It Could Happen Here - 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.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You should probably keep your lights on for

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, 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. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. 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 Could Happen Here. It's the podcast sometimes hosted by me and mia wong it is uh i guess this is a combination things falling apart thing putting things back together episode we're doing some more coverage of the u.s's sort of epidemic of mass evictions but yeah so with with me to talk about this uh is max is one of the organizers and co-founders of santa barbara tenants union and sam sapisi who's another

tenant and a member of the union uh you too yeah welcome to the show hi 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 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 landlord company um yeah i think guys bought your building and is attempting to evict everyone is this yeah yeah so core space is um out of chicago and i believe austin texas have purchased our uh four building apartment complex approximately 243 units i believe over a thousand 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 it, so we're evicting everyone, and then you don't let anyone ever come back

because your quote-unquote renovations are just a way to do a price hike, which seems to be what's happening here. Yeah, and renoviction, it's a nice term for that, right? Renoviction, it's you're renovating to evict, just if listeners are 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 what we presume. That's kind of their business model is to buy up housing in college towns and do some renovations and then hike up the rent drastically. Yeah, I mean, that's definitely a thing that happens. 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 yeah we've 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 and so i guess okay. So facing this eviction, I guess I wanted to talk about how y'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 they like took pictures of my bathroom and my kitchen. It was super awkward. Um, and so we kind of, I think a lot of us knew at that point, like, okay, something's going on, right. Obviously. Um, 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. Um, yeah. And, and I, I, I had just heard about it from a lot of properties, um, or, or, uh, also tenants like in LA friends that I had other, um, college students that had had this happen 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. There's like 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 this is awful. Like, just yeah. So I made a post saying this sucks. And from there, I was referenced to contact Santa Barbara Tenants Union, which I was like kind of hesitant at first because I was like, oh, what are they going to do? Like, 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 this 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 are, we have your back. We gonna do this we will support you

and so from there um i want to say it was within a day or two we went flyering door to door and remember it's it's 200 and like i said i think it's roughly 243 416 yeah it's it's it's a lot of units to knock doors on. I know one of our county representatives, Laura Capps, 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 what they're'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 um other like my neighbors make are with my cats just chilling in the windows and stuff but um yeah to then um i yeah i i didn't even want my cats in the windows i was

i was very very anti-social i still am um but i have opened my mind quite a bit and come out of my shell a little bit but that's irrelevant um from there like like I said, we went flyering. 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. That'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 in the past two months. So I don't know where you want me to go from there. But, you know, that's at least the beginning of it was just, you know, us flyering, going door to door, getting everyone together, getting everyone in a 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, uh, you know, a union, a tennis association for, for your, for yourselves, 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 eight is for listeners? You don't know. 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 twenty five, twenty six hundred600 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. No, 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 like the eighties, like the Reagan era, like gutted all public housing. And so the concession was, it's a voucher based system for the poor, like for the low income people. So, um, yeah, it's just the government will pay a portion of it. Sam said it pretty good, I think. Yeah. And I guess, you know, I I guess this is a sort of, yeah,

an interesting thing about your building is that there's a very wide range of different backgrounds of people who are involved. I was wondering, talk a little bit about 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. But CBC has a ton of families. And as we mentioned, you know, section eight 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 lower caps. Don't quote me on this, but that this is like the lowest one of the lowest income housing apartments in Isla 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, um, I guess just class composition and, and I'm just like, so,

so, you know, if you think there's, um, disabled people that have caseworkers, you have monolingual Spanish speaking immigrants, you have, um,

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 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 whose like parents may be totally loaded or whatever you have you know often an immigrant and low-income family families you have like way more people packed into like a one or two bedroom than than than you would want. But it's the only way for you to make rent because rent keeps going up every year. Um, 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'm in the group chats and I've been, I've been to the building like a few times, but I'm not like there every day and I'm not like flaring every day and stuff like Sam is living there. But like one common kind of like difficult, it's like, it's, it's there every day and I'm not like flaring every day and stuff like Sam is living there. But like one common kind of like difficult, it's like, it's, it's a beautiful thing and it's a difficulty in that, like there's, so we need interpreters and like in SBT, we have, we're, we're a sort of self-funded autonomous tenants union, which means we don't get grants from like wealthy foundations or government entities or whatever. So we can kind of more independently make decisions.

So, um, 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 actually just be impossible. I mean, not like, so that's like when there's a language barrier, right? That makes it hard to organize. Or it wouldn't be impossible.

There's a, there's a handful of like bilingual people, but they're usually super busy. It's if, if, if one of them doesn't show up or if the 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 um the whether it's the lawyers right now who have been hired by by core spaces which uh they're a snaky slimy piece of shit evil firm

they're called uh tyne taylor fox howard llp um just if you see any of them on the street just give them dirty looks don't do anything violent use that against me at some point in the inevitable thing that's probably going to happen um but uh but they whether it's them or the landlords directly there's there's always a you know this is this happens in labor organizing it's a divide and conquer strategy so they want to spread misinformation amongst the Latinos or amongst, you know, amongst the families, amongst the disabled, like whoever they can sort of get an ear to, they're going to give them certain kinds of information to make them really afraid. Um,

they're going to tell them lies and, and they're going to get people to try to self-evict. So I'm, I am jumping a little bit ahead, but like that, that definitely has been like a challenge. Um, in that, you know, if there been like a challenge um in that you know if there was like a totally like linguistically culturally monolithic group of a thousand people there would probably be a little bit easier to keep things like totally unified but those um those demographic differences do present some challenges for sure yeah that makes it that makes sense i mean we've talked to a couple of other tennis associations that have had to... Actually, well, I mean, this one's actually...

