Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 87

Episode Date: June 10, 2023

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know, this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch. If you want, if you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you. But you can make your own decisions. It's it's like an it happened here.

It's the podcast sometimes hosted by me, Mia Wong. I guess this is a combination of things falling apart, putting things back together episode. We're doing some more coverage of the US's sort of epidemic of mass evictions. But yeah, so with me to talk about this is Max, he's one of the organizers and co-founders of Santa Barbara Tenants Union and Sam Sopesi, who's another tenant and a member of the union. You two, yeah, welcome to the show.

All right. Hi, thank you. Yeah, so I guess we should start with talking about the specific mass eviction that is happening, which has been caused by a terrifying and unfortunate product of my hometown, Chicago, a very large company called Core Spaces, who have incredibly suspicious branding for the fact that they're a giant land

Lord company. Yeah, I think guys bought your building and is attempting to evict everyone. Is this? Yeah. Yeah. So core spaces out of Chicago and I believe Austin, Texas have purchased our four building apartment complex approximately 243 units, I believe, over 1,000 people. Yeah. And they just immediately... Yeah, so I guess this is one of the other things we should talk about first is this thing

that landlords do where they either buy a property or they have a property, and then they're like, oh, hey, we're doing renovations on its own, so we're evicting everyone, and then you don't let anyone ever come back because you're, you know, your quote unquote, renovation you're just a way to do a price hike, which seems to be what's happening here. Yeah. And renovation. It's a nice, it's a nice term for that right?

Renoviction, it's you're renovating to a Vic just to listen is not aware of that term. Yeah. And I think if I'm understanding their plan, right, they're trying to basically turn this into luxury student housing. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's what we presume. That's kind of their business model is to buy up housing

and college towns and do some renovations and then hike up the rent drastically. Yeah. I mean, that's definitely a thing that happened. There's a lot of colleges in Chicago, which I don't know. Presumably people know that on a sort of abstract level, but this is the thing that happens basically everywhere there are colleges. Yeah. We've actually talked to other like grad student organizers about this stuff too, because it winds up sort of affecting everyone at all sides. Yeah, so I guess, okay, so facing facing this eviction, I guess I wanted to talk about how you all started organizing against it. We got our original notices on March 16th. We had previously, I want to say it was like December or January, we had gotten notice that some people

will be coming through our apartments, investors to look at it and like took pictures of my bathroom and my kitchen. It was super awesome. Oh, no. And so we kind of, I think a lot of us knew at that point, like, okay, something's going on right, obviously. And then March, I want to say it was March 15th or 16th. We got a notice that the building was sold from Essex to core spaces. And then it was the day after that, we got a notice

that said, Oh, hey, you're all getting evicted because we got to do renovations. I kind of expected it to be honest because I've seen what Blackstone has done. Yeah, and I just heard about it from a lot of properties or also tenants like in LA, friends that I had other college students that had had this happened to them. LA friends that I had other college students that had had this happened to them. But after that, basically, I mean, I don't want to speak for everyone, but my own personal, like what I did, I just kind of went on Reddit and was like, hey, this really awful thing is happening. You know, I went on the UCSB Reddit page, this really awful thing is happening. I went on the UCSB Reddit page. This really awful thing is happening.

There's a lot of families that live here. There's so many section eight disabled people, elderly, and students, but our complex is a little different and that it does have more of the marginalized groups. And I went on Reddit and was like, dude, this is awful. Like just, yeah, so I made a post saying this sucks. And from there, I was referenced to contact Santa Barbara Tennancy, and which I was like, kind of hesitant at first, because I was like, oh, where are they going to do? I don't know. I thought, you know, it's like one of those resources you get where you're just like,

are they actually going to do anything or is it just for me to like waste my time with? But I reached out and I got, you know, a response back within hours and they're like, yes, here's a flyer for you. We have your back. We're going to do this. We will support you. And so from there, I want to say it was within a day or two. We went firing door to door. And remember, it's 200 and like I said, I think it's a lot of units to not doors on. I know one of our county representatives, Laura Caps, called it the largest eviction in California history. And I've heard others say the largest eviction in the United States history. I don't know if that's uh what they're

basing that off of, but it's a gigantic eviction. There are many people here. Um, but yeah, so from there, I just went like door to door knocking. I knew none of my neighbors. I am a hermit. I stay in my apartment. I keep my curtains closed. I'm like, but the only contact other like my neighbors make are with my cats just chilling in the windows and stuff. But yeah, I mean, to be fair, neighbor with cat in the windows, not the worst rep you can have. I mean, yeah, true, but even then I didn't even want my cats in the windows. I was very, very anti-social. I still am, but I have opened my mind quite a bit and come out of my shell a little bit, but that's irrelevant. From there, like I said, we went flying, we went door to door, we found other people that were like,

oh yeah, this is super messed up, like we need to fight this. And we, by just going door to door, telling people, hey, we can fight this eviction, these eviction notices aren't super valid anyway. We were able to get a gigantic group of our neighbors together. It's amazing. Yeah, yeah, and it kind of moved from there. I don't know how much further I should explain. There's such a long timeline of the things that have happened the past two months.

I don't know where you want me to go from there, but at least the beginning of it was just us flying, going door to door, getting everyone together, getting everyone in a group chat, and then SBTU truly supporting us and telling us, hey, here's the next steps that you need to do. This is how you become a, you know, a union, a tennis association for your, for yourself, right?

With their full on support. Um, I, okay. So there is one thing I wanted to sort of talk about a little bit before we move on, which is, yeah, can you explain what section 8 is for listeners who don't know? I can explain it based off. My knowledge, I'm not currently on section 8, but I know that many residents here are on section 8, which I probably couldn't give the best description of it personally, but I know a lot of times it's people that are very low income or disabled individuals, people that can't work for various reasons, get low income housing, meaning they pay maybe, I know some of our residents, for example, pay like they get section 8 vouchers that will pay

about 25, 26, $100 for their rent and their utilities. And then maybe they pay $100 or $200 because they're unable to get that income otherwise. But Max might be able to describe it a little bit better than me. That sounds about right. I grew up on section 8 with a single mom and stuff. And she, yeah, I mean, it's just subsidized housing. It's basically, it's what public housing or in some countries social housing would be,

but in the 80s, the Reagan era got it all public housing. And so the concession was, it's a voucher-based system for the poor for low-income people. So yeah, it's just the government okay, a portion of it, some said it pretty good, I think. Yeah, and I guess, I know, like, I guess that this is a sort of, yeah, an interesting thing about your building is that there's a very wide range of like different backgrounds of people who are involved.

I was wondering, you know, talk a little bit about like what that's been like. Yeah, so, I guess I could say we have four buildings. So we have, so it's CBC and the sweeps. So it stands for colonial, Balboa, Cortez, sweeps. The sweeps has a lot of students because it rents by the bed. But CBC has a, on families and as we mentioned, you know, section eight and and lower income. I want to say, I had heard from another representative, like a county representative, this is, I think it might have been more caps. Don't quote me on this, but that this is like the lowest one of the lowest income housing apartments in Ila Vista.

And so there's a ton of like large families. When this happened, you just, people were just crying everywhere. Like they didn't know what to do. This building is, it's not unlike a lot of buildings where you have a pretty diverse kind of, I guess just class composition. And I've just, like so, you know, if you think there's disabled people that have case workers, you have modeling, rural, Spanish-speaking immigrants,

you have students, and you have some students who are sort of like city college students that are working full-time or part-time and they're full-time students. So they're sort of worker students. There's like full-time UCSB students who's like parents may be totally loaded or whatever. You have you know often an immigrant and low-income families you have like way more people packed into like a one or two bedroom than you would want, but it's the only way for you to make rent because rent keeps going up every year. So, uh, so there's a lot of that. And so, I guess I'll just speak to, um, I mean, I've only,

I, you know, I've run into it a bit like I've been the group chats and I've been, I've been to the building like a few times, but I'm not like, they're, every day, and I'm not like, flaring every day and stuff like Sam is living there. But one common kind of like difficult, oh, it's a beautiful thing and it's a difficulty. And that like, there's, so we need interpreters. And like in SB2, we have, we're a sort of self-funded autonomous tenant union, which means we don't get grants from like wealthy foundations or government entities that ever, so we can kind of more definitely make decisions. So, but we have like a fair amount of dues money now just from the mass membership that we have kind of built.

And so we can afford to pay interpreters to come out basically whenever we need. So there's been interpreters there at almost every one of the Saturday meetings. And without that it would it would actually just be impossible. I mean, not like, so that's like when there's a language barrier, right? It makes it hard to organize. Or it wouldn't be impossible. There's a handful of like bilingual people, but they're usually super busy. If one of them doesn't show up or if like, child of a parent, like a teenager of a parent isn't there or whatever, right? Like, how do you actually get the info across? So I'll just speak to, lastly on that, that

it is like, it's a really kind of frustrating sad situation, and we could probably elaborate on this in that, like, whether it's the lawyers right now who have been hired by course spaces, which they're a sneaky, slimy piece of shit evil firm. They're called a time-taler fox-haward LLP. Just if you see any of them on the street, just give them very looks, don't do anything to violent. Use that against me at some point in the inevitable thing that's

probably going to happen. But whether it's them or the landlords directly, there's always a, you know, this happens in labor organizing. It's a divide and conquer strategy. So they want to spread misinformation amongst the Latinos or amongst the families and amongst the disabled. Whoever they can sort of get an ear to, they're going to give them certain kinds of information to make them really afraid. They're going to tell them lies and they're going to get people to try to self-adict. So I am jumping a little bit ahead, but that definitely has been a challenge in that if there was a totally linguistically culturally monolithic group of a thousand people, they're probably a little bit easier to keep things totally unified, but those demographic differences do present some challenges for sure.

That makes sense. We've talked to a couple of other tense associations that have had to actually, well, I mean, this one's actually as an organization, it's like, I'm back when I was doing tennis organizing too, like I've seen worse in terms of like, in terms of the number of languages, but it's still like never enormously easy thing to sort of have to bridge like I just have to bridge like whistic divides to especially when you're getting yeah information like misinformation different languages is a whole thing I could I could talk for like seven hours about the effects this has had on like Asian American communities like Chinese American communities particular yeah but instead of doing that we're gonna we have to take an ad break. We'll

be back after whatever income, re-hensible ads are playing. Okay, cool. Great ads, bye, bye, good stuff on the ads. And we're back. I hope the ads were short. I don't know. There's some great ads. I'm gonna buy that thing. Whatever. God. It's gonna be the breaking coins again. We're like one of the casinos. Okay, so yeah, so I guess, yeah, you know, okay, we'll just, okay, having, having done a thematic jump, I will now go back to chronological jumps, which is, okay, so you have, you're starting this organizing, what, what starts to happen after you're starting to get people together, you have the tenants, the center of our tendency involved. Yeah, so it started from flying getting everyone just like a basic

Letting them know that they don't have to move that this eviction is Eviction's bullshit, right? But by the way, we didn't we were never giving legal advice that people shouldn't move It was if you don't want to you don't have to because there's certain illegitimacy It's just because I know that the the slimy piece of human fucking garbage by our trash lawyers are gonna be listening to this and trying to use this again. Use it against us. Then I'm sorry, go ahead. Yeah, no, thank you for the correction. That is entirely yeah, they don't have to if they don't want to, basically. But yeah, so after we did the flaring, we, Santa Barbara Tennant's union set us up with some

group chats, and we just worked together from there. We just started talking to one another, and I think it was, it was a new situation for most of us. A lot of, I mentioned this before, but a lot of us didn't talk to each other before. We didn't go out of our apartments, which I think is kind of normal nowadays. It's not like the 60s were like, oh, everyone has a house,

and those are neighbors and stuff. No, people kind of keep to themselves, especially in really large apartment complexes. So yeah, we just started going in the group chat and then someone was like, Hey, I can do this. Another person was, Hey, I can do this. And then eventually we set up a group meeting where we could all come together and basically share our feelings, our emotions, our pain about this, but also find a way to like fight against it. So what we learned was,

which we fully learned from the Senate of our attendance union was, oh, if we go in front of the county board, we can convince them, we can share our stories, we can share our pain and we can tell them, hey, we need the law to change, we can convince them, we can share our stories, we can share our pain, and we can tell them, hey, we need the law to change, we can pass something, we can use our voices to stop this from not only happening to us, but future residents. So from there, it was really in the early stages. I don't know if this is jumping ahead, honestly, my brain

is a little foggerous. There's so much that's happened so quickly. Yeah, I know where it is. But I do know the next biggest step was us coming in front of the Santa Barbara County supervisors, Board of supervisors, and telling our stories and sharing that, I think Max could probably also share a little bit. Yeah, I have still like the dates in my head are like, you know, the March 15th, they bought the building,

March 16th, they issued the notices and then April 6th, which is like three weeks from that, they passed the new law. So that means, I mean, that's like three, yeah, three-week period from the notices to like having, I think, at least a couple meetings with like dozens of people, I don't know, 30 to 50 plus people there. And then like forming, you know, deciding to form the association and voting to call, I don't remember exactly if the vote to call it course spaces trend association was before that the county meeting or after, but, um, and then there also, because there's, there's

also two like pretty crazy facts here too, where like about for, so six weeks before course spaces announced a new ownership, um, all of us in, in SBTU had sort of, we'd heard so many stories on the center by the city level, and center by the city is not the county, right? The county is like this larger geographical entity, and center by the city is within the county. On the city level, we've been hearing so many really terrible stories about people being renovicted,

and we just decided to kind of like grow people at, like, yo, go to public comment, tell the city about what they're doing, tell them they need to pass a ban on renovations. We had like a big rally in front of city council, and we were just going week after week, and after about six weeks of this, like four to six weeks, I forget the exact timeline,

we got the city to pass. It wasn't a ban on renovations, but it was an amendment to their, what's called like their to six weeks, I forget the exact timeline. We got the city to pass. It wasn't a ban on renovations, but it was an amendment to their, what's called like their just cause ordinance, which makes it a lot harder for landlords to, to renovate and that now that they have to get permits first, they have to, they have to, they have to provide,

put the permits in the renovation notices when they're gonna do it. They need to, there's some language that says that it needs to be done in good faith, which is like really subtle, but potentially really important because if your reason is that you just want to trigger what's called vacancy decontrol, which is like picking people out so you can jack the rent over the 10% limit in California. Like right now, landlord can raise the rent

about 10% every year, just because they want to, But if you can get people out of the unit, you can raise it to whatever you want. So on the city level, it was a really big deal. We had just won it and we were pretty exhausted from it. We were like, shit, that was a lot of work and we won really quickly. And everybody around us that's been doing stuff for a while was like, we don't know how you guys did that shit so fast. That was really amazing. And then like, I think it was like the week, like within a couple days of us celebrating that win, core spaces, the core spaces thing.

