Nuanced. - 47. Tyler Olsen: BC Floods, Journalism & the Fraser Valley Current

Episode Date: March 17, 2022

Tyler Olsen is a father, journalist, reporter, and managing editor of the Fraser Valley Current.Tyler grew up in Vernon, graduated with a bachelor of journalism from Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, and then went to work for his hometown paper. In 2010, he moved to the Fraser Valley to start working at the now-defunct Chilliwack Times, and began reporting for the Abbotsford News in 2014. Over the last decade Tyler has covered crime, courts, politics, municipal affairs, health care and a range of other issues. He has been nominated five times for the Jack Webster Award for Community Reporting, winning twice. Having identified a local need for a journalism outlet that prioritizes quality and depth, Tyler launched the Current in March.Subscribe to the Fraser Valley Current: https://fvcurrent.com/Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/zw19Y_PWA-ASend us a textSupport the shownuancedmedia.ca

Tyler, thank you so much for being willing to take the time. I have been really eager to record this one because I think journalists like yourself play an important role in informing the public and making sure that we have a healthy democracy when it comes to decision-making, when it comes to natural disasters. But would you be able to tell listeners a little bit about yourself? Yeah, so I grew up in Vernon, B.C. I went to school there and lived there until I graduated high school, and then I spent two years at the local university college there

and then completed a Bachelor of Journalism degree at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops. After that, I went back to Vernon, where I started working the local community newspaper called the Vernon Morning Star there. Learned a lot there. when that was done or after a couple years I left with my then-girlfriend now wife and we went traveling for a year and a bit returned to BC around 2009 and then that was just after the financial crisis so it was tricky getting a job and it was a very different time to be looking for a job as a journalist than then now especially just personally but um

Eventually, I was able to thankfully land a job at the Chilwack Times here in Chilwack and had a great few years with a great team there. And eventually that paper was bought by, well, it was bought by a couple of different companies, but eventually bought by Black Press. And I was moved to the Abbotsford News. Chilwock Times was closed soon thereafter. And I was a reporter of Abbotscord News until the end of 2020, at which time I left and I have just spent the last year in a little bit, helping create the Fraser Valley Current, which is a new news site news provider, news something here in the in the Fraser Valley. And we produce a newsletter that goes out every weekday morning along with a longer in-depth contextual and just hopefully generally helpful journalism.

That's amazing. And I'd like to start, I think, with what took place with the floods because I feel like a lot of people became aware of the Fraser Valley current. It became a primary news source for many people living in the Fraser Valley. And I think it also sheds light on how important local journalism is when events like this take place in terms of informing citizens and allowing people to prepare. I had the opportunity to see some of the amazing feedback you received during that period. And people were saying we evacuated earlier as a consequence of the information we were getting from the Fraser Valley Current and perhaps other news sources. But could you walk us through what took place? Because I think it's important that we understand kind of the lineage of what took place.

and your involvement, because it sounds like there was a lot of work that went into reporting what was taking place each day. So could you start us, perhaps, from the beginning, those first few days of what was going on? Yeah, I think one of the things to keep in mind is that, and just in terms of both how we produced our journalism during that time, and just in general about that event, is that we, like, we didn't see the water coming over the border. didn't see the water coming border, I didn't, um, wasn't spending like particularly a lot. And when I say a lot, I mean, I wasn't, I didn't have any specific way to know this. A lot of it comes down to the fact that this event is something that, um, had happened before

just on a different scale, um, and had been talked about quite extensive, relatively extensively, occasionally, let's say, in the last five or six years, within the city of Abbotsford and specifically was addressed by their city hall occasionally. And they were working on addressing it to their credit. They didn't get to it in time because the rivers fled on their own schedule, I think. but so as a reporter in Abbotsford I was just as part of my day-to-day job I had been watching those council medians and looking at city documents and as they were considering the threat from the nooksack and as I remember their fire chief telling counsel at one point that it was the thing that kept him up at night it's something that interested me but also just as a reporter

it was something that I could report it on. And so one of the things in journalism is that a lot of the work is kind of accumulative and it comes through just doing your job repeatedly and then you learn something. Just as you, as a podcaster, you don't learn how to shape a podcast new every time you, every time you start you build on that knowledge and same thing as a journalist we build on that knowledge not only our skills but the topics we're talking about um and so i i had known quite a bit about that area before not as much as some for sure um but at least enough to be able to comment and see the seriousness of it when we saw a heavy rain event and um yeah so similarly

Similarly, you had the people in Washington State there in Summas, Washington, which had been flooded in 2020 C beforehand and have their knowledge, suggest that something bad was coming. So on Saturday, they had been sandbagging them. So I think on Sunday, so again, they saw it coming before I did for sure, and before a lot of others did, they had put a call within the community to start sandbagging in case they would, needed to sandbag because the potential flood from the Nuxak River. So that was the first tip-off on Sunday when that was the first tip-off after the highway started getting closed down because when the highways started getting closed down, that suggested the seriousness of this event as somebody who's generally interested in news and as somebody who had a family member who couldn't travel because of those or could travel, but

in the opposite direction they wished to travel because of those highway closures I had come aware that this is something as many people had done this is something that was happening and was particularly serious and so having seen the SUMS folks concerned that was kind of the tip off that something larger would was possible and then essentially from there it just started first on Twitter and then as it became evident that it's something that really was a threat through our website too, reminding people both telling people about what happened in regards to the landslides and the floods and mentioning the fact that there was this other threat across the border, which we in Canada

rarely thought about. Most people probably don't know about or didn't know about the Nuxak River and its threat to Canadians. And so that's something as a journalist it's something that I feel like sometimes reporters get, we can be a little bit, we have to tell people what other people are telling us. We have to, we, we, we can be using our judgment and our knowledge ourselves to be informing people. We don't always have to wait for authorities to tell people that say, Highway 1 might be closed between Chilliwack and Abbotsford. We can that ourselves because even if the government or the various bodies in charge are hesitant to suggest that that people might want to take caution which historically and I

think this thankfully has changed during the floods but historically there's been a large they've been very adverse to wanting to create any communication that might create some anxiety for people that doesn't eventually pay off essentially that isn't essentially justifiable in the rear view and you can't really do that when you're talking about emergencies because you never know for sure whether a disaster is going to come and one the things we saw at the entering the second stage of flooding is that they were a lot more proactive about saying yes these these storms

could bring a lot of water, they could flood, they could do this, they could do that. And that's to their credit that they've adjusted that philosophy. But you see it not just in emergency preparedness, but in a whole bunch of different fields where there's a lot of hesitancy and varies structurally for them to put out certain communications. And we as independent reporters and people who have our own knowledge can say when we're confident, when we know enough, and when the facts line up

and you can put A plus B plus C, we can say, okay, actually this is something that people should be know about, that some people should care about and be at least aware of, if not, actively preparing. And in general,

we have historically I think probably, certainly. And it's kind of inevitable, just we don't consider the risk of natural disasters and emergencies until they're on us, because there's a lot of different things that can befall us, and it's, you can be just waiting forever, and it never comes, thankfully. And when it does come, it can be a shock, and it can be something that you can look back in hindsight and say, we should have done this

and should have done that. Part of it's just human nature, I think. A part of it's also just being aware and realizing there are certain things you can do to make things easier in the future than after. I'm as guilty as anybody about not doing certain things in terms of emergency preparedness. I know if we have an emergency preparedness kit at home, I think we do, but I don't quite, it's going to need some update probably. So there's a lot of human nature there that you're trying to overcome, and the blame is, I think, a little bit, something that I'm not too interested in allocating, but it's something that the facts and the knowledge need to be continually stressed. Yeah, a good example, I guess, is the earthquakes. We're always

worried about earthquakes coming, and we don't, we're always kind of updating people and doing drills, but it hasn't come, and it's always in the back of people's minds that we're due. That's something I commonly hear, but we haven't seen it yet. And so to the government's credit and to other people's credit, we warn, but we don't know if it's going to happen. But what did it mean to you as a journalist to have people react so positively to your willingness to speak up and say, hey, prepare, because I saw people say, I evacuated as a consequence of reading this article. Did that mean something positive to you as a journalist? Like, I've made a positive impact here? Yeah, of course. When, and that's...

one of the, sorry, it's immensely gratifying. That's why somebody chooses to become a reporter is because you believe that the facts and your job has, makes some difference, even if it's incremental in people's lives and it advances and it's meaningful. The job is, I'm not as pessimistic as some about various pay things, but you're not. not going into it to make large numbers of money or large amounts of money. You're going into it because you can make a living doing something that you see as meaningful as lots of people doing their various other jobs. And so to have that feedback. And we get great feedback with the current. And it's one of the benefits, I think, of going straight to people's email inboxes

that people can feel very open about replying directly to it. And it's one of the, what's been one of the, I've been surprised at just how much of it has come through and how, and it is really invigorating and it keeps you going and it makes you grateful that there are people out there who are willing to spend their time on what you're producing and you feel good about helping them in just the same way that anybody who has a job in any field feels good when their job leads somebody else to have a good experience, whatever it is. That's fantastic. What were those early days like?

So you did the reporting of this is a risk that it's coming. Did you have conversations with, I know you have a coworker, Grace Kennedy. Did you guys go through and say, okay, like this looks like it's going to be serious. We're going to be working long days. This is going to be like a lot of information gathering. What were those initial days like of trying to prepare for this or say maybe our regular routines are kind of gone right now? because we're going to try and get information out as best we can.

So the rain and the land site started on the Sunday. And on the Sunday, I was prepared. I was preparing to welcome another reporter on the Monday. Jothy Graywall was starting with us on Monday. And so on Sunday I just had been thinking about that and excited to welcome a new person in the team and all the things that that brings with it and get to work with Trilothy.

And then the landslide started, and so late Sunday, I believe I wrote a story for our website and then included that in the newsletter, so that was a little bit of work. And then from there, it's just, and this is what generally happens when new things happen in journalism. It's just there's not much time to plan, especially when it's something that large.

you're just trying to create and react to the events that are happening because that's kind of the job. So on the Monday we would have been monitoring again what's happening, evolving that, placing that in the context of kind of what I already knew and what we already knew and figuring out what story we were going to produce because our main day today is just to produce one story that we hope is very good and that is provide something new and provides new information to people. And so that's the day-to-day routine. And I believe one of the things is on the Monday, I think, I know we had a story running from Grace about the Tashmi intern and just

east of hope. And it was one of the one of, I think, the best pieces we'd produce. It was, Grace has gone out to Tashmi, we've done research, and it was, I think, one of the, it remained one of the best pieces that we've published. And we were excited for that to come out, and then the slides hit, and we very quickly had to kind of just, it was, had already been published, but normally we'd spend time on promoting it and that type of thing. But we turned mostly just to figure out what had happened, where landslides were coming down, what the traffic situation was. That was mainly aegacy and hope situation. And then just reacting to that, trying to cover some news conferences. And Jothi was a great help on those, especially in the early days.

And she got thrown into the fire, like starting a job. And then suddenly the building's burning down around you. And she just started grabbing water and started throwing water in places, which was immensely helpful. And she, coming from Langley Advanced Times, she knew how to do that and she could react. So she was immensely helpful. Grace, as always, is kind of helps keep everything together in various ways, both seen and unseen. And so on money, we basically just covered what have happened. And then by Tuesday, or by Monday, we were watching the highway.

And I was especially watching the highway and the nooksack close. And it was pretty clear that there was water coming across the border. And my mind turned to what had happened in 1990 when the highway was closed down because of a noxack-related flood. And so I spent some time writing about that and that those threats and kind of incorporating in some of the, the documents from the city of Abbotsford that had been prepared in case of the Nooksack flood and just kind of did our jobs that day and covered it on a more breaking news basis. And then on the Tuesday, I believe, we woke up and Tuesday was the big day where things that obviously happened.

The highway had been closed down the previous night at 5 p.m. without really any warning from authorities, even though we had kind of suggested that it might happen. And so on the Tuesday, Grace and I, we started, we usually meet around 9.15 and we said, I suggested that we do a story on kind of how the Nooksack River relates to the geography of the region and especially the draining of Sumas Lake, which occurred 100 years ago, potentially this year, but a century ago. And people didn't, lots of people knew that a lake had been there, and a lot of people didn't know a lake had been there. But because a lake had been there, it related to the geography of the region and created some significant particular threats regarding the Noxak River that people didn't realize and created additional risk in the flood that was occurring. Because Sumas Prairie, as we did in the future story, and if I would have done it, again, I would have. have roped it all into one is kind of split in two by a dyke and that dyke um was and it hadn't

breached yet but it was in the it was the water was starting to come up probably Tuesday morning towards it and so the Tuesday was really the day in which uh most things took place and I could continue walking you through please kind of that because uh yeah so so the first thing in the morning I said we should said to grace we should do a story on Seumas Lake and how it relates to Noxack blog and maybe you can take one part of it, Grace, and I can take another.

