Vicky Collison
Subject: Firsthand account of the LA fires
Gerald Posner
Subject: Public policy failures for fire mitigation in LA
Bio: American Journalist
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and culture.
Today’s topic is Fanning the LA Flames.
Our first speaker is Vicky Collison who will give us a firsthand account of what it was like to fight the fires in the Palisades. I first met Vicky immediately after graduating from college when we were in the Salomon Brothers Corporate Finance Training Program in 1987.
Our second speaker is Gerald Posner who will talk about the public policy failures for fire mitigation in LA, with particular concern about DEI. Gerald joined us several times previously on What Happens Next. He previously spoke about the JFK Assassination Part 1 and Part 2 as well as the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. He also joined us to discuss his new book on the opioid crisis.
Vicky can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Vicky Collison:
We're driving down PCH, the trailer park's burning on the left. We're at a stop and I think to myself, if I stop here too long, my car's going to catch on fire. We've got these rivers of embers. So, we just keep moving, and then eventually we get out of that horrible area. We had set up a meeting spot at a gas station that was out of the troubled area. We regroup. I pumped the lady up and ended up at my husband's sister's place.
The next morning. I get up and I'm not going to just sit here. I need to go back because I didn't get a lot of stuff that I want. My husband's son and I go to Santa Monica. We've heard about different ways to get into the area. We don't have any success. So, we ran into one of my middle son's elementary school friends and he says, “can I team up with you and run along the beach.” So the three of us head down to the beach. We start running. This young man's mother keeps calling. She's obviously very worried about him. He breaks off and leaves and it's just the two of us. So we run up the beach and then we get up there and an active fire and passing a house like God, if there's an explosion in the garage, so we scurry by that anyway. Then we run into a police officer in a car, and they question us, “what are you doing?” We try to deflect the conversation to, “Hey, there's a school that's on fire, you should go check that out.” They're not from the area.
Then there's a reporter from the LA Times. He says, “Hey, can I interview you guys?” I think, how about you drive? I'm sitting in his car, and he drives us up the canyon. He's got press with a spray can written on his top part of his windshield in the front and in the back. And he's embedded with us for the next four hours. And that's the story that's in the LA times of what happened. Subsequently we stuck around in the house for a little while and did errands for neighbors. Fed a guy's cat, tried to get the cats in the carrier and we weren't successful.
Another neighbor had medication in the fridge that he desperately needed. We got that out. Communicated with another neighbor who had a big propane tank next to his house. He uses that to run his generator when the power goes out. So, he was worried. Meanwhile the fire is very close to our house. We ended up putting out spot fires in our neighborhood for a couple days and then it just became very evident we needed to leave.
Larry Bernstein:
My wife Julie, worked at the World Trade Center during the first attack and there was an explosion in that parking lot down below. The building shook, and my wife said, what was that? And her colleagues said, I don't know, get back to work. And she walked out of her office, down the 70 floors and left the building. She went home.
There was an abandoned ship in the building, maybe three hours later, chaos ensues as people try to leave the building. And in the pursuit of making sure everyone was okay, someone called her cell phone and said, what's going on? She goes, what are you talking about I left hours ago. I'm home having a late lunch.
My wife does not understand why when there's trouble, people stick around. I want to question the decisions that you made as part of your story. There's a fire over there. Why wasn't that an occasion for you to get in your car and get the hell out of there the first time there's trouble?
Vicky Collison:
We have had fires there over the years, numerous times. But nothing like this. This is just another flare up, or it is a small fire. Now here's the big difference is that it was super windy.
Larry Bernstein:
What was that the catalyst for the fire, flames jumping across and igniting something else or the river of embers for the growth of the fire?
Vicky Collison:
First and foremost, it is the wind that is driving the fire. Even when our fire was basically out in our neighborhood, the issue that we were told for re-ignition was hotspots. It is like when you make a campfire and then you put it out and there is those embers that are still burning and you wake up in the morning and they're still there, but there's no flame.
You could get an ember that is flying from many miles away that lands on your roof and it smolders there if it's big enough it starts another fire. So those embers when it is windy can fly and cause a lot of trouble. And I saw embers at our house the night we went back, but they were small, and they flew and then they dissipated into nothing in the air because they were smaller. But if they are bigger and they land, then you can have a re-ignition.