It's like, you know, back when I was doing tennis organizing too, like I've seen worse in terms of like, in terms of like the number of languages, but it's still like never like an enormously easy thing to sort of have to bridge, like just having to bridge linguistic divides too 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 in particular yeah but instead of doing that uh we're gonna we have to take an ad break we'll be back after whatever incomprehensible ads are playing okay cool great ads bye bye and we're back

I hope the ads were short I don't know there were some great ads I'm gonna buy that thing whatever it was it's gonna be the Reagan coins again or like one of the casinos

okay so yeah so I guess yeah you know we'll just having done a thematic jump I will now go back to chronological jumps, which is okay. So you have you starting this organizing what, what starts to happen after you're starting to get people together and you have the tenants, the Senate property tenants union involved? from flyering getting everyone just like a basic letting them know that they don't have to move that this eviction is this eviction's bullshit right um oh but by the by the way we didn't we were never giving legal advice that people shouldn't move uh it was if you don't want to you don't have to because there's certain illegitimacies just because i know that the

the slimy piece of human fucking garbage buyer trash lawyers are going to be listening to this and trying to use us again use it against us but anyway 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 uh yeah so after we did the flyering we um s Barbara Tenants Union set us up with some group chats and we just worked together from there we um just started talking to one another and I think it was um 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. Um, which I think is kind of normal nowadays. It's not like, you know, the sixties where like, Oh,

everyone has a house and knows their neighbors and stuff. No, people kind of keep to themselves, especially in really large apartment complexes. Um, so yeah, we, we just started going in the group chat and then someone was like, Hey, I can do this. And then the 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, our feelings, our emotions our pain about this but also um find a way to like fight against it so what we learned was which we fully learned from the Santa Barbara Tenants Union was oh if we go in front of the county board we can convince them we can share our. 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, but future residents. So, so from there, it was really in the early stages. We, um, I don't know if this is jumping ahead honestly my my brain is a little foggy right there's so much that's happened so quickly but i i do know the next biggest step was us coming in front of the um of the uh santa barbara county supervisors board of supervisors and telling our stories and sharing that um i think max could probably also share a little bit yeah i have so 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 that's like three yeah a three-week period from uh 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 yeah 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 core spaces, then association was before that the County meeting or after, but, um, and then there also, cause there's, there's also two like pretty crazy facts here too, where like about, so six weeks before core spaces announced a new ownership, um, all of us in, in SBTU had sort of, um, we'd heard so many stories on the Santa Barbara city level and Santa Barbara city is not the County, right? The County is like

this larger geographical entity and the, and Santa Barbara city is within the County, but on the city level, we've been hearing so many, um, really terrible stories about people being rent evicted. And, um, and we just decided to kind of like throw 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 rent evictions. 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 rent evictions, 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 put the permits in the renovation notices when they're going to do it. They need to, there's some language that says that it needs to be done in good faith, which, 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, like right now a landlord can raise the rent about 10% every year. If just, just cause 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 I think it was within the week like within a couple days of us like celebrating that win core spaces the core spaces thing yeah but this is but this is county jurisdiction so we were like okay i guess we got to go from city to county we got to get the county to do the same fucking thing um so we were already really fucking exhausted like we were it 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 i'm 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 non-profit staffers or something like that that i think we know. 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, more experienced and better at handling this 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 9am. 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 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 um you know the the news there it was like hot off the presses for a week or two there was 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, like, public comment is typically anybody who's, like, gone to the public comment

at a city or a government meeting. There's usually one or two people that are just, like, really weird. Like, they're, like, human on people. Like they are, they're like, they're like human on people or like, or like they're like the, the next door 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. Um, and then there's actual agenda items on the, in these government meetings. Um, and then there's actual agenda items on the, in these government meetings. Um, and, 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. There were mommy, not 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, um, the county supervisors called an emergency meeting for Thursday. And on Thursday they passed the emergency just cause ordinance, which was just basically copy pasting the city ordinance that we had just won after the six week like marathon. So, wow. I don't know if you, if you caught all that,

but like, that's how, from our perspective, it's like, we don't, 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, cause it took us about six weeks for the city thing, which was still like, everyone told us like that's rapid fire laws. They'll get changed that quickly. And this was like two weeks or some shit. Yeah. I was,

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've i don't know like i i we've we've run into like chicago city council before for example and they oh boy those people are yeah So, yeah, it was a really impressive campaign that you all were able to pull off. Like, yeah. But and this narrative is if we wanted to, like, really make this in a curated way, we could probably have, like, hopeful. We could have inspirational background music. Then we could have, like, horror music.

We could have because, I mean, I don't know, Sam, if you you want to take it from that but there has also been some very dark turns since that um like very dark depressing scary turns because the minute well i'll just 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 this is actually really like important kind of legal fact is that um what that what the law said was that um this notice applies to um any current notices uh posted to tenant stores like after this date as well as unlawful detainers unlawful detainer is a fancy term for an eviction lawsuit. So, um, so basically like any eviction lawsuit that core spaces would

try to, um, file against any of the 250 plus, um, people would be, uh, they would just be tossed out in court. Cause they're just 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, and Z. And they didn't, they'd be like, yeah, you're right. Um, it's just very, there's nothing ambiguous. It's not, it's not a gray area. It's not like you can interpret it 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 would say like, well, what about this and this? There's no, well, there's no other thing but immediately like almost immediately within like a week or something the other side started countering with like insane

propaganda like like disinformation um 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 the disinformation but by by Tyne Taylor, Fox Howard, LLP and Core Spaces, vertically integrated private equity piece of shit firm. Yeah. So the emergency ordinance passed and we all were like, this is great we we have protections but then um yeah that law firm decided to well that and management actually i think prior to the 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 you need to go take your checks you need to sign

that you're leaving etc and when that notice from the um the tine law firm came signed by lacy taylor it lacy taylor reported to the bar it basically said this doesn't apply to you. And if you I mean, OK, 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 fought 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 tennis association and SBTU is saying is, 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 law degrees. They don't know the law. On top of that, the law firm intentionally left out the last part of the ordinance. They said, hey, this doesn't apply to you because the eviction notices were issued before this, but it left out the unlawful detainer part. this but it left out the unlawful detainer part yeah so it was it's it's lying by omission right yeah yeah it's like i wish i had a good like movie example or 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 um i don't know i wish 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'd 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, dot, which was the part that I was into it. They're implying something else is there, right? I mean, maybe some English major was like, oh, I wonder what's in that dot, dot, dot, like what's the rest of the quote? But that's the thing about like using,

abusing their power as lawyers with their like fancy letterhead and all this shit of knowing. And this goes back to like this, this kind of diversity of class composition right if this is a bunch of like super highly educated uh professionals like either with law degrees or or whatever they'd be like oh i'm just gonna jump onto the county you know i'm gonna like look up the ordinance and be like oh it's ordinance 5-1 whatever and i'm gonna read through it and be

like aha they left out the unlawful detainer. But like, my guess is almost zero of the tenants who received those notices did that. And that was, that was the law firm that was, that was Tyne and Taylor and Fox and Howard and whoever the fuck else is, is involved in their, in their, you know, fraudulent joke of a firm. Um, their, their whole thing was they wanted to scare people to get them to self-evict. So if you think about the logistics of... 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. 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 other amounts. You're looking at a situation like this and you're like, okay, 250 units. And then there's somewhere between 500 and 1,000 people. And you don't need to evict the little kids, but you need to evict every person on the lease. That's a lot of unlawful detainers. Like that's a lot of filing that we're going to have to do. We're going to have to like get every single name and every single lease. And we're going to have to like every individual person on every lease. We're going to have to file an eviction lawsuit in the court that we know is going to get tossed out. Like that's so much fucking work for us to do. We don't want to do all that work. That's insane, right? Like we, we want to kind of just eat this retainer money

and do like minimal work. Like, cause 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. But their strategy was, was to, was to scare people through lying with abusing their power as much as possible to empty out that building. So there'd be no need to file, um, eviction lawsuits, um, and, and do the bidding of their, uh, of course spaces without, uh, 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 core 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, in, in, in acommodified real estate capitalist market. That's all this is. We're just describing a normal process that's happening at this point. Yeah, and something we've talked about in other tenant struggles is that, I mean, one of the things that,

I'm not going to use this specific law from doing this, but there's something we've seen in other places. It's like, you'll get landlords who will just fire we'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 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 like it's like this this goes back to the the old the old

sort of capitalism problem right which is like the easiest way to make money is just by taking it from someone and the second easiest way is by is in you know like the the one that's even easier than that is you is you lie to them and trick them into getting either trick them or intimidate them into giving you the money without having to like actually fight them and yeah it's you know what they're doing here it is legal terrorism yeah and i uh i reported uh lacy taylor to the bar i don't know lacy because i'm sure you're listening to this if you if they even notified you but um it was 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. And, um, so it's definitely frustrating. So it's like, no,

like 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, um, like evil ass people who are trying to make people homeless in order to re-tenant. That's the kind of language that these, these firms use. The word is re-tenanting the building. Um, we're just re-tenant. That's the kind of language that these firms use. The word is re-tenanting the building. We're just re-tenanting, right?

That's the sort of real estate capitalist law firm. Oh, that's so hard. That's the industry language, right? We got lawyers for that, right? 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 will just pay to do this. And then you even have these state bar associations that are like, well, yeah, that's just how it is, man.

Probably most likely because like on the side of real estate, I, my 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 like, that's a tie. On the side of tenants, right? And then some of the landlord tenants sometimes will help tenants, right? So they can brag at their little wine and cheese

things like, oh, I help the people or whatever, and I donate to charities or some garbage. But at the end of the day, they're happy to make people die of starvation on the street so that somebody else can make a shit ton of money. This has been Nick Kadappan here. Join us tomorrow for part two of this interview in which the landlords do more bullshit.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the

heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. 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 iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast hi i'm ed zitron host of the better offline podcast and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tex 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, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Welcome to It Could Happen 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 mass eviction by landlord ghouls' core spaces. Enjoy! Yeah, 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 this started um you want to talk yeah either you want to talk about that a bit

uh yeah i i would love to talk about that so i have lived here for almost three years um we did have security i want to say it was saturdays between um it was one security guard for all four buildings saturdays between 11 p.m and like 3 4 a.m just just one security guard that would walk around just during that time um since core spaces has purchased the property we have two to four 24 7 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 i'm going around canvassing right trying to get flyers people's doors 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 they've they've asked me like where what building do you live in what's your name creepy things and i'm like i'm not gonna tell you that i have no idea who you are um 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 buildings, like stuff outside of people's units. It's really uncomfortable. And it's kind of telling because it's like, well, we never needed security before. Oh, 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 um our neighbors talked to one of the security guards he worked there for a day um and was like yeah they lowered my pay to like minimum wage i'm not yeah yeah he literally told me maybe we should try to like help unify the security

dude yes you know we're fucked up man course faces you guys are such uh mark lipschen and chris richards you guys are the cheapest scummiest human beings on the planet right and and he was like yeah i'm leaving like i'm not gonna do this this is stupid um but usually when i go out you know i mean for the most part they're usually just sitting on their phone standing in front of the entrance locking the doors the gates normal cop stuff like that kind of yeah well with yeah well the the the the standing around 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 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 the more

marginalized tenants i'm not i'm not gonna 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 um are they like are they like in like like police uniforms yeah yeah no they have yeah they have security uniforms they have tasers on them um they they they like to direct their power yeah it's probably not similar enough to be able to get them unimpersonating a police officer but it's probably not similar enough to be able to get them on a person and get police officer but it's still really depressing that yeah i don't know but but again and again and the strategy is to get people it's to scare the shit out of people so they'll yeah it's just terror

yeah 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. Like, what the what the hell? Yeah. Yeah. Well, you guys are safer, though, right? So that like bad stuff happens. Like if an evil landlord and their slimy, scummy, evil law team were to try to put you guys onto the streets, the security guards would come and defend you against them, right? Oh, wait, no? Am I mixed up? Oh, they're here to serve the evil people trying to put you on the streets. For minimum wage.