And there's been a lot of research done on on Seumass Lake to a lot of people's credit. But one recent book, Chet was called How We Lost the Lake, and I believe I got that name right, by Chad Reimran. And so I had read it and wrote about it two or three years ago and it talked about the lake as a just the lake that

had been there in its place in the culture of the region and in the history of the region and it was it's a really fascinating book it's been now lots of people have fortunately come across it as they've hopefully come across the various other writings on two mouse lake but luckily that grace that book was already on grace's desk at the time And so, I said, Grace, can you kind of talk about, write a little bit about the history of the lake? I'll talk about the geography of the region that essentially created the lake in the first place and refills it every now and then. Now, and together we kind of just mush those pieces together in something I think that held up. And then about two o'clock, three o'clock, somewhere on two or three, the city of, or the city of Abbotsford would have

of how the press conference, I think, probably early afternoon. Shortly after that, the mayor went up in a helicopter to survey the region. And then shortly after he got out of that helicopter, I spoke to him. And I remember that talk because he was clearly, he saw the water swamping over the dike for a large, large portion, suggested that the dike could fall within an hour or so. And I remember just we have an internal chat and I just wrote, it's bad as I was talking to him just to the, to Joe, to thee and Grace, because it was clear that this flood, which was already clearly very bad in atmosphere and closed down the highway, which is a key artery between, for lots of people, lots of people were suddenly stuck in one commuter or the other. And suddenly this was going to get worse, potentially. And then, of course, the dike broke and the water started to flood into Sumas Prairie,

which then created the water, led the water to rise there. And then later that evening, the Abbotsford put out its release warning people that there could be catastrophic damage because it expected Charlottown pump station to have to close and which would leave the prairie underwater for, weeks if not months so um so when that came out around seven we had to go back to the story and revise it and then um but then we published it the next morning and it's probably the the most red thing i've ever produced it's uh it was a longer story but um i think it put in to context kind of the the moment that we were in and the reason we got there without like I think one large issue with any disaster coverage is trying to both contextualize it for the larger public

and talk about the reasons and factors that could go into a disaster without minimizing the threat and the kind of the human level of costs to that that poses to real people in the moment. And that's always something that you can probably do better. I think in the moment then it was useful because it's just useful in showing like what could happen. That was the point of the story. It wasn't really to show why this had happened because it hadn't happened yet really when we'd started writing it.

But to talk about what could happen, what were the factors causing this and why a river from the United States that normally flows into the Pacific Ocean near Bellingham was suddenly flooding towards flooding and then flowing into the Fraser River. Wow, that's a lot to take in. So when you're developing these stories and trying to communicate it, what steps are you taking to try and make sure

that it's coming across? Do you guys go through readings like when you're putting a piece like that out? I imagine that there's probably a sense of pressure when you're putting a piece like that out of like, okay, like I'm hitting the release button or it's going out tomorrow morning. What process did you have during those moments to kind of go through

and make sure that you were happy with the piece? Yeah, so that's kind of one of the big things we are trying to do at the current is produce, and frankly, we were forced to get away from this during the flood, but produce stories that take longer, produce fewer stories, but with more time on each story. because journalism, I kind of think of it, is a resource problem, right? You can either produce a lot of stories and information and a lot of news, or you can spend more of that time on producing less of it.

And there's a variety of incentives that can tend to push news organizations now towards creating more with less time per story, which has, and there's just financial incentives in terms of like just where, you're getting advertising revenue from how you're how you're kind of making something that's sustainable and it's there's nothing nefarious about it's just a matter of also figuring out how many reporters there are in any town and having the obligation to really cover x y and z with relatively few reporters but one of the things we're trying to do with current and it's one thing that

works in part because there are already reporters in the Fraser Valley doing some of the work that needs to be done too. So we think of ourselves as complimentary in that I think we want to be adding extra contextual information. And so getting back to your question is that we're trying to, we try to make each story go through. It'll go through at least one, maybe two, maybe three even edits, which are just not just proofing the story to make sure that all, ideally, it's never perfect, that all the eyes are in the right places and the T's are in the right places, but that the edits are like just to make sure the structure is right. We're not missing major facts. We don't have facts wrong. There's not a gap in the story. And so it's just

a matter of revising and having other eyes on a story. So if I'm writing a story, Grace will go through it and edit it extensively, and likewise, and I edit all the, all Grace and Dorothy's stories. And we talk about what works just stylistically writing wise, talk about what works as a piece of journalism. What if, is something clear enough, are people going to, because we can have an understanding of something as a writer that doesn't come off to, to, a reader who might not um hasn't been immersed this is the first time they're reading about it so we have to make sure especially with technical complex science and data stories that were conveying those in a way that really um lets people in on kind of what a number means or what

like a description of a of a dyke is or kind of puts it in a human context so all that said like we we yes we go through the story a couple of times um and then ideally go through it, write it again, or revise it and it goes through another edit. And at some point, it's just a matter of saying, okay, the story is good. We're happy with it. We're confident in it. We have other stories that we could run if we weren't happy with it, but we're happy with this one. And that it creates something that provides information to people, that's going to be useful,

that it provides that context and information. And then it's just a matter of putting out there. It's just kind of what a reporter does in terms of at some point, you have to be confident enough in what you've done to say, okay, here's something that people can read and hopefully draw some value from. Interesting. How do you go about choosing in those early days who to highlight?

Because you can think perhaps focusing on what politicians are saying or what government people are saying, but you could also go to the farmers, you could go to different communities. How do you go about in those days selecting which voices need to be elevated and heard from in terms of what's most important for people to know about?

Right, and with something like the flooding, it's a matter of realizing what's already been done. And one of the things that we don't want to be doing is doubling up on what people can find elsewhere, doubling up on what other reporters have done. And lots of reporters we're doing, really amazing coverage on the human element of the floods and what it was impacting local people on the ground.

And it was kind of a decision we made just from the resource point of view and from a what we can provide extra value is that we could look at those stories in a way. But there are so many people doing so much great journalism on that. The great thing about our newsletters that we can just say, instead of creating that information ourselves, we can tell our readers, okay, here's a great story over here on the Vancouver Suns website. Here's the link to get to that story. Go read that. They've done the story on, I don't have one on. That comes to mind that. I know there, I believe the CBC, and I know Vicky at Abbotsford News spoke to a saffron farmer on summa's prayer and so we don't need to speak to that same farmer again

somebody else he's already spent his time with those reporters he's busy um we can send our readers towards those stories and um let them learn about that and we can spend our time ourselves creating other valuable information for people and relaying um information so we spent our time during the floods both on kind of ideally giving people a pretty concise rundown of what was happening where and then trying to break that into and then trying to go deeper on certain contextual topics that we had a background knowledge of or a specific knowledge of that would be useful. So Grace did a good story on the impact on dairy farmers and she had contacts in the dairy industry because she used to be the editor of the Agassi Harrison Observer.

Yes, I blank there for a second. She's watching this. She'll get very mad at that. But so she, and she had done, she's very interested in all things, cows and dairy farming. And so she had that knowledge already baked into her that she could go forward and both go and explore what this meant for her. or what this meant for the region, while using her knowledge already to kind of expedite that process and make it so that a story that so that we can get the story out fairly quickly so it's useful. Similarly, I'm quite familiar with all the Saviabetsford Preparatory documents

and with provincial floodplain mapping and Dike assessments. And so we could write about those things. And again, bringing maybe new voices in or old voices on this new topic on those stories while using the kind of just the background knowledge that we had to ensure both that the story kind of reflects kind of the breadth of ideally knowledge about this topic. And just again, because journalism is a resource game where you want to create things and you have to make choices about how. much time you're going to spend on it. It makes it time efficient to spend your time reporting on something that you have that knowledge of preexisting. One of the things I really admire journalists like yourself, I think that it's an incredibly

important role that I do think people underestimate sometimes the impact it can have. But the other thing people forget about because I think there's a challenge with people thinking, well, you wrote 250 words. So I could write 250 words on a topic. Like they don't appreciate the, I think, the strategies that go into bringing in voices, but they also don't realize the contacts. And so when you were talking about the Nooksack Flood, sorry, the Noxack River, you were talking about people you knew that you had spoken to previously on the topic and people who had researched the river and how it worked,

and you were bringing those voices in. Can you tell us more about the river and some of the people you were speaking to who were, it sounds like experts in the field, if I recall correctly. Yeah, the Noxak one is particularly unique because I, when we started the current, I was thinking, okay, we should, or we talked about it, and what exactly are we going to do and how I'm going to spend my time? The current space were affiliated with Capital Daily and the Burnaby Beacon and part of overstory media group, which is a new company that's trying to find these new models

based around newsletters to create a new model for journalism. And ideally focused on quality content over quantity content and creating publications that are going to speak to that and create and have that as kind of like the driving philosophy and that itself being a value. But so at the start of this, I had been interested in a while about Mount Baker and what would happen if Mount Baker exploded, which is a real possibility, but it's also a thought exercise because it's very unlikely Mount Baker will explode during our lifetimes. But it's a possibility. So again, again, you need to be, you should be prepared for them for every disaster, but there are things you prepare for more. and others. But a big part of Mount Baker, of course, is that the Nooksack River drains from its

flanks, and it flows into Bellingham. But one of the biggest dangers from a Mount Baker explosion is that it would create lahars, which are like large landslides, flow down the flanks of a volcano, and basically go through everything on their path. And there'd been a, and the science suggests that there had been a, so getting back to the story, I thought, okay, let's look at this story. Let's spend a lot of time on this story. So I spent a lot of time looking at Mount Baker. And through that, you find, you learn about Lahars, and I'd known some of this before, is that a Lahar once came down from Mount Baker. And right at Everson, where the nooksack floods, it had knocked on left towards the position. of the ocean had gone straight into Sumas Prairie. The evidence suggests and there's soil analysis.

So through that process, which is an interesting story to write, I'd learned a lot about the Nooksack's kind of history and its path and I have still that Mount Baker story is going to come out and there's going to be other

stories on kind of an evulsion, which is basically when a river that used to flow one way. In this case, the Noxac used to flow into Sumas Lake, chose to flow to the west into the Pacific Ocean just north of Bellingham. And so I'd been researching all that. And through that, I'd spoken to a few people. And so some of the contacts came from there. But really, during those, during that time when we were doing those flood stories, it was a lot of, there weren't a lot of new contacts we were developing and talking to you, in part because we already, everybody

was super busy, everybody was scrambling, and we didn't need too much more. We were synthesizing information a lot of times that had already come out. So I know there had been some, in that one story I mentioned, we just drew on comments that the representatives of Sumas First Nation and made in the previous news story to the Vancouver Center. So, of course, we attribute that we explained in 2013, I think it was Seumath First Nation,

Samath First Nation, counselors told this to the Vancouver Sun. And so there's a lot of, there was, that story was a lot of synthesizing information. And throughout the flooding, situation it's a lot of just knowing where documents are referring to stories and and the historical like the record of what people have said about this thing and trying to bring that all together in a way that informs people and lets people know what's happening because

everybody's ridiculously busy during one of these events everybody's ridiculously busy normally. So you need to, a, find people if possible to speak to a certain topic, but you can also just use your own judgment and knowledge to find information that had been collected when things weren't in the middle of a natural disaster. Right. And you all did a good job of highlighting the risk. So at the beginning, you said that there was a risk that this could continue to flood and that there could be increased problems. And then you also highlighted the risk that the Barrow Town pumps could fail.

Could you elaborate a little bit more on what those pumps do and perhaps the positive story that so many people came out to try and prevent it from failing? Yeah, so we I know for a fact we didn't actually write that the Barrow Town pump station would fail because I didn't think that that was

possible. When the City of Abbotsford denounced that on the Tuesday at around 7 p.m. It was a shock to me and a shot, it seemed like a shock to them that this could get to the point. And I'm still kind of, it's still hard to wrap your mind around how that flood station or that pump station that's vital for draining a huge portion of farmland could itself be flooded and shut down. And just, it's explaining it even verbally is really hard. because it's a pump station that drains what once was Sumas Lake. There's also floodgates nearby that drain what is the Sumas River.