But this is county jurisdiction. So we were like, okay, I guess we gotta go from city to count. We gotta get the county to do the same fucking thing. So we were already really fucking exhausted. Like there was like a sprint, sprint, sprint, sprint, like every week. So the reason I'm bringing this up is, it just felt like natural for us to just like,

and we don't like tell people what to do, like not to not like correcting you Sam, but when it's like, okay, do this, do this, do this. It's sort of like, we ourselves are just tenants. We're not paid staff. We're not like highly trained, like nonprofit staffers or something like that that, that, I think we know everything. We're just tenants ourselves that are non-profit staffers or something like that that Think we know everything. We're just tenants ourselves that are in the struggle just like everyone else And we're trying to gain information

Share information and become collectively smarter and more experienced and better handling the shit together And so we were like hey, we just won some shit on the city level If you guys throw all of all of you which is like a lot of you Straight to those county meetings, and the county meetings are every Tuesday at 9 a.m. and they go back and forth every week between Santa Barbara and Santa Maria. Santa Maria is like an hour to hour and a half drive from where they live. So that's like pretty unrealistic for most people to not only get work off and stuff like that,

but like that upcoming Tuesday from that meeting we had that Saturday, they just happened to be in Santa Barbara, which is more like a 10-15 minute drive like down the street. So we're like, okay, there's the fucking meeting. Like we want to try to get people there. And so the, you know, the news, it was like hot off the presses for a week or two. There was all these articles It was like caught off the presses for a week or two. There was all these articles on the crisis. And then so that Tuesday morning, all of them going and hitting the public comment,

hitting the mic. And I should say, public comment is typically anybody who's gone to the public comment at a city or a government meeting. There's usually one or two people that are just really weird. Like they went on people, they're like, they're like, she went on people or like, they're like, the next store Karen person that's complaining about like, I don't know, some stupid, stupid shit that nobody

gives a fuck about, but like, sometimes that person actually gets something changed because they actually complain over and over again. And then there's actual agenda items in these government meetings. And having this many people, like totally flood a public comment just for one issue as if it's on the agenda is like, it's kind of jaw dropping, right? So people just went so crazy with it, people got off of work.

They were monolingual Spanish speakers that just spoke in Spanish. And there's a live interpreter that they legally have to have at the county meeting. So on Wednesday, the county supervisor's called an emergency meeting for Thursday, and on Thursday they passed the emergency just cause ordinance,

which was just basically copy-baseding the city ordinance that we had just won after the six-week like marathon. So, I don't know if you caught all that, but like that's how Chris from all of this back is. Yeah, that is. We don't live in the building, we just like, we just try to make shit happen. Like it was insane of like how quickly, because it took us about six weeks for the city thing,

which was still like everyone told us that's rapid fire laws don't get changed that quickly, and this was like two weeks or some shit. Yeah, I was stunned by this when I was reading about this. Like this is one of the fastest, like this is one of the fastest campaigns I've ever seen. Like I don't know, like we've run into like Chicago City Council before, for example.

And they, oh boy, those people are. Yeah. Yeah, so yeah, it was a really impressive campaign that you all were able to pull off. Yeah, but, and this narrative is, if we wanted to really make this in a curated way, we could probably have hope, we could have inspirational background music,

then we could have like horror music, because I mean, I don't know same if you want to take it from there. But there has also been some very dark turns since that. We could have inspirational background music, then we could have like horror music, we could have because I mean, I don't know same if you want to take it from there. But there has also been some very dark turns since that. Yeah. Like very dark depressing scary turns. Because the minute, well, I guess I'll just say it if we want to go deeper into it, we can, or if we can skip it. But like, as soon as we were really excited, like, okay, they can't, like what we just did makes it illegal for them to evict everyone, like for now, because they don't have permits and,

oh, and this is actually really like important, kind of legal fact is that what the law said was that this notice applies to any current notices posted to tenant stores like after the state as well as unlawful detainers. Unlawful detainer is a fancy term for an eviction lawsuit so So basically like any eviction lawsuit that course spaces would try to file against any of the 250 plus

People would be They would just be tossed out in court because they're just like you you know an eviction defense attorney would just point to the law and be like The new losses you have to do X-Wine Z and they didn't they'd be like you, you know, an eviction defense attorney would just point to the law and be like, the new law says you have to do X, Y, Z, and they didn't, they'd be like, yeah, you're right. It's just there's nothing ambiguous. It's not a great area. It's not like you can interpret this or that way. It's just not. You can't, you can't, there's no like, there's no like the other side we say, like, well, what about this and this? There's no well. There's no other thing. But immediately, almost immediately, within a week or something, the other side started

countering with insane propaganda, like disinformation, which I guess I'm kind of taking up a lot of space now. But Sam, I don't know if you want to, because you're actually there with all the people having being force fed the disinformation by Tyne Taylor, Fox Howard, LLP and Corespaces, vertically integrated private equity piece of shit firm. Yeah.

So the emergency ordinance passed and we all were like, yay, this is great. We have protections, but then, yeah, that law firm decided to, well, that end management actually, I think prior to the law firm's notices on our door management went around being like, like, come pick up your checks. These aren't, you know, like, you need to go take your checks. You need to sign that you're leaving, et cetera. And when that notice from the, the time law firm came signed by Lise Taylor, it,

Lise Taylor, reporter to the bar. It basically said, this doesn't apply to you. And if you, I mean, okay, this is my interpretation of it. When I read it as a just, you know, random human being, not a law major or anything, it sounded like they would take our relocation checks and or charge us more money if we bought back. That's the way it was phrased. Granted, I know it was like law jargon, but it was made to almost,

like in my opinion, harass us. Like it felt like, oh, everything the course basis, ten association and SBT was saying is a lie. This is the truth. If you want to join them and be with them, well, you might not get your relocation assistance check and or we might charge you more from that. At least with that specific notice, it was super confusing and you know, most people

here don't have lot of grease. They don't, they don't know the law. On top of that, you know, the law firm intentionally left out the last part of the ordinance. They said, hey, this doesn't apply to you because the eviction notice sort of were issued before this, but it left out the unlawful detainer part. So it was, it's lying by a mission. Yeah, yeah. It's like, I wish I had a good like movie exemplary something, but like we've all seen this kind of thing, right?

It's like you tell the person everything and then you kind of black out the last part of the sentence. So that, I don't know, I wish there was like an obvious movie thing to be like look at what the villain did so the person would like make the wrong choice like go down the wrong path in the forest or some shit right like so they get attacked like like that's what it is that's what they did that was that was exactly what they did they literally quoted the new ordinance and then cut off the second half and put dot dot dot which was the part that I was doing. I'm flying something else is there, right? Maybe some English major was like, oh, I wonder what's in that dot dot dot

like puts the rest of the quote. But that's the thing about like using their power as lawyers, fancy letterhead and all this shit of knowing. And this goes back to this kind of diversity of class composition, right? If this is a bunch of super highly educated professionals, either with law degrees or whatever, they'd be like, oh, I'm just going to jump onto the county.

I'm going to look up the ordinance and be like, oh, it's ordinance 51, whatever. And I'm going to read through it and be like, aha, they left out the unlawful detainer. But my guess is almost zero of the tenants to receive those notices did that. And that was the law firm. That was that was time and tailor and Fox and Howard and whoever the fuck else is involved in there and their, you know, fraudulent joke of a firm.

Their their whole thing was they wanted to scare people to get them to self-advict, right? So if you think about like the logistics of like, okay, let's say you're a landlord firm that works for landlords and you evict people and you get paid a lot of money to do so, right? So you get paid some retainer amount, that's like, I don't know, tens of thousands or more,

just for like being on a call to do stuff for them and then maybe you get paid of other amounts. You're looking at, you're looking at a situation like this and you're like, okay, 250 units and then there's somewhere between 500 and 1000 people and like, you know, you don't need to evict the little kids but like, you need to evict like every like person on the lease like That's a lot of unlawful detainers like that's a lot of filing that we're gonna have to do Yeah, we're gonna have to like get every single name and every single lease and we're gonna have to like every individual Person on every lease. We're gonna have to file an eviction lawsuit in the court that

we know is gonna get tossed out. Like that's so much fucking work for us to do. We don't wanna do all that work, that's insane, right? Like we wanna kinda just keep this retainer money and do like minimal work, like, because we also don't have, it's a four, it's a four person law firm and they probably have some legal assistance, but like, do they really have the capacity to do something of that scale? Like this little slimy garbage trash

fire of a fucking firm, of course not. What their strategy was to scare people through lying with abusing their power as much as possible to empty out that building, so that there'd be no need to file eviction lawsuits and do the bidding of their, of course, spaces without going to court, knowing they would lose. Right?

So that's anybody listening, by the way. This is not like, this actually isn't about course spaces or the time law firm. Like, this is just a strategic set of like, of methodology for an industry that views human beings as obstacles to profit in a hyper commodified real estate capitalist market. Like that's all this is. We're just describing like a normal process that's happening at this point. Yeah, and something something we've talked about

in other like 10-inch struggles is that. I mean, one of the things that, I'm not gonna use this specific law from doing this, but there's something we've seen in other places is like, you know, you'll get landlords, you will just file, you'll just file, like mass file, just illegal evictions. And they do it because, you know, okay,

so if they get caught, like nothing happens to them, right? Like, but if they don't get caught, you know, this is an enormous number of people who you could just throw out and not have to go through any kind of legal process with. And so, yeah, these, like, you know, it's, like this goes back to the back to the old sort of capitalism problem, which is like the easiest way to make money

is just by taking it from someone. And the second easiest way is by, you know, like the one that's even easier than that is you lie to them and trick them and to get, either trick them or intimidate them and she's giving you the money without having to like, actually fight them. And yeah, it's, you it's what they're doing here.

It is legal terrorism. Yeah, and I reported Lacey Taylor to the bar. I don't know Lacey, because I'm sure you're listening to this, if they even notified you, but it was a bit frustrating, because they were just like, yeah, this isn't really like,

we can't really do anything about this. It has to be a matter that's settled in civil court. So it's definitely frustrating. It's like, no, this is just straight up lying. This is not like an interpretation of the law, but I do think like this is as a side note, like this is the issue with you can have like evil-ass people who are trying to make people homeless in order to retend it. That's the kind of language that these firms use. Where is retendent thing to building? are trying to make people homeless in order to retenant, that's the kind of language that these firms use. That word is retenant thing to building.

We're just retenanting, right? That's the real estate capitalist law firm. Not that sort of law. That's the industry like language, right? Like, we have a thing we want to do, and this is just the Wild West, and we just want to make a lot of money. And we just have stacks of lawyers just on deck

that we'll just pay to do this. And then you even have the state bar associations that are like, well, yeah, that's just how it is, man. Probably most likely, because on the side of real estate, I'd guess I'm making up this number. The 80% of the lawyers working in real estate are on the side of landlords. And then maybe 20%, probably way less than 20%.

Yeah, that's some time. On the side of tenants, right? And then some of the landlord tenants sometimes will help tenants, right? So they can like brag at their little wine and cheese things, like, oh, I helped the people or whatever. And I donate to charities for some garbage. But at the end of the day, they're just,

they're happy to make people die of starvation on the street so that somebody else can make a shit down the money. Yeah. This has been Nick at Appen here. Join us tomorrow for part two of this interview in which the landlords do board bullshit. Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, Alphabet Boys, we take you inside undercover investigations. I'm Trevor Aronson. And in our second season, we have an Alphabet suit with the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI,

all mixed up in the same case. At the center of this story is Flavio, but who is Flavio? I see movies with arm dealers on TV. Okay, I'm going there for the AI, but I'm gonna die. When I land, there's Flavio in a suit. It's like, follow me. And he slams down his badge in my passport. And I'm like, uh, something's going on here. So you do personal security all over the world and you have somebody call you

and say, can you get grenades and guns for this guy in Colombia? Not not specified grenades, a lot of ammunition. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm deal. Who are the cops? Who are the criminals? And is anyone really who they claim to be? Listen to Alphabet Boys on the I Heart Radio app, Apple

Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Does the US government really have alien technology? And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI? What happens when computers learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events.

We've spent a decade applying critical thinking to some of the most bizarre phenomenon civilization and beyond. Each week, we dive deep into unsolved mysteries, conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies. You've heard about these things, but what's the full story? Listen to stuff they don't want you to know

on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your favorite shows. What's up fam? I'm Brian Ford, Artisan Baker and host of the new podcast, Flaky Biscuit. On this podcast, I'm gonna get to know my guests by cooking up their favorite nostalgic meal. It could be anything from Twinkies to mom's Thanksgiving dressing. this podcast, I'm gonna get to know my guests by cooking up their favorite nostalgic meal.

It could be anything from Twinkies to moms Thanksgiving dressing. Sometimes I might get it wrong, sometimes I'll get it right. I'm so happy it's good because man, if it wasn't, I'd be like, you know, everybody not my mom. Either way, we will have a blast. You'll have access to every recipe so you can cook and bake alongside me. As I talk to artists, musicians, and chefs about how this meal guided them to success.

And these nostalgic meals, fam, they inspire one of a kind conversations. When I bake this recipe, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Oh. Does this podcast come with a therapist? Yeah. It can. Listen to Flaky Biscuit every Tuesday on the I Heart Radio app Apple podcasts

or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome dick at Appin' Here, a podcast about landlords doing bullshit and how you can stop them. Today we're continuing our interview with two tenants in California fighting a massive fiction by landlord ghouls core spaces. Enjoy. Yeah, I was something else I wanted to ask about that I'd heard about was harassment from the guards and the fact that there suddenly started being security guards after they started. You want to talk about that a bit.

I, yeah, I would love to talk about that. So I have lived here for almost three years. We did have security. I want to say it was Saturdays between, I was one security guard for all four buildings, Saturdays between 11 p. 11 PM and like 3, 4 AM. Just, just one security guard that would walk around just during that time. Since core spaces has purchased the property, we have two to four, 24, seven security guards. I know, they're, they're really,

they've made me personally super fucking uncomfortable. I've had them ask me where I live. What like when I'm going around canvassing right trying to get flyers people stores, let them know like hey, this is these are the actual facts stuff like that. They've they've asked me like where what building do you live in? What's your name? Creepy things and I'm like What's your name? Creepy things. And I'm like, I'm not going to tell you that. I have no idea who you are. They walk past our apartment constantly. It's every time I go outside, they're waiting right outside the building. They're taking photos of the things across the the buildings like like stuff outside of people's units. It's really uncomfortable and it's Kind of telling because it's like what we never needed security before Oh, but but once you bought the building and wanted to kick everyone out. Oh all of a sudden you're you're you know, you're hiring These random people which I will also add, one of our neighbors talked

to one of the security guards, he worked there for a day and was like, yeah, they lowered my pay to like minimal wage. I'm not a singer. Yeah, yeah, he literally told me. And my parents said, oh my god. Maybe we should try to like help you to nice the security guard. Yeah, good, good. Yes. You know, Maybe we should try to help you to recognize the chicken. Yes.

Yes. You know, stuff. And core spaces. You guys are such a Mark Lipshin and Chris Richards. You guys are the cheapest coming as going to be anything.

Why not? Right. And and he was like, I'm leaving. Like, I'm not going to do this. This is stupid. But usually when I go out, you know, I mean, for the most part, they're usually just sitting on their phones, standing in

front of the entrance, locking the doors, the gate, normal cops stuff like that. Kind of yeah. Well, with, yeah. Well, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the standing around part of the cop shop. So far, hopefully not the other part of the cop job so far. Hopefully not the other part of the cop job, where they, yeah. Minus any credentials, basically, not that I want cops here either, but, um, but yeah, it's been, in my own personal opinion, it's harassing behavior, you know, and it's in, and I've talked to so many tenants here, um, especially again, more marginalist tenants, I'm not going to like specify them, but they're very intimidated by them. And they actually do think they are cops. They don't know that no, these aren't police officers. They aren't trying to, they

don't have the power to do certain things that you may be afraid of. Are they like, are they like in like, like, policing uniforms? Yeah. Yeah. They have security uniforms. They have tasers on them. They, they, they like to direct their power.

Yeah. I mean, probably not similar to get them on a person and get police officer, but it's still really depressing that, yeah, I don't know. It's an, yeah, but again, and the strategy is to get people, it's just scare the shit out of people so they'll get. Yeah, it's just terror. Yeah, it's, it's uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable when you go out of your apartment

and there's just some random person with a taser just like right next to you and you're like, I'm just trying to go check my mailbox. What the hell? Well, you guys are safer though, right? So that like, if an evil landlord and they're slimy, scummy evil, raw team, we're to try to like put you guys under the streets the security guards would come and defend you against them right? Oh wait, no do I am my next stop? Oh They hear to serve the evil people trying to put you on the streets. Oh, that's for minimum wage for minimum wage Yeah, I mean that's the sad thing too is that the security guards are are probably gonna get renovated by the homeboys of the core spaces executives

at some point, right? Like, they're gonna get renovated. Somebody's gonna look at their, wherever they're living as a low performing asset that needs to be retended and shit. Yeah, so. Yeah, I don't, so that's fun. That's cool.

I don't blame, I know I understand the job, I don't blame them, I guess as individuals. Well, some of them I do, because they're clearly on power trips. They like to enforce their power, but I do understand that they are being hired outside to do a job, but it's really not fun. I couldn't imagine ever doing that myself. I wouldn't feel

right, but I don't know. We're all suffering, right? We're all trying to survive, so I'm trying not to judge too much, but can't help it when they're taking photos inside the windows of my apartment. It's pretty creepy. Yeah, pretty creepy. Yeah, I guess, okay, is there anything else that you want to specific you want to talk about? Let's see, we got the beginning, so we got the law passed, and then we got the slimy thine Taylor Fox Howard LLP garbage law firm, Camelollon. Well, okay, so one thing that's been a struggle and I would say like Sam and a couple others have been,

it's just nuts to me, like how much stamina. Well, no, actually let me say this, like, so I am a mental health professional which I don't like to say in organizing spaces a lot because I don't like to mix up the role too much, but like straight up, everybody I talk to in these situations, like, in the role of, like, an organizer not like therapists, it's just everything reeks of PTSD symptoms, like straight up, like, people can't sleep, people are hyper vigilant, they're going out to their car, and they're

looking around to see if there's a security guard, they're in constant fear, they're confused, they're, you know, their start, their startle responses up, which is,vigilant. I mean, there's literally, you can pick up a fucking DSM-5 and look at the definition of PTSD. And I would say, I can't say everyone, I've been talking to everyone in the building. But I mean, this process creates fucking PTSD. Like I'm not exaggerating, I'm not making this up. And also because the mental health field as a side note is such a like neoliberal individualistic fucking trash fire It's hard to actually look at this correctly to say like This is this is like a mass like trauma of it, but despite the mass trauma that everybody experiences with this

The resilience in it of being like okay We're still gonna go out and we're gonna flyer and we're gonna knock on doors And so like there's been this fate like a two-part kind of phase Which has been continuing to talk to the county supervisors to try to get them to pass a stronger law, because there's kind of this race now where, if in when course spaces gets permits, then they can send out like actually proper notices,

although maybe there'll be problems with the notices and that can be addressed or whatever. But like, it is kind of just buying time, right? If they get permits and then they try to evict everybody, then there's the actual 60-day countdown, I guess, depending on a lot of different factors, right? So, one of the supervisors said, I want to make the most gruesome speed bump to speed bump this eviction for core spaces. And so what they did is it is a big speed bump,

but it actually doesn't solve the problem. What solve the problem is either a no-fall to eviction moratorium, which is be like really broad. We're not sure what the chances are of them to pass that. But another thing would be it's usually called right to return, but we're calling it right to re-rent because right to return, I guess, is a thing that I don't know, I don't we, I don't know, like, Zionist say or something, I don't know.

Yeah, so it's a whole... Right, right, right. So, but right to re-rent, which is like a thing that is in several other cities and counties, which just means, like, if the landlord legitimately needs to make renovations because of, like, safety and have ability concerns or whatever, they have to relocate the tenant temporarily, and then they have to re-rent to the tenant for what we were asking is the same rent. We also think that using the 10% a year framework

would be fine, relocate them, and then raise it by 10% if you didn't already once that year, just treat it as a normal thing. So if we get them to pass that law, then they can't evict anybody, right? So on the one hand, we're like really trying to get the supervisor's students and it's just sort of, it's just unknown like how likely we are on that in this moment. But then simultaneously, we need to continue kind of like educating the tenants on like,

on their rights because they keep, as of today, management started illegally in a racist way targeting Spanish speaking, let's, you know, tenants telling them that they have to pick up their checks right now and Sam, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but it's like you have to pick up your checks by today, I don't know, like next week or something. It's like really soon or otherwise, like, you don't get your relocation money and then you're going to get an eviction lawsuit and course base is already as permits. You're just making up all this, like, all these things are lies. None of them are true. I was just going to say I'm white, so I actually didn't get that notice, but I, you were

correct. The Latina families take it that. Yeah, yeah, because course base is a racist and, and, and John Tine is a racist and Lacy Taylor's a racist and they're fucking evil pieces of shit And I'm, I'm glad they're listening to this and they quote me as many fucking times they want in any context But so having to like try to counter those All that disinformation all those lies is like this constant like parallel process like trying to get the county to do stuff, but trying to get people to understand like, no, they're lying to you, right? Like while they're in this like chronic state of kind of like PTSD, they're like, where am I going to go?

What am I going to do? What's happening? And it's hard for them to know who to trust because they're being pummeled with disinformation and lies from people with a lot of power over them. I don't know if you had anything else. I kind of went off there. No, you're fine. It's.

Yeah, that's that's kind of the way I see it as well. I guess what I would add is if the county doesn't do something, is this going to be. Horrible for the entire county of Santa Barbara, but just California in general, I mean, you have to think of 240 plus units, 50, whatever. We don't even know how many units. There's so many units here. It's like, it's insane. This is going to be so bad. Where are these people going to go? If Santa Barbara has a, from what I've heard, a one to two percent vacancy rate, these, these, these people have, and including me as a person living here have nowhere to go. I'm, I will be entirely forced out of the

county, me and my partner, who holds a job here. He works as a delivery driver. He likes his job. It doesn't pay great, doesn't have good benefits, but he enjoys it. And he's an important part of the community. And if all of these human beings are forced out of here, what is that going to do to Santa Barbara? You know, who's going to, who are going to be the teachers, the healthcare professionals, the everything? I will say in addition to that, this is why we formed Core Spaces

Tennis Association with the help of SBTU, so that we can not only stay together and work together as a union to fight this, but also what Core Spaces will likely do in the future. So we actually learned from the Santa Barbara independent, they interviewed one of the, I think, was one of the course spaces representatives who said, this was, they've done this 46 times. This is the first time they ever got this level of community outreach, which I was like, excuse me, what? What? We know that their executives are, they've previously worked for Goldman Sachs and Blackstone.

And to find out they've done this at least 46 other times and just gone away with it. No, we're not we're not going to keep letting that happen. And so whatever happens here at CBC and the sweeps are four buildings, however it turns out. And hopefully it turns out in our favor, we're not going to stop because they are further, they're just going to keep continuing this. And it's, we, it's disgusting. We can't keep letting this shit happen. Like, someone needs to stop it. It needs to be stopped. And if I hope that we can get legislation to stop it, but if not, we're going to be a fighting force. And, and we're not, yeah, we're not stopping. Oh, yeah. Oh, and then I guess like, yeah, I don't think we really said this, but like if any other tenants that are, you know, course-based tenants wanted to join Sam and her neighbors,

right, like that was like your saying Sam, like the point was to create something, like they could have named it as more of a local thing, like they're kind of association, but they chose course-faces as the company name, right? So like, if you're in Arizona, if you're in Tennessee, if you're in Seattle, or whatever, and you are people getting renovated by these people,

or I don't know, you're just students like renting by the bed, and they won't fix stuff or whatever. You can join the course spaces then to association. This very well could be like the national level organization. Right now it's local, but it's been set up to be something that could be potentially national or international of course, spaces wants to go, you know, capital in those no borders. So if you want to go fuck people up in other countries, then, you know, we can pay more interpreters,

I guess. Yeah, I guess this is the thing I wanted to close on is like, you know, tenants unions are not composed of like some kind of like, like special group of people, right? They're just people, right? Like I did it back when I was at least stuff, right? And like it's just, it's just composed of random people. And like that random person can very easily be you. And you know, yeah, you're saying like someone has to stop these people and if it's not going to be,

they're not going to be you, the tenants fighting them, like no one is ever going to. And they're just gonna keep running people over forever. And politicians just aren't gonna do this. I mean, I could really quickly because of the like show of force from right, so they get like a cover from the constituents and they're like, oh, we're allowed to do this. Like, we can do this and or we're terrified of what will happen.

Like, will this be like another police station burnt down if we pissed them off or something, right? Like, you actually have to sort of like make the politicians afraid of you. I mean, you want to like, be their friends and stuff too. I'm not very good at that. I'm good at like, scaring them, I guess, but like, you have to like kind of scare them into acting. You have to like discipline the politicians into acting. So anybody that's like, we just need more policies. It's like policies don't just happen. Like, you know, like the, like the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, at any time in the entire history of Santa Barbara that could have passed this and they didn't until you came

for them. Right, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And I think you're right about the tennis association being just, we're random tenants. I'm not some politician. I'm not some leader.

I'm a student. You know, I usually just spend my nights making dinner with my cats, watching Jeopardy, like I don't do this. But the point being is when you come together as a group, you have power in numbers. And although I have faith that we will win against core spaces for our complex, even if we don't,

we've left a huge mark and we've helped so many residents of Santa Barbara County for maybe landlords that were planning to change the stove out and not get permits. Well, now they have to find a reason to get a permit. We've at least done that, but I think there's a lot more that we will do and can do, especially against core spaces and their future endeavors. Their properties, they decide that they want to overpay for. Yeah. I will throw out like one other resource that is like a group that's called the Autonomous

Tenant Union Network, which is a network that SB2 is a part of just if you are, if you're in a Tenant Union or you're interested in tenant organizing from anything you've heard, they are there. It's like a network, like the word Autonomous again again is like it's people who are sort of independent of various like non-profits, foundations, and governments just be sort of responsive just to tenants themselves. So I'm not like a representative of the group

or like Autune, but it's a really strong network of really experienced organizers that are really intent on these kinds of things, right? Like forming, like there's a crisis, form a tenant association, like organize your whole block, like get the politician to do a thing, go on rent strike, like whatever, right, this more sort of militant, like we desperate, with crisis requires us to, you know, to meet the crisis where it's at and act that way, right? So, and there's other resources, and I'm sure you can have like, you know, show notes and stuff, or you can have links, but yeah.

Other places specifically people can go if they want to help the struggle specifically? Yeah, so for Core Spaces 10 and Association, the social media handle is all Core Spaces TA. That would be for Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok. We have a go-fun me going as well, just to pay for things like, you know, food for events or I don't know, printing, paper,

flaring, stuff like that. We also have an email that anyone can reach at coursebasesta at gml.com. Yeah, and we will put all of that in the show notes. Sounds good. Thank you to so much for coming on. And yeah, go beat these sons of bitches. Yeah, thank you a lot for letting us swear.

We're definitely making their lives a lot harder than they expected, which is kind of cool. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so let's make it happen here. And yeah, you too can go make your landlords days worse and your days better. In the podcast, Alphabet Boys, we take you inside undercover investigations. I'm Trevor Aronson.

And in our second season, we have an Alphabet Soup, with the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI all mixed up in the same case. At the center of this story is Flavio. But who is Flavio? I see movies with arm dealers on TV. Okay, I'm going there for see, but I'm gonna die. When I land, there's Flavio in a suit. It's like follow me and he slams down his badge

in my passport and I'm like, ah, something's going on here. So you do personal security all over the world and you have somebody call you and say, can you get grenades and guns for this guy in Colombia? Not, not certified grenades, a lot of ammunition. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm steal, who are the cops, who are the criminals,

and is anyone really who they claim to be? Listen to alphabet boys on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Does the US government really have alien technology? And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI? What happens when computers learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town?

From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science. History is riddled with unexplained events. We spend a decade applying critical thinking to some of the most bizarre phenomenon civilization and beyond. Each week, we dive deep into unsolved mysteries, conspiracy theories, and actual conspiracies. You've heard about these things, but what's the full story? Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your favorite shows. What's up fam? I'm Brian Ford, Artisan Baker, and host of the new podcast, Flaky Biscuits.

On this podcast, I'm gonna get to know my guests by cooking up their favorite nostalgic meal. It could be anything from Twinkies to mom's Thanksgiving dressing. Sometimes I might get it wrong, sometimes I'll get it right. I'm so happy it's good, because man, if it wasn't, I'd be like, you know, everybody not my mom.

