It Could Happen Here - Losing Everything: How Communities Recover From Fire When Politicians Abandon Them

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

James follows up on last week's episode and talked to Miles Gray about what it is like to lose your home in a fire and how people can continue to help fire survivors. Sources: https://lacounty.gov/2026/08/04/county-of-los-angeles-fire-department-releases-the-investigative-reports-on-the-cause-of-the-eaton-fire/  https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-03-19/sce-decomissioned-power-line-eaton-fire-risk  https://apnews.com/general-news-ffcad08a8ef14fa88df8bacdd9e73883  https://calmatters.org/politics/2026/08/newsom-wildfire-utility-liability-package/  https://x.com/WildfireVics1st/status/2078175502523585021  https://clickstrategies.us/   Donation Links: Spokane Immigrants Rights Coalition: https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/donation-form/sirc-community-fund  Spectrum running the Rainbow Relief Fund: https://spectrumcenterspokane.app.neoncrm.com/forms/donate  Colville Fund: https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/donation-form/cedar-fund-wildfire-recovery-campaign See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pasto survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.com for details and to check availability.

Bell, connection is everything. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport and Sean Clements. We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook. Each week, we talk to someone in show business and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time, and no one gets mad at their publicists

for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, Adam Scott, Danny McBride, Ben Stillard, and a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast, Solita,

We share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinero, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility. Listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I survived nine months in captivity, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files.

Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. Call Zone Media. It's the first week of August, and it's hot in eastern Washington. The sun must be shining brightly, but we haven't really seen it here in days. A thick blanket of smoke lays across the sky,

as far as in Spokane, the Colville Tribes Reservation, and a Spokane tribal land, mingle their smoke with those further west. I'm in the back of a mini U-Haul trailer, hucking sacks of cattle, horse, and horse, and dog food into a pile and legs of totes of clothing and a generator. Each sack comes from the garage of a house that is itself far from safe from the fire that's burning just over the ridge behind us. But the still heat is giving us some hope that the wind won't pick up and the limited

fire resources and community efforts here will be able to get a good perimeter around the fire that makes a hilltop to glow at night and the sun look bright red. After we're done, we've fell up my rental car as well. It's a good-sized SUV and it'll haul a lot more supplies to keep more people animals comfortable. Hundreds of people in Spokane and dozens more across the tribal lands we're on have lost their homes. As we leave the stuffy confines of the U-Haul trailer and walk back to the garage we're loading up from, Augusta Wind calls us off and everyone winses. Wind moves fire, and fire is just over the ridge line behind us. People here have cut their own firelines around their home, a shingle-roofed wood-paneled house that firefighters have tagged with pink ribbon

to show it's not a structure they think they can save. The shingle roof determined its fate, apparently. Green ribbons seem to dawn the driveways of metal roof structures that we drove by. Firefighters have also left tanks of water and pumps around the houses, with hoses laid around the perimeter. The man were talking to in the garage says he knows how to use the hose. People in North America have lived with fire for generations, much longer than they've lived with European people like me.

I saw a fire truck at the fire camp that same night, that came from the Urock tribe. Engaging fire culturally, it said on the side. A gentle reminder that fire and people have gone hand in hand here since long before a guy named Washington had this part of someone else's land named after him. Fire is one of mankind's oldest tools. As James C. Scott argues in against a grain,

and countless indigenous cultures here will show us, fire doesn't just mean destruction. Fire has been used here to hunt, to help craft the landscape into one that better yields food and cultural resources like basket weaving materials. But this isn't a cultural burn, and the fire here is destructive right now. Still, thousands of years of living with fire,

and without much or anything in the way of state assistance, has prepared people. The house has a good fire perimeter, about the width of a single lane road taken down to the soil, the grass and foliage totally removed to deprive an advancing fire of the fuel it needs. Looking up the hillside, I can see how a firebreak in a similar location

save the house not long ago. The trees are all burned, but the shrubs and bushes have grown back since the last time this hillside caught fire a few years ago. Community members cut the fire lines here, as it did further north in Inchalim, and on the Spokane tribesland, where workers at the decommissioned uranium mine