Larry Bernstein:
I am pretty risk averse physically. At the first sign of trouble, I would have told my wife, pack it up, we are getting out of here.
Do you regret not getting the hell out of town right away?
Vicky Collison:
No, I do not regret getting out of town right away. I have done bungee jumping, scuba diving and contemplating jumping out of an airplane. I do not want to die. Everything we did was a calculated risk. We thought should we go back. And even when we were up there that night, there is two ways in and out and we felt pretty confident that those ways would be accessible. We did leave that night because it was unclear what the situation was. My younger son's a boy scout. So, we have been calling this a very dark adventure. I mean it's just a terrible situation.
Larry Bernstein:
What should you take with you? Some personal items that you can never replace. I am not really into stuff. There are very few items that would make my list. You thought about it, that moment came, what did you include in that special suitcase?
Vicky Collison:
I don't have an art or a wine collection, so I don't have a lot of stuff that would be a great loss to me if it was gone. Some people put that stuff in their swimming pool. I saw another family put boxes of importance out on the sidewalk and it was still there after the fire.
My mom recently passed away and I had come into possession of a lot of old family photos that are not scanned yet. And those were important to me.
I have a lot of valuables like my mom's jewelry in the safe deposit box at the bank. Two banks burned down in the Palisades and it's unclear whether the safe boxes survived. You start to feel like there is no place you can put anything to be safe.
Larry Bernstein:
Fire insurance is expensive in California. Do you have insurance? And if so, how would you decide if it was a good deal? Prices probably will be higher next year. Will you buy it at the higher price? How have you thought about insurance?
Vicky Collison:
Yeah, that is a tricky issue. We have fire insurance. Do we have enough? We have the most on our home. We have a rental property in the village that burned down. We do not think we have enough on that one. It was a fixer upper. Will the insurance pay off the mortgage that we have on that place?
Larry Bernstein:
In the video of you on television, they showed an image of a swimming pool, and you discussed the fact that you had acquired a gas-powered pump that removed the water from the pool to spray your roof and your yard. How did you get this thing? Did it work? Tell me about having some ingenuity to save property and lives.
Vicky Collison:
My son is an Eagle Scout, and my husband was incredibly involved as an assistant scout master in the Palisades. his is very surprising that our house is still standing, but the village is decimated, not what we expected, but we had always talked about a plan for evacuation. So, we have a couple of e-bikes. E-bikes have proven to be great for the situation more so than a regular mountain bike. So, we had two e-bikes and then we said, we have a pool, it's water.
Let's figure out a way to get water on the roof. My husband did the research, this was a while ago, we have had a couple of wet runs so to speak, with this thing where we got up on the roof and we tested it and throw out so much water we were able to spray our neighbor's roof on either side because it is really powerful. It is a gas-powered pump and you put one end in the pool, has a big water sucker, and then it comes through this thing and it's heavy, but even I could carry it. And on the other side you got a big, long hose that goes up to the roof and it has got a pretty good diameter on it. The tricky part is getting the hose up on the roof.
We used it to spray down the garden and the neighbor's houses. And fortunately, my two older boys, one lives in New York, one lives in Dallas, but my younger son's a freshman at UCLA. So, he had said, “if you guys go back, I want to go with you.” And so, we picked him up at UCLA and that is when he and I started our journey back into the Palisades. But he was the one up on the roof spraying the water. At one point we called my husband because we could not quite get it started and could not find the manual. But it's one of these classic things like you pull it and then it starts, but you got to choke.
Larry Bernstein:
The next time. You have described a couple of things that make you more at risk. Having a roof that can burn is bad, would you replace it with a Spanish tile that does not burn? You have got wood and vegetation in your yard. We used to think trees were great, maybe not so much. Are you going to go with a stone Zen Garden instead? How are you going to think about risk mitigation If fires are, we can learn from experience here, what can we do better?
Vicky Collison:
I've seen some stuff on the news about homes that are not built with eaves, which is the part that hangs over. You get gutters that have leaves in them. That's a perfect place for an ember just to fester and go on fire. So, the way you construct your house, for sure. There is a shopping center in our town owned by Rick Caruso who ran for Mayor of Los Angeles, he had tanker trucks with water there protecting his property. He also had fire retardant materials, Spanish tile. I did look around at it seemed like a lot of houses with Spanish tile were still standing.