Either way, we will have a blast. You'll have access to every recipe so you can cook and bake alongside me, as I talk to artists, musicians, and chefs about how this meal guided them to success. And these nostalgic meals, fam, they inspire one of a kind conversations. When I bake this recipe, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Um, does this podcast come with a therapist?

Ha ha ha ha! It can! Listen to Flaky Biscuit every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, welcome. This is AcuraCen here and I am Shreen. Today I'm here to talk to you about, well, you guessed it, Palestine. But today is going to be a little different. I actually want to talk about olive trees and how the olive tree came to symbolize Palestinian national identity. The olive tree is not just symbolic, as it symbolizes their national identity,

but the roots of it are far deeper, pun intended. So let's get into it. Olive trees feature prominently in Palestinian art and literature, as symbols of steadfastness amid a life of displacement. Palestinian olive trees are yet another target, however, for Israeli settlers and the IDF. And this is why I wanted to talk about this, because there's so much talk in Zionism about how sacred the land of Palestine is, how sacred their land is, the land that I will call Palestine, and how this land belongs to only them, the chosen people.

But these chosen people are the same ones desecrating the land and quite literally pulling out trees from their roots. Trees that have been there for centuries been part of that land for centuries. I've never been able to reconcile that with what Zionism pretends to be, I've never been able to reconcile that with what Zionism pretends to be, that they respect anything at all, not even the land they supposedly belong to. And it's just something I always think about when I read reports about olive trees being uprooted or chopped down. Isn't that the land you pretend to love? What could possibly be the Zionist rationale behind destroying the nature of that land? The olive tree encapsulates the Palestinian identity. It roots an entire nation to a land and livelihood lost to occupation while serving as a potent symbol of resistance against the territorial encroachment of illegal settlements. The Mediterranean climate is pretty ball-me, and olive trees have for centuries provided a steady

source of income from both the sale of their fruit and their silky golden oil derived from the fruit aka olive oil. The land around the Sea of Galilee, which is an enclosed sea in the northeast region of Palestine, was once the world's most important olive region. The area was the site of the earliest olive cultivation, dating back to 5000 BC. And this is just a fun fact that I thought was interesting, but southern Spain and south-eastern Italy are now the biggest olive oil producing regions. To this day, between 80,000 and 100,000 families in the Palestinian territories rely on olives and their oil as primary or secondary sources of income. The industry accounts for about 70% of local fruit production and contributes about 14% to the local economy. The trees have been a target

for violence and vandalism in Palestine for decades, which is nothing new, but this is also compounding the already damaging effects of climate change. While other farmers around the world can work to adapt their cultivation practices to a warming climate. Palestinians lack regular access to their olive groves, and it's coupled with increasingly violent attacks on the trees and the farmers themselves. And all of this spells out just a grim future for their historic way of life. And all of press owner and Palestine, abuede, said, climate change

and the occupation are making our job more difficult than it already is. He owns several denoms of land in the inaccessible seam zone. He said, bitter olives, that is our present, that will be our future. Palestinian farmers are also often restricted by Israeli authorities from accessing their lands that are close to settlements or the separation wall. In 2021, the International Committee of the Red Cross said, for years, the ICRC has observed a seasonal peak in violence by Israeli settlers residing in certain settlements and outposts in the West Bank toward Palestinian farmers and their property in the period leading up to the

olive harvest season, as well as during the harvest season itself in October and November. And that quote was said by Elz debuff, the head of ICRC's mission in Jerusalem. They went on to say, farmers also experience acts of harassment and violence that aim at preventing a successful harvest, not to mention the destruction of farming equipment or the uprooting and burning of olive trees. The olive harvest season, which runs between October and November, is a lifeline for, again, about 80,000 to 100,000 Palestinian families in the occupied West Bank.

Since 1967, more than 800,000 Palestinian olive trees have been illegally uprooted by Israeli authority. In August 2021 alone, more than 9,000 olive trees were removed. In February 9th of 2020, 50 olive trees were forcibly uprooted and destroyed in the occupied West Bank region of South-Fit. For the past several years, when the olive harvest begins around October, both Israeli forces and settlers regularly attack Palestinian villages and farmers and destroy their crops on almost a daily basis. They beat farmers, they spray crops with chemicals and uproot olive trees by the hundreds. In November of 2022, Israeli forces abrooted 2,000 olive

trees in the West Bank. Make it make sense, you can't, it's stupid and illogical. On October 20th of 2022 a group of men armed with metal bars and stones attacked Khazim al-Haj-Raham-Mant and his olive grove in the village of El Mulair, northeast of Ramallah. This group of nearly two dozen settlers from the nearby illegal Israeli settlement of Adiyad attacked the olive farmer and his friend Mazen Muhammad, the owner of the grove next door, uprooting and heavily damaging a total of 80 olive trees and almond saplings between the two properties. The trespassers also set fire to a vehicle and water tank for just for good measure,

before retreating to their homes in the legal settlement in the northern West Bank. Khazim al-Hazr-Rahman is a 45-year-old father of four, and he said, the Israeli army backed the aggressors and threw tear gas canisters and rubber bullets at us so that the settlers can keep on destroying our crops. And it's not the first time this has happened. This man already lost an eye in a similar settler attack

a decade ago. And these are far from isolated incidents. This man lost an eye. Now it was losing his entire livelihood and the thing he's built for his entire life life probably his family's life as well for generations. Another incident came from Doha Assus, who is a 60-year-old farmer. She says that she got up at 5 a.m. to journey to her olive grove to harvest. Only to find 35 of the precious trees that were planted by her father 70 years ago, these trees were scattered in pieces after settlers took a chainsaw to them. I couldn't contain my sorrow. I hugged the broken

trunks and waived goodbye to them forever. Then the Israeli army pulled me away from my field. Many of the groves of Palestinian farmers are located in the vicinity of settlements in restricted areas under Israeli administrative and military control, which means that farmers need to apply for permits, specifying when and for how long they can gain access to their own property. allows the government to seize Palestinian fields if they are abandoned for more than three years, which is a throwback to Ottoman era land codes. Taken together, these rules incentivize attacks to keep the farmers from accessing their groves, thus allowing for claims of abandonment and eventual seizure of the land. And many families have given up on reaching their lands for fear of being killed, which is also, I think, what the settlers want. Farming activists Gassan Najad said, during the harvest, settlers attack us on a daily basis. They want to take possession of our lands and build more settlements. Today, the number of Israelis living in some 250 settlements built on Palestinian

territory, illegally, according to international law, is between 600,000 and 750,000 people. And as settlements keep expanding, the rights of Palestinians to access their land in those areas are stifled by ever more restrictive permitting. Since 2005, more than 92% of investigations into complaints made by Palestinian victims were closed without filing legal charges. Surprise, surprise. According to independent observers appointed by the UN, the violence attributed to Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank has worsened in recent months amid a quote, atmosphere of impunity. In response to these attacks, Palestinian farmers have been forced to plant about 10,000 new olive trees in the West Bank each year to prevent the region's 5,000 year old industry

from dying out. Chana Dullin, the director of international relations with the NGO Yesh Dinn, said, impunity encourages settlers to take over more land. They feel more empowered than ever to use violent means to attack Palestinians. It's hard to imagine the situation getting worse than this, but it likely will. And they also added that cooperation between settlers and the army on these organized attacks has become something of an established pattern. We've talked about this on other episodes in the past, but legislative elections in November

of last year brought a sharp rise in settler violence because the far right religious Zionist party and the Utsfa Yehudid party surged in the polls. It's a more ben-gavid, is now Israel's national security minister under a new coalition deal, and this grants him control over the Israeli border police division in the West Bank. He proudly advocates for expelling disloyal Arab citizens from Israel. Dior Sadat, from the Jerusalem-based NGO Bitselim, which documents human rights violations in the occupied territories and framed Israeli policies in the West Bank as those of an apartheid regime, they said, the state of Israel is using settlers as its unofficial armed arm in the West Bank to

take over more land. Settlers are fully backed by the state. We expect to witness much more violence as far-right parties gain positions of power. As the unfortunate triumph of nationalist religious ideals has made the Israeli far-right integrated mainstream politics, human rights groups are becoming increasingly concerned with the implications for Palestinians and the occupied territories, going as far as to fear a formal annexation of all or parts of the West Bank through a Kineset vote. According to UN experts, 2022 was the sixth year of consecutive annual increase in the number of Israeli attacks in the occupied territories

and the deadliest in the West Bank since 2005. Let's take our first break right here. We'll be right back because we always are. Okay, okay, we are back. Let's just jump right back in. In 2020, Harits Magazine published an article about Israelis growing ancient olive trees in the Galilee region in northern Israel. The article focuses on the Noi Mayor family, who have been growing, quote, hundreds of these ancient trees, many of which are between 200 and 800 years old, on land adjacent to Mojave de Zapori in the lower Galilee region. The olive oil produced by Neumer's company, Rish, Mkish, or Lakhish, sorry he was pronouncing that probably, but this olive oil

received high praise from Ronnett Verred, the article's author, and the Harret's food critic. But my question is, how did such ancient trees fall into the hands of the Neumere family who settled in Tizapuri only 20 years ago? No historical context is given in the article to explain the existence of these trees, which the author writes, are, quote, spread out over a large area and found in pasture is difficult for cultivation and harvesting. The answer to this question is that Mojav T Disapori, this region, sits on land belonging to the destroyed and depopulated Palestinian village of Safuriyah. According to Palestine remembered, a website dedicated to preserving

the memory of more than 400 Palestinian villages which were destroyed during the Nekba, Safuriyah was a relatively large community with over 5,000 residents in 1948. The area around the village, according to Waleed Khalid's book All That Remains, was, quote, well endowed with fertile soil and surface and underground water resources, with olives being the village's chief crop. Safuriyah was conquered by Israeli forces on July 15, 1948. According to village residents, only a small number of people remained in the village after it was bombed from the air by Israeli forces, and very few people were able to return and retrieve their property.

We talked about the Nupka in a previous episode, if you guys want to revisit that. I won't get into it too much in this episode because you already have one all about it, but I'm just going to continue talking about this author, Waleid Khalidi, and his books. Waleid Khalidi has another book titled The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, which unveiled previously concealed Israeli state archives, which Khalidi references in his book. concealed Israeli state archives, which Khalidi references in his book. Israeli historian Benny Morris writes that those who remained in Safodia were expelled in 1948, but that quote hundreds infiltrated back in the months that followed. Israeli authorities Morris wrote, feared that if the returning Palestinians were allowed

to stay, the village would quote soon return to its pre-war population. By then, neighboring Jewish settlements had already coveted Sephudiya's lands. According to Morris, one senior Israeli official stated in November of 1948, next Nazareth is a village whose distant lands are needed for our settlements, perhaps they can be given to another place. Soon thereafter, the inhabitants were loaded on trucks in January of 1949 and expelled again to neighboring Arab communities. In short, going back to that harrott's article, the hundreds of ancient olive trees that

are referenced did not just grow out of thin air. The Palestinian residents of Safuria planted and cultivated them for centuries. The trees were stolen from them by force. The state leases those trees after claiming the village's land as its own. Some of that land is now part of a man-made forest planted by the Jewish National Fund. But to ignore the village's history, as the Harits article did, is no worse than ignoring the stolen land on which Israeli companies, like the one mentioned, and many others, produce its olive oil in the West Bank. Taham Ahmad Ali, the famed Palestinian poet, was born in and expelled from Safuriyah.

The family of Muhammad Baraket, the politician who heads the high follow-up committee for Arab citizens of Israel, was uprooted from the village. Safuriyah may be gone, but its memory lives. I want to talk about how olive trees became a symbol in Palestinian art and literature. Olive trees are featured so prominently in Palestinian art and literature, even the far-flung diaspora, as symbols of rootedness in an age of displacement, self-sufficiency in times of hardship,

and peace in periods of war. Sleyman Mansour, a Palestinian painter in Jerusalem, whose art has been long-focused on the theme of land, said, the Olive Tree represents the steadfastness of the Palestinian people who are able to live under difficult circumstances. In the same way that the trees can survive and have deep roots in their land, so too, did the Palestinian people. Rahmoud Dadawish, the celebrated Palestinian poet who died in 2008, his works have many

references to olives. In his 1964 poetry collection, Leaves of the Olive Tree, he wrote, Olive is an evergreen tree. Olive will stay evergreen, like a shield for the universe. Nabil Anani, the celebrated Palestinian painter, ceramicist and sculptor, believes that the olive tree is a powerful national symbol that must be protected at all costs. Anani, who was considered one of the founders of contemporary Palestinian art, told Arab News, for me it is both a national and artistic symbol. It reflects the nature and beauty of Palestine. Our traditions, culture, poems, and songs are often centered around the tree. To the west of Ramallah, the administrative heart of the Palestine government,

Anani said that the hillsides are full of olive trees as far as the eye can see. They cover entire mountains, and it is one of the most pleasant views that anyone can observe," he said. That is the economic and symbolic power of the olive tree and Palestinian national life. The erudual communities that have tended to these crafts for generations are routinely targeted by illegal settlers attempting to strip families of their land and living. The late Fowda Thalcan, one of the most respected female poets in Palestinian literature, saw olive trees as symbols of unity with nature and of hope for the renewal and rebirth of Palestine. In a 1993 poem, she wrote, the roots of the olive tree are from my soil,

and they are always fresh. Its lights are emitted from my heart, and it is inspired, until my creator filled my nerve, root and body. So he got up while shaking its leaves due to maturity created within him. More than just a source of income and artistic inspiration,

however, olives also form a vital part of Palestinian diet and culinary culture. Pickled olives, feature and breakfasts, lunches and dinners, and also provides significant nutritional health benefits. Olive oil, meanwhile, is used in scores of recipes, the most popular of which is Zataduzet, which is basically fluffy, pita bread, dipped in oil, then dabbed liberally in a time-based powder that includes sesame seeds and spices. My mom

actually talks about this all the time. It was what our first April's growing up in childhood. We're obsessed with it. Palestinian Zatad is delicious in particular, but olive oil is a huge part of this cultural Arab staple. Beyond the dinner table, olive oil historically has had many other uses. It's been a source of fuel and oil lamps, a natural treatment for dry hair, skin and nails, and even as insecticide. It is not only the fruit and its oil, but the olive tree contributes to the cultural and economic life of Palestine.