And Sumas Prairie is essentially split into two by a dike that had failed. It's an extremely complex. And this is one of the challenges in, and this was one of the challenges for the city of Abbotsford, is just explaining to people the various moving, not moving parts, but moving systems here. and how they interact with one another. And so the pump station is needed

because the bed of what was Sumas Lake is below the level of the Fraser River. So to get water out of that lake bed, you need to pump it up two or three meters into and just complicating things, is that it's not pumping it into the Fraser River, is pumping it into the Seumass River, which is itself drained through some floodgates that stop the water from going the wrong direction during the flood, which was something that was

actually required to happen. So they need to close the floodgates because the Fraser River had risen. And as I'm saying this, I know it's extremely complex. It's extremely hard for anybody listening right now to wrap their head around it, which is one reason why, hey i like writing and i don't like explaining things uh or i don't uh audio is not my chosen medium and then also just that's why you have these challenges of um this pump station and then uh people not really realize in this essential nature they're the the fact that every that you had hundreds of volunteers coming out to essentially sandbag this pump station save it from um flooding

is both a huge success it's a it's a tribute to all the people who came out in an emergency it's a I think one of the it's a huge indicator of like power of social media because social media is I think and I don't know how many how many of those people came because they were called or got an email from a friend I know a lot of people came after they saw on certain flooding Facebook groups that had been set up in part to deal with like just distributing information that people weren't getting from their authorities and which we were trying to provide, but even journalism organizations don't have all that information. So during a natural disaster, the Facebook groups became a huge benefit and played a huge

role and how people reacted and prepared, especially in the second round of floods for the next round of atmospheric rivers. So it was a huge to them. It's also, So an institutional failure that I'm sure, and I hope people are learning from in government about when you have a lot of people come together to save the pump station because they are required to do so. And when they're organized ad hoc by people, by volunteers, that's a signal that there was no organization or structure to harness that power in place already. apparently otherwise you would have had calls go out for volunteers you would have had sand begging beforehand as Tumass had done before the atmosphere river hit but we didn't have that in part because it feels like kind of the the Nuxak took a lot of people by surprise and and City of Abbasford knew about the Nuxack River risk and

they had been preparing a little bit but the warnings didn't come for a lot of of people and the the information wasn't there that allowed them to provide the help they may have needed and when it did come it often came from these these social media groups and these community volunteers who again did a great job but ideally you have a system in place in which it's structured so that you don't have to rely on on or if you are relying you're relying on them in a way that you can rely on them and not just hoping that they're there, which fortunately we were in this time. That's really interesting. And I think it sheds a lot of light for people on perhaps the importance of community, because obviously it was a beacon of light during

a very nerve-wracking time when we were hearing about the pumps perhaps failing. Seeing so many people come out, the photos, I know that a few politicians had come out and started recording all the people working and getting involved in that kind of makes you feel good that your community is able to come together. But to your point, it seems like we need to have perhaps more preparedness in terms of these events, whether that's through something like I know our phones are capable of notifying us if an emergency is happening. Perhaps that might have been appropriate here so that people were just aware of what's going on and not to scare people, but to inform them perhaps prepared to evacuate in case need be during those early phases. But I'm also interested to know you did, I think,

Twitter spaces on the Nooksack River, and this didn't end up happening, but it re-rooting. Would you be able to elaborate on that a little bit? Yeah, yeah, I think I posted a little bit on Twitter about that, and I have a story that, again, is in the works and hopefully it will come out, but there's a very low chance. So again, it's not something that people should panic about, but there's, There's a world in which the Nooksack River, which used to flow into Siomass Lake, now flows into the Pacific Ocean, again chooses to flow north into the Fraser River. And that would happen through and through erosion that happened over years or through a large event.

And again, there's been a little work done on this, but not much. So you have in various documents, suggestions that the chances are very low of this happening and for reasons X, Y, and Z, which is reassuring and good to know because, but it's also very low, it's not zero, which is interesting. So you can have a world in which the Nooksack River, because it is kind of on, you can think of a kind of like on an upside-down plate, and it's right on the kind of tip. point there at the moment and it chooses to go left. And in floods, the water rises just enough so that some of that water goes north into Canada, which in one of the reasons that

is such a complex issue to prevent the Noxac River from flowing into Canada in the future is that it might not actually be that complex to stop the river from flowing into Canada, But if you don't do that, it has a potential to significantly increase flooding in the United States, which is a problem when the people who would need to stop that flooding from happen are United States officials. So, like, they generally have, genuinely have a very tough problem on their hands that requires a lot of incent, a lot of deciding on what costs, what, and what. going to create the most benefit but but all that being said the river flows a little bit during a flood towards Canada but because it flows that way rivers evolve over time and they can eventually choose to go in one direction or another and and so there's a small chance that one day whether humans are here or not we don't know would a little bit of water would start flowing north

and then a little bit more would start flowing north and then a current would change and then certain way and you'd have that river take a new route as rivers always do and what's interesting and different about the nooksack is usually when rivers take a different route they're in a larger valley where they take a different route and then find their way back to the main channel or that main channel evolves in a certain different way and the fraser itself did this um but the fraser goes in one direction and the nooksack's on that dinner plate and it could tip one day maybe thousands of years from now and flow back north and refill Seumass Lake and eventually end up in the Fraser. Right. And so the risk there would have been like, it sounds like a catastrophe

if that had have happened to us. When you were thinking about this, because it sounds like you're likely one of the top 10 people knowledgeable on the flood systems, on what was taking place at the time who really has like a holistic understanding of what's taking place how what were the things the risks that you didn't talk about were there any concerns about perhaps supply chains perhaps what was going to happen over the next a couple of years if something did get even worse like the the river flowing a different direction what were your kind of less likely concerns of what could have happened well well i mean the evulsion which is if a river takes different that is like the less likely concern. It's probably not going to happen. Very likely, it's not going to happen.

But it kind of illustrates kind of the very complex nature of that river. The fact that if Barrowtown had been closed down, that that lake would have remained there for months on end, that seems like that would have been a higher order of problem. All these things are things that can be kind of fixed by, and then we saw this with the Coca-Hal, fixed with a lot of money and a lot of resources, but it's a lot of money and resources to deal with any of this stuff. And so those are kind of, there's,

if there is a possibility for it, I've probably written about it because that's kind of the job but I think in general it kind of just goes to show that we underestimate both the power and the chances that our world just changes one day significantly and for a long time that a natural disaster can have significant events and it's not just something we see on TV it's something that can have prolonged consequences and the people of Lytton and merit and a variety of other communities. And here in the Fraser Valley, the people who lived on Sumas Prairie are still dealing with this

and still dealing with this for a long time. Our transportation systems that we thought were robust and just there for us to use improprietuity are at the same type of risk that all these other things are, if not more. And thinking about how vulnerable they are and how vulnerable our lives are for things to be upended. So if you commute between Chilwaukee and Abbotsford, you're aware that sometimes it'll snow and you won't be able to get to work or there'll be a crash. But I think, and I know myself as somebody who used to go between Chilwaukee and Abbotsford, you don't imagine the day in which that route between Chilwaukee and Abbotsford, which is 25, 30 kilometers, is closed down for

four months or something. And that's not likely. to happen but it's possible that's what happened has happened in the Fraser Canyon and that's what happened for months between um on the cocahalla route which is where people have built their lives thinking you can get from x to x to y and x number of hours or minutes and then that stops happening and suddenly your life becomes much more different right what was that like for you because you're perhaps traveling around trying to get information going to take a look at different things perhaps meeting with different communities, different leaders. Were you ever worried about getting stuck anywhere?

Was there any challenges to your ability to move back and forth? And was there ever a time where you were, I'm over here? But if anything happens, I could be stuck over here. So we didn't travel around too much during the flooding. And I have significant family in the interior. So I was actually during considerable amount of it actually in maintaining. and just doing my work from there because we work from home and we were able to kind of do most of our jobs from there if required. And during a disaster like that, there are things you can do

in the field and there are things you can do not in the field. And a lot of the choices we were making in terms of our coverage were doing things like the stories synthesizing the geography and the history and stuff that we could do from our homes, and we wouldn't have to worry about getting from Chilliwack to Abbottesford. We weren't attending the Abbotsford press conferences because you couldn't get from A to B, but we could follow those along, and we could try and contact officials through other channels.

And so it's a lot of just decision-making that way. and as like again with everything it's a matter of what you're spending your time and resources on doing and if you're spending your time and resources on traveling during something like that it's not always the best choice because what you're getting for that is uh needs to be needs to pay off in a certain way and if you don't see that payoff then there's there's a lot of other things you can do while you're reporting on anything really um that are going to have a big impact so you want to be in the boat and within your community enough to get the sense of what's going on while still being able to create and have the value that you're creating in your journalism that is going to be there and you only have so much time to write the stories so you have to pick and choose a lot there right the other thing that I was interested in I saw you asking questions during I think it was like a global news press conference with the government coming out. And it just got me thinking about the challenge of asking questions in those moments. In those key moments, you maybe get one or two

questions and maybe a follow-up. How do you go about choosing what you're going to ask? And is that ever a tough circumstance to be in? Because perhaps there's an incentive not to ask too tough of a question where the person's just not going to be able to respond, but you want to ask something engaging. And so just in my own head when I heard you asking that question, I just ran a thought experiment in my own head of how would I go about doing that? How difficult would it be to you want to ask this person's time, but you also don't want to make them uncomfortable? You don't want to come across as too critical or one-sided. There's like, to me, it felt like there was a lot going into my own kind of perspective on how I go about asking those questions. What was that process

like for you, because you only get maybe 30 seconds to a minute of questioning the government on their decision-making. Right. And so we were involved in a couple of press conferences. Like, I could go on for an hour on this, and nobody really wants to hear my round on this. But the press conferences held by the government and involving government ministers are, in certain case is helpful if they have information that they can provide that is new in part there's helpful in such in such context because you as a reporter can't get the information through normal communication

channels from the government because their communication in general is very risk averse and um focused on providing information in sound bites that are often not useful and some of that same risk-averseness ends up translating to press conferences in which sometimes, and there are some ministers that are better than others, some officials better than others who will speak more candidly or not about certain circumstances, and then there are ministers and governments and what have you that when you ask them a question, won't answer the question and won't provide information that is actually valuable to readers or listeners or what have you and so there are some circumstances in which we might be working on the story and we are looking for some insight

into the government's thinking say on its long-term flood management plan or on a specific topic that we're working on so if it's cattle during the number of yeah yeah cattle during a flood or something and so we might be able to ask a specific question that hopefully can get a specific answer but in general and i increasingly think this and lots of people think of this is that these press conferences well semi-useful are often just exercises in which you have politicians trying to avoid saying anything that they haven't pre-planned and run by staff and haven't considered the political implications up and and i think that that's a major problem with kind of how governments run communications because it i don't think it really helps them it doesn't

people catch on people like to see when government officials say i don't know something i that's not my job but hopefully we can find you the answer to it uh rather than give an answer that has no relation to the thing they don't know about but at least is an answer So how do we come up with questions is just basically sometimes, yeah, it's based on like if we have a story in the works and something that we want to ask about and something we haven't seen addressed, then we can use one of those press conference times to hopefully get a question in. They usually limit each reporter to one question and a follow-up sometime and there's only a handful of reporters called upon when there might be dozens on anyone call. So sometimes it's a lot of luck if you're on a call and you get your name called. Hopefully they're calling on somebody local regarding a local event like this, unfortunately. And thankfully, they did in a couple occasions.

But we also didn't participate in every news conference because, frankly, not all of them are useful. Sometimes we can just monitor what happens and see if anything new comes out when we don't have a question that we think is actually going to get a, answer that is worthwhile and worth sharing because a lot of times it's just people talking to try and respond to a question without actually responding to it. That is the thing I think a lot of people feel like we talk about how we want to increase voter turnout. We want to get more people involved in the political process. We want them to engage as a citizen and take on that responsibility and then I watch certain question and answer periods or certain interactions and it's disheartening as somebody who wants people to engage more and get more involved to see that

people not answer the questions and not and pretend that they are and that's discouraging I think to some people and that's where there's this bitterness about government and politics and these challenges and so I really appreciate you being willing to kind of point that out because the other challenge, at least I see, is that there's certain, and I'm interested in your thoughts on this, it feels like there's, while that's going on with the politicians, there's certain people within the journalistic realm that get comfortable asking the lighter questions rather than the tough questions, even though that might not be popular or easy to do. And I'm just wondering, is that a terrain you have to kind of ride in terms of being willing to say, okay, I'm going to

ask this tough question that I'm probably not going to answer, they're not going to answer, but it's worth perhaps your political capital to spend in asking that question? Or is it easier because you get invited back on, you get invited to ask questions again, to just ask lighter questions. Is that ever a challenge? I mean, I can't speak to it from really, because I'm not on these conferences in consistent ways. And we go, when we do take part with like a specific thing in mind. And lots of people, I think in general, there's a lot you have to realize it's just, well, it is a job, and there are practicalities involved where you need an answer on X, Y, and Z, and so you're looking for a comment on X, Y, and Z

on a certain topic, and you're not performing to the cameras, and thankfully you shouldn't be performing with the cameras. Your goal should be to get a question asked or get a response to and get some information. Your goal is always to solicit information. And if you're in a news conference every day, I mean, it is a lot of work. It's a lot of mental energy, too. And so there's going to be times one imagines that you're trying to find some way to get some information for you or your colleagues out of it.

