 with programs like this one to try and bring you some variety and information as best we can until we can get back into the theater and experience it that way. So we're going to be talking about the film Rebuilding Paradise, which hopefully everyone has seen. It's a very, very powerful film. And our guest tonight is a real expert in his field in many fields, truthfully. And I'm going to please bear with me read his biography because it's very impressive and I want to make sure that I get as much of it communicated as possible. So Ambassador Alex Wolff advises public and private firms on international political and commercial matters. He is a board director of Albemarle Corporation, Jet Smart Holdings and Frontier Airlines. He was previously lead director of Versa Materials, a director of Pacific Gas and Electric, which we'll talk about again soon, and director and chair of the Governance and Nominating Committee of Rockwood Holdings. Before he retired in 2013 from the U.S. State Department with the rank of career minister, Alex was the U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Chile from 2010 to 2013 in leading the work of 29 federal agencies. Ambassador Wolff shaped articulated and promoted U.S. policies and commercial interests to the Chilean government, business leaders, opinion makers, the media and the general public. From 2005 to 2010, Ambassador Wolff was U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, where he represented the U.S. under Republican and Democratic administrations. He played a key role in developing, coordinating and promoting U.S. policies on all major geopolitical and economic issues at the U.N. He led successful negotiations on key U.N. resolutions, including on the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs, Arab-Israeli issues, peacekeeping operations, international economic and trade matters, human rights and other top foreign policy matters. Ambassador Wolff was the senior career U.S. official and chief operating officer during a critical period at the U.S. Embassy in France from 2001 to 2005. His 34-year State Department career included tours as executive assistant to secretaries of state Madeline Albright and Colin Powell, deputy executive secretary for other department and special assistant for European and Soviet affairs to the under-secretary for political affairs. Ambassador Wolff has wide experience in European, Middle Eastern, Asian, Latin American and African affairs. He's received numerous commendations, including the Presidential Distinguished and Meritorious Service Awards, the State Department's Distinguished Superior and Meritorious Honor Awards, and the Secretary of State's Career Achievement Award. And having said all of that, please join me in welcoming Ambassador Alex Wolff to the virtual playhouse. Alex, are you there? There he is. Here he comes. I am. Thank you very much, boy. That was exhausting. I'm going to have to shorten that. No, it's okay. We're good. We've got plenty of time. Thanks for joining us. So we're going to get into the film and some of the events in the aftermath in which you were involved in a second, but I did want to ask you your opinion on one thing about the film that I thought was very striking when I watched it, which is, again, it's not really a straight apples-to-apples comparison, but when you look at the film and you see all the hardships that these people went through having lost their homes and their lives being completely upended, I could not help but think about the circumstances we're all in right now with COVID-19. We haven't lost our homes, but our lives have definitely been completely upended. And I'm just wondering how, if you felt sort of a similar parallel to that, kids just now may be going back to school. That's working, not working. It seems where they've gone back. And those scenes in the film where they talked about, specifically about the children going back to school, I thought were very somewhat relevant to today because they had to go, and some cases, miles and miles away and a long distance from where they were actually living at the time. Did you have any similar thoughts upon watching the film in that regard? To some extent, yes, although I think one of the areas in the film that I felt didn't reflect quite accurately and fully and didn't need to because it was actually a part of the backstory was how life developed for the victims during the period they were dislocated. When you're looking at our situation through COVID, we have to start a new, find new ways of managing our lives, dealing with kids and their education, all of these sorts of challenges. Imagine if you were out of your house living in a small hotel room with your entire family, none of your clothes, none of your possessions, none of your family heirlooms before you even go back and start this process of rebuilding your lives in paradise. So to some extent, it's even more horrific in terms of what the victims and inhabitants of paradise experienced and what we're going through now. That regard, it puts a little bit more in perspective and as bad as the situation is for all of us, we should all be very grateful we haven't had to go through something like the people of paradise. I agree, yes. And I think the other thing, the other piece of what you just said is that when you look at, I mean, this is the events of the film take place, it's still less than two years since it actually happened. So I'm sure they were still in the midst of their recovery from the fire when they had to start dealing with the effects of the virus. Exactly, which is just almost incomprehensible how they might have dealt with it. I just wanted to bring that up only because I felt that very much in terms of everything else when I was watching the film I just was curious if you did as well. We're going to talk about the film itself and then we're going