used their heavy equipment to cut lines around homes and buildings. In Inchalim, someone had carved a thick firebreak around the community centre in church we're delivering supplies to with a D4 dozer. When the fire surged, towards the homes of residents of the town, which is one of the larger ones on the Colville Tribes Reservation. Despite the smoke in the air and the gusts of wind,

we crack a few jokes as we load up. This is an area people are supposed to have evacuated, but this is also their land, and they're not going without a fight. And that means people in the community who can help are helping, helping cut firelights, helping feed each other,

and helping folks who need to evacuate fuel up their cars so they can get somewhere safe. for thousands of years. Fire here has made things stronger. Spear points, canoes and communities. I want to bring you an episode on traditional ecological knowledge and fire, but I don't want me to be the one explaining them. So until I find just a right guest and finish reading this pile of books,

we might have to wait a little while. In the meantime, I want to take you back to the city of Spokane, where, as Dan reminded us last week, the state can seem so powerful and so present, and people are still having to face up to the things it couldn't protect them from. Then I want to take you to Los Angeles, where we can see the state having to choose a side between its constituents and giant corporations.

After the initial chaos and fear that came with the fires, Hadley also said that as evacuation stretched on more than a week, the burden of sharing homes, fields, barns and spaces certainly weighed on people. In these instances, it really helps people face with so much uncertainty, to have some more certainty. If you are hosting people, I think recognizing that in a time of uncertainty, it's really a gift and a blessing to offer clear boundaries to like have honest conversations

about what it looks like to host people to talk about what you can offer and what you can't as far as how long people can stay. I talk to a lot of folks who are like, oh, you know, I think I can stay at this friend's place till Friday. Maybe I'll come to yours on Saturday. And then on Saturday, you know, it's, oh, actually I found someone else for three days. I think that uncertainty of now you're hopping around again is really stressful. But if you can say, hey, I can offer three days and then I can help you find somewhere else. Just tell people that.

Helping also meant being okay with people taking what they needed and not everything that you had to offer. This is the time to inconvenience yourself for your friends and let it be okay if the thing that you offer is unhelpful. Like, okay, then don't drop off the clothes. like don't, you know, whatever. But I just had animals. We were a bit of a, we had to sort of like separate animals in different rooms because the children weren't getting along.

I hate to say I'm disappointed. That's not exactly the right word. Like, I'm really grateful that the people in my life all found places. And often I was able to connect folks to someone who maybe was able to be a better host than me because of, you know, space and animal and things like that. But I found myself in a state of like, Hey, it's okay, you can take this and sensing my own friends and community still being like,

e, I don't know, like, I just don't want to be a burden. And it's also totally okay if people are not thrilled by the idea of being my basement dweller in this moment. Like, it's so fine. At moments like this, it can be really easy to get stuck on, what can I give? And that's not a bad place to be. We will have a lot to offer, space, stuff, support, solidarity. But over time, people move from what can I give to what do people need? need and how can I help them get it? And you see sometimes that jump to individualism of like what can I do. And I think it morphed over a few days into, you know, a greater understanding of, you know,

a greater understanding of what can I uniquely offer or like what can we do together? Like, what's our proximity to where there's need? So I was able to get in touch with, you know, all sorts of national organizations that are nonprofits that exist, you know, are made up just of people who are disaster survivors or, you know, different environmental-related groups who were, you know, like, hey, like, we want to help move funds. We want to help, like, you know, hey, we can offer resources in this way and that. Like, that was so cool being able to move those resources to mutual aid groups that we knew we're going to be able to resource people flexibly and directly as fast as possible. And that, for me, was the place where I was encouraging, you know, when folks were like, oh, like, I want to do

something. I'm like, great. It's not always satisfying to give money. But unfortunately, like in the immediate moment, that's what gives people with the proximity to help the most flexibility to do that. In a time of crisis, people turned to networks and people they trusted. Those who they had been helping others was before or who had helped them in the past. As always happens in these situations, big national organizations took a while to spin up their response. And even when they did, it has holes in it. This is where community groups, especially those who had asked cash donations, could fill the gaps. In Inchalim, Dan and I drove some huge gas cans to a community building

where people could fill up enough gas to get to the nearest gas station. In previous disasters, I've used cash funds to buy everything from telly bears for little kids stuck in migrants' camps to food for people's pets. As the community was coming together, a mutual aid groups and NGOs were working together to make sure people had everything they need. Your taxpayer dollars were also hard at work, making sure that members of this community continued to be deported. And at a time where every institution is going, like, unity, community, like, people are getting time off work to go.

