Lucy Walker Surveys Another California Fire

2021 marked the premiere of Lucy Walker’s documentary film “Bring Your Own Brigade” which unpacked the catastrophic California wildfires of 2018, The Camp Fire and The Woolsey Fire. Now four years after the film was released, Southern California recently experienced even more devastating wildfires in January 2025. The most damaging fires were the Eaton Fire and the Palisades Fire. For Lucy Walker, history is repeating itself at an even larger scale and her 2021 film is even more relevant today. It’s a traumatic revisiting of difficult subject matter, and here Lucy shares what she has learned about wildfires since making her film and what she thinks can be done to prevent wildfires from becoming even more catastrophic. Listen to Alec’s 2021 conversation with Lucy Walker here. https://omny.fm/shows/heres-the-thing-with-alec-baldwin/lucy-walker-asks-hard-questions-about-wildfires#sharing See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:08Alec Baldwin?

  This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. In 2021, I spoke with documentary filmmaker Lucy Walker about her film Bring Your Own Brigade, which focuses on the two L.A. wildfires in 2018. The Camp Fire, which nearly destroyed the town of Paradise and killed 85 people, and the Woolsey Fire, which erupted on the same day and destroyed large parts of Malibu. At the time, those wildfires were the largest in California's history. You can find a link to that conversation with Lucy Walker in the show notes of this episode.

• 1:47Alec Baldwin?

  In January of this year, Los Angeles suffered more devastation from out-of-control wildfires that destroyed the Pacific Palisades, areas of Altadena, and killed 29 people. Incredibly, the recent fires eclipsed the size and devastation of the 2018 disaster and have left all of Los Angeles in mourning. I asked Lucy Walker to join me again to see how she's doing and to ask if anything can be done to try to prevent this part of the country from burning so predictably on a regular basis. For Walker, it's been a traumatic revisiting of recent history.

• 2:27Speaker 04

  It was horrifying watching it happen to my friends in my town and knowing so much but feeling so powerless to stop it. And that was such a terrifying couple of days. And I was supposed to go, I was here when it happened and then I had to go straight to New York and go straight to an award show. I was supposed to be on stage and I actually felt so panicked and upset, I actually couldn't go on stage. It really was such an upsetting time to be in Los Angeles and for everyone who loves the city and who has friends involved.

• 2:56Alec Baldwin?

  In your film Bring Your Own Brigade, and you see, of course, that infamous section where they bring in the advisor and they give them the very simple boilerplate of things they needed to do to likely avoid at least that level of severity again, and they refuse. What did you understand was the reason? Why did they refuse? I mean, was something as vital as that? What was that element of human nature as far as you were concerned?

• 3:22Speaker 04

  Well, I think the simple answer is that, you know, the fabulous thing about this country and why I chose to immigrate from the UK is that this is a country of people striking out on their own and doing their own thing and not sort of bound by old community sort of get togethers and really excited to kind of progress and do their own thing. And the bad news about that is when you try to get people together to kind of rein in their individuality and, you know, for example, not have flammable plants, you know, three feet from the house, or not have gutters or something like that, which are a kind of low cost or no cost anti-fire measures, the instinctive reaction is, I don't want

• 4:04Speaker 04

  to be told what to do. But I think there's a deeper issue, which is that the fire issue is really counterintuitive. I went on such a learning journey when I made the movie, and it wasn't intuitive. You know, and it's so, and I've watched my dear beloved friends go through this, it's so obvious that it's the fault of the firefighters, or the fault of the water, or the mayor, or something like that, right? The evacuation system. And yet, it's really hard to take in this bigger picture because it is a layered story. Yes, it's climate change, but it's also- So where we're building and it's also how we're building. And it's just kind of a complicated picture.