to talk a little bit about some of your involvement post the events of the film. We're going to briefly play the trailer right now for everybody who's watching just if you've seen it, the film, that's great. This is sort of just a little bit of a refresher and some of the scenes in the film. But if you haven't seen it yet, I hope this will encourage you to see it because it's really great. So let's just roll that clip first. Lord pray for us. November 8th at 7 30 in the morning, this town started to burn down within three hours was I lost my house to tell you what, it's not easy. No, it's not, but we're alive. It's not just that I lost my house, it's not that I lost my memories. My entire way of life is completely gone. As hard as it is to say, I don't see the town coming back. A lot of people have left. The hospital's gone. Now my school is gone. I thought it would get easier as time went on, but it's actually getting harder. At the end of the day, I have nowhere to go. Paradise water may not be drinkable for up to three years. We have to make them pay for everything because it's going to happen again if we don't. Don't we have a responsibility to stop building if it's going to be in areas that are not defensible? This is my home. This is where I want to be. I love that town and I'm not going to bail on it now. We're coming back. Hey, clear sky, guys. Made it through. Made it through it, guys. That's amazing. Even having seen the film, that's pretty incredible footage that they got. So let me ask you, certainly, you know, we've talked about this past in the past and many people have said this. The first 10 to 15 minutes of that film are some of the most harrowing footage I think you're ever going to find, even in a documentary format or in any format for that matter. Have you ever seen any of that footage prior to it being in the film? Had you, it's all, I imagine, shot with cell phones and, you know, it's people fleeing the fire in their cars. Was any of that ever shared with you prior to being edited into the film? Not the specific personal videos that, as you described, probably were taken from their own smartphones. But there was a Nova documentary called Megafires, which had a lot of footage from the campfire, which is the fire that devastated Paradise, from expert scientists, firefighters who were in the area at the time and also not so much focused on the individual or that the inhabitants experienced from their perspective the screaming, all of that, which is, you know, awful. But Mo from the fire and the damage and the actual spread of fire itself. It's an excellent documentary. If you want to understand the physics of Megafires, which we can talk a little bit about. Yes. In terms of, you know, the campfire and other phenomena we're seeing in the western United States, increasingly. It's a wonderful documentary to help you understand what the challenges are and what the causes of these massive fires are. So let's talk about that a little bit. And actually, if we can start with this particular one, because as it says in the film, again, correct me if I'm wrong. So the fire is traced to a faulty electric line that, in combination with the other factors that they cite, like the drought, the winds. Many people in the film call it, it was a perfect storm. That day was a perfect storm for a fire of this size and ferocity to occur. So and they also announced, if I'm not mistaken, that PG&E had announced they were going to shut the power off in anticipation of this. So that would not happen and apparently did not do so. So can you elaborate a little bit based on, you know, your detailed knowledge of it exactly what did happen? Can you trace it through? Sure. Well, as you described, it's a perfect storm. So the first thing is the situation was ripe for a massive fire. And what does that mean? You had years of drought. So all of the vegetation in that region is parched and dry. You have high winds that in peak fire season begin around October. So they run from about late September, October, through about December. So you tend to think of high fire season as the hottest months of the year, July, August. But they're actually not. The spread of these wildfires requires these high winds and those really take place later in the fall and early winter. And then you have the high temperatures that combine. So in that situation, any spark, any source of heat could start a combustion, whether it's a car that bumps up and down the road and emits a spark, somebody throwing out a cigarette. And in this case, the high winds blew some branches, large branches into a power line run by PG&E. And one of the hooks, it's called a sea hook, holding up this power line gave way, snapped. The line falls down, creates the spark that the inspectors believe started this fire. And then the wind and the heat and the drought conditions fueled everything else. Now, had the power been turned off, as they suggest, would that still have happened? Because was it at a location where if they shut down the grid, the line wouldn't have sparked when it would have happened? Everything would have happened except the spark. Except the spark. And so as you don't have the energized lines with electrons flowing through them, they're inert. It's just like a piece of rubber falling down. And they would not have generated the fire. So it was there. Obviously, there was an incredible investigation that followed this. And we should make clear for everybody listening that Alex was brought into PG&E afterwards to try to sort through all the, I guess, is chaos a good word, Alex, that this fire created, for lack of a better word. So what was the reason that they had given an investigation for why they didn't turn the power off? Was it just a simple communication error? Or what was the reason that they didn't happen when they had announced that it was going to happen? Well, that's