How Homeowner’s Insurance May Change in the Wake of California Wildfires

In California, many major insurers have recently dropped homeowners in high risk areas from their plans, forcing them to seek alternate coverage with the state. However the state has nowhere near enough money to cover current property damage costs, a situation that will likely get worse as wildfires continue to burn.

In this episode of Upzoned, co-hosts Abby Newsham and Chuck Marohn discuss the impact of natural disasters on the insurance industry, the feasibility of government-run insurance programs, and what this might mean for California in the long term.

• Click here for a computer-generated transcript.

  Abby Newsham 0:04

  This is Abby, and you are listening to up zoned.

  Abby Newsham 0:18

  Hey everyone, thanks for listening to another episode of up zoned, a show where we take a big story from the news each week that touches the strong towns conversation, and we up zone it. We talk about it in depth. I'm Abby Newsham, a planner in Kansas City, and today I am joined back again with Chuck Marone. I feel like it's been forever since we've talked. Feels like forever, certainly since before the holiday season. So it's great to see you again. Welcome.

  Abby Newsham 0:47

  It's

  Chuck Marohn 0:47

  It's nice to talk to you. Well. You and I spent 1520 minutes catching up beforehand. It has been it has been a while, so I'm glad that we could both make this work. I just flew back from a speaking engagement I had in Montana, which was really fantastic, and now it's going to be 20 below zero here all weekend. And so getting ready for Yeah, I'm I actually was going to pick out a good book. And after we're done, I'm going to go home and I'm going to haul some wood in the house so I have a nice, good fire going, and I'm just gonna have a really chillax weekend with my wife and my oldest daughter, and I'm looking forward to it. Yeah,

  Abby Newsham 1:27

  winter weekends. Yeah, that sounds actually pretty lovely, as long as you don't go outside. I probably wouldn't, but I understand you are built differently.

  Chuck Marohn 1:41

  The dog likes a walk around the neighborhood. And it doesn't matter, actually, can I tell you something funny? Dog does not like below zero, the dog's feet. He doesn't like it. He's like, he like, lifts his feet up and he looks at me. He's like, I'm cold. Like, what's going on?

  Chuck Marohn 1:56

  For Christmas, we got him dog shoes, like, boot, like, my kid calls them booties, and he hated them. He's like, I hate these. I don't like them. And then he figured out what they were, and now he loves them. I take him for walks and he runs in them. He's like, this is awesome. My feet aren't cold at all. So you can teach an old dog new tricks. Yeah, I love it. I love it. I'll have to get some for my dog, she she likes the snow, doesn't like the cold, so has the same issues with her paws.

  Abby Newsham 2:27

  Okay, so today we're going to talk about California. We have an article here by the New York Times, by Christopher Flavelle, entitled, California's insurance system faces crucial test. As losses mount, so fires in California, as I think everyone who's listening to this knows have has devastated many homes and neighborhoods throughout the LA Metro spring, once again, this question about our land use, how we build a natural settings, climate change, controlled burning policies, and, of course, the insurance industry. So the big issue is that many major insurers have recently dropped homeowners in high risk areas from their plans, forcing people to seek alternative insurance with the state of California, the state has something called the FAIR Plan, which was created by lawmakers 50 years ago, and it helps people who have no other option for insurance. This comes with a steep price increase. One homeowner reported that his insurance increased 400%

  Abby Newsham 3:35

  and for some those steep prices and the fireproofing requirements are prohibitively expensive, and so they go without insurance. And unfortunately, this seems to be the direction of the insurance industry in many places, and in California that is forcing consumers to either pay up, live in a home that's uninsured, or move somewhere else. So obviously, we just saw some devastating fires in California and Los Angeles. Currently, the state has $377

  Abby Newsham 4:09

  million available to pay claims and policies are basically only cover covering basic property damage within the $3 million range the total insured losses from the fire so far have been estimated to be as much as $30 billion and it's not clear yet if the state has the money to pay out on all these policies.

  Chuck Marohn 4:34

  Victoria Roach, I think it's clear.