When it's a firestorm, it probably doesn't matter what's on there, your house is going to burn down. I'll be thinking about a metal roof. Metal roofs are super expensive. And then ultimately the ultimate decision is do I still want to live in this area?
Larry Bernstein:
Let's talk about that. You moved to where you are for a reason. You came for the other people living in your community. There are tons of positive aspects of that community, but most of it is burned out. It is going to be no joy living in that community for the next couple of years. It is going to be a construction site. It is going to be a disaster area. We got one life to live. And guess what? It is a big world out there. A lot of choices. How are you thinking about your future for the next year, five years and the balance?
Vicky Collison:
We have talked about it a lot. We feel lucky, Larry, because we do not have three children in school, and the school burned down and my house burned down and they are all in elementary school and I think those people, they are going somewhere else. I just heard someone is moving back to Florida. So that is one category of people.
I feel super horrible for people that are maybe in their eighties. This is a calamitous situation. This is their only asset and it's now burned down. So that is a difficult situation. I feel lucky. We are 60, my two older kids, they're living elsewhere. My younger kids in college, he had a place to go back to.
Larry Bernstein:
Do you think you will stay or go?
Vicky Collison:
I think we will stay. Our neighborhood, it is crazy, 192 homes, none of them burned.
We live on the west side of the Palisades. But a lot of our friends lived in other parts of the Palisades, and we have 40 friends whose homes have burned down. So, one of my best friends, they have now rented a place in Beverly Hills area, and I've got another friend that's here and another friend that's there. And so, the fabric of our community is now, it is like a diaspora.
Larry Bernstein:
You mentioned that you had an agreed upon meeting spot. Tell me about that. I remember after 9/11 in New York, we had meeting spots. And then as time went by, I have forgotten what that meeting spot even was, and emergencies happen. Is this something that every family should have a meeting spot and a plan?
Vicky Collison:
Having a plan in a meeting spot is worthwhile. We were lucky. We still had cell service that can go down and then you have no way of communicating with your family. I would say also keep your cars gassed up. You just never know when you might need to get out of town. You got to have power for the gas pumps to work. If there is no power, you cannot get gas. It is constantly having a mindset of thinking about the next step and if something happens, how can we protect ourselves, our family, our friends, our assets.
Larry Bernstein:
I end each episode with a note of optimism. What are you optimistic about because of natural catastrophes in your hometown?
Vicky Collison:
We got to learn, right? We cannot lament the past. We cannot change the past. We can learn from the past, and we must try to do things better every day. Let's take what's happened, let's learn from it, and let's try to make a better life for that community. And so, the Palisades, it will never be the same, but it will rise again. It will be there, it will be different, but it's an incredible community. It is a beautiful area, and there are people that have lived there for 60 years, so it is going to come back.
—
Gerald Posner:
Nothing was going to stop these fires. It is an unusual event when embers are flying two miles. It is a catastrophe. When we look back on Monday morning, there is plenty of things that went wrong. Some are systemic; some are due to politics. The state has long-term problems about getting enough water to Southern California. There are problems about pressure to hydrants.
One thing that I focused on was a tiny slice of the entire story, which was that those in charge of public works and water the priority was not just fighting wildfires and protecting the residents of California, the highest taxpayers in United States, but making sure that they had rolled out an effective DEI diversity, equity, and inclusion policy.
And it raises the question, you can spend your attention on so many issues during the day, and if you are spending 10% or 20% of your time worrying about DEI the fire department is taking away some of the concentration that you would have had on the core issues. If DEI did not exist at all, would they have done a better job? I have no idea, but I know that DEI as a distraction, certainly did not help.
I saw crazy conspiracy theories instantly pop up about the fires caused because Israel had used so many munitions in Gaza, it affected the carbon levels, and the world was on fire. It must have been something to do with the Los Angeles Fire Department sent surplus equipment to Ukraine in 2022. That is why they did not have the equipment to fight this.
DEI when I looked there is some substance to it. It is not the reason the fires took place, but it is something that should be addressed by California politicians going forward.
Larry Bernstein:
Can you give me some examples of key DEI initiatives that may have undermined the firefighting?