Like, everybody is pulling together. And the bus that takes folks from the localized field office to the Tacoma Detention Center left on time every day. And there were still abductions happening at our courthouse. They're targeting people who have court hearings regardless of status. So it's like, wow, you know, look, the trains are running. With the state being what it is right now, this was not the only fear that people had to deal with on top of the crisis they were facing. We have a queer community center that in the next couple days is going to be doing things like name change clinics and document recovery and clinics to help folks because it can be really daunting right now to have to go and get paperwork, you know, get all that paperwork reprinted and redone if you're a trans person. And hey, maybe this is an opportunity if you have to get it redone anyways to like get that name change.

you always wanted to do. And it's great. It's like I have this not like this falling in my stomach when I say, it's great because I'm like, it sucks that we have to be doing all of this. I'm so proud of my community. I'm so grateful that I get to see this and it makes me really happy. But I don't want to undersell the fact that there are people who, you know, are going to hear this and be like, yeah, well, fuck you. I lost everything. It sucks. We spoke last week about the National Guard too. I just want to clarify that I still haven't heard back from them. So they still clearly don't think that merits comment or is remarkable. enough for them to even acknowledge.

Let's take a break now and come back to hear from someone who lost everything. Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pastos survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit.

Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. On the new podcast Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinero, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people, and they were like, you smiled at us.

Not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your mind, first trip. I hope you listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook on the Big Money Players Network. Our show is extremely accessible to first-time listeners. Each week,

we talk to someone in show business, aka the biz, and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. got a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, not that great. Actually, can you help me shape this? How about we flip it on his head, right? How about we flip this script? What is the surprise woman?

Actually, you think is the straight man is actually the one who's acting weird. Adam Scott. This entire time, you've been expecting Adam Sandler to come to visit the show. I would never expect. I have, I would never set expectations for something like that to happen. It seems like you did. If the universe allows for something like that to happen, I'm open to it. I'm always going to accept.

You know, Danny McBride, fine. Yeah, it's all this fragile masculinity exuding. I could smell it walking down the hallway, to be honest with you. I was like, is that weed? Nope, it's fragile masculinity. Ben Stiller, no. Because a lot of times out of context, people don't get it or even know what to circle is. is. You know what I mean?

They're like, oh, what's a state. Everyone's so dumb. And fake. Right. Fake and also not interested or just like, oh, I've got my life. I don't care about your life. And a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Oh, and by the way, Will Ferrell told us personally he loves the show and he wants to be a guest

on every episode, but he's just so busy. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mungishit together and I'm back with a new. season of the podcast Skyline Drive. This time I'm diving into a rabbit hole of peptides, organoids, blood boys, blue zones, and brain replacement to try to understand what this longevity obsession is all about and what it really means to live forever for all of us. I learned about some rad science. I can make a brain for you and then we can test what draw is the best for your brain, as opposed to his brain.

Here are some hard truths. I would expect Indians to age faster, but I did not expect it to be almost a four to five year acceleration. And get myself into a world of trouble. I'd say probably start bones smashing. That doesn't work. To make it a lot more defined. They say it works.

I don't know. Listen to Skyline Drive, How to Live Forever on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In January of 2025, as we all stared down the barrel of a second Trump administration. Southern California had not experienced any rain for eight months. Our whole region was a tinderbox.

And in the first week of the month, the Santa Ana wings that bring hot and dry weather here were blowing from the Great Basin to the coast with particular force. These ferocious winds were blowing when a fire struck in the hills above Ethan Canyon wash. The winds and the updrafts were so strong that helicopters couldn't drop water on it when it first began. Soon, it was spreading faster than it could be contained and bearing down an altar deal. Among the families and his path was my fellow podcast host, Miles Gray.

I just want to flag up front that Miles and his family unfortunately lost their home, their garden, and almost all of their possessions. And if that's something you prefer not to hear, skip to the end of the show for the last minute or two. I called Miles after I got back from Spokane and asked him about the moment he realized that this was possible, that whole blocks of a major U.S. city could be lost to a fire that was completely out of control.

I remember I was bathing my son and he was playing in the bathtub and he's like at an age or like I can just sort of like step away for a second. And I went and I looked just sort of like out the window and I could just tell like I just heard all these helicopters. And I'm like that's odd. You know, Altadina isn't necessarily like in a flight path in the sense where like hearing that kind of traffic. is common or live near like a police station, you know, something where helicopters are taking off all the time. Soon, Miles saw smoke and he decided his family should leave for the night. But he didn't realize how bad this would get because it was by far from his first fire.

And in the past, they'd always been stopped. You know, like, I'm not a stranger to power outages and things like that. And also growing up in L.A. my entire life, like, I'm no stranger to hearing about, like, a wildfire encroaching on, like, a residential area. typically the pattern is devastation is avoided through the intervention of the fire department. First, the fire was moving away from his house. Like many of us, Miles' first thought was how he could help the people who were being evacuated and impacted. Then things changed.

By this point, Miles and his family had evacuated to a friend's house, but he was struggling to sleep, worried about the damage to his community and checking the apocalyptic images that were going around almost every smartphone in the city that night. So when the power went out and I saw the fire, my partner was like, hey, are we leaving, which we do? Like, we don't have any updates. And I said, look, the power is out. Our kid, you know, he was like, wasn't even two yet. Let's go to my moms who lives in a different part of L.A.

At least she has power. We can put him to bed. It's not too late. It's not going to mess up his schedule. I can just take my recording equipment and I can just record remotely, which is oddly enough. Like, one of the few things I brought with me was my fucking podcasting, Mike. And I'm still to this day, I'm like, what a,

tortured existence. Like in the midst of evacuating my home that will eventually burn down. I'm like, I need my microphone in order to do my podcasting. But anyway, we go to my mom's. My mom's power is also out. So then I went to my best friend's house who lived like five minutes from there. She still had her power. And then we just slept at her house that whole night.

We get like maybe three hours of sleep. I wake up again like five in the morning. Just turn on the news. At that point, it's now moved completely west and has moved a significant amount west. there isn't enough information to know where exactly the fire is. Like there were a lot of like sort of open source maps that people were contributing to. But it's hard to get really specific. Like you didn't know what exactly was going.

And we had no scale of like the devastation. So then basically at a certain point, there was a live news broadcast from the block behind my house that was fully engulfed in flames. And that's when you're like, oh, fuck. If that's on fire and it's moving, we are literally the next thing to burn. Even as the fire moved closer to his neighborhood, Miles' neighbors who had stayed tried to fight it as hard as they could.

To hear from my neighbors, like, they felt so guilt-ridden that they couldn't save my house. And I felt such a tremendous debt of gratitude to them for even trying. Like, it's just unbelievable. I mean, like, the conditions were, it was like hell on earth. They were both texting me like, we're so sorry, man, we really tried. It's like, oh, man, I'm just so sorry. Like, I really did everything I could.

And I was like, please, honestly, stop apologizing. Like, I can't even believe you guys risked your well-being to do that. We have like a group chat with our neighbors and the wives of my neighbors were saying, like, we've tried to get them to leave. They're still there. They're not leaving. They're not leaving. They need to leave. And then that's when they would chime in.

Like, we're trying to put the fire out. Then, like, the next text, we're like, we're so sorry. We're so sorry. We're so sorry. Yeah. Get fucking goosebumps just like talking about it. Miles spoke to me about how he still carries some guilt for how hard his neighbors fought and the risks they took. But that was understandably one of many feelings that would sweep over him in the wake of the loss of his home.

