Liz Weil
Appearances
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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 L.A. in seven months. And there's not a lot you can do once there's a windstorm and a fire burning.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And so right now in LA, there are these huge wind storms that can carry embers I don't know how far they're blowing in L.A. 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 going to land next and light that spot on fire.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
So the Santa Anas are a huge, they're a huge part of what's going on in L.A. right now. If there wasn't a windstorm, this fire would be really different.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
You know, so that was the first fire article I ever wrote. Basically, I had just started at 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 Inglesby, who had been following this for years. And this whole world that was new to me was, like, so exasperating for him.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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, which is like the dorkiest thing to talk about in the world.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
But basically everybody could agree we shouldn't be like letting our forests get overgrown and like turning into these huge. And so like 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 forever. whether we want it to or not.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
OK, 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. 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.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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?
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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 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.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
I mean, it's a huge funding problem. It's being reported, sometimes misreported this week out of Los Angeles. 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...
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Yes. So 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, the 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.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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 is 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.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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, a whole complicated other story of are we really paying what the risk is in insurance? Sure.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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? Or are people going to have plans to move? It's just so emotional. Like you're saying, you live in New Orleans. I'm sure you live there because you like it. Yeah.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Yeah. So it's sort of the same thing, the idea of managed retreat from sea level rise and people don't use the term as often, but it's the same situation of like, are people going to 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 yeah, Where in 2017, like my aunt's house burned to the ground.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
So I don't know exactly what's going on with these wells that had sort of dried up uphill and downhill. I think 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.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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, you know, All the houses are far more vulnerable.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
So if you have a house that's just like a tinderbox, you're putting your neighbor at 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, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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 celebrity's 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.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
You can still, you know, you can still make these very, these very civic choices, which we do have a lot of control over.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Well, yes. 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.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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 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 Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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...
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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 diamond?
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Exactly. Like, well, 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 and who did not want to be a diamond. So I can't speak to it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
you know, facts I don't actually know about, but I can't 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.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Exactly. To me, 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.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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...