Gerald Posner:
The new director appointed by Karen Bass of Public Works and Power, which is in control of reservoirs, including one that was empty with 118 million gallons that otherwise would have been there because it was under repairs for nearly a year, is behind schedule and over budget. In an interview that she gave in July after being appointed in April to a $750,000 salary, which is not quite double the $470,000 salary of her predecessor, she said, “it is my top priority going forward to correct the systemic figures that have been in place in the past in these public institutions.” You can have that as a priority if that is important to you. If you are socially progressive and you want social justice and you believe that that's something that you should have as a public official, fine, you're entitled to that.
As the United States, we can differ and disagree on the importance it should be applied to that. But when you are taking over a major part of the utility system for water supply in Southern California heading into fire season and you say to an interviewer that is your top priority, then there's something wrong. Now what do we have in 2021? We have NPR and other progressive mainstream news organizations running a series of articles about the fact that firefighting is awfully white.
I always say the only meritocracy we seem to have in the United States is sports. You are either the best or you are not.
I do not think that DEI has been a healthy rollout program. Los Angeles had a vote to take in the 2022 election and they went for mayor who clearly believed in it, and now I think the city must do a reconsideration.
As we talk now, Donald Trump is signing an executive order that will end in federal offices, the application of DEI. States do not have to follow. If your state says no, you are going to pay a cost for that with voters going forward.
Larry Bernstein:
DEI has had influence in corporate America. How do you think Trump's recent action banning DEI will influence whether corporations will continue with their DEI programs?
Gerald Posner:
Some large companies have decided to significantly curtail their DEI programs, including companies that are quite progressive like Facebook, Google, and Walmart. Some of that happened after the November election, so they saw the writing on the wall, they knew that Trump gives them the cover to do it if they feel inside their own companies that DEI is something that they adopted because it was required.
They did not want to be the one company saying we are not doing it. So, they then get boycotted and get canceled, and there are protestors in front of their steps at the headquarters. However, you also get companies that are doubling down. Costco said, not only are not we going to dissolve our DEI program, but we are going to make sure that it's as progressive as possible.
Larry Bernstein:
What surprises me about your framework is you have a limited amount of energy, we are applying energy to this, and we should be applying it to improving fire trucks and hydrants and water management, but I think fundamentally is the best man or woman there for the job.
Gerald Posner:
I should say expressly that I am for meritocracy. The reason that I'm not more critical of the Los Angeles Fire Department is because I don't want to tar and feather those people at the top, the lesbian chief of the fire department may be qualified and maybe the lesbian representative of DEI an assistant chief who's been on video saying, if your husband's caught in a fire, I would've to ask what do they do to put themselves in that position before I take them out?
I am actively involved with Do No Harm, an organization formed by Dr. Stanley Goldfarb who wants to restore meritocracy to medical schools that we have lowered the standards that we have done away with tests. They have done away with the bar exam because they do not want to have people excluded because maybe they came from a situation in which they did not have the same advantages of everyone else to be able to learn to pass the test.
We are essentially putting in people who would not otherwise be qualified, and you want to do that for a little league baseball coach. Fine. But you want to have a doctor, or the pilot and it is somebody who otherwise would not have qualified, but they were able to pass because we lowered the standards.
I am looking into in Los Angeles for the fire, did the standards get lowered? You hear people say, no, they are the same. You had to carry the same amount of weight you used to have to carry in the 1950s if you were a six-foot two man. I do not know if that is possible, but I will find out at some point and if the standards were lowered, because that is what DEI does in the end, it lowers the standards.
Larry Bernstein:
The employment data are the most important economic statistics of the month. As a student, I get into the raw data. I noticed that the timber industry was the most segregated by gender industry. What is going on with timber? And it turned out that they have the highest death rate on the job. Logging is incredibly physically risky. The trees sometimes fall on top of you. And as a result, women have decided it does not make sense to do logging and men are willing to risk their lives very cheaply. And then I did some further research and I saw that the relationship between deaths on the job and gender across industries is fully explained by males willing to take the physical risk.
Most police officers never fire a gun in their careers. And most firefighters probably never have to fight a dangerous fire. But at the end of the day, it is a risky mission and that may explain the desire of men to sign up for a job that women won't.
Tell us about the natural inclination for men to put themselves at risk.
Gerald Posner:
It is built into our DNA for thousands of years so that men tend to rush toward those jobs. That is why they were on the front lines in the military for a long time. But there are also women, a smaller number, who are willing to take that risk who are joining military. They serve in Israel, and they are on the front line, and they serve very well.
What I do not want to do is start to change the standards so that we can get more women in at a faster rate.
Firefighting, when you must carry over a hundred pounds and if you're unable to do that or you're unable to remove somebody who's a dead weight from a fire, that might be a more serious issue.
Larry Bernstein:
One of your areas of expertise relates around conspiracy theories. You work on the JFK assassination and the Martin Luther King assassination. Whenever something bad happens, there must be another explanation. The public start to question the efficiency, transparency, and honesty of the government by opening themselves up to this DEI issue, whether they were in fact capable. The public is still left in doubt as to what happened, whether they can be trusted. And when you leave the meritocracy as the decision-making process, it opens yourself up to questions.
Gerald Posner:
Part of the difficulty in the Los Angeles wildfires was the non-response by public officials. There is no worse video than the video of Mayor Bass on her flight back from Ghana. The bad luck of having a reporter from Sky News on the flight who recognized her and then follows her off the flight and there is that excruciating minute and 25 seconds of questions. Do you have anything to say to the people of Los Angeles? Do you think you should have gone on this trip? And she does not have the savvy of a good politician who would have at least given an answer to say, this is not the time to discuss that. I will be happy to answer all the questions at a press conference tomorrow, and that would have put the end of it.
But instead, she looks sheepishly away. The wildfires you can look at in terms of either conspiracy or public incompetence. One out of six of the Los Angeles large rigs was in a maintenance yard to get repaired. Now, that is an astonishing number. When I first saw that, I thought, it cannot be right.
Then I read an article that said, the reason there were so many trucks in there is because the fire department has been arguing for new equipment. They allow the trucks to break down because they want to say to the city and the county, see, we need new equipment. So now I am not sure which it is, there's always two sides to the issue, but if you're looking for a conspiracy or you're in an echo chamber, you want to run with it.
Larry Bernstein:
Every hurricane season, Florida does not have enough people to fix the power lines on a prompt basis, and engineers from around the country end up in Florida. They get on their trucks, and they are at work.
I heard that other fire departments across the country offered services to be made available that they would just get on their trucks to head over, but there was reticence on behalf of the public officials of California to take advantage of these resources. Why do you think that was? Is it true?
Gerald Posner:
I was startled when I heard an initial report that California had said no to a group of firefighters that wanted to come from Florida. They said, no, we do not need it.
But they did accept firefighters from, Colorado. Mexico sent its own group of firefighters. But there was an initial response at the state level in California, which is we can handle this. No matter what happens, you should be asking everybody to come in and assist.
Granted, in Florida, the state and local officials are accustomed to this on an annual basis, they are ready to roll it and they know how to coordinate with those crews coming in from other states. In California, this might have taken more coordination, but it looked shortsighted when state officials showed a resistance.
Larry Bernstein:
There is a limit to government resources both on the tax and the spending side, and we have as a society to make choices. California has the highest tax rates in the country, and there is an expectation that with that money they should be able to handle basic needs. The disappointment is that California has failed to provide that minimum requirement to firefighting and that they are spending money on other initiatives which should be subordinate. And it is that failure which is hurting the politics of government spending in California.
Gerald Posner:
You are right. There is a perception that has some basis. In the fire department for instance, there is an $18.6 million cut in the budget, but you must remember the budget's $860 million. So, it is a large budget, but the idea that it was cut and that the amount of money that the city of Los Angeles had in the very same budget for homeless services increased over $2 billion. The optics are bad.
The fact that Mayor Bass had a proposal seven days before the fires broke out, before she left to Ghana to cut another $49 million in the coming years budget from the fire department looks bad. And then when you get the fire chief on in the days after the fire saying, yes, we did not have enough resources in personnel, we were hurt by the budget, you might be seeing the budget negotiations between the fire department and the city play out in real time after that.
But it feeds the public perception that we are paying a lot of money and much of it is going to problems that are not getting better. We want protection from fire services and the police, but on homelessness, maybe we are willing to pay those taxes if you can show me that the number of homeless is declining over time, but that is not the case. It is an endemic problem.
Larry Bernstein:
Our previous guest on this podcast was Vicki Collison and she was like a volunteer firefighter. It used to be when we were more rural as a society, when there was a fire, they would bang the bell and all the neighbors would run towards the fire to help and then help rebuild. There was mutual support.
Today when there is a catastrophe, Americans are told to evacuate the area, not stick around and pump water out of the pool and spray their own roof and their neighbors, not to get medication for a neighbor, not to feed the cats, but to leave. And I can see both arguments. There was a hurricane recently in Western Florida and people did not take the evacuation seriously, and then they get trapped and emergency people must be sent in to save people who should have left a long time ago. How do we deal with evacuation?
Gerald Posner:
I love the idea of what Vicki and others did, and there are other stories like hers, people who stayed and saved their own home and some of their neighbors by being smart enough to throw everything flammable in the pools and having the sprinklers on. Those are great, but I am one of those people that thinks a mandatory evacuation order, we should try to follow.
Larry Bernstein:
I believe in rules, and I believe rules should apply to other people, but I am not great about rules applying to me. We appreciate the benefit of societal rules, but not if it is interfering with my life.
Some societies do not tolerate this. I lived in Japan and there would be a red light in a rural community, and you look right and look left and there is nobody around. I am there with some elderly Japanese woman, and she looks at me and she knows how this is going to play out. I start to cross the street and you could see her disgust and she does not move. When you arrive at the Tokyo Airport, there is an enormous banner and it says, “Welcome to Japan, please follow all the rules.” They know one of the great benefits to Japanese society is that they do. How do you feel about this decision to follow the rules only when it makes sense?
Gerald Posner:
It is a problem following the rules only when it makes sense to us, but I have been guilty of it myself. The only time in 20 years that my wife Trish and I left Miami Beach on an evacuation order was a few years ago when a major storm was coming in and we drove in hours of traffic up to Orlando, and then the storm ended up coming up to Orlando essentially followed us up, and I said, I will never evacuate again.
Larry Bernstein:
The mayor promised that she would not leave Los Angeles. She said that she had a previous position in Congress, and she enjoyed travel and she was questioned during the campaign whether she would not leave the jurisdiction for other places. She promised, and yet she left. People leave all the time. I go on vacation. It does not seem unreasonable to go to Ghana if you are the Mayor of Los Angeles, but she made this promise. Is that problematic?
Gerald Posner:
It was crazy to make that promise. Do not make promises you cannot keep. Los Angeles is a major city that is going to have the Olympics. She takes three trips to Paris because she is talking to them about the Olympics. You want to bring tourism in, you have sister cities around the world. Don't say you're not going to travel. It was one of those political promises made impossible to keep. It was just silly to do.
Larry Bernstein:
The fire has been a catastrophe. What happens next?
Gerald Posner:
The question asked often by reporters somebody who has lost their home, “Do you intend to stay or move?”
People have family, they have roots, they have jobs, they have reasons to stay. It is tough. You will find more strength from neighbors and those who are going through the process. It happened here in Florida after Andrew. It does bring people together. It's not easy. I do not mean to minimize it, but I do think that it can be a tremendously good experience where it ends up four years down the road.
Larry Bernstein:
I end each podcast with note of optimism, what are you optimistic about, and what can we learn and apply from the Los Angeles fires.
Gerald Posner:
I believe that the demise of DEI in both the public and the private sector is a good thing for America. I want Americans to be choosing positions based upon meritocracy, then I could criticize you if you failed to respond. You got the job because you were the best for it and you still screwed up, then I am going to write a piece about it. But I would rather be doing that than say you are unqualified.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Gerald and Vicky for joining us.
If you missed our previous podcast the topic was Rebuilding Los Angeles. Our speaker was Ed Glaeser who is a Professor of Economics at Harvard and the author of book Triumph of the City. Ed discussed the key issues for rebuilding the Pacific Palisades. He insists that it will take a long time for the victims to move into their new homes because they are expensive and unique. Ed also expects big problems with permitting and zoning, and he encourages the residents to think out of the box and opt for a major redesign of the entire city.
I would like to make a plug for our next podcast with John Ellis who will discuss why the British Empire was a source for good. John is the former Dean of the Graduate School at The University of California at Santa Cruz. He is also the author of a new book entitled A Short History of Relations Between Peoples: How the World Began to Move Beyond Tribalism. I hope to find out from John why this topic is verboten in American university classrooms, graduate work, and history journals. I also what to discuss what the positive ramifications of British imperialism was to the world.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, Rebuilding Los Angeles, here.
Share this post