It Could Happen Here - How A Butterfly Sanctuary Became The Center of a Border War, Part 1

Episode Date: May 25, 2022

Robert and James head down to the Texas border to meet with the director of a butterfly sanctuary in the crosshairs of a far right culture war.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German,

where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking musica, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians,

actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards.

That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Unfortunately, some of these recordings haven't got the best sound quality. We were walking around the Butterfly Centre. We tried our best to block the wind, but some of it's pretty blown out. We still wanted you to hear them, so we've included them,

but apologies that the sound quality isn't what it could be. There was a time when you could have been forgiven for believing that American fascism had been thoroughly beaten back, marginalized, and damaged beyond the capacity for reconstitution. Only the very foolish and dishonest believe that today. Every time the far right has taken a serious beating in this country, they've had a place to retreat to, a sanctuary to reorganize, recoup, and surge out again towards the halls of power. That sanctuary is the U.S.-Mexico border. There's a song I quite admire by the drive-by truckers named after a young Mexican man, Ramon Casiano. In 1931, after the kind of stupid

altercation young men have been having since time immemorial, Ramon was murdered by another kid named Harlan Carter. Harlan was convicted of murder and then led off by another judge due to a procedural issue with his case. It hardly needs to be said that Harlan was white. He went on to join the Border Patrol during a period when it was seen as a model of good racial policy by the Nazi government in Germany. Carter rose to lead the Border Patrol, helped to militarize it, and then went on to run the NRA and turn it from a simple gun advocacy organization to the far-right culture war institution it became. Everything we're dealing with today from the far right started at the border,

and, to quote from that song, that's still where it is today. But the border is more than just a battleground in America's endless culture war, and it is more than just the system of violence men like Carter helped make it into. The United States' border with Mexico stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, through the homelands of many indigenous peoples and across the migratory trails of numerous species. And to many, many people today, it's still just home. Mariana Jones Wright runs a butterfly sanctuary that has, somewhat improbably, provoked the direct ire of a U.S. president and become the center of a series of conspiracy theories. She also grew up along the border in the Rio Grande Valley. In high school, she'd take trips to discotecas and bars in Reynosa, just across the border from McAllen, Texas.

Today, she runs the National Butterfly Sanctuary just outside of the nondescript town which seems to have endless strip malls, big box stores, and family-run Mexican food joints. You can go there and see wildflowers, walk in the woods, and if you're lucky, like we were, you might even find a snake and some monarch butterflies making their way across the continent without regard for borders or immigration checks. So, you know, growing up here, we all led very fluid lives, and I use that word deliberately. I mean, in the 1970s during the gas crisis, you know, when Carter was president, we would literally drive to Mexico to gas up our cars and then come back. In high school, we would go to high school for lunch and cocktails and then come back for class or skip class and come back for football games on Friday night. From the nights, Saturday nights, we were all in Mexico partying our asses off.

They had the best discos and clubs, and our parents were over there, too, having dinner. I know people who are citizens who live in Mexico because it's more affordable, because they have reliable electricity. I mean, y'all are laughing, but... No, no, no. The border for most people living there, sometimes called fronterizos, is an inconvenience.

You have to drive to a certain crossing. Sometimes your truck gets checked. Sometimes the port of entry is closed and you're late for work. But in the public eye, especially during and after the 2016 presidential campaign, it looms like a scene from Lord of the Rings. And since then, it's also started to look like one. So, growing up here, I knew there was illegal immigration. It's impossible not to know.

I mean, nearly everyone knows someone who came across. They came to visit family on a short-term visit to their home, or they cross the river somewhere. But you'll see here, our river is wide and deep and dangerous. It's deadly. I mean, when I was growing up here, and I'm 52, I have friends who lived in Mexico. Their parents had homes and businesses here and there. Some of them rode the bus across the bridge every day for school in the morning.

I mean, it was nothing. We never thought of anyone's status, you know, in terms of citizenship or anything else. And also, sort of liminal zone where people who might be are coming up the wazoo have to use those two passports to navigate in both countries in which I have citizenship. I have no clue. Or I have nothing. And there seems to be hardly any in between.

In mainstream media, the border is presented as dangerous, as are the people crossing it. But it's hard to feel that you're in danger when you're watching the sunset over the Rio Grande and listening to the owls who begin their work after dusk in the ever-diminishing wild places along the river's north bank. Up until a couple of months ago, we were coming out here four or five times a week, sometimes twice a day on our boat. coming out here four or five times a week, sometimes twice a day on our boat. And bringing a lot of journalists out, it almost never wound up in their reportage because they never saw it. You know, they were like, yes, take us out on the river. We want to see the illegals crossing.