a good question. We never actually got to the bottom of that. And no one ever really understood why. But part of it is you have these running meteorological models that give you a sense when this sort of perfect circumstance exists of high winds and high temperature, low humidity and parked areas and lots of vegetation. But that moves constantly. And you can imagine we can go into this a little bit because PG&E actually got beat up pretty badly last year when we were trying to prevent the same thing from happening from initiating the power shutoffs. Power shutoffs are very disruptive, very disruptive. And if you've got a period of winds and heat that can last hours and sometimes even days, you get a lot of political pressure on government officials to basically force the utility to do something different. So the reality is you've got this trade-off between the necessity to shut off powers, which is the last measure one can take. If you have de-energized lines, these lines are not going to be a problem, a menace for anyone. If they are energized, then you're just gambling. As we all know, I don't know what it's like in your areas, but I'm in the Washington DC area. And it's hard enough to predict when we're going to get thunderstorm here. There are days that they're predicted and they don't happen. And then there are days that they aren't predicted and they happen. And to do a power shutoff, you have to alert people. You've got hospitals that have to prepare. You've got assisted living facilities and the like. So there's a whole communications effort that's underway. And you're dependent and only as good as the information you have from the meteorologists and the models you're using. So that becomes an issue. What I don't know is whether this, what occurred in the campfire was anticipated and then it looked like it abated and they decided not to do it or not. But again, it predated my arrival and the investigation. And it's not something that I recall seeing why they decided not to do. The day before they did do it, if I'm not mistaken, I did turn that off. Yeah, exactly. And so what they'll tell you is they tried to be as targeted and focused and surgical about the power shutoffs as they can be. Because they don't want to do these things haphazardly or get people thinking that this is actually going to be occurring all the time. You've got children's formulas in the fridge. You've got food in the freezer. You've got all of these medications in hospitals that have to be refrigerated. Not everyone has generators. So you're very, very cautious. And there's a premium placed on not cutting off people's power. And I think this is an important point. Most utilities, PG&E, ConEd, others, how do we interface with them as clients? We want to make sure that when we flip that switch, the light goes on. When we turn the dial on the stove, the gas lights and the pilot light lights. So if those things are happening, that's the extent of what you're dealing with with your utility. And when that stops happening, when you don't have light, when you don't have power, you get angry. And people are not very tolerant about that. So there's a premium placed on not overdoing it and doing it only when absolutely essential. And if you're relying on models that are imperfect, and the model is telling you that the wind is going to fall below 50 miles an hour tomorrow, and that's your threshold, you don't plan on it. And then you don't know if it's above 50 miles an hour until it's above 50 miles an hour. So from the utilities perspective, it really is almost a no wind situation. You have to just try to figure what is the least worst scenario. The lesson I drew from this is, I started thinking it was no wind, but when you put it in terms of priorities, you cannot have a fire like the camp fire, which kills 86 people, devastates people's lives, homes, property, billions and billions of dollars of damages, claims, etc. And compare that to the inconvenience of having your power shut off. So if that's the last stitch effort, and you want to prevent that from happening, I described it when I came on board five months after the fire when the company was already in bankruptcy, that our mission for 2019, the year after the fire, was to change the narrative from PGE being a menace to PGE being a nuisance. And then you work on avoiding being a nuisance with technology, with greater investment, your ability to develop better models for prognosticating when and where these conditions are going to be ripe for fire, the ability to disaggregate your grid and have it more sectionalized, which means you have the ability to be more surgical in where you're shutting power off. Instead of having 150,000 people affected, maybe you can only do 25,000 people. Right now, the technology and the infrastructure of most utilities doesn't give you that ability. Right. Well, you kind of anticipated my next question. So five months after the fire, you joined PG&E. And as you said, they've already declared bankruptcy. So what were your sort of short-term and long-term goals? There were lawsuits, there were all kinds of things happening. What was your, I guess, immediate plan and then looking ahead to sort of getting them back on the right foot? Everything was predicated on there not being another fire that was attributed to PG&E, a wildfire that causes loss of life, limb, or property. So that became priority number one. If we failed in that in 2019, then we, the company faced an existential peril. It would have ceased to be an independent company. It could have been municipalized. It could have been broken up, et cetera. So the people, all the shareholders, it's an investor-owned utility as a reminder, a monopoly, but investor-owned. They were very keen on making sure that all of the safety measures were in place and all of the protocols in place to prevent and avoid to