And whether it comes off as a fluffball or not, your job is to get more information for your news organization on certain topics. and sometimes you're going to ask a question in a certain way. And you're also inevitably aware that you can ask really hard-balled questions in a news conference, but asking them in such venues is unlikely often to get any sort of useful response because of the way that people and officials are trained to answer questions. And, I mean, some of this of their own self-interest in that legitimately, if your job is dependent on kind of avoiding controversy, you're going to try and avoid giving a controversial answer. It's human nature, and you can't really fault people too much for some of that.

But, yeah, so I was like, I'm fairly generous. I think we can always do better, and reporters can always do better than they do in the same way that. And there's different qualities of reporters, just like there's different qualities of people in every profession. So it's kind of life in a lot of respects. Absolutely. And I think that it would be nice if there was a way of highlighting those politicians that you believe give those more honest answers or moving in that direction,

that there was a benefit to taking those risks. Because I do know that there were some political leaders, whether it's municipal or provincial, that we're willing to say the harsh truth and take that risk on people. And I think that those are the voices we should uplift and try and make sure stay in those positions, because that is who we don't, we want less people who are trying to be too politically strategic and we want more honesty and more honest dialogues. And I think that that, I guess that's my belief in the role of journalists is not in a bad way, but you're holding people's feet to the fire. You're saying, okay, we need the honest truth. We're trying to inform the populace on what's going

on on the current events. And so you've also been doing this with the decision making regarding the recent BC budget regarding the plans to prevent future flooding. Would you be willing to elaborate on that? What are you seeing from the recent BC budget that they just released? Yeah. I mean, right now it's essentially it's too hard, too early to say and too hard to get an answer to what the actual long-term plans are because there is a long-term And we did hear in the moment of candidness that the province wants to change, how they're changing how you fund essentially flood protections and the sorts of structures that protect cities like Chilliwack. But we just don't know how and when that's going to happen. And the part that's kind of possibly understandable because a budget is a huge thing and dealing with a disaster.

they're going to prioritize the things that have just happened and there does need to be planning in place to figure out how exactly you allocate and speed up the process to improve flood protections and so that's the thing we've tried to highlight in a recent story while at the same time that story is basically suggesting that we don't know that it's something that we need to keep an eye on and that the current budget doesn't provide for and this kind of goes back to what politicians say is that, or don't say in that you can, what I just said, like, there's a very good story to tell that the provincial government or any government is taking X, Y, and Z steps, and they will get to the point where they will be spending

all the money that's necessary to be protecting the communities that need to be protected, that include cities and First Nations and all those other places that are currently behind insufficiently high dikes and then all the other complicating factors that go into flood protections which is that dikes are only one portion of the things that mitigate a flood and that you need more than just flood protections you need you need wetlands and you need cities that are built resilient so that if water does go over the flood the dikes then there's less damage and you need also those sorts of things and then you have all the other competing

interest for the public dollar, which is you need money to prepare for earthquakes and you need money for health care and COVID. And so there's all these like legitimately hard and tough decisions that government is making and is always making. And there's stories to be told candidly about how all these things come out. And people are willing to listen and people I think understand when you tell them that things aren't that easy because I hear it myself. Like when you say some, when you report on something, people will say, yes, but what about this? And that's a very, those are often some most insightful comments you get. It's like, yes, these are all things we should be considering about. It's not just one or the other. There's a million things that governments need

to be spending money on. And that money is tax money. And there's only so much money that people want to be paying in taxes. And that's a whole other question as to whether the level of taxation is too high or too low and and you get what you pay for often. So, um, but those are long conversations that often it feels like government officials and politicians don't trust the public to have or don't want to have themselves or haven't thought out themselves or could be explaining in a more holistic way to, um, show that they're both understanding, um, of the challenges and the needs ahead, while also recognizing and elaborating on all of the challenges they face. And I shouldn't come to me to be making all those excuses for governments. They can make

those excuses themselves because those excuses are there. They can, they're not just excuses, they're reasons, but you ask a politician about any of these, and some of them will be very candid and some of them will use the and use an answer that tries to move somebody on because they don't in part because they don't have all day because they are complex topics but also just I feel like the more information you tell people the better is the more that you show people that you that these are complex problems that they will understand we need to trust people a bit more to trust people a bit more with the information rather than assuming that they can't handle complexity and depth.

I couldn't agree more, and that is what I'm trying to bring about with this, is that I'm not going to make the assumption that we need a quick soundbite. I'm not going to assume that the listeners aren't capable of understanding complex issues, that they're along for the ride, and they can always go back and listen. One of my, I don't want to say it's a dream, but one of my hopes is that this form of communication becomes more appealing to political leaders, this form of long-form conversation of saying this is the direction I'd like to take our community, our province, our nation, and this is why. This is how I've come to these decisions rather than debate platforms that are super short

and you're trying to say the harshest thing or you're trying to see if your numbers go up in that one second is believing that we're founded on the idea of a democracy. And to have a healthy democracy, an informed populace that's able to question things for themselves and that the best ideas will win out. I think we've been really lucky so far. Like you think of, yeah, we have challenges with health care, but you go to the doctor, your doctor is there to help you. And you might wait a little bit, but you're going to get that service. You think of the challenges, I think, with the U.S. and their teachers, and how much their teachers make. In Canada, I think we're in a far different position. And I think that it's good that we're investing in teachers because they're what's going

to educate our next generation. They're the people who are going to make sure we haven't informed young people that will eventually take on all the positions that we hold today. And that's incredibly important. And so I think that we are, we're doing really well. I think we can always do better, to your point. And so I'm just interested to know what your thoughts are. Do you think that it's possible that we can move in a really good direction with our political system, just in general, that we can have more complex conversations? Do you see that over your years as being a journalists that we're having better conversations? Yeah, I don't know.

I mean, I think a lot of it is going to feel like things are, I think it's hard to compare across times in part because we all want to have certain in-depth conversations or we all want to have this or that, but everybody also only has so much time and resources and time to spend on any one subject. And everybody also has a right to sometimes unplug from the serious topics and get out and just find a way to declutter your mind and do something that takes your mind away from it. And so all those things have to be, like, there's a reason that politicians don't spend three hours talking to every single person they come across to explain every single issue.

It's just you don't have that time. and it's the same way kind of with reporters there are a decent number of reporters out there and if they spent that much time on every reporter every day they'd be working six thousand hour days um so like i do respect like that there are confines and that there are like limits to what you can do and especially there are limits to people's attention span today and what people have the ability to kind of process. I think that you can do some of these things in shorter ways and there are ways to communicate things better.

At the same time, I'm, like, also wary of expecting brilliance from every person because there are some very competent people out there, and there are some people who are normal people who are trying to do their best and but are normal people like the that have their own challenges and their own passions and their own skills and attributes and the things that they're good at and things that they're not good at and a lot of us are not good out that well all of us are aren't great at some things and are better at other things and and so we all bring that to the table and some things sometimes people just aren't able to do the things we hope that

they should do or could do at the same time I think so I think a lot of it comes down to like the structures we put in place and what we expect people to do and what the the things we penalize people for doing and the things we don't penalize people for doing so I think we we can do a better job of not penalizing people when they give a contextual but tough answer that is kind of potentially controversial, but you know what they're actually trying to say. I think we can give them the benefit of the doubt sometime because we want the people to take those risks and make those judgments that, you know, it's going to be better for me to provide more information, even if there's a chance I step on somebody's toes here

there. And I think it's the same way when we're talking about anything when we're talking about improving our society is like giving people the benefit of the doubt a little bit so that we can encourage them to take more risks and decrease the riskiness of those risks, I guess you'd say, is I think useful, just something to try and I think we can all keep in mind when we're kind of evaluating people and holding people to standards that whether or not we hold ourselves to that standard. Yeah, that really makes sense. And I think just incentivizing people to be more honest and be more open

and then giving the grace of we're going to make some mistakes. And I'm not going to get this perfect. And I interviewed Gittangeli Gil on world, like global development and what's taking place and making sure that we have. more conversations where you think of the idea of a president's speech when they look you into the camera and they start talking about an issue. I think that that's something that's important for us to be able to share and try and develop our understanding of global issues, local issues, where we have that trust of, I'm going to look you in the eye, I'm going to say some things

you're not going to like and maybe some things that you're happy to hear about, but this is an honest conversation and we're going to go along the ride together. How did you get into this? What made you interest in becoming a journalist? Is there something that polled at you? Were you interested in this for a long time before you went to university at Thompson Rivers? How did you get started? Yeah, yeah. It was just, it was something that probably goes back to early high school.

It's something that I knew I wanted or thought I wanted to do from my early age. And in part because I liked writing and thought that writing would be something that I, felt would be an interesting way to make a career of, and I thought like lots of people do, I write books, but writing books is tough, and I'm not probably a, I don't have a, we weren't like rich growing up, and we were, I needed a job that's going to pay me money and income, and, and journalism also offers an interesting, array of things you can do and it's just fun and so it was a it started as a way to make money while writing and do something interested and then as kind of it tends to go um the more you find

out of the and the more you explore the more things you can find interesting to do and suddenly you are realizing that this is a very interesting career that that can take you in a lot of different directions and that you can make your own in certain ways and you can you can you can your own path, just like, kind of like what you've been doing and kind of thinking about where you can go and what your insight and where you can learn about and how you can translate into something that works. Right. And you, did you learn a lot about ethics and responsibilities as a journalist when you're going through school? What did you take away from it that perhaps surprised you or excited you?

Yeah, going through university, I mean, the university journalism process is, I mean, that was 15 years ago now. And so I learned how to write a lead, which is like the intro to a story. And then I learned some basics, and you learn some, you talk about the ethics of certain things. And probably an ethics class in journalism, hopefully is a lot different than an ethics class in journalism. probably today an ethics class is a lot different than an ethics class 15 years ago. And hopefully that's the case. I didn't have any particular problems with my, like, we talked about like what's important about a story, why we, why fairness is important.

You also talk about things like objectivity and how there's an expectation of objectivity by a lot of people, but there's also an increasing conversations about whether objectivity is ever possible or something to be strived towards and there's been a lot of talk about that in journalism world and there's a lot of interesting philosophical and moral questions about that that I think are really interesting to explore I think a lot of it comes down to the fact of just like being transparent everything there I I'm sympathetic to the idea that there isn't a way for a journalist to be objective per se you're not a automaton or a what either There's a choice in every word you make to choose, and there's a choice in every story you pursue.