And we're like, we're like, dude, the only way to do that is to hook up with the MAGA campaign officials working with the Border Patrol. Some of the most beautiful and fragile landscapes in the country along the southern border. Part of Mariana's work is introducing kids to them. I've been lucky enough to spend time in many of them. Camping in East County, San Diego, where the PCT begins, is one of my favorite things to do. Riding my bike in Southern Arizona is an adventure I take at every opportunity, and I'm not the only one. From jaguars to butterflies, many species of wildlife live along the border, and pass over it on a daily basis. The border might look serious on a map, but for much of the last century you'd have struggled to point to it on the ground unless

you had a GPS device and far too much free time on your hands. These kids that'll be here this week, as part of their academic study, they thought the Rio Grande Valley was a desert. They didn't know that, you know, that we had 11 biologically distinct ecosystems in a four-county region that would fit inside San Diego County, California. That, you know, that we have the river that's not a trickle when everybody flushes their toilets. You know, like it can be in El Paso. I mean, they had no idea that we're the edge of subtropical, you know, America, the neotropics in America. Since 9-11, though, the border's become a physical thing.

A landscape thriving with life that's somehow found a way to exist in places that can kill you with heat in the day and cold in the night, and sometimes both in 24 hours, has been torn apart to provide people who have never been there with a chance to grandstand about security, and various government contractors a chance to line their pockets. Ted Cruz recently posed in a boat wearing body armour and standing next to a machine gun, just feet away from where we watched recreational boaters sail lazily along the river.

along the river. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, Radio app, Apple Podcasts, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture

to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season

digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible.

Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it.

Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. As we walked from the center down to the river, we spotted some trash on the ground and went to pick it up. It turned out to be a battery, the kind used in a tactical flashlight or weapon light. Mariana doesn't use those, and it wasn't there last time she walked down a trail. It's not just the wall that's ruining this landscape, she says. It's the constant presence of militarised border patrol, who see the area as a conflict zone, not a conservation one. As I was saying, they're the ones who leave the trash everywhere. It's for other stuff as well. But they're very commonly used on the kind of lights used for guns.

Yeah, a little lippy. These are CR-123s. They're so expensive that you only use them flash. Mariana knows this only too well. Her butterfly center backs up to the Rio Grande. It's a beautiful, peaceful place. But since 2017, it has been under threat from the relentless militarization of the southern border. The butterflies, she says, are important for a number of reasons.

So butterflies are critical pollinators to all of the green stuff, most of which we don't eat. People know bees pollinate about one-third of our food, and so they care about bees now because everyone would hate to lose one-third of our food. But butterflies pollinate all of the grasses, wildflowers, shrubs, and trees on the planet, the ones that reduce erosion by holding the ground in place against wind and against rain and floods, the plants that reduce the radiant heat that would come off of the earth if we didn't have the green stuff. They filter the water going into the water table, and they produce oxygen for us. They filter our air. That's why butterflies matter.

And that's why everybody should care about them and do what they can in their communities with their endemic native plants to provide habitat for butterflies. It's not just the butterflies who are in danger, either. It's disgusting. But it is, I hate to say entirely predictable, but it's fairly predictable in an end-stage capitalist society where we're moving from a military-industrial complex to a border security one, where border walls and border security are the United States' number one export. And most people don't even know about Bortec. It's operating worldwide.

I have been shot at by Bortec many times. And people don't realize it was the CBP drones that were flying overhead in Minneapolis. To understand exactly what is at stake, both for the border and the butterflies, it's important to understand exactly what the border wall looks like on the ground. The border wall ecosystem is not just a wall. It's a towering 30-foot steel structure topped with anti-climb plates. Along the barrier, which is often hundreds of yards from the actual border, there's a road wide enough for two of the expensive pickup trucks the CBP drives to pass each other. In remote areas, a road to allow construction vehicles to get to the wall also had to be built. For landscapes that had been untouched for

centuries, it's been catastrophic. That's why the National Butterfly Sanctuary fought the border wall. In the summer of 2017, they found contractors on their land using heavy equipment to destroy the plants they had worked so hard to protect. After we found the contractors here illegally clearing our land with no right of entry, no eminent domain exercise, no waiver of NEPA and other laws, we, you know, we filed suit against the federal government. That brought some publicity. suit against the federal government. That brought some publicity. And with it, a lot of people who said, you know, that we, if we opposed border wall, we must be for illegal immigration, as though the issue is that simple. The wall, in addition to being a colossal expense, much of which is