the best of our ability any fire occurring again. And that, if successful, would buy us the time and space for the bankruptcy process to play out and for the claims to be settled and resolved. But if we didn't get the first point right, there was no way we'd succeed on the bankruptcy process. So the first priority we came in is really, really ensuring that everything was done, including a very, very aggressive power shutoff plan. We thought it would be better to suffer the criticism and bad publicity associated with being more aggressive on power shutoffs, so we didn't replicate the situation that happened in 2018. And so if we would have had similar doubt or similar thresholds this time around, power would have been shutoff. And there was the worst settlements. Were all the settlements paid out? The film kind of skirts that a little bit. There were issues. Can you explain there were issues with regard to how much people were going to get because of the number of people that were impacted? Exactly. So for those of you who have ever been involved in a bankruptcy, you can appreciate the complexity of something like this, particularly when you've got such a politically visible bankruptcy with stakeholders that cut across all sorts of sectors. So one reminder, this bankruptcy was not because the company was insolvent. The bankruptcy was to protect in the event that there were claims that could render the company insolvent. And so the bankruptcy process ordered how one dealt with the claimants, with the secured claims and creditors, unsecured claims and creditors, as well as an ability to negotiate with the class of victims rather than have victim lawsuits and perpetuity that were never settled. Remember, there were not just the families of those who died, but there were thousands of people affected by this, lost property whose lives were affected. And so the upshot of this bankruptcy process, which culminated with emergence in June 30th of this year, was a settlement. All the claims had to be settled, or we would not have had an agreement on the bankruptcy settlement because the governor would have held that hostage to settlements. But it was in the company's interest to settle those claims as quickly as possible. It was very complex. Imagine you had different groups of claimants, lawyers, most of whom had a big stake in that settlement. They usually get about 30% of the settlement. And these are tens of billions of dollars in settlements. Well, I think you agree, I know when we spoke briefly about this before, that all things considered, the film is fairly even-handed in its portrayal of PG&E, for the most part. I mean, you certainly there are scenes that you see people railing against them, but I think specifically there was the moment where the gentleman from PG&E is going to talk before the residents of the town. And I felt that that's you feel empathy for him, I think, because you assume he's going to get crucified. And at least as far as what you see on the screen, I don't know what happened in the footage that they may have shot and didn't use, but at least as far as what you saw on the screen, it gave PG&E a human side to consider, certainly nobody wanted this to happen, whether you could make the argument, whether or not someone anticipated this to happen. In all of this, in the bankruptcy in the settlements, did you have any interactions? Were you ever called upon to meet with any of these people, the residents or the fire survivors? Yes, although again, it came somewhat later. I visited Paradise in July of 2019. We had a group go up that was ordered by the judge. No board member, prior board member or the board that had been in place when the fire occurred, had ever visited there. And what I found stunning, and in light of coming back to your analogy with what people are going through with COVID today, when you look at corporate America today in a COVID environment, the CEO is front and center in terms of showing leadership on how he deals with his personnel. Same thing with the social issues that the company is going through right now. CEOs have a leadership role. I found it stunning that this poor guy, this local guy from PG&E, was called upon to speak on behalf of the company. He had nothing to do with any of the decisions. Where was the CEO? It's an amazing scene because I think it was an effective piece of filmmaking because watching that scene, you're waiting for the other shoe to drop. I mean, that's how I felt. It's like, oh boy, what are they going to say to this guy? What could he possibly say to them? And again, the way it's presented is that it was fairly even handed, which I thought was to the credit of the filmmakers that they didn't immediately cast PG&E as the villain, the archer villain, so to speak. I agree completely. And they had plenty of ammunition to do so, and everyone else has. But I think the focus of the film, obviously, on the people rebuilding their town, which was quite poignant and I think was the underlying theme of the community coming back together again and given the challenges they're encountering, rather than a forensic assessment of what happened, who's to blame. There's another point we can get into. I don't know if we can tell. This is one of the underappreciated aspects of this catastrophe, is that paradise is sitting in what a lot of the experts call the wilderness urban interface. If you haven't heard that expression before, there's a lot of scientists who study sort of the habits of groups of people and where they live and how they're encroaching increasingly on parts of nature where urban life had been absent before. And paradise, like Magalia, a lot of these communities in the area, and this is not unique to California, was made up a lot of retirees, a lot of day laborers. These are not affluent people. These are people who can't afford rents or housing prices in