For minimum wage, yeah. For minimum wage. For minimum wage. Yeah. I mean, that's the sad thing too, is that the security guards are probably going to get renovicted by like the homeboys of the

core spaces executives at some point, right? Yeah. They're going to get renovicted. Somebody's going to look at their, wherever they're living as a low-performing asset

that needs to be re-tenanted and shit. Yeah. So. Yeah, I don't. So that's fun. That's cool. I don't blame. I understand the job. I don't so that's fun that's cool i don't i don't blame i know i understand

um 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 they like to enforce their power but i i do understand um that they are being hired outside to do a job, but it's, it's really not fun. I couldn't imagine ever doing that myself. I, I wouldn't feel right, but I don't know, you know, everyone, we're all suffering, right? Like the, you know, we're all trying to survive. So I try not to judge too much, but can't help it when, you know, they're taking photos inside the windows of my

apartment it's freaking creepy like yeah pretty creepy yeah i guess okay is there anything else that uh you two want to specifically want to talk about let's see we got the beginnings we got the law passed and then we got the slimy um pine taylor fox howard llp garbage law firm came along well okay so one 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 uh so i am i'm 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 straight up, everybody I talk to in these situations, in the role of tenant organizer, not therapist, it's just everything reeks of PTSD symptoms.

Straight up, people can't sleep. People are hypervigilant. 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. Their startle response is up, which is hypervigilance. I mean, 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 haven't talked to everyone in the building. But I mean, this process creates fucking PTSD. I'm not exaggerating. I'm not making this up. And also because the mental health field, as a side note 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 event, but despite the mass trauma that everybody experiences with this, the resilience in it of

being like, okay, we're still going to go out and we're going to fly her and we're going to knock on doors. And so like, there's been this phase, 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 and 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, it is kind of just buying time, right? If they, if they get permits and then they although maybe there'll be problems with the notices and that can be addressed or whatever. But 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 the county, 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 like solve the problem. What would solve the problem is either a no fault eviction moratorium, which would be like really broad. We're not sure how, how, uh, what the chances are of getting 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 like, I don't know, like Zionist say or something. I don't know. Yeah, it's a whole. Right, right, right. 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 habitability 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, right?

Just treat it as a normal thing. So if we get them to pass that law, then they can't evict year, right? 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 really trying to get the supervisors to do this. And it's just unknown how likely we are on that in this moment. But then simultaneously,

we need to continue educating the tenants on their rights because they keep like as of today, management started illegally and in a racist way targeting Spanish speaking Latino tenants, telling them that 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 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 CoreSpace already has permits.

They'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 you are correct. The Latina families did get that yeah yeah because core spaces are racist and and and John Tyne is a racist and Lacey

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 can quote me as many fucking times as they want in any context um but so having to like try to counter those all that disinformation all those lies, is this constant parallel process. Trying to get the county to do stuff, but trying to get people to understand, no, they're lying to you. While they're in this chronic state of 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 with disinformation and lies from people with a lot of power over them uh i don't know if you had anything else um sorry i kind of went off there no you're you're fine it's yeah that's that's kind of the way i see it as well um i guess what i would add is if the county doesn't do something this is 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 um it 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 people have, including me as a person living here, have nowhere to go. 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? Who are going to be the teachers, the healthcare professionals, everything? I will say in addition to that, this is why we formed

Core Spaces Tenants 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 it was one of the core spaces representatives who said this was, they've done this 46 times. And 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 their executives are they've previously worked for Goldman Sachs and Blackstone.

And to find out they've done this 40, at least 46 other times and just gotten away with it uh no we're we're not we're not going to keep letting that happen and so whatever happens here at cbc in the sweeps um our four buildings however it turns out and hopefully it turns out in our favor um 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 we're not. Yeah, we're not stopping hell 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 core spaces tenants wanted to join sam and her neighbors right like that's that was like you're saying sam like the point was to create something like they could they could have named it as more of a local thing like their tenant association but they chose core spaces as the company name right so like and if you're in arizona if you're in tennessee if you're in seattle seattle or whatever and you are

people getting renovated by these people or or i don't know you're just students like renting by the bed and they won't fix stuff or whatever um like you can join the core spaces tenant association um this this very well could be like a national level organization like 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 knows 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 and I guess. Yeah, and I guess this is the thing I wanted to close on. Tenants unions are not composed of some kind of special group of people, right? They're just people, right?

I did it back when I was doing stuff, right? It's just composed of random people. And that random person could very easily be you. And yeah, as you were saying, someone has to stop these people. And if it's not going to be you, the tenants fighting them, no one is ever going to. And they're just going to keep running people over forever.

And politicians just aren't going to do this. I mean, politicians acted really quickly because of the like show of force from right so they get like a cover from their constituency 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 piss 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 scaring them, I guess. But you have to kind of scare them into acting. You have to discipline the politicians into acting. So anybody that's like, we just need more policies. It's like, policies don't just happen. Like the Santa Barbara people, it's like, yeah, they acted quickly when they were forced to. But they could have literally at any time in the entire history of Santa Barbara,

they could have just passed this and they didn't until, until you came for them. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think you're right about like the tenants association, the tenants association being just, we're random tenants. I'm not some politician. I'm not some leader. I'm a student. I, you know i usually just spend my nights making dinner with my cats watching jeopardy like i'm i i don't do this um

but the point being is when you come together as a group you have power in numbers and 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 uh like a group that's called the autonomous tenants union network which is a network that um sbtu is a part of um just if you are if you're in a tenants union or you're interested in tenant organizing from anything you've heard um they are there it's it's like a network uh like the word autonomous again is like it's people who are sort of independent of various, um, like, you know, like nonprofits, foundations and governments just be sort of, uh, responsive just to tenants themselves. Um, so I'm not like a representative of the group or probably Autune, but it's, 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 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 desperately, 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 where you can have links, but yeah. Other places specifically people can go if they want to help this struggle specifically. Yeah. So for a core spaces tenant association, the social media handle is all core spaces ta that that would be for instagram twitter facebook and tiktok um we have a gofundme going as well just to pay for things like you know food for events

or um i don't know printing paper flyering stuff like that um we also have an email that anyone can reach us at, at core spaces, ta at gmail.com. Yeah. And we will, we will put all of that in the show notes. Sounds good. Thank you two so much for coming on and yeah,

go beat these sons of bitches. Yeah. Thanks for letting us swear. We're, we're definitely making their heart, their lives a lot harder than they, 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 landlord's days worse and your days better. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going.

