The rise of private firefighting
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 14 January 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As wildfires continue to burn in Los Angeles, some wealthy residents are shelling out thousands each day to hire private firefighters to protect their homes and businesses. But some argue that the market for these private crews diminishes public firefighting resources. We’ll get into it. And, renowned science fiction author Octavia Butler predicted many of our modern problems, including catastrophic wildfires. We’ll explain how looking to the past helped her write about the future. Plus, Kimberly gives us some advice for throwing better parties in 2025.
Here’s everything we talked about today:
- “‘Will Pay Any Amount’: Private Firefighters Are in Demand in L.A.” from The New York Times
- “I Will Pay Any Amount to Not Pay My Taxes” from McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
- “N.K. Jemisin on the prescience and brilliance of Parable of the Sower” from New Scientist
- “A Few Rules For Predicting The Future by Octavia E. Butler” from Common Good Collective
- “The LA Fires Aren’t a Surprise If You Study History and Climate Change. So Now What?” from Teen Vogue
- “Americans Need to Party More” from The Atlantic
- “Here’s how single women are successfully navigating an otherwise brutal market for first-time homebuyers” from Business Insider
We love to hear from you. Email us at makemesmart@marketplace.org or leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone, I'm Kimberly Adams. |
| 0:08.2 | Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today make sense. |
| 0:12.7 | It's the first Make Me Smart of the new year. |
| 0:15.3 | So happy New Year to everybody. |
| 0:17.9 | Kai is out today. |
| 0:19.8 | So Christian Swab is here with me for our first episode of 2025. |
| 0:24.2 | And I'm going to say, I know a lot of you have reached out to me directly and indirectly |
| 0:28.9 | worried about Kai in these fires. Kai is okay. Kai's family is okay. Thank you all for your |
| 0:35.7 | concern. And I know he really appreciates it. |
| 0:38.7 | He did have to evacuate for a couple of days, like many people in the L.A. area, as, you know, |
| 0:45.1 | right now, he's still got his house. Thank goodness. But he's feeling very lucky, and he shared that, |
| 0:51.2 | he's willing to share that he's right now today working on cleanup like a lot of other folks. |
| 0:57.7 | And so that's why he's not joining us today. |
| 1:00.5 | But, you know, Kristen, you and I can talk about this a bit later. |
| 1:04.9 | Obviously, Marketplace has been affected since our headquarters are in Los Angeles. |
| 1:09.9 | Yes. |
| 1:12.1 | I, Kimberly, you're in D.C. |
| 1:18.5 | Yes, I'm in New York, but we have lots of, lots of our colleagues are either in L.A. or has family, you know, roots in L.A. |
| 1:20.4 | So it's been a trying time for everyone, I think. |
| 1:24.8 | Yeah. |
| 1:25.5 | It's Monday, January the 13th, and all of last week, Marketplace |
| 1:30.3 | headquarters in Los Angeles were pretty much closed because of the smoke. But it's a pretty |
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