You know, like, I tried to find a very zen outcome for myself, losing every physical. object that I owned. The instruments that I spent years practicing on to learn an instrument, the hard drives of video projects, music compositions, things that were truly like the physical record of my creative existence leaving is very, it's a crazy exercise to go through and to wonder if that even matters. You know, like the thing you think matters, owning this stuff, having these things you didn't really even, these projects I never worked on. But somehow they gave me the feeling that I would work on them or something, those being gone. What does that mean? And at first, honestly, like, I tried to find just a sense of peace. I mean, like, you know, it's

kind of liberating that I don't have any stuff. It's cliche to say that it wasn't the things he lost that Miles missed the most. But in this instance, I think is also true. Having worked so hard to put down roots in a community they wanted their kid to grow up in, Miles and his partner lost all that hard work and the sense of control and agency they had over their future. Like, I don't have shit anymore. Granted, a lot of those things were very sentimental, but like, I learned very quickly. I'm safe. I'm healthy.

These things are merely just objects. And that one, I'm sure they'll figure out quickly. The thing that was the most devastating was the ability to forecast what my future was going to be. Because when you live in a place and you're raising a family, you lose. live in a place with intent. Like, I intended to live in Altadina. I chose Altadina for a reason to live there. The community, the future that I saw from my family, that's all part of the calculus. And when your entire community is just devastated like that and you were displaced and it's destroyed, you completely lose sense of your presumed future. And that is probably one of the

most disorienting feelings about being displaced that I really underrated. You grieve. what you thought your future was going to be. And now all of that is gone and you have to re-imagined what that's going to be. And so I would say to people who've recently lost their homes, know that that is normal. Know that it is normal to walk around like a zombie where you feel like nothing matters anymore.

Like you don't know what's going. You don't know up from down. Because your whole sense of forward momentum has been blunted by this. I will say that it will come back. I was in a support group with other people who lost their homes. Every day, we were all just saying the same thing

and thought we were fucked up. We were like, I don't even know, like I don't even give a fuck about anything right now. Aside from the emotional trauma, this is also a huge practical and financial burden. Altadina, where Miles and his family lived, it's a generational black neighborhood

were many families who paid off their homes long ago. And so they didn't have to have the insurance that comes with a mortgage. For them, things will be even harder. Meanwhile, for Miles and his family, the work of rebuilding is also delayed. They have to wait for the outcome of a lawsuit. Maybe we need to slow down on this rebuild, because we don't even know where we're going to get them to do it. Just to start, like, it's a good idea.

You know, like we're obviously part of like this mashed tort lawsuit against SoCal Edison. A lot of our future is tied into what that looks like, like how we're made whole because of the negligence of this utility company. So yeah, right now we've kind of prioritized that. On top of that, our fellow podcast host and Sonic the Hedgehog lookal like Gavin Newsom is doing what he does best and screwing over Californians to help out a giant corporation. And then to add to it, like, you know,

the governor, Newsom is now like having these like hushed meetings with the lobbyists of the utility companies to potentially introduce new legislation that would like cap the penalties that a utility company can pay for pain and suffering due to their negligence after a wildfire. And people died. 19 people died.

You know, and this is so different than the palisades. You know, the palisades is also tragic people lost their homes. There's something about Altadena, which was a historically black community. And the redlining that was happening in Pasadena immediately next door meant like this was sort of this byproduct of this, like, racist legacy of this part of the city. And then to have that be completely just wiped out, It's such a different kind of loss for the texture and feeling of that part of Los Angeles. Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies?

Will the pasto survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month, Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements.

We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook on the Big Money Players Network. Our show is extremely accessible to first-time listeners. Each week, we talk to someone in show business, aka the biz, and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time, and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, not that great. Actually, can you help me shape this? How about we flip it on his head, right? How about we flip this script?

What is the surprise woman? Actually, you think is the straight man is actually the one who's acting weird. Adam Scott. This entire time, you've been expecting Adam Sandler to come to visit the show. I would never let go of that. I have, I would never set expectations for something like that to happen. If the universe allows for something like that to happen, I'm open to it. I'm always going to accept.

You know, Danny McBride, fine. Yeah, it's all this fragile masculinity exuding. I could smell it walking down the hallway, to be honest with you. I was like, I was like, is that weed? Nope, it's fragile masculinity. Ben Stiller, no. Because a lot of times out of context, people don't get it or even know what a circle is. is. You know what I mean?

They're like, oh, what's just a state? Everyone's so dumb. And fake. Right, fake and also not interested or just like, oh, I've got my life. I don't care about your life. And a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Oh, and by the way, Will Ferrell told us personally he loves the show and he wants to be a guest on every episode, but he's just so busy.

Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast, Solita, we. share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinero, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people and they were like, you smiled at us,

Not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Munga Shat Together and I'm back with a new season of the podcast. Skyline Drive. This time I'm diving into a rabbit hole of peptides, organoids, blood boys, blue zones, and brain replacement to try to understand what this longevity obsession is all about, and what it really means to live forever, for all of us. I learned about some rad science. I can make a brain for you, and then we can test what draw is the best for your brain, as opposed to his brain. Here are some hard truths.

I would expect Indians to age faster, but I did not expect it to be almost a four to five year acceleration. And get myself into a world of trouble. I'd say probably start bones smashing. That doesn't work. To make it look more defined. They say it works. I don't know.

Listen to Skyline Drive, How to Live Forever on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And I guess this is where we get to this episode, It's Dilid. Because it turns out that power lines in the area that fire struck were long overdue for maintenance, and the LA Times attained documents from Socal-Ellicent filings with the state, listing them as, quote, an ignition risk.

Miles Home burned in a fire caused by the negligence of her major utility. As LA County Fire Department concluded in an investigation released on the 4th of August this year, fire investigators, using the NWCG investigative methodology, they said, found that the area of the Eton Fire origin was on the dry receptive fuel bed below the SCE transmission towers on the spur ridge above the Eton wash. All of this was documented in their press release. Fuel mitigation, according to the LA Times, was part of the work that SoCal Edison didn't do. As his time as our governor draws to a close, Gavin Newsom is using his office to try and limit the amount utilities have to pay the people whose homes they destroyed. In a rush through bill that will skip

much of the public debate something like this deserves. Quote, status quo is not going to work, Newsom said at a press conference. Quote, it's not going to work for victims who consistently are last in line, and that's at the core of this reform. Newsom wants to pass more of the liability to insurers, but the full extent of his plan is not available yet. Newsom says this measure would reduce rates, but here in Southern California we already pay extortionate rates to power companies who are seeking to offset the costs of climate change.

something they contributed to by making rape payers pay for wildfire damage. Indeed, in 2018, when Newsom first entered office, the Paradise Fire destroyed thousands of homes. This fire was started by Pacific Gas and Electricity, who filed for bankruptcy shortly after in 2019. The state set up a wildfire fund after this, paid both by rape payers and shareholders,

but the LA fires were likely clear out that fund. I could have gone for a statement here from wildlife victims first, the Utilities AstroTurf campaign for Newsom's proposed legislation package. But seeing as Wildfire Victims First just happens to share the same PR firm, Click Strategies, as Gavin Newsom, and a campaign against rent control and Uber, I decided not to bother. Newsom is looking at running for the presidency. A part of what that requires is massive donations. Lining up alongside capital and gaslighting fire survivors is a very positive indication.

for major donors, the sort he will be courting if he wanted to take his podcast to the White House. I want to point out here that this isn't a Gavin Newsom-Soccar-Edison problem. This is a problem that is inherent to our political system and the way that it works right now. It's reasonable to expect that in 2018, there will be a big swing towards the Democrats in the midterms. And if things keep going this way, there might be a big swing to them in the next presidential election as well. Who knows? I think that what we are seeing here is Newsom signaling to capital. Don't worry, we're not going that far left. Don't worry, I will still line up with you, even if it means ignoring people who literally lost everything. That is the nature of our political

system right now. We have a choice between the blue team and the red team. And if the blue team or the red team has to choose between you and giant corporations, then not choosing you. Instead of asking Usen's PR guy, I ask Miles how he feels about to fire now and if he feels safe or settled a year and a half down the line. Whenever I hear helicopters

and even now, like when I hear them, I'm like, I'm looking outside, I'm like looking at Twitter, I'm checking like the Firewatch app, like I'm fucking everything. So if anything, it's just really brought into vivid focus how vulnerable we are

and how we're just, we're just on the doorstep of disaster constantly. So I don't know if that's given me a deeper appreciation for the planet, more existential dread about the planet, but at least it's made me be realistic, I think. If you'd like to help, here's Hadley explaining how right now, if you can, cash is the most helpful thing to send.

And if you scroll down in your podcast app, you'll find a bunch of links telling you exactly where to send it. Almost every nonprofit in Spokane that helps people directly is doing something right now to support fire relief. So if you, you know, have already been really concerned about the way that ICE is devastating our communities, you know, donating to the Spokane Immigrants Rights Coalition will make sure that immigrants who have been double impacted now by the fires will have a mutual aid support that helps with things like rental assistance, document recovery. we unfortunately can't do legal assistance, but a lot of that other mutual aid stuff. You know, similarly if you're really concerned about how trans people will feel as they're trying to navigate services and insurance brokers and all the things that are coming up next, you could donate to the Rainbow Relief Fund, which Spectrum Center is organizing.

And then I also just think that if there was a take away, yes, I want money. Give us money, please. One thing Miles said to me after we finished recording, is that in the months after the fire, everyone from all the parts of his life reached out to help. And at first he didn't know what he needed or what he wanted, but he told them they all had a special way they fitted into his life, and to lean into that in helping. It meant that his friends he watched football with helped replace some of his collection of old jerseys.

A friend he grew up with made photo albums of his childhood to replace the ones that burned. Someone else he'd worked in a bar with dropped off bar supplies and booze, because that's what they could do. I think we can extend this a little further. As I said up top, a few weeks before you heard this, I was on the Colville Tribesland, loading animal food and clothing into a U-Haul for distribution on the Spokane Tribes Reservation. I was there for work, but the products and services that support this show had, probably without knowing, paid for a full tank of gas and a rental car.

So I decided to use it usefully. On the Colville Tribes Reservation, I saw forestry workers who knew how to operate heavy machinery, cutting fire line, where elders and kids evacuated. On the day, I drove around loading up supplies, a sur indigenous woman from an NGO called River Warriors, which exists to help people in tribal communities connect with rivers via canoe journeys, spraying interaction, and used their networks and organizing abilities to help their communities. The government wasn't going to put gas in people's tanks,

even if it told them they had to leave. So the women from River Warriors stood at a gas station all last afternoon filling up people's tanks. That's why Dan and I drove some gas cans to a town where people had been evacuated, so they could put enough gas in their tanks to get. to that gas station. People in that town organized supplies and cooked meals at a community building, so everyone had a place to come and get what they needed. I was particularly struck by a big sign in insulin that said free lunch, because there is such a thing as a free lunch, despite what the truism

might have you believe. The way we get a free lunch for ourselves, of course, is by making a world where no one's hungry, which probably means making lunch with someone else first. We can do the same with cutting fire lines, and the same with almost every other aspect of our world where the state fails us. My point here is that we all have places where our light shines are brightest and places where we need someone else to light the way. That's okay. None of us is an island. We're stronger together and better will we let everyone's light shine where it's brightest and work together to make sure nobody gets left in the dark. That's what community means, taking care of each other. I hope you enjoyed our podcast this week. I just want to remind you that this is a collective effort and although my name is on the

podcast header, a lot of people help make this possible. And this week, I want to thank my friend Stephen Rochester, who wrote and recorded the intro music in my living room, and Eva, who edited it into the music you're hearing. I hope as you're listening to this, you'll reach out. You can email us at Natural CausesPod at proton.me. It Could Happen Here is a production of Coolzone Media. For more podcasts from Coolzone Media,

visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources where it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman.

I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinero and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to run. reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Listen to Solita on the Iheart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport and Sean Clements. We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook. Each week, we talk to someone in show business and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time, and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, Adam Scott, Danny McBride, Ben Stiller, and a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I survived nine months in captivity, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive

what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make. it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse.

Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plan. of overthought opinions. Yeah, I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. Listen to pro society on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.