So in doing that, all those choices are influenced by who you are as a person, and you can say, okay, just lay out the facts, but choosing which facts go in the first sentence versus which facts go in the third sentence is a choice that is related to what you think is most important. What you think is most important is dependent on who you are and what you've learned, and all those sorts of. sorts of things and so you can definitely create an illusion of objectivity where you look like a perfectly objective reporter or a perfectly objective news automaton but in doing so are you actually deceiving the reader there's questions about that and these are all like very gray like there's arguments for and this against that some of these there is no answer to it's just that you're talking about. So it does come down to being fair and transparent about kind of where you're coming from and what a story is about and why something is important. And stories are, lots of stories

are arguments essentially. They're an argument that this is important and that this is what the reader should spend their time on. So in writing a story, you are making an argument just by writing a story about the stock market. You're making an argument that the stock market is something that people should be interested in or that some people are interested in and that within that story you're making an argument about what are the interesting things that happen say today in the stock market that are most relevant to people and and so realizing that that's the case is important and it's useful too for the public to realize that there are all those choices that go into it and you as a member of the public can definitely question a lot of these

choices I think it's harder to expect that those choices don't exist because if those choices don't exist the story doesn't really exist so I mean those are the types of fun things that you end up talking like you go to go back to your question like once you get into like the ethics of writing a news story or or or the morality of journalism general or these things things. And it's the same sort of thing when I imagine you're doing the podcast and how you choose your interview subjects and who you're, what questions you're asking. You're asking those questions from a point of view and informed by everything you know and informed probably for the better by your past and what you've learned in previous interviews and what has worked and what

hasn't worked. And so I think a lot of that's the same way. Yeah, the thing that's really important to me is to come at most topics as like a student as a learner because we do carry preconceived notions and my goal is always to challenge those. Why do I support something? And as I've talked about before, I really believe in the term steel manning to take a position that I completely disagree with and then make the best arguments I can for it to see if there's there's anything there. there's not but going through that thought exercise is important to me because it's all the academics that I ever really respected they were really good at making the best argument for something they didn't believe in at all and being able to lay it out in a strong Daryl Plexus is a I think

a good example of someone who is able to make an argument as to why people choose to deal drugs like a convincing argument where by the end of the class he asked he made a compelling argument to a lot of the people in the class and then said like what arguments do you have to not become a drug deal? How would you stop these people? And a lot of the class went, I don't. Like, I think it's actually a good move. And to be able to do that to a group of people and have them see all of these points of like, well, what if your family's in poverty? What if your community is in poverty? Like, this is a way to get your mom the health care she needs. This is a way to get your grandma into a good home. Like, you're against these things. You're against taking and just having

that thought exercise of not just demonizing and saying anybody who deals drugs is just a terrible person and they have the worst of intention for you and your family. It's like they're likely incentivized by certain things and disincentivized and other things. And just being humble in that way, I think it's just, it's really valuable to have someone like yourself go, there isn't a correct answer. When we're talking about the morals of journalism, it's the thought process. It's being critical of yourself. It's being making sure that if you do have a certain perspective that you're just cognizant of it and you're being careful on how you're approaching things, that you're not saying this is my perspective. It's now the only perspective that matters, and I'm going to push that

110% in one direction. And I think it's one of the reasons that I think your whole team really resonates with people, because you can perhaps disagree, but I've seen a lot of really positive reception to the work you're doing with the Fraser Valley Current. And I'm just interested in your thoughts perhaps after the floods or throughout this process of the response you've gotten. Yeah, yeah. Again, it's just that the response has been really gratifying. And just kind of continuing to hear, like, it's always good to hear people say good things about you. So I don't need to talk too much about that. But I think going back to your last point, it's like there are right answers and wrong answers.

It's like something I think that we do also need to realize that there are, you look at all the questions. There are things that incentivize people to do things. and there are in terms of personal lives you're right like there are things major gray areas and spectrums where you know people choose these things for a very rational and logical reason but there are also other people who choose those things for rational logical reasons that are that they use different factors to calculate those logical reasons because their goal is different than their goal is just different than somebody else's. And that goal can be unwittingly or wittingly harmful and bad, right?

Like there are, we see in the news right now, these people who have, and one world leader in particular, who has a goal that is pretty clearly the wrong goal. and he's taken a variety of courses to and he's incentivized in various ways and you might be able to see how he comes to his thought processes while still saying no this was the wrong thing to do because your objective here is wrong and not in not in people's interest not in interest of ordinary people who are in your country and other countries absolutely one area that I've noticed people respond really positively towards that perhaps you've challenged the idea of this that we have of mainstream media and I'm interested in your thoughts on this because we see and you talked about this really well that there are certain publications that have this challenge of getting more information out and not being as detailed and I think they get put on one side and then there's work you're

able to do that's more in-depth that people seem to really appreciate the in-depth nature of and then they seem to put you in a different category. And I'm just interested in your thoughts on how things are emerging, because you do see independent media through things like Substack, that people are gearing towards, and you think of, I think her name's Tara Henley, who left CBC for Substack. And there are other individuals who are journalists, who are choosing to take the more independent route,

and I think they take on a sense of personal responsibility to communicate as much of the truth as possible, because now you have the trust of these people, and you have to somehow maintain it and you don't have the same resources as a big newsroom. So your word is more, there's more responsibility on personally, whereas with perhaps something like CBC, the name CBC has such strong positive brand recognition that you don't have as much personal responsibility for that piece in comparison to someone where it's just your name and people are turning in and paying for your substack account and your writing.

And so I'm just interested in your thoughts. I know when your Twitter page you say there's no such thing as the mainstream. And so I'm just interested in your thoughts. Yeah. So I think. Sorry, if you could just pull up the microphone. So I think the characterization of that is in terms of the motivations of people and the incentives is potentially a little off in terms of I think lots of, I think that the responsibility reporters feel is to the truth. And I think when we talk about mainstream media, I think that's those or what's not mainstream media is that those are, I don't like the term mainstream media because I think it's used by people to put people, put reporters and organizations they don't like into buckets or into a I don't like this bucket.

And a few people use mainstream media in a positive way. part just because that's how that word has come to be deemed I think people may be associate are able to reconcile their approval of certain news outlets and their disapproval of and other news outlets by putting some into I like these independent news organizations and I don't like these non-independent news organizations and I think that there's little in terms of and little. And there are some things that are different about working for a larger established corporation that's been around for decades versus one that's been around for under 10 years.

And most of the differences there lie in corporate structures and things that are not the things that you might, that the people who favor or disfavor those organizations think that they don't like about those organizations. So there's not the, and I know a lot of journalists in a lot of different news organizations, and there aren't almost universally, everybody's doing the same job and has about the same constraints on what they can and can't write, which is they're trying to report the news as they see it, and there is very little to no constraints on what they can, can't write beyond resources. And resources is a huge thing. And I keep coming back to that because

it determines basically everything that a news organization does is where it puts resources in in what degree. So if you're putting resources into coverage of certain topics, you're going to have more stories on certain topics. If you're putting resources into hiring reports with certain expertise is those and knowledge bases, those knowledge bases are going to inform stories in certain ways that if you hire a journalist straight of university, you're going to have a different story. And that's just a resource question and an experienced question that it's not necessarily always a, it's almost never a, what somebody's intention with a story is. There's with organizations, there's levels of accountability built in that are sometimes good,

sometimes problematic when it comes to not so much deterring stories, but influencing how people can speak their minds. So there are various things in various corporations about people maybe discouraged from posting something that's controversial on Twitter or something. But when it comes to or revealing maybe this, but there's people are discouraged to

different extents in different organizations to revealing who they are and what they think and where, kind of what I was talking about before, where their, where their background and what they're thinking is. Because again, if no story

is, if every story is informed by somebody's background, and history, well, you can never remove that. You can only change the illusion that that history and background that reported doesn't exist. So if you, there are companies that might have a policy about, okay, don't post anything, say, politically critical of any politician. I don't know if it's some, I'm just throwing an example of any politician because we don't want that to reflect badly on our organization. And there's reasons those policies exist,

but there's also reasons that in doing so, you're giving the illusion that reporters are fully objective when they're not, which has its own consequences. And then you're just deterring them from revealing their, I don't want to say biases, because we all have biases, but it's taken as a critical word. But what I'm trying to get is, like, all the reporters are trying to do the same job. But if you, when people get mad at one organization or one set of organizations, they tend to lump them in under a certain category. And in the media's case, it tends to be mainstream media.

and then when and that allows them to separate who they like from who they don't like and so they might like us and then not like hypothetically the CBC or something and people have to realize that the general idea of the resources that we devote to certain stories are going to be different and so the content that we produce is going to be different and what they may like about that content or not is different, is going to change. So we're going to be more local and we're going to focus on writing in a certain style. We might have a certain tone in our writing. But kind of the underlying principles of a reporter,

whether I'm here at the current or before the Abbott's for News or if I had taken a job at whatever, the CBC, see, I'd have the same underlying principles, they would be influenced me in the same way. And if anything, going out on your own as a truly independent person. So somebody who is like, yes, on substack or something, that creates just like going out on, like, joining the current, It creates incentives in certain ways and you have certain things you can do or can't do that are different than you could do if you're part of a large organization. You don't have to worry about some things and you have to worry about some things more. You also have incentives to you're also really tied to the business, the business, the,

business sustainability of your project, which can have good incentives and it can have bad incentives in terms of just how frequently you do any X thing. If you do any story on, let's just say the truck convoy, you see and you see how many readers you gain or lose. And so that can have incentives on not your beliefs or not what you report maybe even, but just how frequently you go to that topic. And that can change the tone of any publication. And so those are things that are some of the benefits and drawbacks of something. So you can build a niche for yourself, but you can build a very small niche that doesn't end up talking to anybody new, but is very good at talking to the same people. And so I think I'm going around in circles, but I think

that there's like very, it's something that people need to be aware of is that the people who are doing the job to the best of their abilities at lots of these large organizations are humans and trying to do their very best just in the same way. They aren't being beholden to some large thing that says they have to say good things about this or that. I know they're pretty much free to write and follow the stories that they think are important. And sometimes I disagree with what and what and how they pursue a story too. There's all different qualities of reporters. There's exceptional ones and there's okay ones. But I think that lots of people think that there are directives by these large corporations. And there's not that many

large corporations anymore and there's not that many of them to pursue journalism in a certain way when a lot of them are not going that way and then like you look at something like the National Post and I take issues with a lot of things that they might choose to write but they're choosing to write those and they're publishing them both because they've hired and this is a research thing people who believe these certain things So these people have these backgrounds that lead them towards these stories that they think are important and they come to conclusions that are informed by their own backgrounds. And the nefariousness of it isn't, there's not much nefariousness to it.

They are choosing to employ people who come to a topic with their own background and their own ideas and that influences how things get written. And there are editors who will see in their corporate people who will see certain things do better in terms of drawing an audience and others. And they'll encourage people to further explore these topics that have already maybe interested them. And there's not that much of a nefarious intent there.

there's choices in terms of where resources are put and then those resource choices influence kind of the whole tone and content of a of an organization um in term and then if you go on the opposite direction to a one person shop well you don't have the diversity of different people and the that one person is making all those choices for themselves and in the same way that but their, and then their background comes and informs that. So I think those are things that just, I think, keep in mind why I'm like very hesitant to like ever put, it's a spectrum just like everything else is, I think.

Yeah, I think of audience capture even for myself. And there are certain guests who I can predict are going to pull people in a certain way I can talk about how the conversation is or what we talked about that's going to make people really interesting. But then there's people I feel like I have a responsibility to talk to, like Lee Harding is a biologist, and he's focused on wolf culling. And his research is referenced a lot when it comes to how do we go about taking care of these wolves and reducing the populations in a proper, sustainable way. And I knew that that wasn't going to pull a lot of people in. I knew that he's never looked for social media likes.

He doesn't have any social media. But I felt like I wanted to understand the topic better and who better than the person who wrote a lot of the research articles referenced. by governments, news articles. It was just something that I felt I had an obligation to do. But if you fall in love with the likes, the comments, the views, if you go too far down that path, you kind of get what's called audience capture where you are speaking to people. And if you have a different viewpoint, you can start to lose them, which is why I've tried my best now to stop looking at the views, the likes, and make sure that I'm putting out content that I'm just proud of, that I believe in, that I think are going to help inform people. And I think the way you put it is,

is really important for people to understand because I agree with you that we have certain organizations that have certain incentives or certain audiences that they perhaps appeal to. And then you would just have people who don't perhaps see their lens or they're not able to talk about their lens and say, hey, this is my background. And I think that that would be an area, particularly with newscasts where you have people of diverse backgrounds, but we don't get to hear why they got into it, what their passion is, what they wanted to do, why did they get into this role? Perhaps that's on their bio on the website, but you don't get to hear it from them, and so you don't have a lot of context as to why they're there and the other person isn't.

And I think that restoration of trust in journalism, I think, is something important to me. It's something I see with the current. When you guys start all of your newsletters, you have just a witty kind of blurb at the very beginning that I think lightens the mood. It kind of places you in that. it gives you more of a personalized oh this is a human being on the other side of this article this isn't some industry trying to manipulate me into thinking x which is i think where a lot of people are starting to go they're starting to move into that direction and it worries me because

i don't want us to repeat what the u.s is done when they have CNN and fox news and people consume one or the other and they never speak to each other and then they get more extreme and extreme and extreme, and then they're even more mad at each other, and you can't even have a civil dialogue. I worry when I see perhaps the Globe and Mail on one side and the National Post on the other, and then people starting to, oh, I don't read that. That's fake news or these comments, and then we start to have a more divided populace, and I'm just interested in your thoughts on that. Yeah, like, it's really interesting, just thinking about, to make sure this is in the right place. Like, you mentioned the intro, and that's one thing I've been thinking about, is

that one of the reasons we don't get that much hate mail is that probably people just realize that we're humans and that's something that doesn't mean that like and going back to like what separates us from another place that could just be like one of our like fortunate things that we stumbled across is that and maybe it's something that other places might want to consider is that to humanize the people making a product has itself a benefit, both to the people, because there's people in my profession who are dealing with horrible abuse that they don't deserve. And those people create are what makes those companies work.