Northern California. And so they move further and further away, a lot of them commute an hour or so or longer. Retirees who are particularly those living just on social security and maybe a modest pension can't afford to live in Sacramento, can't afford much less Sonoma, much less San Francisco or the Bay Area. So they go further and further afield to areas that are more and more affordable. And as they do so, they encroach increasingly in areas that are fire hazards or that are other types of flood hazards, maybe even earthquake hazards. And that's a trade off as well. So if you talk to people who know this area in this region and knew what the shortfalls in public policy in California have been for certainly the last decade or two, if not longer, they will tell you that, and I think there was one person in this film as well who alluded to this, that these are areas where these fires are just waiting to happen, they're going to happen. If it wasn't aligned from PG&E, as I mentioned, it could be a spark generated by somebody's motorcycle backfiring, it could be somebody dropping a cigarette butt, a sparkler on 4th of July, anything like a campfire that isn't put out properly. When you failed in terms of managing the vegetation, when you failed in enforcing the codes, the devastation and the breath and depth of the catastrophe is enhanced. And so I think the film wasn't focusing on those things. In this case, it was PG&E. And there was no doubt that this was this flawed, worn seal that failed. But it failed in extreme circumstances and failed. It was never designed to withstand 80 mile an hour winds. It was never, so where is the effort to prepare California, prepare other states to deal with these changing patterns of environment, in this case promoted by climate change that have altered completely, literally and figuratively the landscape in which we operate. We have a little bit of this we're seeing on the East Coast. I was reading about Governor Cuomo's anger at Con Ed following the latest hurricane. But the answer is, if you know you're going to be in a hurricane prone area and there's increased likelihood of severe hurricanes, you harden your system. Similarly, when you're in an area where it is going to be increasingly prone to wildfires and massive wildfires that are in far off underpopulated locations that are very difficult to get to and very difficult to manage, you need to make an investment in prescribed burns, managing the vegetation. That's expensive, but it's far less expensive, far less costly than having the fire of the likes of campfire. To that point, there was one scene in the film that I recall very vividly that sort of skirts that issue. I think that's one area that kind of falls short because there's the scene in the state legislature where one of the representatives says, why are we building in an area that's so prone to fires? They try to because they want it to be that story of rebuilding and renewal, they kind of shut that down. They show it, but they kind of dismiss it too, and so they never really comes back to that. They try to focus more on the feel good, this is our home, we're coming back stronger type attitude. And then you have the issue of the control burn, you remember that scene? Correct. And he's trying to, which they, now correct me if I'm wrong, with the control burns that they attempt to do, they implied that it's not a very popular idea, maybe because they're so sensitive to the idea of sparking another fire, but the control burns seem to be what they're not doing as much as they should be doing. Is that accurate? Yeah, let me elaborate on a couple of those things. First of all, in fairness to the filmmakers, if you look at that hearing, and I was able to see that in another occasion, I've been on, excuse me, to hearings in Sacramento and the Public Utilities Commission, so it wasn't a hearing locally. People who tend to make that argument are drowned out. That's not an argument that people want to hear, that they shouldn't be living in areas and what we call this wilderness urban interface. They don't have a choice where they live often. And so they don't want to hear you shouldn't be living there. My beef, my complaint is that if you're going to live there, abide by the building codes, abide by the fire codes, and that's a failure of public policy in the state that didn't force greater adherence to code. And we can go into that the violations that I witnessed and saw and still aren't being addressed. And in terms of the prescribed burns, these managed burns, one, to the extent that they are near inhabited locations, you have the population itself, the inhabitants, the residents who often say, no, we love our trees. We don't want those burned down. I have a problem here in Washington trimming a tree that overhangs because our neighbors love trees, but it's hanging over my roof, I need to trim it. And they get angry when I trim it because one literally says, if you don't like trees, why are you living here? And this is in Washington, D.C. So it's a real challenge. I don't think it's fair to say that the filmmaker drowned. I thought it was very, very courageous and correct to keep that part in. Now the prescribed burns also are very expensive. To do serious prescribed burns, it's tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, particularly given the vast swath of forest lands and vegetation in Northern California that would have to be addressed. Remember, the campfire started miles and miles away from paradise. It didn't start in paradise. And it went through completely uninhabited forest that had not been managed. There had not been prescribed burns. And so with all of these additional problems of drought and you just had kindling ready to ignite. And with the winds, this comes back to the physics of these massive fires with the heat and the winds. They actually behave