Olive pits, the hard stones in the center of the fruit, have long been repurposed to make strings of prayer beads used by Muslims and Christians alike. As for the leaves and branches of the trees, they are trimmed during the harvest season to be used as feed for sheep and goats, while the broad canopy of the olive grove provides animals and their shepherds with welcome shade from the relentless afternoon sun. The wood of fells trees has also been widely used in the carving of religious icons as far back as the 16th century, and as a source of firewood before the modern use of gas. In fact, the glass makers of Habran, who are famed for their stained glass,

continue to use charcoal derived from olive trees to fire their kilns. And while the quantifiably beneficial uses of the olive tree are many, perhaps what is even more valuable to Palestinians is the inspiration it has provided for poets, painters, and prophets down the ages. Not to mention the special place it continues to occupy in their culture and quest for statehood. This is all why I wanted to mention the olive tree and really illustrate its significance to Palestinians and also just point out that destroying these crops and these trees or claiming them for your own. It actually is an insult to the land itself. And that is a

Zionist action that I just think has no actual excuse or defense. Why destroy the land that you want so badly if not for spite and hate? So that's what I want to talk about today. I hope it was interesting or educational or whatever. I highly encourage you to try Zeta's one day in your life from an actual Arab person so you can make sure it's good. But yeah, that's all I got. So thank you for listening. And until next time, fuck the idea. The and fuck Israel. Bye! In the podcast, Alphabet Boys, we take you inside undercover investigations. I'm Trevor Aronson. And in our second season, we have an Alphabet soup.

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And he slams down his badge in my passport and I'm like Something's going on here. So you do personal security all over the world and you had somebody call you and say can you get grenades and guns for this guy in Colombia? Not not Certified grenades a lot of ammunition. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm steel who are the cops? Who are the criminals? And is anyone really who they claim to be? Listen to alphabet boys on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Does the US government really have alien technology? And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI? What happens when computers learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? have alien technology? And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI? What happens when computers learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events.

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Listen to Flaky Biscuit every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app Apple app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, it's just me again today. It's James. I'm joined by Eric Mesa, who will introduce himself in a second. And we're going to be discussing the environmental and human impact of the border policies in the last decade or thereabouts and to include the border wall. Eric, would you like to introduce yourself? Thank you, James. Of course, my name is Eric Mesa. I use he-him pronouns, and I am the Borderlands Coordinator for Sierra Club, part of the Grand Canyon chapter based out of Tucson, Arizona, which is the unceded land of the Tohonotum and Pascoa Yankee people, many other tribes that might

call home. Thank you for having me. Yeah, thank you very much for joining us. And that was a fantastic introduction. So Eric, I think if we start out by just explaining what the border wall kind of looks like in the landscape and how it operates in the landscape, because although it's something that you and I might see almost every day, for a lot of people, it's something that they kind of saw on the news three, four years ago and then the news start reporting on it. So can you explain the physical kind of stature and impact of the wall? Yes. Well, I think for each person, it definitely takes into it with the perspective that they might have, you know, it definitely impacts people in a different way. But one thing that you can like notice as soon as you see it is how massive it is, how it just divides these pristine, beautiful Sonora Desert lands

in divisible health. So that already for us as an organization since the beginning and the conception of the idea of start walling all of these remote areas, start looking at the environmental impact that social action can have. So it's always really hard to see and just to imagine and to think about all of the different things, not only people, but all the different movements that used to happen in these areas now has been completely interrupted. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I remember in 2020, I was out on on Kumi Island in in place called Campo,

filming a Kumi I protest against a desecration of their sacred sites, but actually I was writing for this year a club. And I saw a deer that day, like, and it just came up to the wall and it was like, what the fuck do I do? Like this wasn't here last time I came here. It was just just really, I don't know why, obviously, the world is horrible here. It was just just really, I don't know why. Obviously, the world does horrible cruel things to people every day, but I don't know why it struck me out how unnatural and unwelcome it was in that place, but it did. So I think maybe if we could look at these different, the wall spans a huge area and it stops randomly throughout that area.

So perhaps you could explain some of the ecological impacts. Maybe if we start where you are in Tucson and then we move gradually west to where I am and the west end of it. Would that be a good sort of way to do that? Yeah, of course. Well, here in Tucson, our closest border is Nogales. And once we start moving east, or I'm sorry, west from there, the closest one right next to it's called Sassabhi. And as you mentioned, Nogales, there is big walls

and then Sudan and stops because then the terrain gets very uneven. There is a range of mountain called the Pajarito Mountains, which is one of the most biodiversity areas here in the southwest with some endemic species of plants and animals actually thankfully the wall stops there and then there is certain areas that there is a lot of unfinished projects or we also call them orphan, like sections of the wall that never were completed, and they just stand there.

Unfortunately, to get them up there, there was a lot of impact to use, for example, they use dynamite to blow up entire mountain tops to get equipment up there. And some of the cases without even constructing any wall at the end. So it's really unfortunate because a lot of the debris that came out of these explosions right now is causing a lot of erosion issues and it's like moving into those canyons and covering a lot of the vegetation that was there before. Then as you keep coming, passing through the Pajarito Mountains,

then you get to the area called the Buenos Aires National Refuge near the town of Sassaville. And there is a large segment of a wall there with 26 gaps, small gaps, big gaps, and all of these gaps have been there since the beginning of the construction. CBP recently announced that they're going to be closing some of these gaps. They have been used by migrants a lot recently, but in recent days actually the influx of migrants have definitely declined a lot, different to what other people see in other parts of the country.

But especially in this area in Arizona, we didn't see the huge amounts of migrants coming after Title 42. So once you pass that section, then you get to what's the, once you pass the SaaS of a port of entry, then you enter the Tejono Autumn reservation. Tejono Autumn decided that they didn't want a wall there and they fought for it and they didn't build a wall. Enteres about, I'm not really sure about the number of miles. I think there is about 16 to 22 miles of just the land that only contains what's known as a vehicle

barrier or Normandy barriers. These are made out of like all train tracks, which we really like environmental speaking because it allows the movement of the animals and the flow of the water as well. And then once you pass the reservation, then you go into organ pipe national park and then you start seeing more wall sections on areas like Kito, Akito Springs, like a very important ceremonial site for the tohonotan, here's your autumn people and a lot of destruction on those areas, sacred sites as well. There are very cultural and important for the Tohono Ota

and people like Monument Hill, a burial site that was built right on top of it. And just keep moving and then you get to areas that are more remote until you get to Yuma and then we have also a cocoa part reservation there that there is no wall. The wall exists just after the reservation. There are some segments I believe that still have no wall in there. Recently, there was the action by the state governor to put shipping containers there.

They were removed recently to be replaced with the regular ball or type of ball, the wall that you see in other places. And yeah, you keep coming past Calexico and all those areas until you get to umi island and the U.M. all-time mountains and all the way to what's known as French Park which is a binaural park located in the border between San Diego and Tijuana which is the last binaural park or the only one that we have in the border between San Diego and Tijuana, which is the last bi-national, or the only one that we have in the southern border. And now as we speak, new 30-foot walls

are being built in that area as well. So even so, President Biden said that he was not gonna build more walls. We still see new construction happening as we speak right now. Yeah. We've had friends at Friendship Park on our show before, and I'm sure we will again, because they do very important work.

And it's a very important space for so many families who are divided by the border. Yeah. So I think people, I guess, when we talk about ecological impact, people always like, people like big animals, right? So the charismatic megafauna, I guess, that are impacted by this. So maybe that's a good way to look at this. I know that there are some jaguars, jaguars, whatever you want to say, that are impacted in,

it's my very British pronunciation. In Arizona, there is the big horn sheep, of course, who are closer to me right near to Hukumbu, where people will have heard the scripted series by the time this comes out, so they'll be familiar with Hukumbu. Can you talk about the impact of the wall on those sort of bigger animals? big animals? Absolutely. Yeah, that's has been our main focus as a environmental organization. Since 2005, when the real ID waiver came up signed by George W. Bush as a response to 911 and the intention of secure the borders, the real ID act waived every single environment a law that we know, like including the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act.

A law that you can imagine, it's included. It's about 40 or more of these laws were completely waived in order to start building walls. We noticed right a way that the first walls started coming up. It was really easy for people to go over under, cut through them, or go around them. But then we started noticing that animals were not able to do that anymore. We're starting seeing the impacts on some of the species that are super important. seen in the impacts on some of the species that are super important. You gotta remember the species of the desert. They need to cover large amounts of territories to find the resources they need to survive.

We're talking about large migration routes that go from Mexico into the United States back and forth. And just to mention some of the species that are considered in the area of California, we got the big conchip, then you start coming and there's the sonora and there's a prong corn in the desert of El Tar, then we got jaguars in Arizona, we have also black bears. The thing that makes this area so special here in Arizona

is what we have known as the Sky Islands, which is a really high altitude mountains that you can find some of the species that come from the north. This is their southest more territory and some of the species from the south. This is their northest most territory. So species like Jawors, Kenolofosada,, being drinking water out of the same pond with a black bear. And that is very unusual and very rare and very amazing. So we also have also lots, which is another type of cat that lives here in Arizona.

We also have the Mexican gray wolf species that is in danger, that use these corridors back and forth. And unfortunately, we have and had the opportunity to track properly a lot of these animals to recognize their migration patterns because a lot of these animals cannot be put on a GPS color, for example. But what we have done is put a lot of cameras

on the wilderness, and we are able to photograph jowers on this side of the border and photograph the same jow, or a few years later in Mexico, or vice versa. So, it is a lot of proof that all these animals have been using these corridors for thousands of years. There is plenty of evidence that the importance of these wildlife corridors in the Sonar and Desert. And also we see, you know, like the, that with the construction of the border wall, a lot of the species that we used to see more often in the United States. We don't see as much anymore animals have a memory. So when they come and all of a sudden see these really large obstacles, they're less likely to come back

and try it again. And that can be a generational thing that they can pass it to. It's your generations. One thing that you mentioned there, which I think is something else we should stress, is like you spoke about how the jaguars and the bears can share the same pond, but the wall and the roads we should mention that too, right? People didn't just get helicopter into the wall. They had to first build roads to get to the place where the border is to build the wall. Can we talk about how those have affected drainage and water sources along the border?

Absolutely. Yeah, water is life. So in here in Arizona, for example, we have two rivers that actually flow on north, the San Pedro River and the Santa Cruz River. These are rivers, for example, the San Pedro is born in Mexico, and the Santa Cruz comes in the United States and goes down to Mexico and then goes up again.

And a lot of the drainage, that has been one of the biggest issues that we have encountered because the wall acts like a dam almost. And in a lot of places, doesn't allow the water to flow as it used to. And that is going to bring an impact to all of the different species of animals, but also the plants that depend on these water to survive. So when the construction of the border wall came, you mentioned roads and the road right next to adjacent to the wall. Now it's like a four or five line road in some places.

And it's been also increased the elevation. So when you increase the elevation on these roads, and do not have the proper drainage on the areas that need to be, and then you're going to have water being stuck on one side or the other of the border and not able to make it to the areas where it used to flow normally. So we might not see the consequences in the first year or the other of the border and not able to make it to the areas where it used to flow normally. So we might not see the consequences in the first year or the second year, but we can start seeing consequences in a few years from now, several plants, all of a sudden

starting to die because they didn't have the water, that they're habit that used to provide for them. So that's why they grew there on the first place. So we might see a lot of changes on the landscape in regards of the way that the water moved on those places. Yeah. So another thing I want to address is like the, we talked about plants, right? And a number of cacti, specifically,

like cacti that are sacred to the whole autumn people have been either moved or destroyed in the construction of the wall around organ pipe and like just not on their reservation but very much on their unseated homelands, right? Yeah, yeah, the Saguaro Actu series considered as a relative for the Tahono-Autumn. So you can just imagine the sentiment of the autumn people by looking at the saguados being chopped or bulldozed on these areas, considered sacred for them. So

there was definitely a lot of that happening. There is an effort, but we haven't seen it yet. It's just on written right now that they're going to revigitate some of these areas that go impacted, but we're still waiting for that. Yeah, and that stuff always comes like last and slowest, if it happens at all. And I know like both the Kumi eye, the autumn, I'm sure, other tohono time, other tribes have had their ancestral burial grounds, as you mentioned, destroyed. And for a similar reason to the real idea, I think it was different. I think this was because it was done under executive order and it was an emergency that they waived a lot of those,

normally they would have tribal nations would have the right to sort of inspect and do a survey before digging, but I know in 2020 they weren't doing that, right? No, they didn't. So, and the real idea also has a lot there to protect archaeological resources. So they were able to do those things even when there was, if it was on federal land, and it was indigenous sacred site. Yeah. So, another thing talking of Fedor or LAN that we should probably mention is this concept of the Roosevelt reservation that people might not be familiar with.

Can you explain what that is to folks? The Roosevelt reservation, it is the area of the border about 60 feet away from where the border line or division is and that's what's known as the Roosevelt reservation. So that is an area that's right now mostly managed by CBP or border patrol. And people can't, it's like technically not, it can't be private land, right? Or the government can take it at any point, is that right? Yeah, I know that's what they were using

in the case of the around campo. That's what they were doing. One thing I think we've neglected to do, I guess, I spend half my life trying to do this, but I'll let you take a swing at it. Can you describe these desert landscapes for people who are... Because people think of the desert, right? And they think of Ossetia Wells, where people like to go drive their vehicles. And it looks like Saudi Arabia, but that's not most of the desert.

The desert is actually a very alive place, and a place full of life that has struggled and made a way to exist there. Can you explain, and it's a very special place, not just because it's unique, but it has a real, yeah, it has a uniqueness that you can't really feel anywhere else in the world, I guess. Yes, thank you, James. I definitely agree with you on that. As a person that grew up here and had this deep appreciation for the desert environment, I think it's it is such a beautiful area and not only beautiful in the sense that it's the Sonoran desert, for example, is considered the most biodiverse desert in the world.

So, yeah, so it's considered a desert because the amount of water that we have, but the amount of species, it matches no other desert in the world. Here we have the most species of plant, most species of animals, and only for people like, and people goes out there sometimes on a hike on the desert and might not seem much of the wildlife there, older than the birds and especially on areas where there is a little bit of water, but you got to remember also that the desert comes most alive at night. So that's when all of the species, you know, that are not wanting to hang out on the heat of the desert, they come out and this place becomes like a whole other place at night. So it is it is definitely worth protecting these and every single desert, you know, because sometimes as we might not see the biodiversity in our first visit, it's there and we

Like the amounts of plants and animals were enough to sustain entire populations of people as well in the past so I Think once you build that relationship with the desert and able to experience you and everybody that I have talked Start developing this really deep appreciation for it, for sure. Yeah, it sort of pulls you in once you, once you appreciate it, yeah, you become a desert person. We're talking about this,

so who can be the other day, how like you just turn into a desert, you know, you can see who the desert people are and who the people have been out there before are. So obviously the desert is a beautiful place and a very diverse place, but it's not a place that is necessary easy to cross, right? And when we, as you've explained so well, the wall is not a contiguous thing, it's full of gaps and holes, and a lot of the places where there are gaps, are places where it's hard to build and therefore it's hard to cross. Can you explain what this,

this creates a funnel, right? Like a funneling effect through the gap sometimes. Can you explain what that means for people who are crossing north? Yeah, that is a huge issue. These funnels or areas where there are no walls, because what's been happening and we observe is that as more people

start going to these really remote areas of the desert, we have two issues. First, people is putting themselves on bigger danger and they're more likely to get them so hurt and some of them die. So, as also, you start pushing up people to more remote areas out in the desert where used to be these nature-pristine environments,

now we have the impacts of people moving through these areas. Not only the impacts of the people, but you got the impacts of border patrol, patrol in the area with their trucks, and drag in tires to erase their footprints. And these are really fragile soils already, opening new roads through the desert with ATVs or flying helicopters on these mountains or drones

or putting lights in the middle of an areas where it used to be one of the most dark skies in the country. So all of those put together create huge issues for people and the environment as well. Yeah, yeah. The light thing you mentioned, like it's very, I don't know, people, again, who haven't been to the desert, went and understand how much more you can see when, like, there is no light for hundreds of miles. And there's a place I like to go, which recently got a Border Patrol, like, substation. And now it's just, like, glowing.

And you can't see the Milky Way and things. In addition to the human impact, which is, we said, is terrible, right? Like, I think 860 people, Border Patrol found in 2022, had died crossing North. That's a very low estimate for the amount of people who died. And that Border Patrol are kind of actively trying not

to count all of the deaths, according to agents I've spoken to, right? So, this is a difficult topic because it's a horrible thing, but like shouldn't happen. But I guess can we discuss how lethal the wall is for people crossing north if you're comfortable talking about that? Yeah. Well, definitely the design of it, like on most places, is a 30-foot wall with a metal plate on the top. And for some sources, I have heard that it was designed because when people reach a 30-foot height, they start kind of getting dizzy or nauseous. So they're more likely to fall down. So it's already like a dead apparatus,

you know, like designed to kill. Still people will venture and give it a try. Some young folks, like almost, it's kind of funny to see them climb as fast. They're able to do it. But we got to remember that not only like, young folks are trying to climb, you know, sometimes there is a older lady or sometimes an older man that wants to give it a try and the rate of injuries definitely has increased so much of people falling because they got dizzy, they got nauseous, they burn their hands, they they lose balance, and then fall from 30 feet high, you know, it can be lethal.

So we have a lot of broken legs, spine injuries, head trauma, people that has fall, people, one person, one time hang out from it, and end up choking herself. So there is definitely a lot of dead when people try to go over the wall, but we also see people now just cutting through the baller. So it's easier and then just put the thing back so they can... There is all kinds of people doing in all different kinds of ways depending on the area and we see a little bit of everything for sure. And of course, you know, if you

tried to reach for the gaps, then you had to do a longer hike and usually people is not even able to carry the amount of water that they need to do these kind of hikes. We got to remember that a lot of the people that we encounter now in the border, they come from other kinds of environments. They're not familiar with the desert, they come from tropical areas where they can find water everywhere, they are not used to the heat of the dry heat of the desert, they are not used to the cold of the nights of the desert. So all of these factors make this environment really challenging for people

to try to cross it. You tell in a lot of ways, yeah. Yeah, definitely. And it's a very hard environment. I spent a lot of time camping the desert. And I don't think there's a year that I've been hiking in the desert that I haven't rescued someone who was very well equipped and had just gone on a day hike, right?

And they've run out of water, they've overheated, they've drunk water and not electrolytes, and they've got hope and a dreamy or whatever it is. And that's people who went to RRI the day before, let alone people who've been walking since a daring gap or people who are much less and means to equip themselves. It's a very dangerous environment. People may be listening and thinking,

like I think with immigration issues and specifically with the wall and the border, it's such an apparatus, right? The whole, you know, DHS, and it's 175 billion dollar budget, it's such an apparatus that people can feel powerless in trying to just put a stop to this to make this change, to make this even, you know, a little bit more humane. It's just so we seem to like ratchet up the evil meter every year

at the border, regardless of Democrats or Republicans, like it doesn't matter. What would you suggest folks listening can do to make it more humane to advocate advocate for even less impactful border policies on the environment or on people. Yeah, I think we need to look at what we have done so far and look at the results. I think we can see that in some areas to build a border wall, a mile of border wall, we're spending over $30 million. And I think it's important to think about, what can we do with that money? There is a lot of resources that we have used

for these false sense of security that a border wall can give us. And it's just not working the way it's supposed to be working. And it's putting a lot of pressure on the environment. And if we really care about the environment, I think that should not be after-talk conversation, because I think when we listen to politicians and it's our next time to go out to vote,

we need to really start asking's our next time to go out to boat, we need to really start asking the questions about the environment. I know it's important that we hear in the border narrative of politicians talking about immigration, border security, trade with Mexico, but there is very little talk in the border around the environmental issues. You know, that shouldn't be an after-tought border people, people that lives in the border lands also should have a chance to live on a good environment, a clean environment. Yeah. And yeah, so I think a solution or for people, things that they can do is definitely I think a solution or for people, things that they can do is definitely

like ask those questions when it's time to vote and see how can we really address root causes, you know. The border wall is just a medieval solution that it's really trying to stop such a trying to stop such a complex issue by doing that, it's not going to work out. So it's originally a border patrol said that the border wall is just the only intention it has is to slow down people for at least five minutes. Well, is it really worth it then, you know, to slow them five more minutes to all these impacts and all these expenses that we're doing. And the maintenance that nobody has talked about yet is that we have sections of the wall already that they're falling apart because it was just thrown up really fast. You know, the erosion is already exposing the foundation and we are looking at millions of millions of dollars that will come just to try to keep it every year after every

months' season. Yeah, I know in, along the Rio Grande as well, the the wake from the Border Patrol boats is causing the river to undercut the foundation of the wall, which is fantastic on the part of the government. Good work. Eric, where can people follow you and your efforts? If they want to follow along online and maybe see some pictures of the border and hear more about what you're doing? Thank you, James. I appreciate that. We do have a website, the Sierra Club borderlands.

You can learn all about the waivers there. You can learn a lot of the work that we've been doing in the past. We are part of a larger coalition of environmental related border organizations. We work with people all the way from California through Texas, but mostly here in Arizona. And we have our social media, Sierra Club Borderlands.

You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all of the different. We have a YouTube channel as well, and we can see some of the videos of the documenting that we do. We're able to go down to the border, document with drones, so people can actually look at the irony of the whole project.

We do also outings that we take people out into the desert to get familiar with the issues themselves. We do cleanup at the local rivers and collaborate with other organizations. All kinds of work. So if people and the audience is based here in Arizona, they're welcome to join us to some of these audience or activities that we do with the community. We are going to do an announcement probably in the next month because since 2019, Sierra Club in collaboration with the Southern Border Community Coalition, Sue the Federal Government for the legal use of funds of the 284 and 2808 funds, which were funds that were originally allocated for the military and drug related programs that were used to border well construction. So we saw the government

and we're about to settle on this and we're hoping that we're going to get good results on environmental remediation and wildlife passages along this southern border. Oh great, that's good to hear. Yeah. And there are a lot of lawsuits, again, individual tribes sued the government as well for that. And so we'll have to do a lawsuit roundup one day and have you back. Well, thank you very much Eric. Thank you for joining us in sharing some of your experiences along the border. Absolutely. Thank you for the invitation. And I'll see you up to you soon. Yep.

In the podcast Alphabet Boys, we take you inside undercover investigations. I'm Trevor Aronson. And in our second season, we have an Alphabet Soup with the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI all mixed up in the same case. At the center of the story is Flavio. But who is Flavio? I see movies with arm dealers on TV. Okay, I'm going there for C.A. but I'm gonna die. When I land, there's Flavio in a suit, it's like follow me and he slams down his badge

in my passport and I'm like, uh, something's going on here. So you do personal security all over the world and you have somebody call you and say, can you get grenades and guns for this guy in Colombia? Not, not specify grenades, a lot of ammunition. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm deal. Who are the cops?

Who are the criminals? And is anyone really who they claim to be? Listen to alphabet boys on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Does the US government really have alien technology? And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI? What happens when computers learn to think?

Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers, and government cover-ups from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events. We spent a decade applying critical thinking to some of the most bizarre phenomenon civilization and beyond. Each week, we dive deep into unsolved mysteries, conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies. You've heard about these things, but what's the full story?

Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you find your favorite shows. What's up fam? I'm Brian Ford, Artisan Vaker and host of the new podcast Flaky Biscuit. On this podcast, I'm going to get to know my guests by cooking up their favorite nostalgic meal. It could be anything from Twinkies to moms Thanksgiving dressing. Sometimes I might get it wrong, sometimes I'll get it right. I'm so happy it's good because man, if it wasn't, I'd be like, you know, everybody not my mom. Either way, we will have a blast.

You'll have access to every recipe so you can cook and bake alongside me. As I talk to artists, musicians, and chefs about how this meal guided them to success. And these nostalgic meals, fam, they inspire one of a kind conversations. When I bake this recipe, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Oh. Does this podcast come with a therapist? He can. Does this podcast come with a therapist? He can. Listen to Flaky Biscuit every Tuesday on the I Heart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever

you get your podcasts. Oh boy, it could happen here. A podcast about what we like to call the crumbles, which is the process of the aspects of modern life that were nice and convenient and functional, breaking down as the climate and our political systems continue to fray around the edges and gradually collapse. Today, a lot of you are living through a pretty undeniable piece of that. If you're anywhere kind of in the Eastern seaboard, if you're in New York City, if you're in Philly, if you're in DC, if you're in one of the other places at Baltimore, you're

dealing with air quality, the likes of which you've probably never seen unless you fled there from the West Coast. Basically, everyone who lives in the Northeast of the United States right now, as well as a huge number of Canadians, are absolutely cloaked in wildfire smoke, drowning in the ghosts of 1,000 forests, and that's a bummer. It's a bummer, and it's a real problem.

And so I wanted to kind of sit down with Margaret Killjoy, our resident prepper extraordinaire. Hi, Margaret. Hello. How are you? Yeah. Do it, do it. Do it. Great. Because we're not drowning in wildfire smoke. But three years ago in Portland in 2020, the air quality was even worse than it is in New York City right now. So we've got, I've got some experience dealing with this and Margaret, you spend a lot of time thinking about practical prepping. And that's something that I think a lot of folks probably are wishing that they had had spent more time doing right now. This is the kind of thing that happens. It's not on, you know, anybody is like a moral thing, but it happens anytime. There's a disaster

that affects everybody at once. All the stuff that is useful for countering that disaster sells out or is looted very, very quickly. And then people suddenly don't have the kind of options for tools that they need. You know, this is not not great. So I wanted to kind of sit down first off and kind of talk about one of the better airsats tools that you can put together if you are trying to deal with the problem of making your air cleaner. And basically, we have to kind of split this problem into two, right?

There is the problem of what do I do if I'm going outside and we'll talk about that later, but there's stuff that you purchase, that is the only things that's going, or stuff that you already had on hand, all that's going to help in that instance. But there are some things you can do to keep your inside space clean of particulate and relatively safe that don't require at least as many things to purchase and that are, you know, can be made with stuff that you probably are likely to have on hand. So I wanna talk first about what you can do

to like filter your indoor air. In Portland, when we had our horrible fucking wildfire, apocalypse, yellow, smog, blanket in the world and making everything look like fucking blade runner. Everyone at least had gas masks and full-face respirators, which folks in the Northeast right now haven't gone through that experience

and so don't have that kind of stuff on hand. But what we didn't have in Portland was the stuff that can keep your indoors cleaner. For one thing, people don't have like hepophilters or central air in Oregon as often as they have it in some other parts of this country. And so a lot of people wound up creating a building for themselves, what are called Corsi Rosenthal boxes.

Now a Corsi Rosenthal box is a kind of like air filtration system for rooms that's made up of a box fan and five air filters, like the kind of filters that you're gonna use for your HVAC system in your house, right? Pretty much most houses are gonna have some kind of like air filter already. And they're also widely available, like if you go to any home depot or lows,

they're gonna have a shitload of air filters. You can use multiple different types, the bigger the air filter, the more air it'll handle. Corsi Rosenthal boxes were invented, kind of right at the start of the pandemic. One of the guys who made it, Richard Corsi, was an environmental engineer who kind of realized as soon as the pandas started that a lot of poor people were going to be absolutely fucked when it came to filtering air in their homes because good, you can get like a nice hepa filter like like standalone hepa filter, but they're usually several hundred dollars. So he wanted to try and provide people with something they could make that was a lot cheaper.

He had worked previously with the CEO of a filter company that I think is based in Texas. So he called that guy up and they collaborated on a design that basically used you build like a box out of air filters and you stick a back box fan on top of it. If you Google Corsi, C-O-R-S-I-Dash Rosenthal, R-O-S-E-N-T-H-A-L, box, you'll find the Wikipedia page, which has a guide to making these. It's very simple. If you're not crafty at all or have no real tools, you can still make it work. I built one couple of years ago when should happen in Portland as did several people I knew, and they're not hard to do. The most common size of box that you can build will allow. It'll basically change the air out in a room,

five full times per hour and a 500 square foot room, which is reasonably good. It'll make a meaningful difference in your indoor air quality if you're like blanketed in Hellsmog right now. Yeah, that's about, that's about the same as like $150. If you were to like go out and buy, a hundred square foot filter, it'd be about a hundred

fifty bucks. And that is about what this will cost you right now. I think because shit's got more expensive. At least that's what a recent outside magazine article gave the cost of constructing this. Oh, interesting. That said, you might be able to get it for cheaper. There's a good chance. That's if you're buying everything. Most people in most places have a box fan. Yeah. And most people have a couple of filters, which should cut down on the cost. It'll depend on kind of where you are

and what things are running. But hepophilters are also standalone ones likely to sell out fast as opposed to kind of the raw components to making a coursey rose and ball filter. So you may find it easier to get access to. I like the coursey-rosanthal filter for a couple of other reasons. Obviously, it's accessible and it's comparatively affordable. But it also is something that you can make yourself that will have a meaningful impact

on how you weather this event. That's important psychologically and it is asked, or feeling as if you have some sort of agency by actually doing the useful thing. And it can also be important from a community point of view. You can theoretically raise money and put together people to make coursey-rosanthal boxes and hand them out to people who maybe can't afford them,

or have mobility issues, or less able to get the equipment. That's the kind of thing that builds community connection and also offers an immediate alleviation of suffering and health consequences for people, which is the kind of thing that I like to see people doing in a disaster like this. I also kind of like this filter because it represents

a rare example of people you might call elites taking immediate action to ensure cash poor individuals had a life saving tool available to themselves. It's one of those kind of rare examples from the start of the pandemic of like that radical solidarity we saw bits and pieces of. And I think Jim Rosenthal and Richard Corsi are pretty cool in my book for figuring out this thing. So, you know, there's a lot that's nice about these filters.

Oh, so I just looked at the cost of making one. I just like kind of added it together. It looks like you could probably make one for about 65 bucks. Oh great, great, great, great. The outside guy was probably buying all the Gucci shit. Right. If you just buy cheap, you need at least a Merve 13 filter. That's the level of filter where it starts cutting out smoke. And if you get the 20 inch filters, which I think is what usually people are getting a 20 inch box fan. And so it's, and you only need to four filters, I believe, because the bottom isn't sucking

air in. The bottom ends up flat when I was looking at it earlier today, but you've built one and I haven't. So yeah, honestly, it was three years ago. Yeah, everybody, I misspoke saying five, I think you can do it just fine with four. I'm not sure if either we did it weird when we did it last or if I was just remembering wrong, but that means, yeah, a lot more available. Like, I had three filters on hand in my house this morning just because that's how many, you know, I usually keep as a backup.

So a lot of you are probably in a similar situation. And yeah, that's a more accessible thing compared to the equipment we're about to start talking about stuff like respirators and stuff like sandal and hepa filters, which are likely to sell out pretty quickly as people go to all of the stores to buy up all the things. Although I will say it's almost depressing right now. I was checking availability for some of my East Coast friends. I'm actually an East Coast friend normally, but I went to the land of smoke,

the usual smoke Pacific Northwest and missed it. But most things are still available right now, at least as of recording. I don't know whether it's people just haven't put it together that it's necessary or people felt like they couldn't afford it. A lot of stuff is still in stock as of this. That's really good to hear because that's what we're about to get into. So I did want to kind of lead into this moving from this kind of what I think is inspiring about the course. Rose and Thal filter, which is that it's something that is accessible, something that like people can work on and provide for each other together and sort of representative of the kind of radical solidarity you see in disasters.

I think that's kind of particularly meaningful to me because of why this air quality event is so frightening to folks. People who are in New York or Philly or Richmond or DC or a lot of other places in the Northeast Have not dealt with this kind of air quality before This is because most people who are young in those areas because most young Americans have had the privilege of Experiencing air pollution primarily as either an annoyance or as an abstract concept. A big part of why is that the Clean Air Act instituted in 1963 did a huge amount to stop the kind of poisoning of the sky that led to fairly regular smog events in the 50s and early to mid 1960s, even 1970s in a lot of parts of this country.

It took a while there was more involved than just the Clean Air Act. But shit like this used to be a lot more common. And Americans suffered from a variety of illnesses, including adult onset infosima or young adult onset infosima at a much higher rate because of stuff like this. If you are young and by young, I mean like my age, Margaret's age, you know, not all that young because air quality in the United States has been significantly better than it was for like my parents when they were kids for quite a while. You have benefited from a pretty remarkably successful campaign to render Americans at least less vulnerable to them to this kind of pollution.

Now, this came alongside years of others reforms in things like emission standards, which were successful enough that in West LA right now, a lot of days of the year, you can see the mountains. That was not a thing for people who lived in Los Angeles and say the 1970s. I had an annual checkup right after I moved there with my doctor in Southern California. And I asked him what life had been like there during the smog years. And the thing that he mentioned to me that stuck with me is that he had a shitload of like patients in their 20s who had the early symptoms of infosima, which is just not a thing that really occurred in occurs in Southern California anymore. Although, you know, because of climate change, there are similar things that are starting

to hit. You know, there's there's a number of like fungal-based infections that people are getting, particularly in the valley that's really nasty and wildfire smoke could bring back a lot of this stuff. And so yeah, we're kind of looking at a lot of the gains in public health caused by reducing, you know, the amount of smog in the air going away as a result of, you know, externalities that can't be controlled locally. Now, the downside of the really lovely state of affairs that was kind of ushered in by the Clean Air Act is that most Americans have spent their lives in kind of a bubble of artificially pure air, while the negative externalities that made our tech heavy lives possible were exported to the global south.

And those people experienced with increasing regularity, the kind of catastrophic pollution that in an earlier age here caused the Kaiohoga River in Cleveland to light on fire every spring or so. Globally, in 2018, some 8.7 million deaths were caused by air pollution, specifically pollution created via the burning of fossil fuels. David Wallace Wells, who writes about climate catastrophe better than most people, put the cost this way in a testimony before the US Senate Committee on the budget in 2021. Those punishments are heroingly widespread. The Lancet puts the global annual death toll of air pollution at 9 million. This is dying at the scale of the Holocaust every single

year. In India, where 349,000 stillbirths and miscarriages have been attributed annually to the effects of air pollution, the average resident of Delhi has had his or her life expectancy shortened by more than nine years from the repetitive inhalation of smog. Globally, the average figure is two years. So this is bad. So this is real bad. And it's one of those things that we're, it's so shocking and traumatic to people right now because we haven't experienced this in most of the US outside of like the West, you know, recently as the wildfires have gotten worse for quite a while. But the problems that cause

this were, were, you know, suffered by people outside of the United States consistently for years. Like one of the things that's, you know, you've kind of seen on like Twitter and shit is like people in the West Coast and the East Coast fighting about who's had it worse in terms of wildfire smog like. And like, well, the answer if you want to talk about who's been dealing with this the worst and the longest is like people in fucking Delhi, people in shins born, I mean, this is not in the US too, by the poor, but it's been born by the poor outside of the United States because we successfully externalized a lot of the consequences of our lifestyles. And ideally, the hopeful thing is that perhaps

experiencing this in New York City, which is if you're not aware, we're the only writers that people apparently listen to. We'll call us some kind of enhanced solidarity for the folks in what you might call or what often is described as the global south who have been dealing with this for years, and we'll continue to deal with this in a much more severe form with much fewer resources available to them. If you are currently living in one of the great cities besieged by wildfire smoke, your lifespan has already been shortened. Now, I'm not trying to be

like panic-inducing. We're talking about like by the same, it would, like if you had smoked half a pack of cigarettes since this all started. It's kind of similar to that. But there is no safe amount of time to inhale particulate in the quantities. When you're talking about AQI over 400, there's no safe amount of time to just be raw-dogging the air out in the street. Any amount is going to damage your lungs, it's going to stiffen your arteries, it's going to increase your chances of a number of cancers. Heart attack risk increases by a meaningful amount when you are out dealing with stuff like this. Your immune system is significantly weaker.

And you don't get to look cool like smoking. You don't get to look cool like smoking, right? Like it's all of the downsides of being a daily smoker with none of the significant benefits of looking rad as hell, of looking like fucking Martin Sheen and apocalypse now. Oh man, I love a good smoker, but nobody looks good in this shit. Unless you have one of those sick ass apocalypse dusters and a face mask, which we're about to talk about, then you can look cool,

although your clothing will probably always smell of wildfire. There's a lot, also, it's kind of worth noting that when we're talking about the dangers here, it's not, it may smell like a little like campfire smoke, but you're also inhaling incinerated asbestos and particle board and presumably hordes of ammunition that had been buried by Canadian preppers.

So like there's a lot of reasons why you don't want to breathe this shit in. So when you go outside, you are going to want to wear a mask. In 95s work reasonably well for adults. If you have any on hand or if you're fortunate enough to live in a city with the kind of emergency preparedness budget that allows them to provide stuff like that, New York City is providing in 95s and in some quantity right now. If

you're out on your own, an N95 may be an easy thing to acquire quickly for relatively cheap. That said, they're not perfect for one thing. They don't tend to work very well on kids for this just because like the fit is often wrong. But you may find that something like a KF94 allows you to get a better fit on a child and those do work reasonably well, certainly better than like nothing at all in this kind of a situation. My personal recommendation, if they are in stock and if you can afford them, is either a half or a full-face respirator.

We'll talk about the differences between those in a second, but these are the kind of masks that, like, if you're a contractor and you're putting together a building, you're dealing with a shitload of insulation, you're cutting certain kinds of metal, or you're doing a whole bunch of different things that can kick up nasty particulate. You probably have a number of these, right? Like people I know graffiti and graffiti. Yeah, if you're doing a lot of graffiti, um, you know, hang out near a building, you know, that kids that kids spray paint a lot and then, you know, stick them up with a handgun for their, their respirators. That's a responsible way to deal with this broccoli smoking. That's the, that's what I'm trying to teach everyone. Smoke through the respirator.

That makes it extra cool and healthy. So yeah, we're talking about here, like if you're looking for a thing to type into Google or whatever, 3M Half Mask Respirator. I found a 3M Half Mask Respirator kit with a couple of, what are called Bayonet Filters for 46, 41 on Granger.com right now. You can get them for similar prices on Amazon.com. If you walk into a Lowe's or a Home Depot and they have not, there hasn't been a run on them, you can probably find these.

You will wanna make sure you get filters with them. Sometimes you get just the respirator and you have to buy the filters separately. Usually, if you get one, it'll come with them. But make sure the filters are going to be these. Most of them look kind of like triangles with rounded edges that are sort of this like pinkish purple color for the most part. There's some that are gray and like circular. It doesn't really matter which kind of filters yours get.

I would say just get whatever they have the most of. Well, yeah. In general, the filters filter out a ton of different stuff. And the thing you're looking for is the particulate filtration, which is actually the easiest and that's why almost any filter will do this. The rawest doesn't do anything else filter that you would be looking for is a P100. And sometimes those are, they're more likely,

I believe 3M marks them as the pink. Yeah. So if it's pink, it's particulate with 3M. There's other brands, there's Honeywell, and then there's, I can't remember off the top of my head. But anyway, P100 is like, you just look for particulate filter, but honestly, yeah, pretty much.

Anything is going to do it. Basically, any kind of respirator, you're going to get it like a home depot with filters is going to be sufficient for this. There are kind of like the one and that there's two main categories of respirators. The one we're interested in are called air purifying respirators. That means you breathe in the air from outside and it filters it, right? The other kind of atmosphere, supplying respirators, which normal people do not need in this situation.

That's like, you know, it has like a tank of stuff. It's like a tank of stuff. Don't get that. It's going to be a lot more than is necessary for at least the next like six to eight months. Respirators are then further divided into half face masks, which think like Batman from that the worst of the Nolan Batman or not Batman. Think of Bane from the worst of the Nolan Batman movies. It's a little bit like that, right, where it's kind of just over your mouth and jaw.

And then there's full face masks and there are also reusable Alastomeric respirators. I tend to prefer half orful face masks for one thing. There's no reason to like, you're not working in some sort of like capacity where you want to be tossing it every time. You might as well just get one, you can plug new filters into. A half-face mask is going to be a lot more convenient. It's a lot less sort of weight and stuff,

but it doesn't protect your eyes or anything, which if you're dealing with really heavy particularly that you may find your eyes getting irritated out there. The benefit of a full face mask is that it does protect your eyes, and if you happen to ever be in a situation where there's hella mace or tear gas being used, it provides excellent protection from that kind of thing. The downside is that these are three to four times as expensive as the half-face respirator. So they're not my general recommendation to people, but again, either of them is going to be perfectly adequate for wildfire smoke.

And then the full-face ones have the additional problem of most of them are not designed for wearing glasses. Yes. And you need a full seal on the side of it, so don't just throw it over your glasses, but they make adapters, or you can work contacts if you're not actually out expecting chemical weapons. And I would do that sometimes when we were dealing, specifically, particularly with like

Mace Heavy Fights as contacts in a full face, it always worked for me. People will say that if you have a beard, it can fuck with the seal. I think I'm sure that's true with like really heavy beards. I keep mine reasonably trim, and I never noticed a problem, it can fuck with the seal. I think I'm sure that's true with really heavy beards. I keep mine reasonably trim, and I never noticed a problem, even in very thick tear gas with either my full face or with my gas mask. Like, is this is why beards fell out of favor in the United States? Oh, because of World War I and the US masks. Yeah.

Military people had to start shaving because otherwise you'll die. Because that's the difference, right? You're like, oh, a little bit of smoke is getting in, that sucks. A little bit of murder gas gets in. Yeah. Terry people had to start shaving because otherwise you'll die because that's the difference, right? You're like, oh, a little bit of smoke is getting in. That sucks. A little bit of murder gas gets in. Yeah. That's an excuse.

Yeah. That's an excuse. Yeah. A lot of folks may be, and I've seen questions about like getting a gas mask, right? And obviously, if that's what's available to you, if you've already happened to have one because you're a weirdo prepper or if that's just what you can find. A gas mask will indeed protect you from particulate. You may, if you are someone who has the benefit of money, decide, I'm going to just go ahead and get a good gas mask.

If so, you know, there's a number of places you can look to for that. The one I have is called a Mira MIRA. They're three, four hundred dollars, something like that. I can confirm that they work great when you're drenched in tear gas So heavy that you can't see through it People bitch at them online and like weirdo prepper community sometimes because they have some like silly attachments and stuff that are kind of too expensive, but like I have used every kind of face mask filtering product in heavy gas and mace

This mask filtering product in heavy gas and mace mirrors are comfortable. They do work well. That said, much more expensive and much heavier than you need for something like filtering particulate. This would not be my first go to for anybody. Any kind of gas mask you get is going to be very bulky. Even the ones that are made specifically for stuff like special forces use where they're like really stream lines so that you can like shoulder a rifle with them.

Those are still much bulkier than, you know, a normal half-face respirator is going to be. They also, you know, one of the benefits, one thing I will say I did a few times when Portland was bad as I would put on two filters in my gas mask, which allows you to kind of breathe at close to the normal rate that you can and I would go jogging Otherwise, you really can't safely. I'm not saying you should do this. Please don't like avoid outdoor exercise as a general rule

Anyway, military surplus gas masks if that's what you have again, and you have filters for them That can help if you do attempt to do this You will immediately gain an understanding of why chemical warfare sucks so much because most especially milsir, gas masks suck ass to wear. Super uncomfortable, super shitty visibility. Not ever my primary recommendation, but again, if that's what you've got and all you can get, it will indeed filter out particulate. And an expired filter, a military style filter. It's usually the NATO standard. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They an expired one, it's like, I'm not recommending people use expired ones, but they're, if you're not defending yourself against like murder gas, an expired one should do you. Yeah, we are again, when we come to stuff like this, as long as you have some sort of filter and a military gas mask, it's probably going to be certainly better than nothing. Yeah. Because we are just kind of dealing with smoke and particulate here. We're not dealing with like mustard gas or seren or whatever.

Yet, I'm bringing up gas masks just because it's what a lot of people might already have on hand or something, as opposed to recommending that as what you get. You should just get a respirator that's going to be a lot more effective for basically 100% of people. Now you will probably notice, if you've been paying attention to what we've been talking about today, that all of the effective measures for mitigating the danger of smoke cost money, nearly all of them at least, and also rely on having stuff like access to transit that can get you to a store on having an address that packages can be delivered to.

Because once again, as we talked about with places like India that have been dealing with smog like this for many, many years, the costs of climate collapse are always heaviest on those who can least bear them. Assuming you are housed, there are some other decent tips that can allow you to protect your house. One of them is that you probably want to create a clean room for your animals. Your cats and your dogs, number one, are less capable of understanding what's happening, and they will notice something is wrong.

They will not go outside and feel like it's a normal day just because they're They're they're stupid dog or whatever like they they will recognize that something is gravely wrong You want to keep them inside as much as possible because it's even they're smaller than you right? It's even worse for them the same thing with like you want to keep your kids inside because The kind of shit that like maybe a 200 pound adult can sort of shrug off in terms of particulate will hit a 65 pound child or a 45 pound dog, a lot worse. So a good thing to do is to create a clean room, potentially with the kind of filters, the Corsi-Rose-Inthol filters that we talked about.

If you have the ability doing something like you would do kind of for a mud room, a little kind of airlock situation when you take your pets in and out from from doing their business. So you can minimize the amount of shit that gets in. There's a few ways to do this, you know, when there's not currently health smog everywhere, making sure that the seals and stuff on your windows and doors are of quality and up to date and recently replaced is key. Obviously, if you're under smog right now, that's less of a realistic thing that you can do. But one thing you can do, people did in Portland during this, if you get like towels and soak them and put them

around the edges, if you know you've got, oh, I know this windows. Yeah. I know stuff's getting in. If you kind of can tape that up around and keep it wet around the window, that will take some of the basically particulate. It'll get kind of soaked into the towel. And it should minimize kind of what you're dealing with in the house. I haven't seen actually, this is one of the things I haven't seen like studies on how well this works. but it's what most of the people I knew who had older houses did and do during wildfires, and it seems to have an impact. So I would recommend trying that.

And if you can get to the store, you get foam strips and stuff like that. If you don't have much money, you can do the whole... Everything's a free store for the brave. But it's not very expensive anyway, they're foam tape. And that would be, again, much better than trying to do the brave. Yeah. But it's not very expensive anyway. They're like a foam tape. Yeah. And that would be, again, much better than trying to do the wet towel thing. That said, one thing you should be doing every day is wiping off large surfaces in your house with a damp cloth to clean away the particulate that's settled during the day. That's going to reduce the strain on whatever kind of filters you've got going indoors. You're going to want to very quickly change your air filter.

Unless you, like, if you change your filter a week or two before this hit, it'll be fine for a little while. But if, like most people, you kind of let that go a little long, probably one of the first things you should do is slot in a fresh air filter if you've got one. If you are shopping for an air filter and you want something that is going to work better in your HVAC system on particulate, you want something with a high minimum efficiency reporting value or MIRV, which Margaret mentioned a little earlier value. Those are going to catch more particles than normal filters.

You're going to want to switch your HVAC into fan-only mode immediately. This will ensure that it runs your indoor air through the filter rather than pulling air in from the outside. Yeah, that is a key thing to do if you've got kind of a central system. You're also gonna want to turn off

anything that pulls an air from the outside. For example, the portable air conditioner units with like hoses that go at your window, which is the things that like everyone in the East Coast tends to have as opposed to essential systems. So if you've got one of those, some window ACs will have what's called an outdoor air damper that you can close. If they don't have that, you're going to want to keep it off and sealed. You're going to want to, in any case, use tape or whatever you have to ensure that the seal around the unit is more robust. I know people generally can be a little bit lackstasical about the actual window seal with a unit like that.

It's generally not perfect. You're going to want to be extra careful because even a small gap that allows shit in is going to allow quite a lot of particular in like a surprising amount. Again, some of these methods are just like stuff that you should be doing to prep your house, but a lot of them do require resources, which is frustrating for a lot of reasons. I'm hoping Margaret that like what you found online is accurate to people's experience and that stores have not sold out of the things that are useful in this situation. That is one of those things kind of when we talk more

broadly about preparation for stuff like this that people should be thinking about. Like, don't just think about what stuff has gone wrong in the past. That's a great way to have plenty of toilet paper when there's a shortage of water or whatever. Likewise, it's one of those things where, you know, if you were in, when I made a couple of posts about what was happening in New York earlier and somebody responded and I was baking the joke that like, hey, if you get a full-face respirator, it'll be useful, you know, if you've got to fight the cops too. And their comm was like, well, we don't really get tear gasped here. And

first off, I mean, that may be true, but like you guys do get maced, and they're great against mace. I can say that from a intense personal experience. But the other thing is that like, well, that's part of, when we talk about kind of proactive practical prepping, a big part of it is thinking about stuff that like maybe unlikely, but is not impossible. And that if you don't have shit on hand, you're not going to be able to deal with, right? And one of those things is having a fucking respirator. Basically, everybody who is capable of affording them should have a half-for-a-full-face respirator. You should get that, you should get a couple of spare filters, and you should just have it, even if you're in a place where wildfire smoke has never been a problem for you,

because it will be at some point. That's just basically guaranteed. Yeah. And I want to say for dogs, I don't know about cats, but they make masks for dogs, they make respirators for dogs. I don't know about cats, but they make masks for dogs. They make respirators for dogs. The brand that I've gotten that I can't specifically, I haven't compared to other brands is called canine mask. And then I know people who have made their own dog respirators basically out of N95s and tape and stuff. And then if you're dog, if you're really on top of it, you're going to do the

work to acclimate your dog to this, right? Yeah. Reward your dog greatly and then slowly build up their tolerance. And if you don't have time for that, you can put a cone on your dog to keep your dog to keep the mask on. And obviously you don't want to like, I mean, mostly just want to keep your dog inside, right? But if your dog doesn't pad training, yeah, exactly. There's actually an argument for pad training my dog that I've never bothered to do. And that may be, by the way, when we're talking about like what stuff should you keep on hand?

Well, if you're not a normal pad training person, that could be a useful prepping thing to have, to have pads on hand, and to occasionally use them so the animal understands that that's an option because there are a variety of things that might make it not feasible to take them outdoors, you know, if you don't have a yard especially. So yeah. But also say, even though it's better to look at what's next instead of what's current,

right? Like look at the next problem instead of the current problem. It's also okay and what most people do realistically is prep for the thing that went bad last time. Yeah. I have an emergency blanket on me at almost all times in my emergency kit because when I was like 13, it saved my life or whatever, right?

I've never needed one ever again, but I didn't forget that I needed one and someone else had one. I will just have one, right? And so if this is, you're suddenly I need an air pier fire, it maybe is too late, it may not be too late. It don't beat yourself up if this is when you decide that you're going to start having one, you know? Yeah, like it's, for one thing, there's this, if you like study military history,

you run into this too. The problem that military planners are always fighting the last war, right, when they're preparing for shit, which is why a lot of stupid and useless crap is on hand every time we enter a new conflict. But everything actually really does work that way, because that's just the way people be. Yeah. And so, I'm sure basically everyone in New York had extra toilet paper on hand.

But they weren't ready for, you know, which is, you know, that's not, uh, New Yorkers, you're so stupid. No, that's everybody. That's how, that's how we all are. The only reason Portland was more prepared for this when it hit us is that we'd been getting like a significant portion of the city had been going out and getting tear gas every night. Yeah. Um, but it. But it does kind of mean that like part of prepping is like sitting around and like bullshitting with your friends. If you want to like be all cool and military larpy about it, you can put on gear and you can like sit around a war table with a map and game plan out stuff. You can make it fun.

Like there's no reason not to treat it like a session of D&D walk through different kind of problems that you guys think are more likely and try to lay out kind of consequence trees as to like what might happen and what might be necessary. And then, you know, think about what kind of equipment would be useful in those situations and put it in a kind of tier it in a list of like what is more affordable, what is more likely and you know kind of triage it with that. And what's small too? Yeah, what's small, what's easy to have on hand. I'm gonna go get eye drops now.

I don't keep eye drops around normally, but as I'm like looking at this stuff and I'm talking to people who deal with smoke, they're like, well, the half-mask respirator is great, but if you don't have full mask respirator, bring eye drops. Yeah. And I'm like, oh, that's not something I ever considered. That's cheap and takes up no room in my truck. Yeah, you can have that in your go bag, you can have that in your car. I always keep a set of bone knives and nitrile gloves and a tarp in my car, because I like to process roadkill.

But there's other disasters that's potentially useful. You know? Much like your pig farm. Much like my pig farm. Yeah. So, and it's just kind of like, like this, this, this shit's gonna keep happening. Something else will probably happen this year.

That's like a chunk of the country dealing with some sort of terrible disaster that affects everybody at once that people in that area at least haven't dealt with before. Because that's the world that we're living in now. And so you're never going to be perfect at thinking through stuff, but like the more time you spend kind of trying to make your brain elastic when it comes to disaster, the more likely you are to have at least some of the things that you need to deal with problems when they occur. Especially since a lot of tools are like multi-use tools, you know, respirators are great with wildfire smoke. They're also potentially useful, if like, for example, a pandemic were to hit.

Right. When it was awful that all this happened during a respiratory pandemic. That would be fucked. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that if you do prepping right, it can actually reduce anxiety instead of increase it. A lot of people avoid prepping because they're afraid to engage with these problems because

if they think if they look at the, it's the prey animal thing, I don't know if this is real or not, but you think if you don't look at the predator, it won't notice you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that people do that because they don't wanna think about these things. And that is understandable. We live in a very high anxiety time, right?

Yeah. But I think that looking at these problems is overall reduced my anxiety around them. Because like, for example, when I lived in more in the woods than I currently do, and I lived in a cabin in the woods and I was like what will I do if there's a forest fire and I thought it through and most of the answer was keep my car you know gasped and ready to go and have my go-bag and and then I was like

that's it that's the only preparation I'm going to do for this fire that that may or may not happen and so then I stopped worrying about it because I've done everything that I'm going to do. There's like a next level thing, like actually these particular fires, I was looking it up. I think 100,000 people have been splaced from their homes in Canada as a result of this. Jeez. It is, we are currently at 1,400% of the fires that are normal for this time of the year. Yeah, and we're not even in summer yet. Yeah. They've 8.7 million acres of burn so far this year, 6.2 million per year is normal, like total, and we're not at summer yet.

And so, shit's going to get worse, but it's not, but we can handle it. And we can like look at these things and we can look at the predator and Well, we can't it's invisible because of the yeah little invisibility field But we can we can I mean there are some predators that we can look at which is where I should say that like there's a pretty good movie about Pipelines that came out recently. Oh, yeah but uh, yeah, no, I mean you you have, looking it in the face is necessary. And also, finding, this is part of why I brought up, the first thing I brought up was those coursey-rosanthal filters, because like, having a thing to do when like, you wake up in

the morning and it's orange, yeah, like, it's a nice way to lay the doom feeling, like, give yourself a task, it increases agency. And once you build that thing, either you'll use it all up right away because those filters don't last forever, or you'll have something on hand the next time this occurs. Yeah. So yeah, I don't know. That's what I got, Margaret.

You got anything else to get into? Uh, I wanna say that if you're in a fire area, you should have your plan of escape, you should have your go bag. If a fire is like particularly likely, you're going to keep that go bag in your vehicle and keep it pointed outwards. You want to clear the area around your house. If that's something that you choose to do, obviously if you're like, no, the whole point

is I live in a cabin with trees over or whatever, right? And there's more that you can do to look at making sure that like a lot of the fires are about sparks getting sucked in through vents and there's ways to close it up. And I also want to say this is a really good time to take care of each other. In particular, look out for asthmatic friends or if you're the asthmatic friend, get other people to help take care of you. go get groceries for your asthmatic friends during a smoke emergency because you're going to be able to handle it a lot better than some other people might. Yeah, if you're heading down

to the store to go get filters and a box fan or something, check in with your neighbors and see how they're doing and what they're capable of handling for themselves and stuff. Hopefully this won't be bad for everyone for too long, you know, as we always say, but like, look guys, this isn't going to be the last time in New York is the color of Mexico in a breaking bad, right? Like, it's this is going to happen again, the fires aren't going to stop until there's no more forest left. Then we all have more, more, more, all have more. More or less clean air.

Yeah, totally. Yeah. Well, then the final thing I want to say is that like a lot of the stuff, right, like walking around in a half mask respirator is a little bit less weird to people than walking around in a full face respirator is a little bit less weird than walking around in a gas mask. And, and we actually need to build these social norms. I think the reason that people have stopped masking in a lot of parts of the country

is literally just because of social norms have stopped having people mask and people don't wanna be the weirdo with a mask. And I will say as someone who has been the weirdo for the past 30 years of my life, it's not that bad to be the weirdo. And we can build new social norms. And so if you're worried about wearing a half-mask or a spray

or in a smoke emergency because you'll look weird, it's better than getting sick. Yeah, it's one of those things. All of us crazy people had a nice moment at the start of the pandemic when we like looked over at our mountains of beans and storeable foods and rifles and whips. It was all worthwhile. And so we need to break the social norm about preparing in general, right? And I actually, I mean, if you're listening to the show, then you're probably a little bit aware of this. But we just, you know, like talk to your friends who wouldn't normally talk about preparing and talk about how we can, how we can do this. We need to make preparedness like a part of our culture because shit is getting more intense. Yeah.

So, you know, handle, handle your shit. Sorry, this is happening to you. Easties. Eucosties. I did hear a good joke recently where someone was like The visibility is so bad that we New Yorkers can't even go. I'm walking here anymore Yeah, it's good. It's good Anyway, enjoy that joke everybody and avoid dying Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of

the universe. It could happen here as a production of CoolZone Media. For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website CoolZoneMedia.com or check us out on the I Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here, updated monthly at CoolZoneMedia.com slash sources. thanks for listening alphabet boys is a podcast that takes you inside undercover investigations in the second season we've got an alphabet soup with the d a the c i a

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