funneled to Zeckelman Industries, a Canadian-owned steel company which was fined $975,000 by the FEC for illegal donations to the Trump campaign in 2020, is pretty useless. The border wall is built miles inside the United States, that Border Patrol picks up ladders every day to share photos of ramps built so vehicles could literally drive over border wall, like, you know, the old Range Rover commercials and also other breaches. We also got a chance to explain to them that up until President Trump, the Border Patrol Union itself had opposed border wall. They had called it a waste of monies, ineffective, and really irrelevant to their mission of preventing illegal entry to the United States. Walking along the border, we found half a dozen ladders constructed from old wooden pallets. Alongside them were IDs, clothing, and detritus that migrants had either abandoned on their

journey north or had thrown out for them by border patrol agents who'd apprehended them. Either way, these discarded things told a sad story of young people, sometimes parents and sometimes children with siblings, crossing a river and then a wall to try to get a chance at a better life. What the border wall does do, very effectively, is funnel people through the giant gaps in it. From Texas to California, the Trump administration has rushed to build as much wall as it could in order to live up to the wildly exaggerated claims that Trump made in his 2020 election debates. We now have as strong a border as we've ever had. We're over 400 miles of brand new wall. Of that over 400 miles, 350 odd were repairs to existing barriers or secure fences,

as they are technically termed. But the rest was built in places that were easiest to access. In Southern California, mountains and valleys are simply skipped. The wall stretches across the flatlands in between. People are forced to cross in these gaps, in the hardest places, and as a result, many more of them die. The Butterfly Center isn't one of the hard places, but Mariana has found dozens of identity documents, some of them in evidence bags labeled Department of Homeland Security. She says that people aren't dumping them. They are being stripped of their documents when they are detained. I know that the other side, as we're seeing in the videos that we're hearing at the end of January, they claim that the cartel strips the migrants of their phones and their IDs

and stuff, and that's a lie. The migrants keep their phones because their phone is how they communicate with family to say, you have to send more money, or, you know, I've made it this far. The phone is the bank. The lifeline that not only, you know, aids the immigrant, the cartel. That's the only States don't understand.

They don't see that we find garbage bags full of medical records, birth certificates, marriage licenses, ID, and other things from migrants that they have brought here with them to prove their identities and their illness or the violence that they've suffered and everything to make their asylum cases. But Border Patrol trashes all of that. Throughout the four years of the Trump presidency, the Butterfly Center fought to protect the ecosystem they had created and to keep the pristine riverbank for barn owls, not Border Patrol trucks. Mariana isn't alone. The South Texas Birding Preserve was forced to back out of a deal with the feds after a co-unity outcry at the thought of the loss of one of the very few wild places in the area.

While they have, so far, been able to stop the construction of portions of the border wall, they have not been able to stop the multiple armed agencies that police the border, and often each other, from encroaching on the center's land. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter? I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award.

Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes.

You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Currently in Texas, there are several overlapping missions to protect the border. Under Operation Lone Star, Texas National Guard soldiers are deployed to protect the border and prevent drug smuggling and child trafficking, at least according to the office of Governor Greg Abbott. Sadly, they're not able to protect themselves from each other. So far, four soldiers have died by suicide, two in accidental shootings. Texas law allows

National Guard soldiers to bring their own personal weapons, which were responsible for both deaths, and one drowned trying to save migrants from the river. Because the troops are deployed under state orders, not federal ones, they receive fewer benefits and their families are not compensated as well in the event that they die. In addition to the 10,000 Texas troops, there are also 4,000 National Guard soldiers on federal orders along the border. Task Force Phoenix, as it's called, is a combination of 34 different guard units stitched together with very little cohesion or prior experience working together and has been blighted by low morale.

Troops in this deployment are three times more likely to have a car accident than seize illegal drugs. And a battalion deployed to McAllen had three soldiers die, the same number as the rest of the National Guard combined that year. DUI issues are so common that breathalyzers are being issued to units. The crisis isn't at the border. The crisis is the border. It's not only United States soldiers dying along the southern border. It's also migrants. According to the Missing Migrants

Project, and the state is admittedly better viewed than it is heard, migrants coming from Central or South America are far more likely to die at the USA's southern border than they are at any other point on the way there. 1,248 people died or went missing last year making the trek north, 595 of them at the border. Given that the border, both under Republicans and Democrats, is a weapon that's increasingly effective at killing people and increasingly present in political debate. It's surprising how many people have never been there. The border, at least a bit of it without the wall, doesn't feel violent.

