Hello, Prestige Heads and welcome to American Prestige. I'm Danny Bessner, here as always with my friend and comrade, Derek Davidson. And we're excited to welcome to the podcast today, if under a bit of grim circumstances. Hamilton Nolan, you've

probably read him, but Hamilton is a labor journalist. He's written for a bunch of places,

including in these times where he writes most frequently. And he's also the author of the

sub-sac, How Things Work, which you should check out. And Hamilton just published a Pete

a piece titled Lifeboat Capitalism, Some Burn, Some Dound, and Some Make Money Either Way, which is about the fires that are at the time of recording still raging across Los Angeles, a city that I've lived in for years. I'm no longer there now, but I've spent time there for going on 20 years, one of my favorite cities in the country, and to some degree, at least as I argue in my own scholarship, a city that is really

the city of post-1945 America, a city where the weapons of America are built in its defense

contracting industries, where the ideas of America are made at think tanks like the Rand Corporation, where the ideas of America are made at think tanks like

the Rand Corporation, where the dreams of America are exported by places like Hollywood.

So Los Angeles to me is really a metaphor for the entirety of the United States in its rise,

in its moment of hegemony.

And what happens there is, I think, meaningful beyond just

L.A. and the entirety of Southern California, but for the country and the world as a whole. So I'm

very excited to welcome Hamilton on the podcast. So Hamilton, thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having me. So let's talk about these fires. What emerged when you were watching this happen on your phone or computer or TV screen?

What thoughts did it spur?

Well, I mean, clearly a human disaster, first of all, and I'm sure all of us know a lot of people in l a family and friends in

l a and and it's it really struck me how surreal it was to watch um because it's it's such a

realization of something that we all knew was coming right i mean this is something that's been

long predicted and it's it's one of the most important American cities

burning. It's the, it's the, you know, result of the climate disaster that we've all been hearing

about. So there was that, there's that weird duality of something that we all knew was coming and

we all expected an intellectual sense, but seeing it actually

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