  Abby Newsham 4:39

  It's interesting wording. Yeah,

  Abby Newsham 4:42

  no, exactly. And I'll say one other thing that is, I would say, really damning. So last year, Victoria Roach, who's president of the FAIR Plan, actually told the California legislature that the system was one large event away from insolvency.

  Abby Newsham 5:00

  Okay? And so the question is, what happens if, if, when that insolvency does occur, does it cost the taxpayers of the State of California? Does it impact us nationally? And of course, California is not the only state that is dealing with this. We've talked about Florida and the hurricane and flood risks in the past. Colorado experiences forest fires. There's so many examples of places that have been decimated by natural disasters, and insurance companies are facing this very existential threat. So it's like, you know what happens next? Essentially, with the insurance industry,

  Chuck Marohn 5:38

  this is such a hard, a Hard series of questions, right? And I mean, while you and I are having this conversation, there's homes that are still on fire and there's neighborhoods that are still burning. So it's really also very sensitive and very difficult conversation to have. I mean, when we've spoken in the past about hurricanes, when we've spoken in the past about other fires and natural disasters. It pretty much is over. The thing that's been kind of remarkable and tragic about this one, I was on PTO. I mean, I we start the year with a board meeting, and then my daughter came down to Florida, where our board meeting was, and her and I spent a few days my oldest one, just the two of us. It was very nice. But when I'm when I'm hanging out with her, I don't watch the news at all, and I was getting like, little snippets on my phone, like, oh, there's these bad fires and, like photos, and it looked horrible. We're 10 days after that, and it's still, I mean, it still is going on. This is a disaster. It isn't like watching a train wreck, because a train wreck happens and then you watch the mess. It's like the train just keeps crashing into the station over and over. So I'm, I'm kind of cognizant of the fact that, you know, we're talking about something in real time where people are still processing and still kind of dealing with the trauma, and we'll be, you know, for a while yet. Can I add one thing to the insurance story? And I think there's a lot of ways we know, but I feel like it's important to for us to recognize what insurance is, because we have distorted our view of insurance, because we use health insurance in this country in such a weird way. Health insurance is not really insurance. It's like the mechanism we use to pay for health care, which is not insurance. Insurance is I have a one in 10,000 chance of this thing happening to me. We're going to get 20,000 people together who all have similar circumstances. We're all gonna put money into a pool, and then the poor, one of us who this does happen to, they're gonna get a payout from everybody, and your goal is to, like, not be the person who has to use it. That's what insurance is. When we get into this gray area, like homeowners insurance, where, unlike health insurance, you know, where you have to have health coverage, you need to go to the doctor, you can live for a long time. I mean, there's a lot of people who go their entire lives without a home insurance claim. I mean, there's a lot. Ideally, that's what would happen. Almost everybody has no, no claim at all. In fact, I've had one claim in my life. We had a bad storm come through and the old the house that I built, that my wife and I built, that I moved out of, like, eight years ago, we had a hailstorm come through and rip off the roof and drop trees on the house, and it was a mess. My parents had never had a claim. I mean, my parents are in their 70s. They've never had a home insurance claim. The idea that you would have home insurance claims is is very, in a sense, very rare, like it's not something that will happen frequently. Step back though, and look, and there are parts of the country where claims do happen frequently. They happen frequently. In Oklahoma, where you have lots of tornadoes, they happen more frequently. In your part of the world, where you have more tornadoes, they happen in California a lot, because we've built in very precarious places. So whether it is earthquake damage or mudslide damage or forest you know, wildfire damage, you have a high prevalence, obviously, Florida, Louisiana, these places, also, because of hurricanes, have high degrees of damage. I think there's an interesting question. And I say interesting in a Minnesota way, there's a question that's worth pondering about how you structure national insurance programs like a state farm or a progressive or like whatever big company you have. I'm going to say this without naming names I have. Had an opportunity to meet with a lot of these companies. We've been doing this thing called the crash analysis studio, which I know you're familiar with, and I've been going to get them to fund it, because this is a way we can dramatically reduce car crashes, and it's also a way, if we had their backing and support, that we could get cities on board and get others on board. A lot more rapidly, we've been trying to get places and they all have philanthropic arms. We've been trying to get their philanthropic arms to fund this stuff. Every one of those conversations has devolved into a conversation about home insurance, because they want, you know, they want my input. They want a sense of of this, in all of these scenarios, what the insurance companies, and I'm talking with, like, not the highest level of executives, but like decision makers, like real people who are these are not like the people who sell insurance or the number crunchers. These are like the executives making decisions. They will say, you know, Florida limits our rate increases. California, by state law, limits the amount that we can increase our rates. And so what happens is that you in Minnesota wind up paying higher rates because people in California live in very dangerous areas and doesn't seem right, and we can't go to our Minnesota customers and say you haven't had a claim in 70 years, and we're going to raise your rates by 15% because there's a hurricane in Florida. And I said, Well, I don't live in Florida like i My house is here, like I judge my house based on my property, my location. I think in theory, that's a really like sound way to do it. I mean, if you live on sand that's well drained, that's not prone to fire or earthquake, your insurance should be less than the person who lives on the mud, mud slide prone hill with high winds and hurricane potential and earthquake potential, like it really should be. That's, that's what insurance is. And let me say this in like, a different way. If you're a, if you're an 18 year old boy, you know 18 year old young man, your car insurance is going to be way higher than a 50 year old man's car insurance is going to be because you're going to drive when you're 18 year old, you drive like a maniac, and you're more likely to kill someone and you're more likely to get in a crash. I think we all like accept that. The problem is, when it comes to people's homes, do we treat this differently? And we've, we've, we've struggled with this as a country, because if we look at, like, health insurance, which, again, is like, this weird thing we've done that doesn't it's not really insurance, but we've said, you know, Abby, you eat well, you exercise, you're in good health. Chuck, you drink too much diet, Mountain Dew, and you don't get enough exercise. And you know your health is is is not as good as Abby's Chuck. Your insurance is going to be higher than Abby's. We don't do that like we you. You have certain we've even gotten away with some of the precondition type things, right when it comes to a home, should you pay more when you live in a high risk area? And if you should, what that means is that California property owners, California property should be far less expensive because the insurance should be far, far greater. And the state of California by pretending they can run this kind of insurance hustle on the side, and, like, make up the difference. And basically, like, play, you know, wildfire roulette every year, and like, hope the thing doesn't ever land on green. You can do that for a while, but then when it does land on green, you've got $200 million in the bank and you've got 30 billion in claims. Like, there's no way that number works out. Like it just cannot work. I don't. I'm at a loss here, like I don't even know how to process the extent of this kind of calamity. And I feel like, if I'm going to say this, and then I'll be done, I feel like if this were Florida or Texas, the idea of going to Washington, DC and saying, Hey, we're really screwed. We need, like, $30 billion to plug this hole, like we got a lot of people, but the fact that it's California, and the fact that, you know, we're having an inauguration this week where, like, the balance of power is shifting to a different party, California is kind of known as the state that goes around lecturing every other state about how they should be living and what they should be doing. There is a, I think, just a, a human reaction that's been kind of gross to me, you know, people like, Well, screw you, California, you know, because I. I don't want to do that in this time of need. But on the other hand, this is like, do you just, like, I just got back from Montana, should the people living in manufactured houses on a flat ground in, you know, non disaster prone Montana had their rates go up 20% to pay for the people who want to live on the hillside overlooking the ocean in California. I mean, that's a really weird suggestion. Yeah,

  Abby Newsham 15:30

  there's definitely a class overlay to this whole conversation, because I think people are seeing like large estates and very wealthy people losing their houses, and it may not even be their only house. And so there is this visceral reaction that I've seen, and I personally try to keep myself from doing that, just because it's like unkind, but that's just I feel like a really natural reaction that people have when you know there are people living paycheck to paycheck and then getting dinged for their own insurance where they don't live in the middle of a forest or in these risky areas. I do want to ask you about whether you think that you know, obviously the private insurers are pulling out of the market. And I want to ask you about whether or not you think that a state or national insurance system could work. And I want to note this because obviously, insurance is this game of statistical probability. They're calculating the probability of major natural disasters and other risks. And i It seems that these models that they had are not working anymore, and that it's getting more and more difficult for private insurance companies to make sure that the house wins, essentially. And there's this question in the articles about whether or not you know if the state can't afford to pay out all of these claims, if that is going to impact the rest of the country in terms of our the taxpayers, but in the private model, it already is affecting all of us. We are all experiencing inflated insurance rates basically nationwide. So I don't see that as so different than, you know, the state of California going to the Feds and asking for a bailout and then it affecting people across the board. What are your thoughts about that? Do you think that there's a model that works? Do you think that insurance, you know, given the risk that is involved here, can work in the future?

  Chuck Marohn 17:48

  Let me, let me answer the question in two ways. Because I think, if the answer is, can it work? The answer is like, Yes, I think, I think you could do it. It's possible for the government to run an insurance company that's actually solvent. If you look at things like FDIC, which is Federal Deposit Insurance, that is an insurance company that the federal government runs, banks pay into that to ensure deposits, in theory that results in like lower interest being paid to everybody. So you're as a depositor, you're paying for that insurance, in a sense, through the putting your money to work at the bank. So it's a very simple insurance policy. We can look at that and we can model it out right, like we stress test banks. It's not like there's natural disasters that happen that take out banks. I mean, we can look at their flows and their balance sheets. It's very, very simple, with a simple process like that, where kind of the variables are are mostly known, we still struggle to fully capitalize that. We still struggle to have enough actual money in the bank to pay out the insurance when banks go bad, doing natural disaster insurance, like homeowners insurance, is like a full it's not like twice as hard. It's like a magnitude. It's like 10 times as hard. It's vastly more difficult than running an insurance company for banks. And so what I see is that the federal government's just not capable of doing it because the incentives are wrong. If you look at the incentives for an insurance company, I realize people will say, well, their their their incentive is to make money, and yes, their incentive is to make money. The way they make money is by staying in business. Okay? I mean, that's like a prerequisite for the insurance company being around. So if we go back to, if we go back to the early 2000s and we look at the subprime crisis, you might remember the bank, AIG, or the insurance company, AIG, American Insurance Group, I think, is what that stood for. AIG was. The center of the subprime crisis, because they were writing insurance policies that they thought had no chance of paying out, and so they were writing them to whoever wanted them. I mean, you saw the movie, The Big Short, right? That movie, part of what they were doing is they were buying these credit default swaps from banks like AIG that were just saying, Sure, we'll insure that mortgage, we'll insure that mortgage, we'll ensure that bundle of mortgages. No problem. Well, AIG had to be bailed out by the federal government to the two, I mean, they didn't have to be. They were bailed out to, like, $200 billion because they had written a bunch of insurance policies that they couldn't cover. Abby, I can write you an insurance policy. Let's say that I'm going to write you an insurance policy, and you're going to give me $100 a month, and if you wind up having your house burned down, I will pay for your house. Okay, that's going to work out really well for me, so long as your house doesn't burn down. And we could do this like, you send me $100 a month and I'll be like, Yay, I'm making profit. The thing about the insurance company is they need to be there once the house burns down, they have to be able to pay that claim and be there. And that's why they'll have this like team of actuarial scientists, and their job is to say, Okay, what is our liability? How much are we going to have to pay out? What is like the range of things here, and what's the likelihood of it? When you put this in the government, it does start to become less like, how do we stay in business, and more like, how do we do something that's politically acceptable? And when you get into that latter realm, that's when you get a state like California, and we see the same exact thing in Florida. So this is not necessarily a Democrat Republican thing. It's just a human politics thing where you don't charge enough premiums, you don't have enough money, and you're not actually really insured, except by the idea that there's some bigger backstop behind you that maybe you could tap into. Hopefully, if things go really bad, that's not an insurance program, that's a public welfare program. Yeah,

  Abby Newsham 22:17

  that's really interesting that you say that, because that, I've really been thinking about how, what, how a government run insurance industry would would work, and what kind of the Levers would be there. When you think about, like, the question of, how do we do something that is publicly acceptable, I do wonder how that would impact how claims are paid out, and what kinds of I guess, controls there would be to actually rebuild in these places. Would public insurance companies be more responsive to the public interest that it is not in the best public interest to actually rebuild neighborhoods in these areas, or would would the private insurance companies be the driver of that? Because to me, this seems like fundamentally a land use problem where we are building in places where we shouldn't be building. And I think my question is, would it make a difference if it was public or private, as to whether or not we incentivize rebuilding in these areas that are just too risky, that are impacting the costs of everybody else?

  Chuck Marohn 23:33

  So really hard, that's a really hard question, right? Because it involves so many different human variables. You You said we shouldn't be building here. And I think at the end of the day, I agree with that, like Southern California is a desert made artificially habitable by tremendous public works infrastructure projects to deliver water there in ways that are kind of artificial. You have people living on these steep hills. And let's be clear, too, not everybody whose house burned was rich. I mean, there's a lot of really poor people who've lost their homes here too. But you know, you have people living in these kind of naturally precarious, let's just say, unnatural places. To me, if the market was working, what you would see would be all of their insurance premiums would be 10x your insurance premium would be or 20x or 50x they would be really, really, really high if you're going to live on a fault line, on a mud slope with kindling all around you with, you know, the potential for 100 mile an hour breezes coming off the ocean. You're you're basically living in a tinderbox, and your insurance will be really, really high. You ask a question about, like, what's in the public interest? I think that part of why. We got to this position is because we've made an argument for there's a lot of different arguments that have made that got us here. But one of them was, is in the public interest to grow and develop. I mean, even recently, in California, the obsession has been about housing prices. We need more housing. Let's go. Let's build more. Let's build more wherever we can put housing. I'm not saying that is what drove the housing in this area, but the idea that we would say not rebuild here. How would that work in the, you know, NIMBY land of California, like, where are all these people going to go? Are they just going to leave the state? Now? Are you done? So I feel like this is I'm not a market absolutist. I really am not. But I do think that this is one of those examples where, when we regulate the insurance market to say you can only increase your premiums X amount, it's almost like a prop 13 for insurance premiums. You can only increase your property taxes by such amount. Because we pass prop 13, we all recognize like the distorting effects we go to insurance companies say you can only raise your premiums by so much, because it really is uncomfortable for our homeowners. They don't like it. They're not happy with it. You can only increase it by so much we put a cap on it, those insurance companies are going to just not offer insurance anymore. And that is a that is a artificial market failure that I think is exacerbating this problem. I don't think ending that that rate increase thing would have necessarily like solved the problem, but it would have made the problem much more acute, much more quickly, in a way that we could deal with, as opposed to now, where you're dealing with cinders, you know, it's a very different thing.

  Abby Newsham 26:51

  Yeah, well, it seems that now insurance companies are leaving the markets, but before that, they were really just dissolving the the price into the national market right by increasing costs across the board. And I think that, I think the reason why I'm I'm kind of pondering about a federal insurance industry, however that would work is, would that create a disincentive to try to kind of dissolve and those prices into people you know who have homes in Missouri or places you know Montana, places where that aren't quite as risky. Because I wonder if citizens would, there would basically be a public push to not increase insurance rates so that people can live in deserts or forests and other risky areas.

  Chuck Marohn 27:47

  Yeah, I mean, anytime you would make it political, I can't tell you how many times I saw water utilities. A water utility is like, we pump water on the ground, we treat it, or we bring it in from a reservoir and we treat it and we send it out to people. There's only, like, so many moving parts in this system. We know how much it costs. We know how much we need to collect. And you get to there and like you, put together the rate study and say, rates need to be here in order for us to do this. And the politicians would say, well, that's a tax increase. We can't do it like you. Rates need to be $50 a month. They're 25 now, sorry, we'll give you 26 but we can't give you 50. And so what that means is that the water system is going to fall apart. The water system is not going to be maintained. Things are not going to be taken care of, and you can physically see it. That is something where you actually have, like easy math. When you get into actuarial science, you're saying, well, what's the likelihood that there's going to be an earthquake in California. What's the likelihood that that earthquake, then will be of such magnitude that it will damage these structures? And so you have almost, like, four degrees of and I'm just going to say this in a human sense, deniability, like, oh, this has got to happen. And then this happened, and this happened, and then it's a $30 billion disaster, yeah, what's the likelihood of that? Well, not very, you know, in any one year, not very good over the lifetime of insuring it really, really good. And this is where I think the political part of it, which when you get to water rates, treat it like a tax. When you get to insurance, rates would absolutely treat it like a tax, like we got to keep our job is to keep this as low and affordable for our rate payers as we can. You are short changing everybody by doing that. And you're, you're basically being AIG. You're, you're, you're, you're paying insurance, you're collecting insurance premiums for a catastrophe that you can't possibly pay for with the premiums you're collecting. And you're hoping to do it because for AIG, you make money along the way. For the state, you can pretend to provide this service without actually having to provide it, and as long as the. Conflagration doesn't happen on your watch. You're all you're all good,

  Abby Newsham 30:04

  yeah. It reminds me of, I think we've talked about before, when people go bankrupt slowly and then all at once, like,

  Unknown Speaker 30:11

  that's exactly,

  Abby Newsham 30:15

  yeah, exactly this entire insurance business seems to be. We've been using it to not feel the impact of or not really not feel the consequences of building in places that are very high risk to the detriment of basically everyone else who maybe are not living in risky areas. And so I really do wonder if eventually we're going to come to a head where it impacts where people are able to build in general, and I also wonder if it may impact migration patterns, where people might leave the state of California altogether.

  Chuck Marohn 30:55

  Well, I feel like one of the the immediate like I'm going to use the word interesting again, as I realize that that's a Minnesota ism interesting. Is not like, Oh, this is fascinating. It means like, Oh, this is kind of like, not cool. Like, let's, let's, uh, there's a, there are a whole bunch of homes that have burned down now that are covered by FHA mortgages, federally insured mortgages. Those places are required to have insurance how many of them have let their insurance policies lapse? And you get into this situation where you know, if I owe you $100 that's my problem. If I owe you a million dollars, that's your problem. A lot of these mortgages are are very large. They're federally backed, they don't have a lot of equity, and now there's no home, and there's no insurance to rebuild the home. Who gets stuck with that and like, how does that, in a sense, ripple through the market. And in a normal scenario, you would have a readjustment of home prices, but we have this situation where, because we've had this long period of low interest rates, there's not a lot of float in the market, and now you just destroyed in one of the most high demand, highly stressed markets, a whole bunch of homes, and you know, if they can't be rebuilt, because now the federal government owns the as assumed the mortgage, and it's going to take that loss. There's just a whole bunch of like these side implications that I think we've even started to ponder yet. They haven't even come to light yet, but are going to have a deep impact on who gets to build, where they get to build, what that's going to look like, and the federal government might wind up being like the largest landowner in the Pacific Palisades, for example, just because they're going to get stuck with a bunch of unpaid mortgages.

  Abby Newsham 32:58

  That may be the case? Yeah, I mean, problems have solutions and predicaments have outcomes. And this is definitely a very layered predicament, and I think that we are have yet to see the outcomes of all of these kind of unsustainable approaches to development, and how we ensure our development not just in California, but in other places as well. This seems to be a growing conversation that is fundamentally kind of driven by insurance, and I wonder what will happen to population migration patterns when it becomes prohibitively expensive to rebuild in these areas, or people are, you know, financially like totally ruined because they didn't have insurance and now they can't pay on the mortgage,

  Chuck Marohn 33:54

  right? Yeah, it there's tragedy upon tragedy upon tragedy here. And I think, you know, the only thing, the only thing definitive, is that I think we should all feel empathy for everybody who's caught up in this. This is not, I remember watching Hurricane Katrina, and there's a certain like madness that you get where it's like, okay, we knew this was gonna happen. Like, this was, this was inevitable. Like, you're you're playing roulette, and like, eventually it is going to land on green, and like, it will statistically happen. And Couldn't you have been more ready for this? And but in the moment, you do have to just say, my heart goes out to everybody who's suffering, because no one would want to go through this, and no one you know this is gonna this is the low moment for 1000s of people's lives, and that's just a horrible, horrible tragedy. I think the only like saving grace is that for the most part, and I know there's some exceptions to this, but for the most part, we. Are talking about property and not lives. And property, you know, lost is a loss, particularly when you're you're losing, you know, heirlooms and other things that are important to you, but, but at the end of the day, it is property that there are, there are, there are a handful of deaths, and those have are obviously tragic, but for a disaster of this size to have this few people, ultimately, who have been fatalities, is really a minor miracle. Yeah,

  Abby Newsham 35:33

  definitely, it's incredible and and very good that we haven't had as many deaths as one might anticipate for a fire of this scale? Well, I guess we'll leave it there. Chuck, there's really no way of knowing what happens next, but it's definitely something that we should be paying attention to over the coming years. With that I want to end with the down zone. So this is the part of the show where we could share anything that we've been up to lately, anything that's been on our mind. Chuck, I'm gonna throw it to you. What do you got?

  Chuck Marohn 36:11

  I am, you know, it's been a while since we've talked, and in December, I do a lot of baking, and I listen to a ton of books when I'm baking, and I'm like, Oh, I have this long list of fiction books because it's the only time of year I really do fiction. I started a book at the beginning of the year, and I'm only about halfway through it, but it's called dopamine nation, and it is essentially about, it's partially about how our, you know, dopamine receptors, react. It's written by a psychologist who would, you know, try to get people who were addicted, whether it's addicted to drugs or opioids or what have you, or even addicted to, like pornography or what have you, to, in a sense, recognize the receptors in their brains and condition themselves in different ways. I'm finding it not only very illuminating, but also, like, deeply uncomfortable. Because, you know, I go through life and I'm like, Yeah, I like my Diet Mountain Dew. And then I realized that at like, 1130 in the morning, my head is starting to hurt a little bit. And I'm like, Yeah, I better have a pop here. And you know this idea that, well, I'm not, you know, I'm not addicted to x and so, you know, I just am. We all have the same human brains, and they work in very similar ways. And I'm just finding this book to be very humbling. Maybe is the right word, yeah,

  Abby Newsham 37:39

  that's fascinating. Well, I Oh, here's what I'll share. So I've been binging a series that I have not binged any series in like, several years, so I'm pretty excited about it. Have you ever heard of the show? Hell on Wheels? It's kind of an older show. Okay? It is. It's an it's like a Western television series that was from the early 2000s that is all about the construction of the first transcontinental railroad in the US, and the towns that would pop up along the railroad, as you know, laborers were there, like these little towns would essentially pop up and move with the railroad as people were building it. And so it's a whole series about that, and it's gotten me really fascinated just about the development of the railroad. There's also a Netflix series that just got released called American primeval, primeval. It is a much gorier and terrifying version of, you know, limited series about the construction of the railroad and the West and what it was like to live back then. And I could only watch one episode of that, so I'm gonna watch more of it probably in the next couple of weeks. But it's really fascinating, just because my ancestors on my mom's side were Irish, and they came to the US during the potato famine, and they built railroads across the US until they got to Missouri. And so I never really thought too much into that. And this has put kind of a, I guess, an image of what that might have been like in my head that I had never really considered before

  Chuck Marohn 39:30

  fascinating. I've loved your show recommendations in the past. I just looked up this one as you were talking, and on Google, they have a list of the characters, and there's five seasons of this, and I counted, they have 49 characters listed on Google. So, like, there's got to be a lot of people doing a lot of stuff and a lot of things going on throughout this series. It looks pretty interesting. Yeah,

  Abby Newsham 39:53

  there is a lot going on with the series. I had never even heard of it, but apparently it's pretty i. It's been around for a while, so I'm sure a lot of people have seen it before, but it's gotten me really fascinated, and just like westerns and learning more about the culture back then, I mean, this country was built by some pretty crazy people, so that into context, yeah, all right, well, let's leave it there, Chuck, thank you so much for joining me today, and thank you everyone for listening to another episode of up Sound. Thanks, Chuck. Take care. See ya. See ya.

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• Support Southern California Wildfire Relief. (Thank you to Strong Towns Artesia for providing this resource!)

• “California’s Insurance System Faces Crucial Test as Losses Mount” by Christopher Flavelle, The New York Times (January 2025).

• Abby Newsham (X/Twitter).

• Chuck Marohn (Twitter/X).

• Theme Music by Kemet the Phantom.

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