One night while we were in Texas, we sat on the bank of the Rio Grande and looked across the river at the sunset. Behind us was a wall funded by private donations to a group called We Build the Wall. It's built so close to the river that the weight from the border patrol boats will see it undermined and washed away in less than five years. Across from us, little cabanas and bars studied the shoreline. It looked idyllic, and were it not for the thousands of armed people who make it their job to stop it, it would have been quite nice to swim across for a drink. Swimming over was out of the question, but the peaceful border we encountered was not the one you'd recognize if you've seen Fox News over the past four years. For much of middle America, the border is constructed as a lawless land,

somehow also as a desert despite the fact that 1 that 1200 miles of it are marked by a river. And a place where cartel violence goes unchecked. Human trafficking runs rampant. And young children are snatched away from their families and sold into sex slavery. Of course, young children are snatched away from their families at the border. But that's your taxpayer money at work, not the Zetas or Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación. Sadly, the Butterfly Center's opposition to the war combined with this political theater at the border to place a group of people who just wanted to be left alone to be nice to butterflies at the center of a culture war they

wanted nothing to do with. At some point, the Trump White House became aware that 100 acres of Texas grasslands were holding out against all the legal, and questionably legal, efforts of the Department of Homeland Security and the Trump administration to destroy the little haven along the Rio Grande. We know that Jared Kushner said in May of 2019 in the Oval Office, we solved the butterfly thing. And Steve Bannon had been the you know, the former special advisor to President Trump. And then he is the one who started this PSYOP. And they took aim at us. And being against the wall and possibly for open borders, they declared that we were a cartel front and actively engaged in trafficking humans and drugs, that we were not about conservation

at all, but we were selling women and children into sex slavery. Mariana's Twitter bio, at a time of writing, reads, Do no harm, take no shit. And that's the approach she took as the MAGA community began to sling an increasing amount of shit at her. The North American Butterfly Association filed suit against Brian Colfage slash We Build the Wall, Tommy Fletcher slash Fisher Sand and Gravel slash TRG Construction, and Lance Newhouse slash Newhouse and Sons on December 3rd, 2019. Colfage, a US Air Force

veteran, attempted to crowdfund the wall after Congress wouldn't fund it, to the ridiculous extent that Trump desired, he raised over $25 million. In August of 2020, Colfage was indicted, along with Steve Bannon and two other co-defendants, on federal charges of defrauding hundreds of thousands of We Build the Wall donors. Federal prosecutors said that despite repeatedly assuring donors that Colfage would not be paid, the defendants engaged in a scheme to divert $350,000 to Colfage, which he used to fund his lavish lifestyle. Colfage was separately indicted in May of 2021 on federal charges related to his falsification of tax returns. In April of 2022, Colfage entered a guilty plea, having accounted for about $10 million in spending and little under five miles of actual wall. Colfage's attempts to build the wall in Texas were hampered by the National Butterfly Center lawyers, who argued that it was a flood risk, because it is, and by various tax issues that Colfage's team seemed entirely unaware of. While they hoped to transfer the wall they built, which they called the Lamborghini of walls, to federal ownership, CBP wanted nothing to do with it, as they were building their own wall outside of the floodplain.

After ignoring a 2019 ruling, Colfage eventually built about three miles of wall in Texas, and then declared the project complete. In November of 2019, with litigation ongoing, Colfage took to Twitter to accuse the National Butterfly Center of having a rampant sex trade taking place on your property and the death-sick bodies. When we first saw Brian Colfage's tweets and the We Build the Wall videos using my image and talking about the butterfly lady and everything and the Butterfly Center, at first, you know, we kind of reacted with humor, like, this is too funny, like, who in their right mind

would believe any of this, and, you know, we even tried addressing, I mean, I didn't know who Brian Colfage was at the time, but, you know, we replied, like, you have a very, very active imagination or you're a really, you know, twisted person. And we use the hashtag liar, liar, pants on fire because we really did think it was ridiculous. But any notion that this was not deadly serious was soon dismissed. And now I've become this lightning rod for extremism in American politics, or as I've told others, you know, I've had a lot of journalists ask me, what does it feel like to be at the crossroads of the culture wars in America? And I'm like, I'm not at the crossroads of the culture war. I live in the borderlands, which are the proving grounds for fascism in America.

That's where I live. And we're going to see it more and more. Everybody's going to see it more and more. They test things like the aerostat balloons here. And the fact that we didn't cut them loose and shoot them down and set them on fire, the fact that we were like the sky, we can live with it. Means that now it's gone out from under DHS to DOD and it's being deployed across the United States. Coming soon to a community where you are. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. find legends and lords of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into Tex Elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking music, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my culture. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world

and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight-up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award.

Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards.