensuring that you got your house in order when it comes comes to what is happening online. And that is a smart idea for anybody. Even if you're not in Keshe Patel's book, there are data breaches happening all the time. You can't see when the neck loan is going to come and you don't know what information about you might be repackaged, shared or leaked. So you have to be vigilant. Delete Me is the best way to keep your personal information secure and out of the hands of data brokers. Data brokers make a profit off your data. Your data is a commodity and anyone on the web can buy it and see your private details. This can lead to identity theft, phishing attempts, harassment, unwanted spam calls and more. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Deleteme now at a special discount for our listeners. Get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to JoinDeleteMe.com Bulwark and use promo code Bulwark at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to JoinDeleteMe.com bulwark and enter code bulwark at checkout. That's JoinDeleteMe.com bulwark code bulwark. That takes us nicely into the politics. I do say, having had this conversation, I feel like we were remiss to not have my colleague JVL here as a just antisocial crank lover of his private time. He does have a lot of kids, so maybe that solves the solitude problem. But I may be sending him a homework assignment for the newsletter to give a to give the contrary, not the non extrovert view on all this, the practicing of politics alone. And some of this I do think is related to what we've seen from younger men in their engagement in politics online. You write about how what this leads to. There's an obvious element which is demonizing and alienating other people because you don't encounter them, so you don't understand the nuances of their views as much. It also, maybe for a different class of people, leads people to be out of touch with people of differing views because they don't encounter them. And you also say it kind of leads to a nihilism. So talk about how you're connecting the increased solitude to our political moment.

[Derek Thompson]

So Mark Dunkelman, who's a wonderful writer and researcher at Brown University, has this really lovely schema where he says that ironically, this era of social isolation has actually deepened our relationships in two specific ways. In the so called inner ring of family and friends, you know, you have. We were just talking about intensive parenting. Intensive parenting is, to a certain extent, kind of extremely social. If you consider sociality, spending time with your kids and obsessing with your partner over how your kids should spend their time. We're much closer to our families, spend more time with our families than we used to. That's the inner ring, and there's a far outer ring that I think of as sort of tribe. It's easier for you. You're a Nuggets fan, is that right?

[Tim Miller]

I am, yes.

[Derek Thompson]

Okay. It's easier for you.

[Tim Miller]

I don't live in Denver.

[Derek Thompson]

Right. It's easier for you to follow other Nuggets fans. It's easier for you to contact reporters in Denver to ask, you know, what can the team do in order to build more talent around Jokic, who's just this generational star. You can follow the sport and follow people who share your ideological preferences in a dozen other ways or your aesthetic preferences. You know, I don't know what kind of music you like, but I'll bet it's easier for you to follow people who listen to your type of music in a way you never could 40 or 50 years ago. Right. Like, you're like, you know, you could like DM writers at the Athletic to be like, I think you should write this about Jokic. These are relationships that weren't possible 50 years ago. So where does that leave us? Where the inner ring of sociality for many people is stronger, that is close family, and the outer ring of sociality is stronger of tribe. Well, it means that what's atrophying is the middle ring and the middle ring. If we call the inner ring family and the outer ring tribe, that middle ring is village. We know our neighbors less. We know our cities less. We know the people who live around us less. And one reason why I think that matters a lot for politics is being around people who aren't our family and don't share all of our ideological preferences like our echo chambers do. Being around people that are around us but different, I think is a naturally moderating instinct. It allows us to see people who are different than us as human and reasonable and having their own set of interests and sometimes even sharing our own interests. You know, recognizing that the person who's voting for a candidate you consider heinous actually shares many of your key priorities. That's moderating. And in a world without that cooling agent, you get people like Donald Trump, who I think is a classic all tribe, no village avatar. And I also think that, you know, as long as we're just trying to diagnose evenly across the board, I think that you have some progressives who struggle to see how half the country could like Donald Trump in the first place. When their neighbors, in many cases, are voting for Donald Trump, you know, people can say no. Well, Derek, there's this theory of the big sort. We tend to live around people who agree with us about everything. Well, a third of Brooklyn voted for Donald Trump, right? In a room of 18 people, six of them voted for Donald Trump in Brooklyn. So I do think that, like the cold medicine that I do have for progressives like me or liberals like me is that if we feel like we're living in a country that's alien to us, when half the country, roughly speaking, every four years, votes for this guy, maybe it's because we have made ourselves strangers in our own land, and maybe we should try to reach out and understand people who seem like ideological aliens to us.

