Jay Powell
speaker
227 appearances
13 recordings
4 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 30 Apr
Jay Powell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 12 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 10.
Appearances
Devastating wildfires basically have formed a ring around L.A., the most destructive of which has been the Palisades Fire, which has stretched into Malibu, obviously. And 15,000 acres or so have been burned in that area. Thousands of homes, maybe 2,000 homes. Here's some images. They're just devastating. And we have a lot of friends in this area.
And the area you're seeing on fire, if you don't know the topography of Los Angeles, is north of Santa Monica. You have Palisades and then Malibu. And obviously, east of the 405, you have things that you've heard of like Bel Air and Brentwood. This area is part of a mountain area.
area called the santa monica mountains and they get very dry and there's a phenomenon which we'll get into called the santa and it winds that blow really really strongly and a perfect storm has happened where thousands of homes and tragically five lives and i'm sure there will be more unfortunately have burned it down this video of driving down pch
If you've ever driven, PCH, the Pacific Coast Highway. These are 10, 20, $50 million homes that are literally on the Pacific Ocean. The most coveted homes in Los Angeles are not Bel Air and Brentwood. You might think that because you hear them on TV.
But really, if you were an incredibly successful person, you would aspire to live in the Pacific Palisades, just west of Brentwood and just south of Malibu or Malibu. Many celebrities live there, many executives, etc., And these homes are gone. Thousands and thousands of homes.
This has turned into the ultimate Rorschach test on social media, where people are projecting into this tragedy, which tragically occurs every year to varying degrees. And maybe every 20, 30 years, it's an acute situation. We'll get into that in a moment. But looking at this absolute, just devastating loss of property and lives, the lives could have been a lot worse.
Freeberg, from a scientific perspective, maybe we'll start there. When you look at these wildfires, extreme weather, global warming, and you look at this situation, is that where your mind goes or in this Rorschach test of how you feel about these kind of tragedies and how you interpret it? Do you go somewhere else? The incompetence of California's government, DEI, Ukraine?
I mean, everybody is superimposing on this natural disaster, whatever their pet issues are. Where do you come to when you look at this?
Okay, let's get to that after we go through maybe a little bit of the quick reactions here.
Okay, so Chamath, I think table stakes, we all agree, global warming, extreme weather, depending on what degree you believe in it, there's play some factor here. And this is something that has reoccurred over and over again in this specific region. region. But on social media, we're seeing a lot of other interpretations of this event. Maybe your thoughts on some of the other interpretations.
And then when you look at it, what do you start to think about preventing this in the future? Or maybe who's responsible? What's your general take on what we've seen in the last week?
Okay, Cyan, you've heard Chamath and Freeberg's take here. some amount of incompetence, some amount of, hey, this keeps occurring and there might be some global warming that is contributing to it. What do you take away from this situation?
Yeah, and I actually lived right next door to this area for a long time in Brentwood. And to your point about roofs, it seems silly. And a lot of these fire prevention things can seem silly when you first mention them, which Trump looked, let's face it, the way he says things sometimes is very colorful.
And when he said, listen, you're not raking like people in wherever he said it, Scandinavia, Finland are raking the forest. And he was absolutely 100% correct on that. Maybe it sounded bombastic or silly when the way he said it. But the truth is, in Tahoe, where we just were over the holidays, people are clearing underbrush.
When I lived in Los Angeles, people who lived in the Hollywood Hills would get a fine if they didn't clear it. But there are mountain ranges that nobody owns. And when you showed that Sepulveda Pass, that's the 405 going past the Getty Center. That area has got to be cleaned by the city and the government. And maybe they weren't doing it as much. Look at this. This is apocalyptic.
Yeah, so I know this past very well because I would drive through it.
Yeah, and I think that's going to be a big part of this breakdown after this happens, because in a lot of these cases, you might lose a home or two, but you haven't had this kind of wholesale destruction in a while. And when I lived in Brentwood, I had a shake roof. That's a fancy way of saying shingles, wood shingles, and they would bake in the sun.
And I love this roof, but my neighbors, who in Brentwood were all 70, 80 years old, and I was right on Sunset Boulevard, and I could look up from my house and see the place you just showed, which is the Getty Center and the Sepulveda Pass on the 405 and Sunset Boulevard. I was only allowed cyan to replace 30% of my roof at a time. You couldn't replace it and put shake roofs on.
You could only like maintain it because in 1961, there was the Bel Air and Brentwood fires. And these fires, you want to talk about like in memory, Jamal, this one, Zsa Zsa Gabor and tons of celebrities lost their homes as well. This one was started because of the Santa Ana winds and somebody was just burning a rubbish pile. I think it was some construction workers were burning that.
They said to me, the neighbors, do you know about the Bel Air fire? You know what the Brentwood fire? You got to get rid of that shake roof. You got to get rid of that shake roof. When my daughter was born, the roofer said to me, let's put composites on. I put composites on. And he said, what do you want to do with the sprinkler system?
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