Chapter 1: What personal experience influenced Jacob Soboroff's journey into journalism?
Kings Network. Welcome to South Beach Sessions. We do it out here on the West Coast to get the most interesting people. Jacob Soboroff, I'm sorry I'm doing this with the circle, but he represents a lot of the things that I'm interested in, not just journalism that he does for MSNOW, formerly MSNBC.
The book he's written about the destruction of his childhood home and how he ties it to climate change. You guys know I'm interested in climate change. And the very important work you're doing, fact-gathering, in what is the border war situation. where you have more information than most, and it's information that's a bit personal to me because I don't understand what's happening in America.
I don't understand what's happening in America either, so maybe we'll figure it out. So thank you for joining us, and we'll talk about your book in a second. It had to be a very personal, emotional thing to see your childhood home destroyed in the Palisades fires and then to decide to explore the depths of all of that emotion.
So I look forward to talking about the book, which comes out soon, and I will tell you the title in a moment because I don't want to read my notes right now. And the title of the book is a little bit – it's a bit depressing because it's not just the great LA fires but it's impending disasters that are on the horizon everywhere. I'll do it for you.
Firestorm, the great Los Angeles fires and America's new age of disaster.
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Chapter 2: How did the Palisades fire impact Jacob's childhood home and community?
But I will say – and we'll talk about it in a little bit. And thank you so much for inviting me to do this. I've wanted to do this for a long time and spend time with you. I think it's so cool what you're doing. I love that you're interested in all of this stuff.
But I do think that the story of the fires, as much as it is a story about climate change and about the politics of the moment and really awful, awful stuff that took place in L.A. a year ago. It's a story about people and it's a story about hope and it's a story about optimism. So it won't all be depressing. So people should stay tuned to the end of our conversation. What?
I also imagine that it probably represents in some ways your entire journey through journalism and all of the things that you have learned and this moment in America that seems so perilous with attacks from all sides that go from the border to fire, natural disasters and disasters of our own making.
Yeah, there was a guy who was an icon in public television here in Los Angeles when I was growing up. His name was Huell Hauser. And he probably did thousands of episodes of a local public television show called California's Gold.
Chapter 3: What connections does Jacob draw between climate change and the fires in Los Angeles?
And he had a couple other sort of offshoot shows. And what Huell always did – and it inspired me to get into this line of work – was treat every person in every place he went, no matter the circumstance. And he was a jovial sort of quirky guy with the utmost respect.
And it might have been, I mean, there's some, you should look up the clips or see the Simpson spoof of him, but it might be a dog eating an avocado or it might be female firefighting inmates learning how to put down a fire as they were incarcerated. But this man taught me about, not only about journalism, but about connecting with other people.
And that's the beautiful thing about my job is that I get to do that every day, no matter the circumstance, no matter where I am. And so, yeah, of course, I always look for hope and optimism and interpersonal connections about growth and about ourselves and everything I do. And that's the best part of this job, hands down, no question.
Well, explain to me, because you clearly love it, but can you explain to me how it is that you got into it? Where were the starting points on you following this as a career path? I grew up here in L.A. and I was like I was a theater kid. And so I loved I loved performing and sort of being out front. I was a horrible student, but I did have parents who were involved in civic life here in L.A.
Chapter 4: How does Jacob Soboroff describe his transition from theater to journalism?
And so I was around politics and I was love politics and I love the news. I was at the television news on in our house while we were eating dinner. The TV was on way more than we allow it for our kids in our house now. And I went off to college and 9-11 was my seventh day of school at NYU. And so I was in acting class when they told us that the towers were falling down.
And I left and I quickly switched my area of study from acting to politics. And I went to intern for Mayor Michael Bloomberg when he was mayor of New York. And my jobs in politics led me to meet a lot of people in journalism. And I realized that there were a lot of similarities between being out there and performing and
Turning us telling a story, put it that way, whether it was fiction or real life. And so then I start to pursue odd jobs in media and I started make my own YouTube channel. And I started with an election reform video blog called Why Tuesday about moving election day of the weekend. So more people could vote. And one thing led to the next. And I worked at the Huffington Post.
Chapter 5: What insights does Jacob provide about the role of journalists during crises?
Good idea. That one, by the way. Right. Right. Do you know why we vote on Tuesday? I don't know why we vote on Tuesday. Absolutely no good reason whatsoever. It was about farmers in 1845 so that they could get to the county seat to vote and get back and have time. It makes much more sense to put it on a Saturday or Sunday so people don't have to ask for more.