And so there's a world in which you wonder if there's maybe something those companies can do, if those organizations can do, to better humanize their staff and better remind people that this is a product made by humans, has been going to be flawed in the same way that all things are made by humans, but is also, like, uses that human experience just in the way that your podcast uses your human experience. And there is one reason why I think podcasts have have worked is that it you hear the person's voice and when hearing that person's voice in a especially in a casual manner you're less likely to get super mad at them maybe and you're less likely to and you're more likely to relate to them and and empathize with

them and so yeah that's like that's something I've been thinking a lot just in the last couple weeks and um and it's something that is i think we like our profession can do a better job of some reporters can do a better job of two in in how they convey themselves i can probably sometimes do that too on social media and like you just want to remind people that you are a human when you're when you're writing about x and y and z and sometimes everybody consumes things in different ways so it's understandable that some people will come across you're working may be incidental to all that and they'll never get that experience and then but there's there's all these ways in which you can actually format things you would and when you talk about like

kind of the the guest you bring on I'm interested here like how that's kind of how you've felt your knowledge base expanding over time what that's given you and how that contributes kind of how your podcast is growing, and then how you kind of consider the world in general? That is a very complex question. One of my goals is to bring about different guests from a variety of backgrounds, and that was something that was important to me from the beginning, and I could see during probably the first year people really wanting to typecast the podcast. I'd have a couple of lawyers on, and they'd say, oh, you're a lawyer podcast.

I'd have a few people on who were business owners, and they'd, oh, you're a business. podcast. Oh, you had a few indigenous people. You must be an indigenous podcast. And so the challenge was making sure that I don't define myself and that I look at this as a learning experience for me because the goal from the beginning was to say, before I started this, I told my partner Rebecca, like, I feel like I don't have a lot of role models. There's a few people that I've been able to glean knowledge from, but we wouldn't have dinners. We wouldn't connect regularly where I could learn, how did you go about doing this? And how did you think about that? And so knowing that there's brilliant people like Brian Minter, but how long do you get with him if you're in the store? Five minutes,

10 minutes, then he's got to go do something else. And so there's people that I felt like I would have done better to learn from because I think I made a lot of mistakes during my high school life of thinking of how people should be or how I should be or how I should hold others accountable or how I should approach things. But I didn't have someone able to say, okay, this is how you learn from other people. This is how to listen. These are the people you should perhaps look up to. Not having that made me feel perhaps disconnected from the leaders in our community and having a humility of I don't know everything and there's lots to learn. So starting it, I was like, who would I have wanted to hear from growing up? Who would I have benefited from that would have expanded my understanding

of things rather than having, I'm right, your wrong perspective because my mother struggled with FASD growing up. And so there was a lot of overcompensation. I pretended to know things. I tried to sound smarter than I was just to cope with the fact that I really felt like I was directionless. And so I really wanted to address that. And I was like, well, who do I talk to? Who can I talk to where it's not a counseling session of these are my problems? This is how you address them. And then you move forward. It's like, how do I connect with those people that I would have liked to listen to? and then realizing that there's so many brilliant people out there that only get like a sentence in a news article often like John Haidt who was one of my professors who got mad at me for sleeping in his class and he

was like hey like you're better than this and those comments really pushed me to want to figure out well how good could I be if I were to amount to that and so I took an interest in saying okay let's let's sit down with people long form there's some people that I admire that I know not everybody admires like Joe Rogan, where I said, that three-hour format, there's something to that long-term that I can benefit from, that I can utilize their time, hopefully, properly, and learn from other people. And so I started that out, invited people on that I knew personally that I said, you have some nuggets of knowledge that I think you can share, and then I can start to learn about this medium. And then through that, it's just been a development of saying, what don't I know about?

So upcoming, I'm going to have our provincial beekeeper, a person who shares information on how bees work. We went to Chilawak Honey, and we learned a lot about how bees function and how important. And I remember seeing the bee movie and really being awakened to the fact that we have a very delicate ecosystem and saying, this is a person that's not going to get three hours on a newscast. So maybe I can sit down with him and learn something. And then trying to find other people in niche areas that don't get the same light. like Gietangeli, who's an expert in global development and saying, well, there's a lot going around, a lot going on around the world that we don't know about. And she had really positive

things to say about the development and Canada's policies in foreign affairs regarding women and making sure that both women and boys are supported in getting an education, growing up without stereotypes and judgment, and all of these different things, and trying to convince her to consider doing something of her own where she shares those positive foreign stories of she talked about the detriments of just focusing too much on women and I guess there was this woman who was working really hard to develop her farm and she was using ancient knowledge instead of the modern kind of techniques and then when the newscaster really focused on her and excluded everyone else her husband took a tractor and destroyed the whole farm area because he felt left out and so

understanding that we can play a role and we can understand what's taking place around the world in a meaningful way has i've tried to come at every guest as a student and have a mindset of how is the conversation going to be structured and so for someone like scott sheffield we went through i was like okay this is a professor he's really knowledgeable so let's go from world war one to world war two to indigenous people to bc and i'll do that all first then we'll talk about his family life and and stuff like that the same logic kind of applied with this i know that for a lot of listeners, the floods are going to be at the forefront of their mind. And so that's going to be a good introduction for them on what's important today, but also understanding

who you are. What's your background? How did you get here? What are you trying to do with the Fraser Valley Current? And how does that matter to other people? And so over the course of developing these interviews, I've tried to understand what the layout's going to be. And often the guest maybe doesn't see that. Maybe listeners don't see that either, that I have a mindset that when I'm going into the conversation of how it's going to be structured so that there's a logic to it, at least for myself, so I can steer us back. Because in those beginning days, it was kind of like, I don't know what my next question is going to be.

It's going to be based on whatever pops into my head next. And so I've worked hard on trying to understand how I best learn and how to fully utilize this medium, because for indigenous people, we talk about how we're from an oral culture. Then I think podcasts are the way. I think that we need to lean into this medium. I think we need to take advantage of the long-form nature and having someone like Sonny McKelsey on really demonstrated to me this person needs like 10 more episodes because he was shortening everything for me and I was like that's so wild because so many people go three hours

that's probably a little bit too long and realizing this some people have developed a really deep understanding of things and we should admire that and take that extra time and that's an area I noticed that I've really gotten interested in is hearing from indigenous leaders like Sunny McCelsey, Eddie Gardner, Carrie Lynn Victor, because their thoughts are really profound. And I feel like growing up, I was taught to take an interest in indigenous culture, but it was in a finger waggy, you should know it because you have to, not because you would want to. And then when you hear from someone like Sunny McElsey, you go, wow, like anytime I tell someone now that Mount Chiam is for where wild strawberries grow, they go, that's so cool.

And that wild strawberry patch is still up there. There's something heartwarming, I guess, about that for people. And so I enjoy learning about those things and trying to share my interest with other people. And that's really how I've tried to develop this, is what conversations are going to interest me. And if it interests me, hopefully it'll interest other people. And so it's been a challenge when people just say, you should have this person on, which I get all the time. Oh, you should have my cousin Tim on. He'd be great. I have to have a vision for where I take the conversation.

and some people see their family member or someone they know in a certain way, but if I can't, if that person just says you should have that person on and they're not willing to elaborate and say, this is why, this is what I see in them, this is what I admire about them, it's tough for me to have those people on because I need to see a three-hour conversation and perhaps not a 30-minute conversation. There's people I find interesting that I could probably do 30 minutes with, but I can't see that full three hours with. And so I hope that sort of answers your question.

Yeah, and I'm really curious as to, so when I grew up, I didn't grow up and family will say I still talking that much about things. I always been a written word type of person and then for a variety of reasons, it's always like ordering my thoughts using words like orally has always been a challenge or at least it's been something that I haven't, a skill I haven't developed and I've developed it more than last. year in part because of things like the flat and I was on some radio programs and then in part because starting a new news organization that you have to talk to rotary clubs and that type of thing and some of those things are just frightening as as all but like looking back I realized that's like a skill I hadn't really developed over time and so I'm interested from you like have you always had that skill to be able to order your thoughts orally in depth in kind of the way you just did or is that something you've seen yourself really grow at

over since starting the podcast? I think I've always been to a certain extent articulate in terms of my ability to communicate. I think it really started to develop like in high school, but it was dishonest. It was saying facts I didn't really understand. It was trying to hold positions I didn't really understand and an almost grandstanding in a dishonest way. And it was trying to be smart. I was accused a lot through middle school and high school being told you're not going to graduate. They would tell my mom. My mom would start crying with me in the room and like, what am I going to do? How do I support my child in their development? I had one teacher say that I had narcissistic personality disorder. And so there was this really aggressive part of me. I do rank higher

on the disagreeable side. I think I'm in like the 99th percentile of disagreeable. And it was a reputable place that I took the personality course from. And so I was trying to be intelligent or what I thought intelligent looked like. And so I think that's where it started from. But then there was just that part of me inside me saying like, no, you don't really think that, no, you don't really understand what you're saying. No, you don't really know what you're talking about right now. You're saying things because they sound smart, but they're not necessarily smart. And so I started digging in and trying to say, okay, you're saying these things that aren't, that aren't you that aren't embodying how you actually feel. How do you fix that? And so I started listening

to a lot of podcasts and hearing other people have honest conversations like Andrew Huberman, who's a neuroscientist and he is really interested in sharing his understanding of the mind and how to utilize the tools of our brain to fully maximize your life and your life quality. During that same time, I started thinking about the people who had sacrificed for me, not perhaps knowingly, but knowing that my grandmother attended Indian residential school and that she experienced a lot of the abuses we talk about today, knowing that she, for better or worse, passed on FASD to my mother because of the drinking that she did to cope with those atrocities, and knowing that my mother was adopted as a consequence of the 60 scoop into a Caucasian family, and those people

put a lot of work into supporting my mother, and with the challenges she faced, and then chose to support me as well, that there had been a lot of background of investing in me. And seeing throughout my education at UF.E, that indigenous people as a whole aren't represented in the best way, we're facing a lot of challenges, and that I'm not one of those people. And I got frustrated throughout that education of the description of indigenous people as disadvantaged as, oh, we're not doing well, we're failing. And I really resented that because I felt like there are great leaders in indigenous communities. We're just not hearing from them. And so, yeah, we may have our struggles, but my approach was always like, watch us bounce back. Like, don't underestimate us. Just because

you can point to our crime rates, our education rates, we're going to turn this around. It's going to take some time. The Indian residential school is only closed in 1996. Give us 100 years, and we'll turn this around. And so that made me interested in figuring out what my full potential was. And within indigenous culture, we have this idea of seven generations that you're supposed to look back seven generations, and so for indigenous people, your family might have survived in your residential schools, 60 scoop, colonization, various challenges, perhaps famine and struggles that way. But I always want people to keep in mind that you can do that as well, even if you're not indigenous. So if your family experienced World War II, the Cold War, World War I, your family

has been through things too that you can learn from and realize perhaps your grandparents wanted to give your parents a better life and your parents wanted to give you a better life. And so what are your responsibilities to them if they've set you up in a better circumstance what can you do to build on their legacy and then trying to pass that forward seven generations is the same idea and so what can you do for your children your grandchildren your great-grandchildren to structure the world in a better way climate change is often how people think about that is we're not going to pass on a healthy world for our planet but if you think of there's other examples of that in our political system in regards to bees there's lots of different areas where we can make positive progress to hand off our world in a better way.

And so I guess that's one of the goals and perhaps how I've developed this ability to communicate long form is through listening to people long form and being patient while they develop thoughts. Like Lex Friedman is one of my favorites right now. And he made a really good point about people stop when they're speaking or when they're thinking. If you ask a really good question, they might take a few seconds. and the instinct as podcasters is to cut those pieces out. People don't have time if it's silent for a few seconds, but there's beauty when people are thinking issues through, and his example was interviewing Elon Musk,

who took like 10 seconds to think about the question before he answered. There's something to admire when people take their time and think about something before having, like, we want that quick answer, that really fast, but don't you want the thought-through answer? That's the more thoughtful answer, where they've really made sure that what they're saying is correct, rather than rushing through, and I hope that that's what people learn through these longer form

conversations is there's beauty to the whole process of somebody thinking things through and sharing their personal journey, because that's the other part I felt like I missed out on. We talk a lot about how men don't share their emotions as much, they're not as vulnerable, but the best way to do that is to let them share and not rush them. And so I've had multiple guests share emotion on the podcast that you wouldn't see in rushed interviews in rush circumstances that I think I can only get out at the two-hour mark, at the two-and-a-half-hour mark where they're comfortable now, they're calm, they feel a sense of, okay, now I can tell you about my struggles with alcohol, I can tell you about my

honest feelings with First Nations communities, I can share the vulnerable parts of myself. Like, I've had multiple males show emotions in different ways on this podcast. That's not like the crux of it, but I think it's admirable, and I don't think it would have been possible if it was shorter form 30-minute interviews. Yeah, I think that's right, and that you're, especially when you're being interviewed by somebody, inevitably, you're kind of the format of it's going to change how you react to various things. And, like, I see that interviewing people. What I do is, like, you want, and sometimes, like, there are various time constraints too that you want to respect people's times and you're

you're looking for them to contribute their insight to you as they can but the way you structure a question or the way however you're formatting it's going to impact kind of the depth they give you and so you can feel people tense up or loosen up in certain ways and I think one of the Yeah, one of the ways you can do it is that, yeah, by by structuring these over a longer time period, people do just, they feel often like probably they have like the chance to say something they'd like to have said in the past. You're at a point where it's something that you can say with, oh, especially after you preface it with enough of your life, then people suddenly, they see you again. like we talked about early, as a human being. And so they're willing to take those ideas in and consider your response in this moment as a human being.

And so probably you let down your emotion more at that point. I'm interested, too, from your perspective, and this is something I've seen or I've felt, like, I have a life, just like you have a life outside of what you do here and what I do current. And that influences kind of how I assume people act and kind of also influences how we do our work and kind of how we're trying to reach people in terms of I know that lots of people don't watch the news all the time. I know that lots of people aren't don't have these huge polarized opinions.

They're just sometimes reading something and then they go off and do their job because their job doesn't involve sitting on a computer for a hours a day. And I see those people and I talk to them like I have some sports teams and the conversation is not often about politics and all the things we like to think is important. We like and I think lots of people think is kind of what everybody is talking about because what that's what we're interested. And instead those are people that are interested in certain things at certain times and then are also part of our community. So we need to be reaching them in certain ways both with information and say during a natural disaster we need to be reaching those people and so that's something that I've fact that factors into kind of how we approach

things so when I write something I think can my friend who is like Bill's homes for a living or something is he going to have kind of the the awareness of this one concept that's that certain people in certain fields might know about, but which you need to be deeply invested in these certain fields to know about. I think sometimes those are the words that we use when we talk about important things like social issues. We can sometimes reporters and others can use words

that require, like, there's a lot baked into that single word. And I know there's resistance to thinking that do we really need to hold people's hands through this thing again and again. But sometimes you just do because people are busy and they don't know these things. And sometimes you do need to beat them over the head with like the preexisting facts, whether it be about climate change or whatever, because they're busy. They're doing other things and they don't, they haven't been thinking about these in depth because everybody's got a ton of things to think about.

So I'm wondering like from you, like what part of your background kind of, informs how you, and I guess you just answered this, but do you feel that too, like that, that outside of this, your background outside of this is kind of also impacting kind of the, your audience and how you think about your audience and who you're trying to reach in terms of people who aren't just, or aren't like you and I maybe, trying to broaden your audience and how do you go about doing that yeah i think that that is one of the most important parts and i mentioned it a little bit earlier that i think that it's important that i

always am open to hearing both sides of a perspective um one of them that people might be surprised by is i'm very hesitant on land acknowledgments i'm super hesitant on how we talk about reconciliation as a culture i think that these topics if you push him in the wrong way which in my opinion they've they've been pushed on Canadians in poorly done with, standardizing an email signature at the bottom saying that you're on the unseated. When people don't know what they're saying and you're making them say it, that's not something to me that's going to bring about reconciliation. It's going to bring about a sense of frustration. It's going to bring about hesitancy of why do I have to do this. And those things, they made me nervous when I was going through school and I'd see at UFE,

my professor's saying, holding a little piece of paper and saying, I here I recognize I am, this person doesn't know what they're saying. And that, that scared me because there, we, the word racist has been used more and more commonly. I don't agree that when the wet to win things were taking place, that there were disrespectful people saying belligerent things. I'm not willing to call those people racist. I think that when you're frustrated and you're driving to work and someone's blocking your path and they frustrate you in some way, that's a reaction. It could have been a different skin color. It could have been a different group of people. And they would have said belligerent things regardless of the group. That doesn't mean that they have prejudice against

that one group. That means that they're reactive, short-sighted, perhaps temperamental, and inconsiderate. I'm protective of that word, but I do think that when you start telling people you need to think this way, I'm against the idea, and this is perhaps controversial to some, of the idea of white privilege. Of course, people have privileges. They have better circumstances. I was able to have my full education supported by my indigenous community. My partner, who's part of Ukrainian, she has to take student loans out and work part-time in order to pay for that. I have certain privileges. She has certain privileges. We all have different starting points. The beauty and what I hope people get out of this podcast is that no matter somebody's circumstance, they have

overcome adversity to get to where they are. When I reached out to Scott Sheffield, he was like, why I haven't really experienced any adversity? So I'm probably not a good fit. And I was like, you can't like I don't believe you and then on the podcast he talked about how hard how how difficult it was for him to go take a job when his family was on the island and go work in the interior and how his son started to feel like his dad didn't love him anymore because he never got to see him that's adversity that's super like in that moment you know he wants to quit his job and say I don't need the money that bad I need to be with my child and so people have these moments that develop them.

And I get scared when we focus on one group's problems too much because it makes other people feel like my problems don't matter. And my partners struggled with this. She said, I don't feel like people, like we've been at dinners with people, and they want to hear about me, and they want to hear about Indian residential schools. And that's really good. I don't want to discourage that.

But you make other people feel like what they've faced and their challenges don't matter because you're putting some up on a pedestal, and others are, well, that's life, and you've got all these other privileges. And so it's been important me to highlight everybody's adversity. And that's been sort of the cornerstone of it is because some people say they believe in the idea of white privilege, then they come on and they talk about how they overcame adversity and how they grew as a consequence and how they hope others learn from what they went through. And so I struggle with that movement and I see rumblings of real genuine racism start to. arise when we don't let other people share their stories, when we don't, when we value some too much and like genuine real people who want the worst for certain communities. And that scares

me because I want, and I think this is not an unreasonable ask, is I want everybody to reach their full potential. I believe that if you have people in indigenous communities who aren't able to reach their full potential, just because their family doesn't have any money because they don't own their homes, the band owns their homes, we miss out on the businesses they'd start, the art they'd create, the food they could make us, the knowledge they can share with us, we miss out on all of those things. And then we don't do as well. You think of when you want to try a new food. Well, why can't you try Bannock? Well, why can't you try different cultures foods? And isn't that the idea of what Canada was founded on is that we're multicultural,

that we bring the best of all of us, bring the best of everybody, not just these people now and these people later, everybody. And so that is how I've tried to approach it. And I know that some may disagree with my mindset on that, but it's always with the intent of highlighting people that might not be on your radar, people that weren't on my radar, and trying to make sure that it's inclusive of everybody and the different occupations and the different work

and showing that you can go excel in your life no matter your background. And no matter, if you're disadvantaged, you can use that as fuel. And like, I don't know if you've heard of David Goggins, but he's a person who is extremely overweight, abused by his stepfather ruthlessly, in every way imaginable. And he talked about this idea of now he's like an ultramarathon runner and he ran like six ultramarathons in like six weeks or something crazy like that. And he talked about how when he gets to heaven or whenever his life ends, hypothetically, if that person's there and saying, you were supposed to go do this, you were

supposed to go, oh, I didn't expect you to go run that ultramarathon. Oh, I didn't expect you to go and make that difference. Oh, I didn't, uh, that's what I try and bring to this is, um, I have a lot going on with law school, other jobs, um, other things pulling my attention, but I want to, whatever that end date is, I want the person to go, you weren't supposed to record a thousand interviews. We didn't expect you to do that. I want to live my life to the fullest and, uh, These interviews are always fuel for me. They carry me through the week. They make me proud when I listen back on them and go, wow, I'm really proud that I asked that question.

Or I think, like, I'm glad this person shared that. And that was maybe not the easiest. I'm always looking back on them and trying to think, how could I've done this better? How could I have made this more accessible for people? And with the belief that this is my civic responsibility, if I can, I should, because there's so many within my indigenous community who can't or who don't. have the resources or who don't have my connections or don't have my educational attributes that make people go, maybe this is a waste of my time, but he's going to law school, so maybe it's worth my time to go check it out. Maybe it's not going to be as good as I thought it was going to

be. That's why developing the questions is important to me is because I'm asking for three hours of time. And so if I'm not prepared, they're going to say no. And I would do, three hours is a long time. And so I do my best to be strategic in how I approach this. But this is, If I could do this full-time, this would be my preference because I get so much out of it as the host. And as long as I keep feeling that way, I'm going to keep filling my weekends with this. That's great. Yeah, when you talk, it's really interesting to kind of hear your perspective, too, because I think of most people, like, most things exist on like a spectrum. And, like, there's going to be everybody starts, as you said, from different place.

and see some people start from or have a lot more challenges than others for obvious reasons and things that are for a whole bunch of different like historical things and and so it's interesting too thinking about like the spectrums of thought among communities and the spectrums of behavior among communities I think about that a lot is that if we want to treat everybody, if we assume everybody is a human and equal, and then we need to also accept kind of the failings of wherever you are on the, on the whatever spectrum we're talking about, about kind of whether it's kind of just on the spectrum of diversity of thought too. Have you, when you're talking about and when you're talking to indigenous leaders and when you're like in your own community and just from your own point of view, do you think people kind of simplify too much or grasp the kind of the, that indigenous communities are as diverse and complicated just in terms of like different people having different depend?

opinions, like in every other community? Do you think people grasped up to the correct degree? I think that communities with economic development definitely start to have a variety of perspectives. I think you see that with the Wetowin community, that their chief in council supported the pipeline, and it's their hereditary chief that did not. And so that I feel like was not well communicated to people, that nuance. I think one of the challenges is that within Indigenous communities, they're so, and I've been asked this, is like, should we get rid of the reserve system? And one of the complexities, at least with my community, is you have a lack of access to

information and knowledge and people from different backgrounds, like I was talking about before. In my indigenous communities, you're not going to find doctors, dentists, politicians, like, people from just an array of experiences that you, oh, this person's my next door neighbor, and I can just go ask them a legal question because they're a lawyer. that exists perhaps on promontory. It doesn't exist in my community. And so the challenge is that you're you're passed on certain baggage, whether you're in one community versus another. Some, it might be racial prejudices of, we're better than them and we're in a better circumstance. And then

you pass that baggage onto your children. In indigenous communities, the sense that I often hear is, if you go against the government, you lose. If we've competed, we've tried to stop Indian residential schools. And this was like one really important thing Derek Gap raised, which was we talk about discoveries. And for indigenous communities, if you've read the Indian horse book or watched the movie, you know that at the very beginning of that movie, they're fleeing Indian residential schools. They're trying to get their children up north so they don't go to these schools. Why? Because they know that there's a huge risk. Their children aren't going to come home. When you interview people like Charles Joseph who talk about how there were multiple children who were dead bodies, and the people who ran that

handed the child the lighter to have to burn the bodies. When you think about the atrocities that have taken place, indigenous communities knew that, and it scares me when you mentioned that certain journalists know not to criticize any politician or that they, I'm not saying they do,

but there's a potential for that because indigenous communities know what government overreach, what government errors can do to their community. And so I think that communities are alive to that. It's where I've struggled with making certain rules and regulations on people because these rules often detrimentally impact indigenous communities the most. And they need more access to counseling, more access to resources. We need to bring those into indigenous communities. And I see that happening with Musqueam, with Squyala, with Shiactin. I see really good progress being made.