• 4:42Speaker 04

  And, you know, I've seen the same sort of things kick in with my smart friends here in Los Angeles, sort of seeing a part of the picture very clearly, but not the whole picture. And so I really was so grateful through this that I'd had financiers and colleagues when I was making my film that actually supported me to go on this kind of hard journey of finding out the whole story. Because it's inconvenient and it's complicated. But now in a situation like this, this is exactly why I made the film with all the rigor and worked so, so hard and our team worked so hard. Because I wanted, I felt a responsibility to get it right. I felt like lives are at stake, homes are at stake.

• 5:26Speaker 04

  And I felt like if I didn't get it right, it would, you know, I don't want to be grand and say I'd endanger lives, but I really felt like, gosh, I just want to get the story right so that people can understand, because it isn't easy to. I knew for myself when I started making the film, I had this naive idea, just put out the fires. And another simple idea, oh, it must be just climate change. And neither of them are quite true. And, and understanding now as I do, when I looked at the fire in Los Angeles and all the dreadful things that have happened. If you understand what's going on, I can understand everything that's happened in this dreadful last few weeks. I can see when someone opens their mouth, I can almost tell you what they're going to say because I know this story so well.

• 6:09Speaker 04

  And I think it's, it's hopefully going to be a real resource and help to people. That if they do watch the film, I think it is hopefully clear information that, that really gives you a 360 picture.

• 6:21Alec Baldwin?

  When I lived there, I got absorbed in Southern California living. And when you told me this happened in this area, I thought, this can't be true. So much of it being gone and I'm wondering, do you think these people will be different from the people in the campfire? And they'll adhere to some new code of how that might be restored?

• 6:42Speaker 04

  I've been reflecting deeply on this and have some absolutely, some of my favorite closest friends who've lost their homes and their animals and their kids' schools and.

• 6:55Speaker 04

  Just so profoundly impacted. And I'm hearing something a little bit different. And I guess my prayer is that this is an opportunity for some really well-informed and well-resourced people to have this hard, hard conversation that I do believe we're going to have to have sort of one way or the other. This conversation is pressing up against us is, are we going to do something a little bit differently? Because I do think that the fundamental proposition of living in the wildland urban interface in Los Angeles and perhaps more broadly in California has changed. And part of that is going to be the insurance companies, which in the short term are going to be prevented

• 7:40Speaker 04

  from pulling out or changing coverage and things like that. But I don't think that's going to last very long. I don't think you can kind of force insurance companies to, you know, expose themselves for these risks.

• 7:52Alec Baldwin?

  To change of circumstances for them.

• 7:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a change of circumstances. And it's been kind of creeping up. But I think this has really changed things with the amount of money. And yeah, so I think that the hope is that we will have less of these in future. And we might build back smarter and have opportunities to live in a way that will have less of these just devastations moving forward. Because it's not just, I can't even say it's not just because we're just in the middle of this horrific shock where it seems so overwhelming and everything that we've lost. But we've lost animals, we've lost homes, we've lost neighborhoods.

• 8:30Alec Baldwin?

  Oh, my God. If people only knew that area, how it is. I mean, California, living among many things involves, you know, if you've got two acres and a paddock in Agora or North Hills, you've got a horse. You know, people, animals are a big part of people's lives out there because of the weather in a way they can't be other places.

• 8:49Speaker 04

  Exactly. It's not just that people have lost so much in the short term. In the long term, it's also these neighborhoods are not going to go back quickly. The trauma can really last a long time. People have health impacts actually after, you know, because you imagine the shock and the stress of being homeless and finding new places and moving around and just having to cope, you know. We'll continue to see people have health problems that are not actually, they won't be traced to the fire. But I remember, you know, to be absolutely. Brutal about it, but let me, let me say that two of the people I was following in the aftermath of the Paradise Fire died of causes that you wouldn't recognize

• 9:32Speaker 04

  connected with the fire in the year following as we kept filming. Heart attacks in particular.

• 9:38Alec Baldwin?

  From stress.