That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun.

Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal 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. better offline as 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, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hello, welcome. This is It Could Happen Here, and I am Shireen. 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, 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 balmy, 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 southeastern 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 this is 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. An olive press owner in Palestine, Abu Eid, said, climate change and the occupation are making our job more difficult than it already is. He owns several dunams 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 Els de Boeuf, 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, and on February 9th of 2020, 50 olive trees were forcibly uprooted and destroyed in the occupied West Bank region of Salfit. 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 uprooted 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 Qasim al-Hajj Muhammad and his olive grove in the village of Al-Mughayyir, 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 just for good measure before retreating to their homes in the illegal settlement in the northern West Bank. Ghazal Malhaz Mohammed is a 45-year-old father of four, and he said, Ghazal Malhaj Mohammed 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. 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 he's losing his entire livelihood and the thing he's built for his entire life, probably his family's life as well for generations. Another incident came from Doha Asus, 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 waved 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. On top of that, Israeli law 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 activist Ghassan Najjar 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 Din, 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 Utsva Yehudit party surged in the polls. Itamar 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 B'Tselem, which documents human rights violations in the occupied territories and frames 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 in mainstream politics, human rights groups are becoming

increasingly concerned with the implications for Palestinians in the occupied territories, going as far as to fear a formal annexation of all or parts of the West Bank through a Knesset vote. or parts of the West Bank through a Knesset 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, Hearts Magazine published an article about Israelis growing ancient olive trees in the Galilee region in northern Israel. 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 Neumair's company, Rish Lakish, or Lakish, sorry, mispronouncing that probably, but this olive oil received high praise from Ranit Vared, the article's author and the Haritz food critic. But my question is, how did such ancient trees fall into the hands of the Neumayer family who settled into Zaporri 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 pastures difficult for cultivation and harvesting. The answer to this question is that Mojave to Zaporri, this region, sits on land belonging to the destroyed and depopulated Palestinian village of Safuria. According to Palestine Remembered, a website dedicated to preserving the memory of more than 400 Palestinian

villages which were destroyed during the Nakba, Safouria was a relatively large community with over 5,000 residents in 1948. The area around the village, according to Walid Khalidi'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. Safuria 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 Nipka in a previous episode if you guys want to revisit that. I won't get into it too much in this episode because we already have one all about it, but I'm just going to continue talking about this author, Waeled Khalidi, and his books. Waeled 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. Israeli historian Benny Morris writes that those who remained in Safaria were expelled in 1948, but that, quote, hundreds infiltrated back in the months that followed. 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 Safuria's lands. According to Morris, one senior Israeli official stated in November of 1948,

Morris, one senior Israeli official stated in November of 1948, next to 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 Haaretz 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 Haaretz 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. like the one mentioned, and many others, produce its olive oil in the West Bank. Taha Muhammad Ali, the famed Palestinian poet, was born in and expelled from Safuriyah. The family of Muhammad Barakeh, 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 in 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. in times of hardship and peace in periods of war. Sliman 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 do the Palestinian people. Mahmoud Darwish, 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. He wrote, 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 in Palestinian national life. The rural 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 Fauda Talqan, 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 in breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, and also provide significant nutritional health benefits.

Olive oil, meanwhile, is used in scores of recipes, the most popular of which is za'ataruzet, which is basically fluffy pita bread dipped in oil, then dabbed liberally in a thyme-based powder that includes sesame seeds and spices. My mom actually talks about this all the time. It was one of her staples growing up in childhood. We're obsessed with it. Palestinian za'atad 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 an insecticide. It is not only the fruit and its oil that 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 felled 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 glassmakers of Hebron, 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 Zayt al-Zatar 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 IDF and fuck Israel. Bye. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run

and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. 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. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin I've wanted 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. 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.

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, to include the border wall. So, Eric, would you like to introduce yourself? decade or thereabouts and to include the border wall so 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 unseated land of the tohono o'odham and pasquayaki people many other tribes that might have called 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 like the physical kind of stature and impact of the wall um yes uh well I think for each person it definitely takes into a with the perspective that they might have you know it definitely impacts people a, 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 Sonoran desert lands in divides them all half. 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 Kumey Island in a place called Campo filming a Kumey Island protest against the desecration of their sacred sites. Actually, I was writing for the sierra club um and i 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 this 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 at 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 then

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, the western end of it. And 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 started moving east or I'm sorry, west from there, the closest one right next to it is called Sassabee. And as you mentioned, Nogales,

there is big walls. And then soon it stops because then the terrain gets very uneven. There is a range of mountain called the Pajarito Mountains, which is one of the most biodiverse 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 walls, 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. For example, they used dynamite to blow up entire mountaintops 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 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 Sassabay. 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 have seen in other parts of the country. Yeah. 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 Sassabay port of entry, then you enter the Tohono O'odham reservation. Tohono O'odham decided that they didn't want a wall there and they fought for it and they didn't build a wall and there is 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

barrier or Normandy barriers. These are made out of like old train tracks, which we really like environmentally 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 quito vaquito springs like a very important ceremonial site for the tohono o'odham here sheraton people and a lot of destruction on those areas sacred sites as well they are very cultural and important for the tohono O'odham people, like Monument Hill, a burial site that wall was built right on top of it. And you 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 Power 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. governor to put shipping containers there. They were removed recently to be replaced with the regular bowler type of ball, the wall that you see in other places. And yes, you keep coming past Calexico and all those areas until you get to Kumeyaay land and the Yuma Otay mountains and all the way to what's known as Friendship Park, which is a binational park located in the border between San Diego and Tijuana, which

is the last binational park or the only one that we have in the southern border. And now as we speak, new 34 walls are being built in that area as well. So even so, President Biden said that he was not going to build more walls. We still see new construction happening as we speak right now. Yeah, and 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. Yep. So I think people, I guess when we talk about ecological impact, people always like, people like big animals, right? And 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, however you want to say that, that are impacted in, it's my very British pronunciation, in Arizona. There are the bighorn sheep, of course, who are closer to me, right near to Huk Hakumba where people will have heard the scripted series by the time this comes out so they'll be familiar with Hakumba and can you talk about the impact of the wall on those sort of bigger animals? Absolutely yeah that 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 9-11 and the intention of securing the borders, the Real ID Act waived every single environmental law that we know, 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 away that the first walls that are 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 started seeing the impacts on some of the species that are super important. You got to 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 danger in the area of California, we got the beacon sheep. Then you start coming and there's the Sonoran Desert Pronghorn in the Desierto de Altar. 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 really high altitude mountains that you can find some of the species that come from the north. This is their southernmost territory. And some of the species from the from the north this is their southmost territory and some of the species from the south this is the northmost territory so species like jaguars can all of a

sudden be drinking water out of the same pond with a black bear yeah and that is very unusual and very rare and very uh amazing you know So we also have ocelots, which is another type of cat that lives here in Arizona. We also have the Mexican gray wolf, a species that is in danger that use these corridors back and forth. And unfortunately, we haven't 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 collar, for example. But what we have done is put a lot of cameras on the wilderness, and we're able to photograph jaguars on this side of the border and photograph the same jaguar a few years later in Mexico or vice versa. So, there 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 Sonoran Desert, and also we see, you know, corridors in the Sonoran 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 this really large obstacle, they're less likely to come back and try it again. And that can be a generational thing that they can pass it to future 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? Like people didn't just get helicoptered in to build 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 here in Arizona, for example, we have two rivers that actually flow north, the San Pedro River and the Santa Cruz River. These are rivers, for example, San Pedro is born in Mexico and 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 this water to survive. So when the construction of the border wall came, you mentioned roads and the road right next or 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 second year, but we can start seeing consequences in a few years from now. 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 their habitat used to provide for them so that's why they grew there in 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, we talked about plants, right? And a number of cacti, specifically cacti that are sacred to Hohenarten people, have been either moved or destroyed in the construction of the wall around Organ Pipe. And just not on their reservation but very much on their unceded homelands right? Yeah yeah the saguaro cactus it is considered as a relative for the Tohono O'odham

so you can just imagine the the sentiment of of the Tohono O'odham people by looking at the saguaros being chopped or bulldozed on these areas considered sacred for them so there was definitely a lot of uh that happening there is an effort but we haven't seen it yet it's just on uh on written right now that they're going to revegetate some of these areas that got impacted but we're still waiting for for that yeah and that stuff stuff always comes last and slowest, if it happens at all. And I know both the Kumeyaay, the Otum, I'm sure, other tribes have had their ancestral burial grounds,

as you mentioned, destroyed. And for a similar reason to the Real ID Act, 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 tribal nations would have the right to inspect and do a survey before digging, but I know in 2020 they weren't doing that, right? No, they didn't. The Real ID Act also has a law there that protects archaeological resources. So they were able to do those things even if it was on federal land and it was an indigenous sacred site.

Yeah. So another thing, talking of federal land 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 at 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 exactly and 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've spent half my life trying to do this, but I'll let you take a swing at it, is like, can you describe these desert landscapes for people who are, because people think of the desert,

right? And they think of ossetia wells like where where people like to go drive their vehicles you know and it looks like uh like like saudi arabia but that's not most of the desert uh the desert is actually a very alive place and a place full of like life that has struggled and made a way to exist there can you explain and it's a very special place, not just sort of because it's unique, but it has a real sort of, well, 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 um it is such a beautiful area and not only beautiful in the sense that uh it's the sonoran desert for example is considered the most biodiverse desert in the world oh wow so well 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 people go out there sometimes on a hike on the desert and might not see much of the wildlife there other 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 the species you know that are not wanting to hang out in the heat of the desert they come out and this place becomes like a whole other place at night so it is uh it is definitely worth protecting these uh 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 started developing this really deep appreciation for it for sure yeah it sort of pulls you in once you once you appreciate yeah you become a desert person uh we were talking about this at okumba the other day how like uh you just turn into a desert you

know you can see who the desert people are and who the uh the people who haven't 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 necessarily easy to cross right and when we as you've explained so well there are 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 it 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 um that is uh there is a huge issue these funnels or areas where there are no walls because what's been happening and we observe uh is that as more people start going to these really remote areas of the desert

we have two issues you know first people is putting themselves on bigger danger and they're more likely to get themselves hurt and some of them die so as also you start pushing out 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 and not only the impacts of the people, but you got the impacts of border patrol, patrolling the area with their trucks and dragging 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 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 uh

again who haven't been to the desert won't 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 as 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 then 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 that 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. top. 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, it's kind of funny to see them climb how fast they're able to do it.