And what I'm working on in law school right now are two different papers, one on what are economic development corporations in indigenous communities, how do they work, how do they make sure that there's opportunities for economic development? And then the other is how do we look at rural communities versus urban? Because it's really, Shiactin and Squyala are far better positioned to develop because they're right in the community. What do you do about communities like Yale, like Chihuahawafel? places even farther up north that don't again have the same access to resources and there's a

variety of solutions to these problems um and just having those conversations and getting those people on to share what they know i think just increasing everybody's understanding because again to me if these people don't reach their full potential we we as a society miss out and um i don't know if that's i don't think that that's controversial and i guess it would worry me if that was yeah yeah and talking about geography is a huge one because geography is it determines so much in where somebody is determines so much in like how much you hear from them because we hear from people in Vancouver just because they're closer to more media organization so inevitably the the coverage of certain things is going to be tilted towards having more voices from

Vancouver in part there's lots of people in Vancouver so it's on like a per capita basis you justifiable you're trying to reach your audience and you're trying to represent your audience at the same time you have people going through very different things in places further from media or further from resources and how we kind of how they get their views heard how they get their problems heard and how those problems get dealt with is a big thing you'd see that with Lytton a lot and the surrounding area where there's been a huge amount of coverage of that disaster and that town burning down but if you look at the progress there it's been incredibly slow in part because while there's been a large amount of coverage there there has

been relatively little done in the last six months and something that's just a challenge for something we've tried to do not super successfully because it's just hard because there's not that many people and people are scattered everywhere and it's a challenge some places have there's has been covered it's made a difference but because it's so far away and because you don't have people driving through it every day because of landslides and fires and stuff it's they are in a world in which it is harder for them to get get the ball rolling on certain things, I think, or to get exposure that certain things are happening or aren't happening, that a place in middle of Chilliwack would be. And so the less

extreme would be, yes, talking like, I imagine like a community that's right in the middle of Chilwaukee, people are going to be more aware of it. It's going to have more benefits than place that, and more just opportunities for the people in it than places outside. And I think there's ways in which probably we can improve both people and help both people who are in places like on on reserves and at the same time help people who are off reserve too and are struggling with the same type of thing and living in places like Boston Bar where they're in a community that's that's been cut off from places and is hasn't been growing a lot and there's limitations on if you're born there, I imagine.

There are some, it's just tougher to, like, go to university because you don't, you can't live at, you live at home and go university. So there's all these things, I think, that we have to be aware of, and we have to be aware that we don't, if we don't live in those places, we don't know or carry that, that information with us. So we have to actually seek it out and be aware that we don't know it. Exactly. And I think of individuals like Chief David Jimmy and Chief Derek Ep, and they're consistently working for, like, bringing in all communities. They're not saying, this is our border. Don't cross our, like, we're separate from you and we're different from you. Derek Ep has worked hard to increase resources, not just for his community, because he has economic development, but for everybody and increasing access to counseling with his social work background. And that's a really uplifting, positive story. all the committees he's a part of trying to build others up, I think is really inspirational.

And again, not somebody who's going to get onto, and this is no insult just to them, but like global news or CTV, he's not going to be a reoccurring guest. He's got too much going on. And so the opportunity to sit down and say, how'd you do it? Like, how are you putting your community in such a better circumstance than other communities who are more limited on their infrastructure? and it's like your point about geography is so important for people to understand because I believe in having these conversations but when I see people like Jagmeet Singh say well it's really racist of us that we don't have high quality water up in these northern communities in Ontario or none of it it's like right but I've seen I got the opportunity

to go to Saskatchewan and take the NLC program which is a law program for indigenous people and one of their chiefs came in and said we had a water development plan they spent the money on it we didn't have any community members who knew how to run it we didn't have any um development in terms of being able to convince people to come and live here because we're asking a lot for someone to move from vancouver or saskatoon to move from where they live up into the middle of nowhere you need to pay those people more and incentivize their investment and move into our community we didn't have those resources. And so now we've got this really big water facility plant and nobody knows how to run. And so when I see comments of like, just spend more money, it's not just a money issue. And

those communities want to employ their community members. So the community members need to be trained on how to use those facilities. It's not just about bringing in foreign people from all around the country to just come and live in this community to fix their problems. You want those community members to take on those roles and have those impacts. And so these issues are complicated. I think it's important that we always come at them with a sense of humility. We've gotten, particularly with this government, a lot of lip service, a lot of words to sound good or ideas that sound good that make you feel optimistic. But the proof, I think, is in the pudding that on important days to indigenous people, where were you? Oh, you were in Tafino. That's very discouraging to our

communities. For you to have spoken on that day, for you to have said what you've done so far, even just to say, look at all the things I've done. I would have been fine with that as well to not be there on a day that that was, I think, one of the first days where it was a holiday for people to take off. I think it's important that we build each other up in that way. And seeing those approaches, I think discourages indigenous communities from feeling like they're going to see genuine progress. And I think that my optimism comes from seeing people like Chief Andrew Victor, the way they ran their last election, it gave me a lot of hope because they had. the elders ask a list of questions to each person, and they had to write out long-form answers.

In a lot of indigenous communities, the election is based on last name. Oh, you're this last name while you get the vote. And that's not going to bring about progress. When you think of how many politicians conduct their elections through debates and stuff, we don't have that yet. Hopefully we could do a better job of it than perhaps some of the debates you see. But when we don't have that, we don't get the best ideas that get to lead the community. But that is what's taking place with communities like Squyala and Sheactan. They have amazing leadership. And genuine people have been at that table for years saying this is time to pass on the torch to the young leaders who have a vision and want to run with it. And that gives me a lot of hope because I think

you could see indigenous communities outpace other communities because there's a little bit less red tape. There's a little bit more opportunity to do things differently. And And that gives me a lot of hope in terms of where we're heading. Yeah, I think there's the systems that you spoke of, like, and I think we've heard the term systemic racism. But like just the systems, just in general, systems are like super complicated. That's why we make some systems. And I get, and looking at like going back to the flood thing,

flood protection stuff and flood mitigation is a big system. and you get the sense sometimes that so is policing. Policing is a big system. It's like a multitude of police organizations and they're all tasked with different things. And to, we can, I think, lots of times try to improve elements of those systems,

but if we conclude, but sometimes I think there's good reason to think that these systems were set up 60 years ago or 90 years ago, and are we putting enough effort into considering whether the system itself is just needs to be torn up and redrawn in terms of not necessarily big like defunding certain things or or reallocating but just changing how things are funded how the money is coming who gets what and being able to do that in a better way we see that with again flooding where municipalities have been tasked for 20 years with paying for flood protections. And now finally the government has said, okay, no, that's not working. We need to come up with a new system, essentially, for how that's working,

or new allocation. And that is, it shows progress, but it's like one system among many. And you just don't see those changes in systems very often. and for good reason, because it's incredibly hard to do, partly because I think politicians are just, it's a lot of work and politicians work on like a four-year time cycle. And then partly I think just because of lack of imagination sometimes that thinking about which systems should be overhauled and who's going to do that.

And who's going to do that is a huge thing because there's only so many people out there and everybody's super busy as it is, and everybody has only so much capacity, and there's only so many people with that capacity, and there's only so many people who can do what you're doing, or be a reporter, or run a water system, or farm food, or there's only so many people out there. So it's all tough.

Yeah, absolutely. I'd really like to, I know you have a hard out. Let's just make sure, can you tell us about the journalists you work with? Can you tell us about how you came about bringing on Grace and Jothi, if I'm saying her name, perfect. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Grace was the editor, the Agassi Harrison Observer. For a few years, I don't have the exact number. But when I was in Abbotsford, her work always stuck out to me as like somebody who, and she was part of the same chain.

And we'd see work from various people. And there was lots of people doing lots of great work. Grace's was pretty consistently very high quality. She's clearly trying new things with things like maps, and she is also finding interesting stories and telling them an interesting way. So when I started current and knew that we had the budget to bring another person on, there were maybe two or three people who were kind of at the top of my list, and that's not a slight to anybody who wasn't because there's lots of reporters out there.

but in terms of kind of where we were and who was somebody who I thought that would complement my skill set well and add new things to what I couldn't do to somebody who was there and I thought would do very well and then she's surpassed all those and is more organized than me and does a whole bunch of stuff that people don't see and does a lot of editing and it wouldn't be what we were without her and then we brought jolothi on in november and then that was an interesting time because again her first day was on the day that highway one closed down between chilovac and abat sard and everything um went to hell so she just basically came in and and instantly started helping us like manage the flood of the

all the stuff we were having to do or needed to do in terms of trying to inform people and keep up to date on what was happening, just stay cognizant and participate and get out our daily product that we get out every weekday morning. And so she was super helpful with that way. And then since then we've been working and she's done some great stories for us and she used to work at the Langley Advanced Times and so I knew her worked through that way and yeah and she came on

and it's been a great help she helps and just like Grace help fill in some gaps in my skill set. Jothi's helped in fill in some gaps that Grace and I don't have and together this is kind of like how a news

organization grows and succeeds is that you have enough people with enough knowledge who are able to do enough different things to hopefully provide that and this one thing I think about a lot is like the mix of stuff that we do because we don't want all our stuff to be

about Chilliwack or At leastford or we don't want all our stuff to be about floods or farming or business or we want to ideally have something again because the newsletter is kind of our main product in there every day hopefully that somebody finds value that a reader can find value

in and if they don't find value one day we really want them to be able find value the next morning that's kind of how this thing's going to succeed is if we build that that relationship with our readers where they're getting that value and learning and kind of seeing that this is something that they want in their email inbox and if they don't they can always unsubscribe just like you can unsubscribe to various newspapers but but that's kind of how it work. So you need that mix of stories and you need that mix of personalities. And it's like any news organization where you ideally don't have everybody who's just like the same person. You have

different people from different backgrounds and different knowledge bases that can call all kind of like provide their unique ingredient to the product. Can you highlight what Grace wrote? You mentioned an internment camp and then perhaps some work from Jothi that you saw that you have really admired our thought was great just because you mentioned at the beginning that you really

thought that that was one of your best pieces so far and that it didn't get the coverage so let's try and give it a little bit a show of that.

Yeah, the Pashmi internment camp piece that Grace work wrote was really interesting about the internment camp

that was set up in the Sunshine Valley during World War II and the work that's being done to kind of try and preserve

that history and just drawing on historic documents about one of the families who was removed from their home and had to go to Tashmi. And I found that really interesting.

The other really interesting piece that she did, I think, that sticks out of my mind is one on Joseph Trutch and his work and how it related specifically to the Fraser Valley and the shrinking of the reserves here. And it's one thing that ideally we're going to keep trying to focus on and look at it's just kind of how those things, because all those things have long implications. There's huge value in land right now, we all know, and who owns land has huge effects on how our communities grew to where we are today

and how they're going to continue to grow and who develop those communities and who has power and who doesn't and just how things are changing. And so those are really interesting. And then Jothi's done a couple great pieces. She's just trying to think what's been published and what hasn't, because there's a couple ones. Well, the most recent one was a great one that she'd done.

She went out to visit some Sikh motorcycle members of a Sikh motorcycle club, sick motorcycle club who were helping a couple who was new to the Agassi area rebuild their property. And just amid kind of the unhappy news, it was just, I saw a lot of, we had a lot of great response to that this is, it was a little heartwarming story about a club that was basically begging more people to call them because people were too shy to, to want to call them. But this couple called them and the club did a great work, did great work time, just fixing this couple's property because this couple was also new to the area. they didn't know many people and they were able to get help from these people and now meet new people and their neighbors saw kind of the the impact that this motorcycle club made and you don't the average person doesn't talk very much to you talk to people who live next door but it's great to like see those

cross community even if it's just cross geographical barriers kind of and how we're all kind of part of the same community. I just love what you guys are doing. I have a huge admiration for the role you play during the floods. I love that you're still bringing it up and you're looking into it because I do think that we struggle with having a short-term kind of life cycle on issues and that we can forget and then all of a sudden the flood happens again and we're in the same circumstance. So I really admire the work you're doing. I'm a huge, huge advocate for I send your newsletter out all the time because I really believe in everything about it from the witty little blurb. I again, I think that makes it super personable. I remember graces with the train

and the shenanigans going on there. And it's just, it makes it you eager to find out what's going on in your community. It makes it more personable. I think the approach all of you have had throughout great times, throughout tough times, highlighting different communities like the Semeth First Nation, I think you did a great job of that. I've learned about potential guests as a consequence of the work you're doing. And so I am just super grateful for all of your guys's work on this and I hope to continue to have you as a guest and your team as a guest

because you guys are always looking into new things and there's more information for us to learn and hopefully we can share that through the written form and through oral communication and have these complex conversations because I've learned a lot and I feel like we could go another three hours in terms of all the complex issues that we're facing

so I really appreciate you being willing to take the time thanks so much I'm super impressed with your podcast. Again, you talk about ideas from us. I've looked at your guest roster and looked at your podcast and thought, okay, we need to try and get a hold of this person. Sometimes we can't get a hold of them because you do a great job in finding people and it's really impressive and I hope you keep doing it. Awesome. Well, please tell people how they can find you online on social media, how they can connect with your website and subscribe. Right. So I just, you can subscribe to the daily newsletter at www.fvcurent.com. We come out every weekday morning. You get links to both the

stories we produce and links to other stories of interest in the community, and that's our main product. And I guess I'm on Twitter at Ty underscore Olson, but don't worry about that. www.fvcurent.com. That's the one that I want to be selling. Go check it out. Their coverage is in depth. It's high quality. I truly admire all. all the work they're doing. You can find them on Instagram. I highly recommend them. Please go check them out and support this great local news.