• 9:39Speaker 04

  From the stress, absolutely. You can never kind of pin those things, right? But it did seem like a lot of people, you know, it makes absolute sense, right? So the thing I've been really praying is that the people impacted can really try to sort of really take care of their health and really prioritize just trying to recover themselves because it's kind of a long haul.

• 10:03Alec Baldwin?

  Filmmaker Lucy Walker. Listen to our 2021 conversation for more in-depth discussion about the LA fires and Walker's documentary film, Bring Your Own Brigade. The title is a reference to wealthy residents who hire their own private firefighters to protect property during wildfires.

• 10:23Speaker 04

  What I wanted to understand is, well, how are we stopping it? And why are people living in these areas and building these houses that burn over and over and over again? Could we do better? So you would think that when people look at developing an area for housing, they would think about fire safety, but nobody's actually thinking about, well, are they going to be able to insure these homes? And who's going to pay if these homes burn down?

• 10:51Alec Baldwin?

  To hear more of my conversation with Lucy Walker, go to here's the thing.org. After the break, Lucy Walker details why she believes residents who choose to rebuild in fire-prone areas are taking on enormous risk to both their financial stability and their lives.

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  Hey, it's Nile Rodgers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by my friend, John Ledge. What still makes you just sit down at the piano?

• 12:59Speaker 07

  If you sat down at 9:00 a.m. and then at noon, you had a full song that you recorded and put in your voice recorder or you recorded at your studio. You just created something brand new that didn't exist when you woke up. What a beautiful feeling it is. I'm always excited to write something new. I've been writing for Broadway, which has been a new challenge with new collaborators and amazing performers who are triple threats, who can sing and dance and act and do all these amazing things. And I want to keep feeling that. And so that means not resting on my laurels, going out there and continuing to create something new.

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  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 13:47Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin, and this is Here's the Thing. I first spoke with filmmaker Lucy Walker in 2021. I was curious if she stayed in touch with any of the subjects that she was acquainted with while making her film.

• 14:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. The film came out, and it really followed not just the fires, and it sort of talked about fires in general. And actually, if anything, it was specific about could Los Angeles burn, because that's where I live. And that was my sort of naive question that I kind of sparked the conversation into the movie with. But the fire looked at those twin events that happened in November 2018, but it didn't come out till 2021. So I was filming a couple of years after the events and put that in the movie. But actually, you get really close with people when you film with them. So I have absolutely kept in touch, and it's a really slow journey back. And these neighborhoods don't recover all at once. And what we're seeing now is people have to live or make that decision. And it's toxic for a very long time.

• 14:45Speaker 04

  And these are going to be very slow, hard decisions about building, and then it's a very slow process.

• 14:51Alec Baldwin?

  What's it like there now, in your campfire area?

• 14:54Speaker 04

  In the campfire area, it's coming back. In that neighborhood, the spirit was just rebuild back as fast as possible.

• 15:01Alec Baldwin?

  In the same exact way?

• 15:03Speaker 04

  Yes. There's a strange thing that happens where real estate goes up. They call it fire gentrification, because you get a lot of displaced people. And so it's kind of like, things actually kind of escalate. What cuts off this is the insurance. What people are up against is that the insurance companies are really pulling out of these areas. And there is this thing called the California Fair Plan, which is, you know, the state gives you this option of getting very expensive and very restrictive. You have to sort of trim and do the certain things to get your fire insurance. But it does give people a backup option to get insurance, rather than not be insured at all. But it's increasingly true that I think in that area, people are choosing to go without insurance.

• 15:46Speaker 04

  And of course, going without insurance is a nice, affordable strategy until it all goes wrong. I think some people there are individually choosing to build back in a more Fire safe way. And what we've seen as these stories have emerged from these new Los Angeles fires is there are stories that the home that was fire hardened has survived. Now, that's not foolproof. My understanding is that even if you have a fire hardened home, it's not sort of impossible that it'll burn, but it's way less likely. And so I think these stories, they did get through to some people in Paradise and some people did build back in a more sort of hardened way. And they had a fire that came through already. I think it was two summers ago and they managed to put it out. So it wasn't a huge uncontrollable one.

• 16:31Speaker 04

  But that area is likely to burn again very soon again.

• 16:35Alec Baldwin?

  I'm very curious also as to what comes back afterward, where the campfire people were like, Bruno, we don't want to change a thing. And I'm wondering, do we wind up in a situation where you almost have to have an AI capacity to develop what the next Palisades will be? Like the road you drove up to go to your house, that road doesn't exist anymore. Do they replan the whole thing? Every square foot of it as to access, density, vegetation, building materials. This is an opportunity to have like an almost lab experiment. Do you agree?

• 17:09Speaker 04

  Absolutely. What the movie showed was that the town leadership, the town council and the firefighters in that town. In Paradise, leadership, the firefighters in the town and all the organizations involved really came together and had this really good process of imagining how they could rebel back differently and presenting it to the town. And the town actually voted it down. The town pressured the town council to vote down these initiatives one by one, which was very disheartening to watch in the movie. However, they did have that dream, but I think that exactly what you've described will happen in these areas in Los Angeles, that I think that people are going to come together and say, how can we do it a little bit differently?

• 17:53Speaker 04

  And I don't think it'll be as radical as in the movie. There's a section where Mike Davis, who's since passed away, but wrote a lot about fires. And he talks in the movie about how when Los Angeles was designed, the most famous sort of town planners of Los Angeles were these guys called the Olmstead Brothers. And their vision was that these areas that were burned repeatedly, such as Malibu, but that were so beautiful that we wanted to be there. Let's be there, but let's only build sort of carefree cabins where we can let it things burn, not keep our great treasures there.

• 18:29Alec Baldwin?

  Disposable homes.

• 18:30Speaker 04

  Sort of disposable homes and to enjoy for as long as they might be there. But if the winds line up and the rains haven't come, just get out of the way and let nature take care of cleaning up. And then come back and build another cabin again, once that's passed. And of course, that's not what we've done. These areas are so beautiful. We've built these absolute palaces of homes with, you know, great artworks and so forth there. And then, of course, we get terribly attached. And then we've got also all this fantastic, you know, strawberry and all these, you know, quite flammable plants and other flammable stuff. And so we've kind of built up this huge problem for ourselves. But I think now there is sort of a blank slate about how we come back. I don't expect that we'll get the carefree cabins,

• 19:13Speaker 04

  but I do hold out hope that there will be positive conversation about doing things a little bit differently so that we don't have our hearts broken to this extent again.

• 19:26Alec Baldwin?

  At what point in terms of public policy do people in every area like this, if you're building in flood zones in the East Coast and you're building in fire zones on the West Coast, how much do you say to people, you're on your own. You're, you're going to have to take care of all your costs. No insurance. Don't ask the federal government to come in and, you know, save your neighborhood. Or the more important, yes, save it on a safety level, but not to pay for it, to rebuild it.

• 19:51Speaker 04

  That's right. One thing that I heard from people, particularly in Paradise, I think, because it is this quite rugged, anti-big government area was like, oh, we don't want to pay taxes. We don't want government. What does government give us? But in the same conversation, they say, oh, I'm waiting for my FEMA money. I wish my FEMA money was more. And not making that connection that FEMA was a great gift of the government, really. And that is what government can provide. And yet, what is that question about wanting to sort of pay into this kind of common resource and pay out, you know? And now we're dealing with insurance. It's like, well, this is a very expensive incident.

• 20:31Speaker 04

  And moving forward, now that we are starting to know more, are other policyholders who live in safer areas going to want to subsidize these homes in less dangerous areas? And are insurers going to be able to even afford to insure homes in safer areas if they keep being exposed to these incidents in more dangerous areas? What I hope, and maybe that sounds naive of me, but what I hope is that people can be really helped through this really complicated change. Because it's really not intuitive and it's really new. And we love these areas. I mean, what a gorgeous landscape. And it is heartbreaking to think that we're not safe in this place that we think of as the most beautiful home imaginable, full of nature and inspiration.

• 21:16Speaker 04

  And to sort of really fundamentally change our relationship with how we think about risk there, we're not very good at that, human beings. And that's before you add in commercial pressures, like the realtors. I remember, I started out my project, as I remember telling you, during the terrible mudslides in Montecito and the terrible, what was at the time the worst fire in California, which was the Thomas Fire around the Santa Barbara and Ojai area. I had a shocking experience during that when I saw a realtor selling the property to a new customer who wasn't aware that the previous residents had been killed in this mudslide. And this property was really where it was situated geographically because of the potential

• 22:01Speaker 04

  for slides in certain, you know, Santa Barbara being under, you know, very steep sort of mountains that go down to the ocean. And that after a fire, these hillsides can really collapse in quite predictable sort of places. And so this property was really very dangerous.

• 22:16Alec Baldwin?

  Boulders sliding down hills?

• 22:19Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Yes, exactly. It does have these predictable slides after the vegetation that kind of holds the hillside together gets burned off. When the rains come, the boulders can kind of get loose and really land on houses and sweep them all the way down to the ocean. It's absolutely horrifying.

• 22:36Speaker 04

  So I think that the way that kind of, you know, the way that it all works, because people have property values and they want to keep things going. And obviously, everyone understandably is in this. But I think that we're going to need some help at, you know, so that individuals are helped who are involved and impacted to really get with this new reality that there are really dangerous places to live, that unfortunately, the risk is perhaps just too high now and too expensive to live in the way that they might want to live right there. And there's also another problem at the other opposite end of the economic spectrum, which is it's not just the well-resourced people who have this choice of living in this most spectacular part of Los Angeles, that's the hilly part, that's very fire prone. It's

• 23:20Speaker 04

  also true that the cheaper areas that California is building into, and not just California, you know, looking at other states too, it's not just California, many states and Canada and Maui and other countries, certainly, especially Mediterranean countries are really being impacted by these increasing fires. So what we're seeing is that actually affordable housing further out of town is also being built in these areas that are hilly and fire prone, this wildland urban interface. And we saw, for example, during COVID, where a lot of people were moving further out of the cities into places with more space, they were almost all moving into these areas that are very fire prone. So you've kind of got

• 24:02Speaker 04

  more rich people living in these spectacular areas that are fire prone. And you've also got a lot of people who are much less wealthy, for example, Paradise Communities, or some of the communities that are much further out of Los Angeles, where a lot of the more affordable homes are being built. And developers are building huge amounts of homes there because there's a lot of people that want homes in California. But unfortunately, that development isn't exactly the areas that might be affordable now, but aren't going to be insurable and are really prone to burning soon. So I really hope that we can get our heads around this because unfortunately, the fires are not going to stop.

• 24:42Alec Baldwin?

  Filmmaker Lucy Walker. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend. And be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeart Radio app, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Lucy Walker discusses the most recent devastation to befall Los Angeles and why she feels the 2025 fires feel like LA's own 9/11.

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• 26:34Speaker 02

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week... I'm joined by rising star Sienna Spider. What is so fascinating to you about impermanence? Everything about us, everything we do is temporary. And I just got terrified of that. You know, what we do with our time and how I feel like the way the world is today and how fast paced it is and how much we don't even acknowledge anything around us. How I felt temporary to the people around me and how that made me scared and how much I wanted to last and make an impact on people.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  And I guess to change the way I looked at things and to change myself and to change how I guess I approached everything in my life. It's important that things are impermanent because nothing would feel special. And enjoying, you know, learning to love with knowing it's not going to last. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 27:42Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. After the most recent 2025 fires devastated huge parts of greater Los Angeles. I was curious how individual communities had been impacted. I asked Lucy Walker if she's noticed a shared sense of grief among residents across LA.

• 28:03Speaker 04

  I have never felt the city more united and that spirit of nine 11. Actually, it was ironic because sort of after the fires, I had to go to New York for this award show and they gave me hotel room number nine 11. And I looked at it and I thought that is exactly what I feel like. This is Los Angeles is nine 11 and that what's beautiful, I do think, and may it last is this really open hearted feeling of just infinite kindness and compassion for those caught up in it. So many people affected, so many people know so many people affected.

• 28:38Alec Baldwin?

  Yes.

• 28:39Speaker 04

  It's absolutely overwhelming.

• 28:41Alec Baldwin?

  Almost like everybody knows somebody. Are you on the east side or the west side?

• 28:44Speaker 04

  I'm in sort of southern Santa Monica on the Venice border and an area I never thought could burn.

• 28:50Alec Baldwin?

  What, you Ocean Park?

• 28:51Speaker 04

  Yes, I'm exactly in Ocean Park. So I'm a good sort of five miles from where the fire perimeter in the Palisades was. But my experience that first night when the fires erupted and I'd been watching them and I'd been like five hours ahead of the news because I was looking at the winds and I knew what we're up against. And nobody could get planes in the air to see it. But just from following X and radio traffic and looking at the winds and I just knew what I was looking at. And my firefighter friends, just, just this horrifying feeling of knowing what we were in for and watching it unfold. But there was this moment that night when I looked out of my window and it was orange and I smelled smoke.

• 29:35Speaker 04

  And the wind was knocking you flat if you walked outside your door. And I found myself for the first time in that position of thinking, oh, grief. I'm going to have to figure out what I need to take. And I am in the opposite. If there was an area in Los Angeles that would be the lowest fire risk, that's where I live. And I'm a good, you know, four, five miles from the hills here. And yet, even here, because these sort of ember-driven windstorm type events, you know, once those embers get going and those kinds of winds, you know, there's kind of no stopping it. And I was sort of paranoid and traumatized to sort of be afraid of thinking, I didn't really think it would get this far. Because if it got this far, you know, it'd been, sort of, the whole city would have been at risk.

• 30:17Speaker 04

  But to actually have to go through for the first time for myself, that situation. And I think most people in Los Angeles had that experience was like, oh, God, could it get here? And how many people do I know? And so many people have friends living with them now who are helping people. So many people have stepped into that role. And that's obviously what's beautiful about these disasters. And that I'm, my prayer is that there are gifts in this for people. And I did film people, not just during the fires and the immediate horrific aftermath, but on the long term, for the next couple of years following, and have kept following up with them even since filming. And the beautiful thing, of course, humans being resilient.

• 31:01Speaker 04

  You know, our movie ends with a wedding of two people who would not have come together had it not been for the fire. And so I hope that there will be gifts in this, even for the people that at this point just feel so overwhelmed with the grief of what they've lost.

• 31:16Alec Baldwin?

  Are people out there, are there beliefs that the power authority was indeed involved in this in terms of the arcing and where the origin of the fire was, do they think that that might be a suspect, is that still being discussed?

• 31:27Speaker 04

  I think that it does seem like that's being discussed, and I will say from my observations is that the learnings about, you know, what causes the fires and what went wrong, sometimes they're really slow to come out and that can be frustrating for people who, you know, in their anger and grief, very natural, but that, you know, the impulses to point fingers sooner. And what I've observed is that the firefighters and especially are very good at being incredibly accountable and responsible, and even when it's tough to sort of realize mistakes were made and to discuss failings, they do it unflinchingly and they do it because their own lives are at stake.

• 32:12Alec Baldwin?

  I'm not even referring to the fire, I'm talking about the electric company.

• 32:16Speaker 04

  The electric companies are slower, I would say, to get into it, but I hope that it does seem like the story, even with the electric companies, is that they will be held to the fire, I guess, can I use that pun? I do think that, you know, it does seem like people are going through the evidence pretty thoroughly. The one thing that I'll say that's kind of a bigger point, though, is that things will burn, even if we had no electric companies.