But we got to remember that not only young folks are trying to climb, sometimes there is an 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 or they got nauseous or they burned their hands or they lost 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 or people one person one time hang out from it and end up choking herself so there is definitely a lot of debt when people try to go over the wall but we also seen people now just cutting through the boiler so it's easier and then just put the the thing back so they there's 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 try to reach for the gaps then you have 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're not used to the heat of the dry heat of the desert they're not used to the cold of the nights of the desert so all of these

factors make this environment really challenging for people uh to try to cross it yeah in a lot of ways yeah yeah definitely and it's a very hard environment like i spent a lot of time camping in the desert and i like i don't think there's i spend a lot of time camping in the desert and i like 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 hyponatremia whatever it is like that and that's people who went to REI the day before, let alone people who've been walking since the Darien Gap or people who have much lesser 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 DHS and its $175 billion budget is such an apparatus that people can feel powerless in trying to put a stop to this, to make this change,

to make this even a little bit more humane. Just so we seem to 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 for like 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.

You know, 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? You know, there is a lot of resources that we have used for this false sense of security that 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 an afterthought 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 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. That shouldn't be an afterthought.

Border people, people that live in the borderlands 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 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 complex issue by doing that. It's not going to work out. So it's originally 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 and millions of dollars that will come just to try to keep it every year after every monsoon season. Yeah, I know in along the Rio Grande as well, 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. And yeah, 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 you 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 in the audience is based here in Arizona, they're welcome to join us to some of these outings 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, sued the federal government for the illegal 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 wall construction. So we sued 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 the southern border. Oh, great. That's good to hear. I know there are a lot of lawsuits, like 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 and sharing some of your experiences along the border. Absolutely.

Thank you for the invitation. And I'll see, talk to you soon. Yep. hey guys i'm kate max you might know me from my popular online series the running interview show where i run with celebrities athletes entrepreneurs and more after those, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens.

So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome. I'm Danny Threl. 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. 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. 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, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. 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 D.C., if you're in one of the other places or 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 a thousand 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 Kiljoy, our resident prepper extraordinaire. Hi, Margaret. Hello. How are you? Yeah. Doing 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 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 spent more time doing right now. This is the kind of thing that happens. You know, 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 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, you know, that is the only things that's going or stuff that you already had on hand is 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 likelier to have on hand. So I want to talk first about what you can do to like filter your indoor air. You know, in Portland, when we had our horrible fucking wildfire apocalypse, yellow smog,

blanketing the world and making everything look like fucking Blade Runner, everyone at least had gas masks and full face respirators, which, you know, 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 HEPA filters or central air, you know, in Oregon as often as they have it in some other parts of this country. Oregon as often as they have it in some other parts of this country. And so a lot of people wound up creating, 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 going to use for your hvac system in your house right pretty much most houses are going to have

some kind of like air filter already um and they're also widely available like if you go to any home depot or lowe's they're going to 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 Pando 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 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 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 air out in a room um five full times uh per hour in 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 in hell smog right now yeah that's about that's about the same as like 150 if you were to like go out and buy yeah a 500 square foot filter yeah it'd be about 150 bucks and that is about what this will cost you right now.

I think because shit's gotten 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,

and most people have a couple of filters, which should cut down on the cost. You know, it'll depend on kind of where you are and what things are running. But HEPA filters are also standalone ones, likelier to sell out fast as opposed to kind of the raw components to making a Corsi Rosenthal filter. So you may find it easier to get access to. I like the Corsi Rosenthal 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 in a disaster, feeling as if you have some sort of

agency by actually doing a 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 Corsi Rosenthal boxes and hand them out to people who maybe can't afford them or, you know, 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 also i just looked at the cost of making one i just like kind of added it together and it looks like you could probably make one for about 65 bucks oh great great great great it's probably the outside guy was probably buying all the gucci shit right if you just buy cheap you need at least a merv 13 filter that's the level of filter where it starts cutting out smoke um 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 then you only need the 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 standalone 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 Corsi-Rosenthal 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. You know, 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. You know, 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 emphysema or young adult onset emphysema 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 this kind of pollution. Now, this came alongside years of others reforms and things like emission standards, which were successful enough that in like 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

in say the 1970s. I had an annual checkup right after I moved there with my doctor in Southern California. And I asked him like 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 patients in their 20s who had the early symptoms of emphysema, which is just not a thing that really 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 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 the amount of smog in the air going away as a result of externalities that can't be controlled locally. 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 Cuyahoga

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 U.S. Senate Committee on the budget in 2021. Those punishments are harrowingly 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, 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 lately. And like, well, the answer you 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 shenzhen

you know the in china like this is a a problem that is primarily born i mean this is not in the u.s too by the poor um 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. writers that people apparently listen to live, will cause 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 will 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 kind of 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 in Apocalypse Now. Oh man, I love a good smoker. But nobody looks good in this shit unless you like have one of those sick ass,

you know, apocalypse dusters and like a face mask, which we're about to talk about. Then you can look cool, although your your clothing will probably always smell of wildfire. There's a lot. Also, it's kind of worth noting that like 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, you know, presumably hordes of ammunition that had been buried by Canadian preppers. So like there's, 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. N95s 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 N95s 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. 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 like putting together a building, you're dealing with a shitload of insulation or you're like cutting certain kinds of metal or, you know, 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. And graffiti. And graffiti. Yeah.

If you're doing a lot of graffiti, 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. Yeah. This walk away smoking. That's what we're trying to teach everyone. Smoke through the respirator. That makes it extra cool and healthy. So, yeah, what 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 Grainger.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 there hasn't been a run on them, you can probably find these. You will want to 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 just the respirator and you have to buy the filters separately. Usually if you get one, it'll, it'll come with them, but, but make sure the filters are going to be these. Most of them look kind of like triangles with like 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, you know, which kind of filters yours get, I would say, just get whatever they have the most of. Well, yeah, the, 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 P 100. And sometimes those are are they're more likely i believe 3m marks them as the pink so if it's pink it's particulate um with 3m there's other brands there's honeywell and then there's yeah 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 at a Home Depot with filters is going to be sufficient for this. 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 are atmosphere-supplying respirators, which normal people do not need in this situation. That's like, you know, it has like a tank of stuff. Scoop a tank for walking around. 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 things like Batman from that, the worst of the Nolan Batman or not Batman thing 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, your mouth and jaw. And then there's full face masks. And there are also reusable elastomeric respirators. I tend to prefer half or full face masks for one thing. There's no reason to like, you're not working in some sort of like capacity where you, you want to be tossing it every time,

you know, you might as well just get one. You can plug new filters into, um, 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 particulate,

you may find your eyes getting irritated out there. Um, 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 wear 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 and 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, you know, even in very thick tear gas with either my full face or with my gas mask. Wait, did you know this is why beards fell out of favor in the United States? Oh, because of World War I and gas masks? 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. then you have a more severe problem. Yeah. So 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 already happen 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 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 Amira, M-I-R-A. They're $300, $400, 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. 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. 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 really streamlined so that you can 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 is I would put on two filters and my gas mask, which allows you to kind of breathe at close to the normal rate that you can. And I would go jogging because because like 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 um 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 milsurp gas masks suck ass to wear super uncomfortable super shitty visibility um 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 um it's usually the nato standard yeah yeah yeah um they an expired one it's like i'm not recommending people use expired ones yeah but they're if you're not defending yourself against like murder gas yeah an expired one should do you yeah we are again when 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 in particulate here. We're not dealing with like mustard gas or sarin 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, 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 a stupid dog or whatever. Like 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, we'll 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 Rosenthal filters that we talked about. If you have the ability doing something like you would do kind of for a mudroom, a little kind of airlock situation when you take your pets in and out 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 hell 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, you know, 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 window's leaky, 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 kind of older houses did and do during wildfires and it seems to have an impact. So I would had kind of older houses did and do during wildfires. And it seems to have

an impact. So I would recommend kind of trying that. And if you can get to the store, you get like 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. Yeah. But it's not very expensive anyway, though, like 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 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. If you unless you like if you change your filter a week or two before this hit, you know, 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 MERV, 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 going to want to turn off anything that pulls in air from the outside, like, 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 a central system. 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. And 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, you know, can be a little bit lackadaisical about the actual like 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, you know, that allows shit in is going to allow quite a lot of particulate in like a surprising amount.

Again, a lot of, 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, you know, frustrating for a lot of reasons.

I'm sure it hope 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, right? 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 making

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 comment was like, well, we don't really get tear gassed 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 an 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

may be unlikely, but it's not impossible. And that if you don't have shit on hand, you're not going to be able to deal with. Right. Yeah. And one of those things is having a fucking respirator. Basically, everybody who is capable of affording them should have a half or 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, 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. Um, and then I know people who have made their own dog respirators basically out of N95s and tape and stuff. Um, and then if your dog, if you're really on top of it, you're going to do the work to acclimate your dog to this, right? And reward, reward your dog greatly and 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 yeah if your dog isn't pad trained and yeah exactly um there's actually an argument for pad training my dog that i 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 yeah that that could be a useful prepping thing to have to have pads on hand yeah 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 i'll 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 you know like 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? Yeah. I've never needed one ever again. But I don't, I didn't forget that I needed one and someone else had one. I will just have one, right? And, you know, so if this is, you're suddenly, I need an air purifier.

It maybe is too late. It may not be too late. 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. Like, the problem that military planners are always fighting the last war, right? Yeah. too like the the problem that military planners are always fighting the last war right when they're when they're preparing for shit which is why a lot of like 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 um and so like 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 new yorkers you're so stupid no that's, you know, that's not 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 gassed every night. Yeah. But it is 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 and military larpy about it you can you can put on gear and you can like sit around a war table with a map and and game plan out stuff you can make it fun yeah um like there's no reason not to treat it like a you know a session of dnd walk through

different kind of problems uh 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 more likely, and you triage it with that. And what's small, too. Yeah, what's small, what's easy to have on hand. I'm going to go get eye drops now.

I don't keep eye drops around normally, but as I'm 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 a 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. Yeah. You know, 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 for, you know. Much like your pig farm much like my pig farm yeah so um and it's 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 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 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 um especially since a lot of tools are like multi-use tools you know um respirators are great with wildfire smoke they're also you know potentially useful if like for example a pandemic were to hit right wouldn't it be awful if all this happened during a respiratory pandemic that would be fucked yeah um 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 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 want to 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 has 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. 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, gassed 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 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 displaced 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 um and so shit's gonna get worse but it's not but we can 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 look at the predator and, well, we can't, it's invisible because of the little invisibility field. But 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 yeah, no, I mean, you have like, 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 Corsi-Rosenthal filters, because like having a thing to do when like you wake up in the morning and it's orange. Yeah. Like it's, it's a nice way to allay the doom feeling, like give yourself a task. It increases agency. And when you, once you build that thing, you know, either you'll use it all up right away cause those filters don't last forever or you'll have something on hand the next time, uh,

this occurs. Yeah. Um, so yeah, I don't know. That's what I got. Margaret, you got anything else to get into?

Uh, I want to 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 um 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 it or whatever right yeah um 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 um 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. You know, hopefully this won't be bad for everyone for too long, you know, as we always say. for everyone for too long, you know, as we always say.

But like, look, guys, this isn't going to be the last time New York is the color of Mexico in a Breaking Bad, right? Like, this is going to happen again because the fires aren't going to stop until there's no more forests left. Then we'll all have gloriously clean air. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Well, and 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, uh, in a lot of parts of the country is literally just because of social norms have stopped having people mask and people don't want to 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 respirator and a smoke emergency because you look weird, it's better than getting sick. Yeah. Yeah. It's one of those things. All of us crazy people had a nice moment at the start of the pandemic when we looked over at our mountains of beans and storable foods and rifles and went, ah. It was all worthwhile. Yeah.

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 do this. We need to make preparedness like a part of our culture because shit is getting

more intense yeah so um you know handle handle your shit sorry this is happening to you you easties you coasties i did hear a good joke recently um where someone was like the visibility so bad that we new yorkers can 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 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 slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, Thanks for listening. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. 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. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions.

Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday.