It has been one year since the Palisades and Eaton fires tore through Los Angeles, destroying

thousands of homes and killing more than 30 people.

In his new book, journalist Jacob Soberoff offers a deeply reported account of the catastrophe,

told through the voices of firefighters, political leaders, residents, and others with a reflection

on the lessons learned. The book is called Firestorm,

the Great Los Angeles Fires, and America's New Age of Disaster. And Jacob Soberoff of MS Now joins us now.

It's good to see you. It's good to see you, Jeff. Thanks for having me.

You described the 2025 L.A. fires as the fire of the future. What made these fires qualitatively different from previous ones?

You know what's so wild about this is that I was certain having watched my child at home

carbonized in front of my own eyes that what I was looking at was my past. But when I sat down to sort of explore what it was that I had experienced in real time, which I couldn't

process being out there covering this live on national television. I realized it was exactly that,

the fire of the future. And that is in talking to experts, firefighters, as senior emergency

management officials. One of them here in Washington, D.C., said to me, what you experienced was

the fire of the future because of four phenomenon.

Changes in the way we live.

Our infrastructure is falling apart.

The global climate emergency, obviously, and the politics of misinformation and disinformation

all played a part in making the great L.A. fires, not only the costliest wildfire event

in American history, but something I think that will stick with Angelinos. And people that read this book will soon experience in a neighborhood near them, I am sure, elsewhere in the United States and around the world. Let's talk more about that, because fires are so often a climate story, but this one, this became a political story in large part because of the misinformation. How did that change the trajectory of the response?

It's so true.

And I think when people read Firestorm, it reads like at times a sci-fi thriller,

but it is as true of a true story as it possibly can be.

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