[Tim Miller]

I agree with that admonishment to some progressives, but on the Trump part, and this type of figure could emerge on the left, who knows? The solitude obviously lends people to be more likely to be susceptible to demagogues and to people that lie about and demean the people of the opposite tribe. Right? I mean, people are always like, humans are wired like this. We are. We are tribal beings. So we are susceptible to this regardless. But you are particularly susceptible to something that you're already biologically susceptible to if you are not doing anything to offset it in the real world, right. If you're one of these lonely men that you're talking about, in particular younger men, and you're not actually, you're not going on dates, really, you're not communicating with people in the real world. Then when you have a figure like Donald Trump that comes up and says, well, your problem is all, you know, these whatever, progressive elites in Los Angeles. So your problem is like the Haitians in Springfield. Because the problem is these fucking people that annoy you on the Internet. Like, you're much more open to all of their critiques, no matter what their validity is.

[Derek Thompson]

It seems so many thoughts came to mind as you were saying that, which I agree so much with. Let me try to rank them in my head. Arlie Russell Hochschild was a sociologist, I believe, at ucla. I don't know if you've spoken to her.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, she had a great book.

[Derek Thompson]

She wrote a great book called Strangers in Her Own Land. And she just wrote another one. I think it was Stolen Valor, I think is what it's called. And I was emailing with her for this essay and her comments did not make it into the final draft. I'll tell you this right now. She said that in a lot of the homes, a lot of the mobile homes that she was visiting in these deep red areas in rural Kentucky, a couple things were true. Number one, the largest piece of furniture was the television set. People were spending a ton of time in front of Fox News and they were spending less time outside their homes. And that had an interesting effect where among this group, one of the most important issues to them was fears of migrants. But if you look at census data, one of the areas with the lowest share of immigrants in America is rural Kentucky. So people living in villages, villages, people living in cities, in rural towns that had the lowest share of immigrants thought that the most important problem facing this country was immigration. That to me is at least a suggestive sign of a world where people aren't prioritizing the issues in their so called village, that middle ring, because the middle ring is atrophied, what they're prioritizing is the outer ring of tribe. The national political becomes the local story, right? The classic all politics is local. No, all politics is focal. All politics is whatever, Fox News or Ben Shapiro, whatever can get you to pay attention to that is a national storyline. That's politics today in the age of the Internet. The other point that I want to make, and you on ramped me to this, is that there's a Danish political scientist named Michael Bang Peterson who's found that among people who are socially isolated, they tend to become more nihilistic and they adopt a political attitude that he calls the need for chaos. These are people who've lost faith in the political process entirely and they're disconnected from the knotty and complex politics and processes of the world around them.

[Tim Miller]

If you're not involved in your community, then you don't know how this stuff gets out.

[Derek Thompson]

And so they tend to be much more likely to agree with pronouncements like I need chaos all around me. When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking, just let them all burn. They tend to see politics as a kind of at an arm's length, distant show, a kind of postman esque reality show that affects their lives, but is also in some way bigger than their lives. It's a story for them to participate in more than a set of policies that can affect their day to day experience. And as a result, what they demand is entertainment. What they demand is chaos. And that to me is absolutely scary, uplifting stuff.

[Tim Miller]

We've got AI coming too, which is great. I don't have time to get to that right now so people can imagine what they think the impact of AI is going to be on this solitude, the increasing trend towards solitude. I just want to do quick rapid fire on a couple of your other articles because there's some good stuff there. And this isn't really rapid, isn't really right up your alley, Derek, but I'm trying to challenge you a little bit. We can all grow. You wrote about the most important breakthroughs of 2024. You write this every year. It's one of my favorite articles. What was the most important breakthrough to you of 2024, scientific or otherwise?

[Derek Thompson]

Let me challenge myself to be relatively brisk for these, which is rather than write small essays over audio. The most important breakthrough is a kind of half vaccine that's been developed for hiv. HIV kills hundreds of thousands of people a year. Tens of millions of people around the world suffer from hiv. We haven't developed a vaccine for hiv, but we've developed a shot that people can take twice a year that seems to protect them 98 to 100% from HIV. I mean, that's very close to what we have with the COVID shots. We call those vaccines, which I of course think we should. It's extraordinary that we've developed this drug and if we can scale it like we scaled the COVID vaccines, it's possible that we really could take a day out of this disease that's killed millions and millions of people. So I think the news is biased toward negativity. And I like writing this article because it forced us to see the positive. And this is an amazing, amazing, therapeutic.

[Tim Miller]

You wrote another article called How Trump Won Everywhere. This might be harder to be brisk with, but we'll try to be as brisk as we can. Michael Potozer is insightful guy that writes about trends, political trends and data. And he wrote something that I uncharacteristically disagreed with recently, was that he thought that it was a lack of turnout among Democratic groups that was the core reason why Harris lost. I mean, maybe I can have a longer conversation with him. I don't mean to have him catch a stray on the pod here, but I more agree with a different view, which was yours, which was about how Trump won everywhere. And it was this small movement towards him as a result of some of the post Covid environment. So why don't you try to sum up your case?

[Derek Thompson]

Well, yeah, first on whether it was people pulling out of voting entirely versus being persuaded the numbers are still coming in. But just looking at Wikipedia right Now, Trump received 74 million votes in 2020. He received 77 million votes in 2024. Harris received 75 million votes in 2024 versus Biden's 81 million. We're going to end up very, very close to where we were in terms of total votes cast. So I'm not as persuaded by the idea that this was about people not voting for Harris. I frankly think there were a lot of people who voted for Joe Biden who then voted for Donald Trump. And we should be curious then why that happened. And this clearly, I think especially happened among people who lived, who were Hispanic number one. And the swings among metro areas was absolutely extraordinary. I mean, just reading from the reporting that I did, this was back in November, excuse me, in the New York metro area alone, Manhattan shifted nine points, right. Brooklyn shifted 12 points, right. Queens shifted 21 points, right. The Bronx shifted 22 points, right. In Florida, Orlando and Miami and Houston and San Antonio and Dallas, all these places shifted about 10 points to the right. So did Wayne County, Detroit, Cook County, Chicago, all of them about 10 points to the right. This is not like a 10 point shift is not just about Biden folks sitting out. This is about people who wanted to vote for Donald Trump showing up. And I think people on the left and liberals need to look at liberal governance in liberal states and blue states and in blue cities to ask the question why in the states that we run and in the cities that we run, did Donald Trump move the electorate double digit percentage points to the right? That's a big, big question.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah. And I'm going to talk more with Liz here up next about all of the factors for these fires in la. And there are many. So people just forgive us here, we're obviously going to gloss over some of this. But I do think that you can't look at what has happened in LA and not see it as another example where you have these kind of high tax, big government places that felt unprepared for the challenges that they faced. Now this is just this massive challenge and there's a bunch of misinformation out there about the fire hydrants ran out of water. It's like actually there wasn't enough water in the fire hydrants for all these different fires at the same time. But that said, like the mismanagement and the management failures are hard not to observe.

[Derek Thompson]

Yeah. And the truth is I don't know exactly how to bake and slice the blame pie right now. I think that we're in a moment.

[Tim Miller]

And I'm not asking you to, I.

[Derek Thompson]

Just mean as a broader, I take that look, the pie will have to be baked and sliced. I mean, if these are policy errors, then we should know what they are so that we don't make them again. Like the western US is not going to turn into Brazil in the next 10 years. Right. This is, this is no forthcoming rainforest. It's going to get drier and drier and hotter and hotter and pressure gradient differences between the Pacific Ocean and the inland California Nevada desert, which was what causes the Santa Ana winds. These factors aren't going away. So if we're going to live in nature, we ultimately have to live in nature. And that requires technology and it requires smart public policy. I think at the moment there's probably a lot of conflation happening right now around how much of this is just the Santa Ana winds are an incredibly strong force of topographical fact. How much of this is the fact that there hadn't been a fire here for a long time and so the so called fuel, the vegetation and the, and the housing simply created a lot of kindling. How much of this was the fact that California or Southern California had received an astonishingly low amount of rain, which again made the kindling perfect for fire. And then how much of this is a public policy failure, whether it's on the housing development side, the brush clearing side or after the fact, because there's a lot of people angry right now about the insurance policies, which again, I think that's important. But insurance doesn't cause fire. So it's important to talk about what part of the blame pie we're looking at here. So there's a lot that we don't know and a lot to disentangle on the cause front and then on the response front. And I just, I really want people to be specific when they're describing the how and assigning blame. But there's no question that we're looking at an event right now. I have family that's dramatically affected by these fires. We're looking at an event right now that is going to, I think, I don't think this is alarmist. I think it's going to reshape California for the next few years. I mean, if you have parts of that city where people are spending millions of dollars on homes and those homes are uninsurable. What's that going to do to the Palisades? What's that going to do to Malibu? What's it going to do to Pasadena? What's it going to do by ripple effect to other parts of Los Angeles and Southern California, even parts of Northern California if this state becomes uninsurable? Just huge, huge questions.

[Tim Miller]

All right, man. Yeah. That is so complex. Appreciate your thoughtfulness on it. It sounds like we'll be having you back again soon. You got a new book coming out. Up next, much more on the fires and what's happening in California with Liz Wild. Stick around. All right, guys, it's, you know, it's a new year and this happens to me every new year where I'm like, I'm going to cook more. I'm starting to cook more, less takeout. You know, we're coming up with a plan, we're coming up with agenda. I do really good in January, do pretty good in February, starts to go downhill in March, but I'm committed to it. This year we're going to be doing cooking at home. And especially on these busy weekday nights when you got the kids basketball practice or music practice or I got a blab on msnbc. It's important to get dinner done in a way that is super easy. And that's why I've turned to HelloFresh. HelloFresh's new Ready Made meals go from the fridge to your fork in just three minutes. It's the same high quality ingredients and restaurant worthy flavor that you expect with just none of the work. Save valuable time with fewer trips to the grocery store. Thanks to HelloFresh Market, there's over 100 add on items you can add to your weekly box like quick breakfast, packable snacks, beverages and more. Luckily, my little baby girl is pretty adventurous eater, so that's good. We've got some other folks, some of my other podcast co hosts over the next level jvl It's a little tougher situation in that home. You know, they got children with exacting standards on the meals. But across all of us, Sarah and JBL and me, what we found is there are options at HelloFresh that work for our kids, make it easy for us to cook and do meal prep and also do prep for these podcasts. Listen to Derek Thompson's article in my earphones that I can cook at the same time and ask engaging questions like I did today. It all works out if you need to multitask. If you've got kids that are looking for a good meal. If you turn to HelloFresh, you can get up to 10 free meals and a free high protein item for [e-mail] thebullworktenfm one item per box with active subscription free meals applied as discount on the first box. New subscribers only. It varies by plan. That's up to 10 free HelloFresh meals. Just go to hellofresh.com thebullwork10fm all right, we are back with Liz Weil, features writer at New York Magazine. She previously covered climate in California for ProPublica and was a writer at large for the New York Times Magazine. She won an Emmy in 2023 for working on a documentary, Unlivable Oasis, about a Southern California community of farm workers living in sunbaked trailers. Boy, it's been a tough couple days, huh? I was reading your old article and I was like, I really want to get this person on the podcast. We've never met before, so I appreciate you doing it. One of those articles you wrote that jumped off of me. I just want to start there because it was just, it was kind of like a throwaway line in one of the articles you wrote. Where we are now, January, the fresh and less fire alarming time of the year, should be the moment for us to relax. You know that in a January article, I think in 2022. And here we are. That's a pretty ominous sign. So I'm wondering what your biggest picture thoughts are. Watching everything going on in la.

[Liz Weil]

My biggest picture thoughts are it's heartbreaking and it's like all of the issues all at once happening in LA right now. And I wrote about this a bunch. Like if you're a person who follows climate and follows wildfire in particular, or if you're a fire scientist, you know all this is going to happen. And it's just all the more horrifying to just like see the same movie again. And worse, given that, you know, it's hotter and drier, it's barely rained in LA in seven months, and there's not a lot you can do once there's a windstorm and a fire burning.

[Tim Miller]

Your first article, the one that prompted me to reach out, was titled Mega Fires. Why Won't Anyone Listen? It was written in 2020, but it references an interview with a guy going back to 2005. A lot of that is about much of the more what I guess urban, rural part of California, where the forests meet the communities, if you will. The LA situation is a little bit distinct in one sense. I Pulled up there as this Didion. In Slouching to Bethlehem, she writes, it's hard for people who have not lived in LA to realize how radically the Santa Ana winds figure in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles deepest image of itself. The violence and unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in la, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliable reliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are. I was curious for you, before we kind of get deep on, you know, forest management, how much of this you see as a part of the broader California story or something unique to Los Angeles and the Santa Ana.

[Liz Weil]

So what the fire nerds called the wui, the Wildland Urban interface is like the most dangerous spot for people in California. And la, even though it's a huge city, sort of falls into that category. So there's a lot to burn right near the city and the Santa Ana winds. You know, a colleague of mine was sending me images of the Santa Ana's blowing the shingles off her house and like calling it Didion weather. If you're a reader, you think of didion when you think of the Santa Ana winds. And wind is like the huge unspoken part of fire stories like these big fires generally don't start like on the ground from one house to another. They start with embers getting blown in the wind. And so right now in la, there are these huge windstorms that can carry embers. I don't know how far they're blowing in LA right now, but for like a mile, for like a really long time. And that becomes the impossibility of fighting them is you don't know where some burning hunk of wood is gonna land next and light that spot on fire. So the Santa Ana's are a huge. They're a huge part of what's going on in LA right now. If there wasn't a windstorm, this fire would be really different.

[Tim Miller]

In that 2020 ProPublica piece, you interviewed a guy named Tim Ingoldsby, and he had started a group, Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and ecology, back in 2005. And you read that he'd been lobbying Congress, trying to educate anybody who will listen about misguided fire policy that is leading to the mega fires we're seeing today. And so when you wrote that in that context of 2020, obviously this right now, everything gets so political so quick, right? And everybody's like, well, it's just the climate. Or you have Trump, it's like, it's just the smelt fish in the water, coming down from the. And it's like. But with regards to what's happening in California, there was a very specific thing that you were writing about that people have been warning about for a long time. Talk about that, you know.

[Liz Weil]

So that was the first fire article I ever wrote. Basically, I just started up ProPublica. California was burning. And they were like, write us a fire story this week. And I started talking to people, and I was so struck by people like Ting Ingoldsby, who had been following this for years. And this whole world that was new to me was, like, so exasperating for him. It was like, you know, the Truman show of fire weather. So one of the most surprising things to me about publishing that was that, like, both sides of the political spectrum, it was like the one thing people could agree on was forest management. It was just like the dorkiest thing to talk about in the world. But basically everybody could agree we shouldn't be, like, letting our forest get overgrown and turning into these huge timber piles. And so this is a message that firefighters and wildland firefighters have been talking about forever of just like California is a mediterranean climate. Our landscape was meant to burn, and it is going to burn whether we want it to or not. So we can do that in a controlled way. We can, like, go into the wildland, urban interface and other areas and try to, like, take the fuel out of there before the fire gets to it. Or we can do nothing and then have these huge mega fires. So, like, a few years ago, there was a big fire coming towards South Lake Tahoe, and South Lake Tahoe had actually done a really good job of forest management and whatever other things happened too. But that was part of the reason the Tahoe didn't burn.

[Tim Miller]

So here's the thing, though. If you say it was the one thing that the bipartisan, everybody can agree on, we're doing this wrong. But then it doesn't happen with a few exceptions. And you wrote, I think it was in the Times article about In 2021, California was starting to do this. There was a managed fire that was created to clear out some of the brush, but then it got out of control and there was damage, and then they stopped doing it for the rest of the year. Right, because there's blowback from the community. In the prehistoric California, 4.4 million acres burned each year. Between 82 and 98 California land managers burned about 30,000 acres a year. Between 99 and 2017, it dropped to 13,000 acres. If people on both sides agree with it, like, why isn't it happening? What's happening?

[Liz Weil]

Okay, theoretically, I should qualify this. So, like, when that mega fire piece came out, it was like Ben Shapiro was retweeting it and Bernie Sanders got it. Like, it was like, everybody could say they were for it. But you're totally right. On a local level, when it comes to, are we going to have this intentional fire, managed fire, what people call it, like, in our county, people are very, very nervous, and understandably. So you have this fire burning and then the winds come up, and usually it goes well, but occasionally the fire jumps and houses burn down, and then people are furious and feel like, why didn't we just put this whole damn thing out? And when you have that repeated again and again and again, you get in the situation, like you were just reading those numbers about where we're not burning nearly enough. And so when the fire weather comes, when the, you know, when the winds are blowing, when it hasn't rained, when all of these climate change impacts are happening and all of these fires are made worse by climate change, if we haven't been able to manage it. And so, like, yes, politically, theoretically, everybody's for it. At a local level, people are very upset.

[Tim Miller]

Another thing that jumped out at me from one of your stories was California only manages, like, 3% of these lands. Like, about half of it is a federal land management problem. If, you know, Inglesby and such have been advocating about this for since 05. You know, we've had presidents and Department of Interiors of both parties, you know, going back and forth over this. Like, what do you have any sense for? Like, where. I guess the failure point at federal California both, like, what's your sense for that?

[Liz Weil]

I mean, it's a huge funding problem. Like. Like, it's being reported, sometimes misreported. This week out of Los Angeles. Like, firefighting is incredibly expensive. And there are several firefighting agencies in California. So there's the Forest Service, and then there's also Cal Fire. So it's basically the federal firefighters and the state firefighters, and then there are county firefighters, too. And so there's not enough money. There's often not enough personnel. A lot of those personnel are California inmates, which is a whole other issue that we could get into or not get into. It's an economic mess. And there are times when the federal firefighting policy and the Cal Fire policy are not in line. And so there's just like a political mess of what exactly to do and who's the boss costs.

[Tim Miller]

Because it's January, some of the resources they put into this are seasonal. Right. And so like they didn't have the people, the equipment, you know, ready that they might have had it been, you know, September.

[Liz Weil]

Yes. So the, the seasonal firefighting workforce, there's a whole host of issues there of people who don't want to just be like seasonal contract employees anyway. But yes, so the seasonal workforce is down. Also, firefighting resources are often shared with Canada and Australia. Like the big planes that come and like scoop water out of the ocean and dump them on the fire. So right now it's summer in Australia, they don't have planes to send us. They need to be fighting their own fires. But usually it has worked in the past for like it's winter here, we can send our resources there and it's, you know, and vice versa. So part of what's happening too is due to the fact that it's January, those resources aren't available either.

[Tim Miller]

The extent of it, just the fact that I anecdotally know two people whose houses have burned down just sort of shows the extent of this. And it's just so widespread and yet you have to talk about how this is like this challenge is also like a challenge of choice of all of us. Look, I live in New Orleans, so I'm making a similar choice, right? Like people that are choosing to live in high risk areas and that we're not kind of living in reality. You did this good interview with somebody who was talking about just like how our brains are wired to be like, oh, everything is going to be fine or it's the apocalypse, right. And there's not this in between of understanding managed risks and making choices that are smart and making growth choices that are smart. Anyway, you've done a lot of reporting on this in California. Like what, what Maybe this might be a moment for that to change.

[Liz Weil]

I don't know, maybe, you know, human beings are not rational. ProPublica's main climate reporter lives in a really fire prone area and loves it. Like it's just where his home is. So like people make these choices for lots of reasons, not just their climate risk. And frankly, insurance is a big part of that. Like if whole complicated other story of are we really paying what the risk is in insurance? So from talking to people, it seems to be the consensus that it's often very hard to make the decision that I should relocate right after your house is burned down, when you just want to get back home, when you just want to get back into your house again and where whole counties are in distress and it's not really a great moment to have to make a whole new plan. So one of the smartest people in fire had said to me, it's really his belief that the communities need to have planned ahead. That if you live in a fire prone county or city, it would be really prudent to have a plan of what you're going to do and what your citizens are going to do if there's a huge fire. And are people going to rebuild their houses exactly where their footprints were in exactly the same fire prone way or are you going to try to rebuild in a far more fire safe kind of configuration of your city or your county? Are people going to have plans to move and that like it's just so emotional. Like you're saying you live in New Orleans, I'm sure you live there because you like it and you love people there, whatever.

[Tim Miller]

But like, you know, the house is on cinder blocks, you know, we do different things at the windows, you know. Yeah.

[Liz Weil]

So it's sort of the same thing. The idea of manage retreat from sea level rise and people don't use the term as often, but it's the same situation of like, are people gonna like retreat from these incredibly fire prone areas? Like my, my parents and my aunt all had houses in the same little cul de sac in Napa and where in 2017 like my aunt's house burned to the ground. My parents house a few doors away did not. But just by luck the whole community rebuilt right there because that's what the insurance money was. Whatever. There's so much inertia in that moment and it's also completely insane to rebuild in some of these places.

[Tim Miller]

What about the water side of this? I mean, you know, this is a lot of the Republicans have really kind of glommed onto this particular that there's what was water coming from the northern part of California and it was slowed because of the fish or you know, certain environmental concerns. How do you see the water management question in California intersecting with the firefighting question?

[Liz Weil]

You know, I haven't paid super close attention to what's going on now, but the big story of water in California is agriculture, not salmon. It's really not. So to me it's like if you're not talking about agriculture when you're talking about water in California, you're having a completely disingenuous conversation. So I don't know exactly what's going on with these wells that had sort of dried up uphill and downhil. It was in Altadena. I Think that's a much more local issue, but on a big scale of like, is this, you know, people getting precious about salmon? That's a political conversation, not a practical one.

[Tim Miller]

Coming back to our headline, why won't anyone listen? If this is a moment to get people to listen, obviously the managed care of the, of the forests and like the, the density of the forests, which are unnatural based on California's historic geology. And are there other things that, that the experts that you spoke to are saying, like, it's just insane that we're not doing this or it's insane that we're doing this.

[Liz Weil]

You know, there are things like a certain subset of experts really talk about that are practical that you can do for your own home. Like have what people call a defensible space around your home. Like, don't have a lot of like vegetation right up against your building. You know, like clear your yard, have a roof that is far more fire safe than the roof that's probably on your house right now. So there's like a lot of talk about, you know, ways that you can just get your house not to light your neighbor's house on fire. Like a lot of the fire people also talk about that, that it's a little bit of a herd immunity problem, that once a community starts burning, all the houses are far more vulnerable. So if you have a house that's just like a tinderbox, you're putting your neighbor at risk. Risk. So there's that sort of very local level of protection. And then I think that there are just the big issues, like this is a climate change problem or it's exasperated by climate change, it is going to get worse. We have some control over how much worse it's going to get. And that conversation. And even just the idea of climate change so often gets left out of reporting. When you're in a moment, there's like a huge house, like some celebrities house is on fire. And that's like far more compelling than emissions. But if we're going to have a saner future, that needs to be part of the conversation.

[Tim Miller]

That absolutely needs to be part of the conversation. I have deep concerns about that. I do think we've just made a choice that at least in this country, we're not going to care about that for the next four years. And so that's why some of these other like, management issues are so important. Right? It's like, yes, we should do things to address climate also too. This is inevitably getting worse and we, we can't like put our heads in the sand about that.

[Liz Weil]

You know, we can't put our heads in the sand. And it's an issue that exists on, like, the biggest scale and the smallest scale. Like you're saying, like, we're in a moment where politically it's really difficult to do anything about what was already a monstrously difficult problem. But you can still decide where you live. You can still decide what kind of roof you have. You can still, you know, you can still make these very. These very civic choices, which we do have a lot of control over.

[Tim Miller]

You wrote a beautiful article called this Is not the California I Married, just about your relationship to the state and these fires in New York Times Magazine. We'll put it in the show notes. It resonated with me on a deep level as somebody who's made a marriage of choice to a city with a different ecological, environmental challenge. If you don't mind. You also wrote a profile of Sam Altman. Can I just pick your brain on that really quick before we leave? There's this big drama for people who have missed it right now about Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI and is probably the leading AI entrepreneur in the world right now, for folks who aren't familiar with that. And his sister has gone through a lot of trauma, a lot of emotional issues, a lot of personal issues, and now there's a big lawsuit where she is firing some pretty serious allegations against her brother. But you had written a profile on Sam and interviewed Annie for it, which is, like, pretty interesting given the moments. I'm just. I kind of just wanted to put a quarter in the machine and hear what you had to say about that, that whole story.

[Liz Weil]

Well, yeah, so this is true. I was writing a profile of Sam Altman, and I was just sort of doing regular reporter due diligence of trying to learn about his family. And I was reading an obituary for his father, and it mentions a sister, Annie Altman. Like the Altman brothers. He has two brothers. Jack and Max are mentioned in the press all the time. And they're like, they had a venture fund. And, you know, there are these pictures of them and narratives about them. And Annie was mentioned nowhere in any of this. Like, the New Yorker ran a huge profile years ago, no mention of Annie. So I was, like, really struck of, like, who is Annie? Why have I never heard about Annie? So I started poking around, and, yes, I went to go visit her in Hawaii a year and a half ago. And like a lot of families, there's a really complicated dynamic in their family. And Annie, like, I don't know exactly what happened, like, in private between the Altman siblings or what happened in private in their childhood, but she is obviously incredibly hurt by whatever it is that happened, and she has obviously been until very recently, written out of the story. For some reason, the wild part of.

[Tim Miller]

The story that I read was like, I mean, she was hungry. I mean, she didn't have enough money for rent and for groceries.

[Liz Weil]

Yes.

[Tim Miller]

And Sam Altman is one of the richest people in the world, depending on the success of OpenAI, might be the richest man in the world in the next decade. That's insane.

[Liz Weil]

That's insane. So the part that is, like, was not difficult to report out at all. Are these kinds of facts that you're talking about. Where Annie was living in her car while Sam was running OpenAI, Annie did not have money for food. While Sam was running OpenAI, Annie started doing sex work because she needed money. While Sam was running OpenAI, Annie got sent a memorial diamond. I don't know if you know about these things. Out of their father's ashes. Like, if somebody you love dies, you can send their ashes somewhere and have it turned into a diamond, like an actual diamond. So Annie is living in Hawaii, totally broke, worrying about money for food. When Sam sent her, I forgot what was an email or text. But I, you know, whatever the. I've read these things saying, like, where should I send this memorial dime?

[Tim Miller]

Like, bro, I'm living in my car. What are you talking about?

[Liz Weil]

Exactly. Like, will you send me 300 bucks for food instead of this? Like, when her mind was like, a totally perverse object of this parent that she loved who did not want to be a diamond. So I can't speak to facts I don't actually know about, but I can speak to the fact that there's been this very difficult, incredibly lopsided, not particularly compassionate seeming dynamic within the family that obviously just exploded this week into a lawsuit.

[Tim Miller]

Look, I understand family dynamics are complicated. Sometimes you don't want to enable somebody that's, you know, and try to encourage them to make good decisions or whatever. But, like, if you're one of the richest people in the world and your sister can't afford groceries, you can't figure out a system for ensuring that they have groceries. That's.

[Liz Weil]

Yes, exactly.

[Tim Miller]

To me.

[Liz Weil]

I wound up being most interested in the fact that we are all across from Sam Altman's power. We are all living in a world where he has a lot more power than almost all of us do. And his dynamic with Annie is some microcosm of that in some way. So what is it to be?

[Tim Miller]

Certainly raises some questions about how he's gonna wield that power.

[Liz Weil]

Yeah. Of just like, how good is he at dealing with vulnerable people while he has a lot more power than they do. And so part of reporting out on her and why I felt she was really important for whatever. There are lots of reasons, but that is one of them. Of just like, what can we learn about a dynamic between Sam Altman and the vulnerable by looking at how he's handled it, this relationship with his sister.

[Tim Miller]

It was quite an interesting piece. I encourage people to read it. I was reading it last night later because I was looking at the other articles you've written, and I was like, huh, I should read this one. It's like midnight and I'm scrolling through it. I was like, what? What? I don't know why I hadn't read it when it came out. So I encourage you all to go check her Sam Altman profile also. Mega fires. Why won't anyone listen? This is not the California image married. It is just. It's a tragedy out there. It is awful. And my heart goes out to anybody who is involved with it or his family's lost a home. And we'll. In the coming days, we'll be including in the show notes some kind of vetted places where you can support victims. So I appreciate that. Appreciate you, Liz Weil, for taking the time here to come on the pod. And everybody else will see you back here tomorrow. Peace.

[Unknown Speaker]

See what I do first look at the phone Turn on your TV Unscrew a bottle for beer an orange square cellophane cheese First I think of this Then I turn to that maybe just don't think you might sing a diss I might sing to that if I could only say now as you can see this clearly isn't me I'm not alone I'm just blue I'm not alone There was a day when I was alone A few same days ago There was a love I've been living with I'm lost on the well well First I thought of this Then I turned to that Then I turned a little bit scared oh but I feel a little bit easier Knowing that you're here now as you can see this clearly isn't he I'm not alone I'm just blue I'm not alone.

[Tim Miller]

The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.