David Brancaccio

speaker

2,652 appearances 78 recordings 2 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 5 May

David Brancaccio’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 78 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 37.

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Marketplace All-in-One · Building Tomorrow: A Special Look at the Future of Housing · 21 Feb 2026 podcast

So it acts more like concrete, forming these big, solid panels you could use for walls, floors, and ceilings?

There's a prefab piece of this, not prefab in the sense of standardization, but a prefab in the sense of a lot of the work gets done in the factory setting, and then I guess it shows up on a truck?

Do you think I'm crazy?

for trying to use cross laminated timber to build a small single family home in the fire zone.

Wood burns.

That's the obvious concern.

But what researchers have found is that thick mass timber behaves very differently under extreme heat.

When CLT is exposed to fire, the outer layer chars and burns away first, forming a blackened crust.

That char layer actually protects what's underneath, slowing the fire and insulating the remaining wood.

What's it like to live in your CLT house?

Susan decided to build her own house as a living case study.

Small, urban, and experimental.

Just 1,500 square feet.

It's a proof point for how this material can work not just in big buildings, but in homes.

So first of all, we see some beautiful surfaces.

These are CLT panels I'm looking at?

You can see the cross-section of your CLT behind you really clearly, right here.

Beautiful.

Walking these few blocks, Jen, what stands out is how many different answers there are to the same question, not whether to rebuild, but how, especially in a more extreme climate.

Some people would say we crash test houses.

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