Michael Loewinger

When it comes to home improvement, even the most experienced DIYer has a limit.

When to call the experts and when to do it yourself.

That's this week on Explain It To Me.

Find new episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, Eloise.

Can you just introduce yourself, please?

I'm a huge On The Media fan.

Aw.

I once ran into Brooke, the host of On The Media, at a wedding a couple years ago.

And when she said who she was, I, like, spat out my drink.

So tell me about this series you've been working on.

Yeah, we talk a lot on the show about...

how climate change is making natural disasters more unpredictable.

It does feel like exactly the time when you would want to have this agency around.

And I was really interested to find out that a lot of the distrust around FEMA stems from conspiracy theories.

It feels like it parallels a lot of other stuff going on with federal agencies.

You know, we did several episodes about the pullback of funding in federal science agencies like the NIH, the CDC, NSF.

And it didn't occur to me really to connect that with FEMA, but it seems like a similar thing is happening with FEMA and it comes from this sort of fundamental lack of trust.

I think that could be said for a lot of agencies.

And the current political moment is very complicated for a lot of reasons.