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This is fresh air. I'm Tanya Mosley. On New Year's Eve, 2024, journalist Jacob Soberoff was sitting around a campfire with a friend

when he said something that would soon come back to haunt him.

The last thing I want to be doing, he said, is covering a fire.

And that ridiculous yellow outfit, absolutely no way.

Just one week later, Jacob was standing on a street corner in Los Angeles, in that yellow

outfit, reporting live as fire tore through the Pacific Palisades, the community where he was raised.

It's hard to fathom the scale of the devastation that followed. 31 people were killed. 16,000

structures were destroyed.

Nearly 40,000 acres burned, an area roughly three times the size of Manhattan,

making the Los Angeles fires among the most destructive wildfire events in American history.

Jacob Soberoff was there for all of it and has written about it in a new book called Firestorm,

the great Los Angeles fires, and America's New Age of Disaster.

It's a minute-by-minute account of the catastrophe told through the voices of firefighters, evacuees, scientists, and political leaders.

And it's also an investigation into why it happened and why experts agree it will likely happen again.

Jacob Soberoff is a correspondent for MS Now, formerly MSNBC, where he covers immigration, inequality, and national politics.

His first book, separated inside an American tragedy, documented the Trump administration's family separation policy at the border.

Jacob Soberoff, welcome back to fresh air.

Tanya, thank you so much for having me back.

So I want to play a clip of your coverage. And this clip, I think it's probably around 24 hours after you started reporting.

You're standing in a neighborhood. Homes are fully

...