differently than normal fires and they feed on themselves and they end up burning an acre a second. It's larger than a football field, a second. So to prevent that, the amount of investment to do so that guy is huge. So I'm not saying it's an easy answer, but it goes back to the point that this woman in the film made is, should we really be allowing people to live in some of these areas? Right. Over 100 years and that's their other argument. Well, some have, most haven't. I would dispute that point. There's no doubt some have, but there weren't 25,000 people living in paradise 50 years ago. But in other places, the example I know in southeastern France in the foothills of the Alps and in the low Alps, similar terrain, similar climate patterns, the authorities there tell you if you build in an area, you have a right to build, if you build in a fire prone area and you don't implement the codes in terms of set back from trees and brush how close your propane tank is to the house, water supplies and all of that and multiple options for egress, for departure in a crisis. They tell you we will not come as a fire department and help you when there's a fire. You're on your own. So, you know, you talked about the codes and during the course of the investigation to the campfire, was it, you sort of alluded to this possibility, did they find that most of the structures in paradise were not a code or was it some more, some warrant? I mean, the devastation was seems pretty significant and across the board. It's a great question. And of course, you know, the answer is what you would expect. That was not something people were eager to delve into. Because you had a convenient, you had a guilty party. There's no doubt about it in PG&E. But it's also very convenient to put all the blame on that. Not to put the blame on why are people living in these areas, why are they not adhering to code? Where was Cal Fire? The authority without a guy very, you know, articulate, professional head of Cal Fire, who was interviewed in the film. No one asked him about code. That's the entity responsible for enforcement of fire codes. Right. So no one asked him about that. I went back and visited, when I visited and toured around the locations that were a little bit further off, some of the communities that weren't quite hit by the fire, because of the wind direction and the like. And I, there was no adherence to the even minimum setback from brush and trees and the like, propane tanks literally next to the kitchen. Instead of with a necessary 20 foot setback, which is whatever the setback that is required by code, there's 100 foot setback. If you're building a house from trees and brush, well, they issued the reissuing permits as we speak today, not requiring that setback. Well, I should rephrase that, not enforcing that setback. So it's a tendency just to repeat. It's harder to sort of share the blame and spread the blame of which, in my opinion, there's plenty to go around. And the, the, you had this been sparked by lightning bolt and had the same degree of devastation. I think people then might have looked at enforcement of codes a little bit differently. People might have looked at the issue of managed burns a little bit differently because they say, well, it's an act of nature. What are we going to do to deal with that? But when you have somebody who presumably was delinquent in their maintenance or whose, whose infrastructure was, was old and decrepit and faulty, I'm not saying it was, but this is the argument. It's very convenient just to focus only on that and say, for that, we wouldn't be in this situation. And so let's focus on that. But, you know, my, my fear is that in the future, and we're seeing examples of it in California today, as we speak in Southern California, there's another massive fire. The, the, these are, these are the new normal. This is going to be life in, in these areas. And if you don't enforce code, if you don't make the investment in the prescribed burns, if you don't improve the infrastructure, if you don't force the companies, these are you monopoly utilities. I won't get off on that tangent, but it's a real object lesson when you don't have competition and you're in a cozy relationship with your regulator. And these companies have for decades been some of the most generous political donors to the very people who oversee them. There's no incentive to, to modernize. There's no incentive to invest the way you might if you had a competitor. Right. Well, I'll, how about we take some questions? There's been a few that have been submitted. I actually think you've, you've sort of touched on some of these just in, in the course of the conversation. So one question is, you were just kind of talking about it, that this is sort of the new normal. So what are the question is, compared to five years ago, even almost two years ago, before, right before the, the campfire, have you seen the states, whether it's California or any other states, how are they prepared, are they better prepared to deal with prevention and containment? You mentioned there's another fire burning right now. So the answer is probably not all that great. But have you seen any progress towards, towards any of that in your opinion? My fear is that people tend to be focused on the symptom rather than the cause. So they've, you know, they, they now understand that there's going to have to be power shutoffs. But shower power shutoffs are the last resort. And power shutoffs ensure that your utility line doesn't cause the fire, but does nothing to prevent other sources of fire. And if the, you have this incredibly combustible combination of, of factors contributing to a situation where these massive wildfires are going to be, be the new normal, you've got to start addressing the cause. And if you don't have a rigorous prescribed burn policy, if you don't have a rigorous enforcement of, of fire codes, if you don't control urban planning where people should live or not live. I mean, you know, the, the, there are insurance companies that won't ensure you if you live in flood zones, they won't ensure you for floods. So you want to live there and go ahead, but you're not going to be able to get insured for that. You know, if insurance companies had the ability to manage that decision in California, they can't in California, you can live where you want. And if you're going to be living there, the utility company is part of the compact, has to provide you the energy, the fire department has to come out and protect you. And the, the, the, all of the other public services have to be provided to you. So this is going to not be simple and it's going to take some political courage, but to think that you can deal with it only by managing the symptom and, you know, how you deal with fires rather than how you help prevent them, I think is, is an act of folly. We actually have two questions that are somewhat related. So I'm going to ask them both and you can answer them in whatever order you want. So the first part, someone has asked the question, as, as we know, just in the last couple of days, Ron Howard was interviewed about the film locally. And he said that the takeaway, his takeaway from the film is that it's hopeful and inspirational. What, what do you think is that your takeaway from it? This person tends to disagree. And then the second question, which came in, which is somewhat related to that, at the end of the film, you recall, they illustrate without using any real narration, other recent natural disasters from around the world that are, I guess, intended to highlight the perils of climate change. So you touched on a little bit before, what is your, what's your take on the subject? Do you think the film is, is, is truly presented in a hopeful and positive manner? And do you think that the science of climate change or what's being dedicated to climate change is, is making any progress in addressing it? I would answer in two different ways. I think given what I know, and you know, I'm a bit biased here, as you can tell from my own experience. You know, I recognized in terms of what Ron Howard was trying to do, that, you know, it is a hopeful, you know, rendition of the, the perseverance of the human spirit. And people who've gone through these tragedies are determined to pick up their lives again and go forward. And you know, and there's something romantic almost about, you know, going back to the place that you lost and rebuilding your life there in the same community that you lived with before, etc. And it is romanticized in my opinion. What it doesn't address is these other, the other side of the coin, which is, you know, you know, people are going right back in and not learning their lessons. You know, for the life of me, if the answer was these areas are going to be more and more prone to fire. You still, one of the things that the film didn't dwell on much, but one of the real problems was there's only one way in and out of paradise. And so you saw the traffic jams. It's not as if you had lots of options, that was it. What are they doing to fix that? You know, if this ever happens again, you know, how do you have multiple avenues of escape? That's not happening. It doesn't address the number of people who are not coming back. We're not coming back for a variety of reasons, including, you know, the horrible experience they went through, and they don't want to repeat it. But it doesn't answer the question that that woman in the council meeting posed. You know what? Should people be living here and if they should, what are we going to do to make it safe? And that's not addressed. And so I felt a bit, it was romanticized a bit. You know, I appreciate the aspect of the human spirit. But you know, what was it? Einstein's off misquoted statement about the definition of insanity is the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Yeah, they gave it a little bit of a Hollywood ending, I mean, is what they really did. Yeah, the most part. Alex, we would be remiss if we didn't ask you about some other current events given your background and your expertise. So can we can we shift gears for a couple minutes and talk about some other topics that come up? So there's been in the news recently, the historic agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. What is your take on that? Do you see this as being the precursor to similar agreements between Israel and other Arab countries? I would start by saying I don't think one can underestimate the significance of this agreement. In the following sense, the only two other Arab countries that have relations with Israel and peace treaties with Israel are, as you know, Egypt and Jordan, immediate neighbors. These are further afield, these kind of the UAE, the Gulf countries, etc. They're not under the same immediate pressures or risks or threats to reach an accommodation with a state of Israel. And for decades now, the framework for peace in the region was defined by land for peace and land meant to the Palestinians. And all of a sudden, you're getting a situation where you have a normalization of relations between two countries where that's not an issue. It might be indirectly because of the agreement that Israel would not take control, assert sovereignty over the settlements, which are in areas that are still disputed. But that, I think, is a fig leaf. I think the real strategic and geopolitical shift that's taken place is what everyone's been talking about, which is the common enemy, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And so Iran has been behaving, increasingly aggressive and hostile manner and has the wherewithal and resources to do so. This rapprochement between the UAE and other Gulf countries in the region really started some time ago. It predated the Trump administration. There were signs of it already in the Obama administration. Why? Because there was concern that the Obama administration, at least concern among some of these Gulf shakedoms, that the Obama administration was being more solicitous of the Iranians and more eager to reach an accommodation with Iran than previous U.S. administrations. And so these countries felt that without the United States there to really enforce good behavior on Iran or protect the other countries against Iran, how are they going to manage this? And Israel is the most potent military force in the region and prepared to take on Iran in the views of these countries. So I think now with the Trump administration coming another phenomenon, fed on that in my opinion, and that is the retrenchment of the United States increasingly from areas of traditional presence, including the Middle East, the desire to withdraw more and more and let countries fend for themselves, which in a perverse way fed on this concern, not so much that this administration, the current administration, was more keen on establishing friendly relations with Iran, but that this administration wasn't as keen on remaining engaged and involved. So the same dynamic developed which was or continued, which was we're going to need to fend for ourselves. And if we're going to have to fend for ourselves against the behemoth, which is Iran, with an expansionist and aggressive theological worldview, we're going to have to accommodate to less favorable allies and relationships than might otherwise be the case. So and the last one I would make is that again, I think there's general Middle East fatigue, not just in the United States, but also in the region with the Palestinians, which is in part of their own making. And so the short answer after that long explanation is that I think there will be more efforts. It's hard to imagine small countries like the UAE doing this without the wink of an eye from the Saudis and an understanding that others are going to follow. Nobody likes to be exposed and alone and isolated in the Middle East in the region. So I don't know who will come next. I don't think it's going to be the Saudis. I think the Crown Prince still needs to consolidate his role in the country and given its role as protector of the holy sites, including in Jerusalem, the likelihood for me is that you'll probably have Bahrain or Oman, maybe Morocco follow suit. That's amazing. And we have one more, which is during the course of your career, you've met so many of the world's political leaders. How does Xi Jinping measure up in terms of the strengths and weaknesses versus other leaders that you may know? Angela Merkel or Vladimir Putin or Shinzo Abe, for example. Well, I've not met Xi, but whenever discussing China and leadership in China, I like to start by reminding people just how unprecedented the challenges are to lead that country. There is no precedent in human history of how one organizes and manages 1.7 billion people. And a country where the majority of that population is still impoverished. You've got religious strife. You've got regional urban strife. You've got a huge middle class, aspirational middle class that expects more economic growth, more openness, that travels more. These are huge, huge challenges. And so I think whoever is the leader of China is faced with complications that are orders of magnitude more difficult than any other leader of any other major power. You take Putin, for example. Putin has a lot of challenges, but the population is a fraction. And the resources are multiples of what the Chinese have. The Chinese don't produce oil. Russia exports oil. Chinese don't produce gas. Russia exports gas. So Putin has different sets of challenges. Merkel, her challenge is pale in comparison, in my opinion, to what Xi's challenge is on. And he also has competing elements within China right now. You've got the hardliners in the People's Army. You've got hardliners in the Communist Party apparatus. And then you've got very liberal elements. People who, again, have been abroad, have traveled disciples of dengue, who understand that economic growth is dependent on opening the system, on trading with the world, on minimizing conflict with others. So this ongoing balance is a real challenge. And I don't know who and how one can do that well. I do think that for the short term at least, he's probably made the right bet in trying to promote economic liberalization and openness and engagement with the rest of the world while maintaining a tighter grip politically. But that's unsustainable in the medium and the long term. That's just completely at odds and in conflict with the types of aspirations people who have experienced economic growth and development and have traveled and have been exposed to how other societies operate and the demands they will be making on that country. It's an interesting world. Well, Alice, I want to thank you very, very much for all of this. Your insights have been fantastic. I really appreciate it. I understand that you actually also predicted the current Democratic ticket well in advance of the actual process beginning. Is that true? I won't ask you to predict the election. It's okay. You don't understand. I did, but I wasn't the only one in all fairness. Oh, you should take the credit, Alex. It's okay. Well, thank you again. I hope everybody enjoyed this evening. It's always great to have someone about to statue and join us for these types of programs. And I hope you found it at all interesting. If you haven't seen Rebuilding Paradise, you definitely need to watch it. Alex, thank you again. And I hope that when better days are ahead, we can host you at the Playhouse itself for another type of program. It would be my pleasure. Thank you, Dan. That'd be great. Thanks very much, everybody. Have a good night.