Or allow people to mail-in voting if it's safe and secure, which it is. And as a total side note, yeah, during COVID, we got to have that experiment. And of course, the voter turnout went up and more people participated. Right. So I did an election reform video blog and I got odd jobs. I was working at NPR.
Chapter 6: How does Jacob address the issue of family separation during the Trump administration?
I worked for HuffPost when we started the streaming network, HuffPost Live in 2013. I worked at Pivot, a short-lived cable news channel. Sorry, a cable television channel that was owned by Participant Media, the movie company. And I worked for YouTube. I did a show for DreamWorks called YouTube Nation that was like a clip show. It was like TRL for YouTube videos.
And of course now we know nobody cares about what some person is telling them to watch on YouTube. They go and find exactly what they're looking for. And that's how MSNBC found me. They said, can you do what you did for Why Tuesday and all these other outlets on the real news? And that was over 10 years ago. That was almost 11 years ago now. But hold on for the uninitiated.
When you say I quickly went from theater major after the towers fell to deciding on something else. an inspired moral choice instantaneously?
Chapter 7: What themes of hope and resilience emerge from Jacob's experiences?
You see towers fall and you're like, I need a new career? No, it's a good question. I think I spent the semester, maybe the better part of a year, in the acting program at NYU. And I had wanted to be an actor. And I think that what I was witnessing happening around me and understanding the world and being away from home for the first time made me want to ask my own questions and learn more.
And so I took, I think my, if I remember correctly, I took my first semester of my sophomore year off from acting and went to arts and sciences. And that's when I sort of started bird-dogging Michael Bloomberg's office because he had won the election saying I wanted to come and work for him. And I got hired first as an intern in the scheduling department.
So I would open mail and I would call people back. The invitations were ridiculous, so many different – they get thousands of invitations a day. And you don't have many qualifications, correct? I don't have any qualifications. But the things – I would call people and say, Mazel Tov, the mayor says about your bar mitzvah but he's so sorry that he can't make it.
But that was – now that I think about it, I haven't ever actually articulated it this way. My job was to call people and make a connection with people so that they felt meaningful that someone from Mayor Bloomberg's team was calling them back.
Chapter 8: What lessons does Jacob Soboroff hope readers will take from his book, 'Firestorm'?
Little did they know I literally sat in the basement of New York City Hall at a tiny desk in the corner as far away from the action as anybody possibly could. Yeah. You're basically the – AI is formed by human beings doing the most menial of work on manipulating people. You are the original AI. There is no doubt that that job is being handled by artificial intelligence today.
And I got asked to be an advanced man, a part-time advanced man, which is I think the most important job in politics you've probably never heard of. I think it's so consequential because it can make or break the careers of the most powerful people in the world. You go out ahead of them, you set up their events, you brief them when they get there, but you're in the shadows the entire time.
They have to trust you, you have to trust them. And so I advanced Mayor Bloomberg at all kinds of stuff, including down in the pit at Ground Zero on the first anniversary of 9-11, at firefighter funerals, at Christmas tree lightings, you name it. And so that job was the thing that connected me really to the world of journalism for the first time.
And so that was my journey from 9-11 to seeing journalists up close and being in the blue room with them in City Hall. But you're actively, consciously craving connection here somewhere? Yeah, I gotta be fucked up.
Excuse me, I don't know how to say that on the pod, but there's gotta be something with me deep down where there's something about connecting with other people, whether it's people close to me in my life, or people I don't know. I'm walking on polling place lines on election day. I love it. It's one of my favorite things I do. In my job, I've had all forms of it. I've
Got to meet people at the border or in the war in Ukraine or in countries around the world or on the plaza at the Today Show when I would fill in. But what do you love about it? Just the connective tissue of humans living big lives presently? I think so. Looking in someone else's eyes and telling them that I'm happy to be here.
And I'm happy to be listening to you and makes me happy that you're enjoying the same. And in my line of work, oftentimes it's in people's absolute worst, most horrible moments. I meet them on their worst day. Kind of like a policeman might or a firefighter might. And there's a privilege to that, too, that you're getting to learn from them as much as they're getting to learn from you.
And so the experiences have run the gamut and the places I've been have and the types of people that I've met. But they all to me, it's all to me unified by. By shared humanity that we have. Well, hold on a second, though. Are you somebody who's following journalism because you care about the tenets of journalism or you're seeking experience? No, I can answer that question easily.
So you're seeking experiences. I never went to journalism school. I don't know anything about it. I don't know the first thing about journalism. what any of these folks are doing in the podcast back here, what it takes to run a television broadcast, what it was like to be a newspaper reporter. I never wrote anything of substance until I wrote my first book about the family separation crisis.
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