• 32:42Alec Baldwin?

  No matter what you do.

• 32:43Speaker 04

  No matter what you do. When the European, the first European boat sailed up to the coast of Los Angeles, and it's kind of how I opened my movie, it was on fire. They called it the Bay of Smoke because it was a fire. Now, there weren't any electric companies here when the Europeans first sailed up. It was, obviously, that would have been a lightning strike probably, right?

• 33:02Alec Baldwin?

  It's meant to burn.

• 33:03Speaker 04

  It's meant to burn, it is a fire landscape, whether it's a firework or a cigarette butt, or just the way that the sun magnifies through somebody's discarded glasses, you know, there's a gender reveal party that winds up setting a big fire and killing somebody that we show in the movie, and so there's always going to be something. And the other thing that I observed, which is kind of hard to get you Your brain around but true is that it's a disaster and things are going to go wrong. And that might be a water reservoir or it might be an evacuation system. It might be a bad call that in retrospect turned out to be not the right one, but was made under duress by a firefighter who had to just go one way or the other in the moment and has to make decisions that in our jobs,

• 33:47Speaker 04

  you know, I'm not faced with those kind of life and death decisions in the course of my work. Right. So it's a disaster and things will sometimes go awry, even when they're pretty well set up. In Paradise, ironically, they had a really robust evacuation plan that they'd worked on and rehearsed that you kind of, if the fire hadn't come through and killed eighty six people, you would have textbooks and they'd point at Paradise and say they were well prepared. But things go wrong. That's actually the nature of accidents and disasters. And so I, I sort of had this bigger picture where, yes, there's going to be failings. So yes, we definitely need to learn from them, but we also perhaps need to face into the very challenging reality.

• 34:29Alec Baldwin?

  Do you have animals?

• 34:30Speaker 04

  I don't because I travel all the time as a documentary. But I love animals and my heart's been absolutely broken for my friends that have lost their animals. But I, I feel lucky to be surrounded by these people with great spirit. I was just at physical therapy and I saw a friend of mine who lost everything in the Palisades and, and has three kids and, and has this great stoic attitude, you know. But he said to me, I don't think we're going to rebuild in the Palisades. I kind of like Venice now. I don't think we can do it the same way anymore. And I do think that this could be the moment, which when my film came out in twenty twenty one, I don't think we were there yet, but I think this episode has been so hellacious.

• 35:13Speaker 04

  I'm really glad for you for having the vision to have this conversation four years ago and then to revisit it now. And I think more people may be actually looking for this kind of information and, and conversation. And it may be time to have a conversation that we really don't want to have, and I get it. But I think that we will be better off the sooner that we can get our heads around it.

• 35:33Alec Baldwin?

  My thoughts are with you and stay safe.

• 35:35Speaker 04

  I'm so grateful for this outpouring of love for Los Angeles and for you for highlighting the hopefully good information that the film contains. And it's really, that's the sweetest thing about this is to feel your support. And I really, really appreciate doing this. Thank you.

• 35:52Alec Baldwin?

  My thanks to Lucy Walker. Her documentary about the California wildfires, Bring Your Own Brigade, is streaming on Paramount Plus. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach McNeese, and Victoria DeMartin. Our engineer is Frank Imperial and our social media manager is Danielle Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's The Thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.

• 36:35Speaker 05

  Football Sundays are at my house this year, so I've been making a Total Wine & More run before every kickoff. Cold beer for the group is a given, but this time of year I like to bring in some fall flavors. A bottle of maple whiskey and a salted caramel whiskey that even my friends who don't drink whiskey end up trying. I get everything I need at the lowest prices at Total Wine. Discover your new favorite fall flavors at Total Wine & More. Spirits are not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly. Must be 21.

• 37:01Speaker 06

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• 37:45Speaker 06

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• 38:07Speaker 02

  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 38:39Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.