Hollywood celebrities and American politics.

The period from roughly Bonnie and Clyde and the graduate in

1967 to maybe network and one flew over the cuckoo's nest in the mid-70s

is considered the second golden age in Hollywood history, along with the era around World War II.

That's Ron Brownstein, incomparable political analyst whose latest book is all about Hollywood

celebrities. Well, that's not all. He explains how LA's popular culture of the 1970s helped

shape today's world of national politics. We'll learn a lot today and have some fun with Ron

in the process, but first, California's fire season is underway all too soon, and firefighters are

adapting an ancient practice used by Native Americans for centuries, but a risky business in our

highly developed world. It's fighting fire with fire. Lenya Quinn Davidson is with

the prescribed fire council of Northern California. Hi, Lenya. Thanks so much for having me.

What is a prescribed fire? What does that mean? Yeah, so prescribed fire is the use of fire as a tool

under really specific conditions that we set out ahead of time.

So we can meet a number of objectives with prescribed fire, including fuels reduction and

wildfire hazard reduction, but also a lot of ecological goals like habitat restoration

and invasive species management just by using fire. Why is fire so important?

Well, in a state like California, most of our ecosystems are either fire adapted, meaning that they

have evolved to survive fire, or they're actually fire dependent, meaning that they need fire in order to persist. So in

California, we've taken fire out of the system for about 150 years, and we've had huge implications.

That's why our wildfire problem is so bad. Why we have such bad fuels accumulations is because

we took fire away. So now we're trying to bring fire back as a natural

process that can restore and protect our communities and have so many benefits. How did we come to

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