It Could Happen Here Weekly 133 - podcast episode cover

It Could Happen Here Weekly 133

Jun 01, 20242 hr 11 min
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All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.

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Transcript

Speaker 1

All Zone media.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 3

Hello, and welcome to It could happen here. This is Sharene and today is part one of a two part series where we talked to someone who was on the ground in Palestine in both Lesday and the West Bank. I'm going to say Lesday because that's how you say in Arabic, but that means Gaza for those who are unfamiliar. Ever since Israel began bombing the people of Lesday in October of last year, it has been virtually impossible for

aid to get into Lensday. Both the Israeli government and its citizens, acting on their own initiative, have blocked AID convoys, destroyed life saving medical and food aid, and harassed people for supplying aid. AID workers who even can get into Leze have been bombed, shot at and killed. And it's not just AID that can't get into Lese. It's extraordinarily

hard for information to even get out. Cell Phone signal is scarce, and understandably people there use it to contact their families, not foreign journalists, so to get a good sense of what life is like on the ground. In the Dafa, we spoke to Ava, one of the Mutual Aid volunteers who, at great risk to her own life, traveled into Lesse to help the people there.

Speaker 4

My name is Ava. I am a nurse and street medic. I'm Jewish of European ancestry and was raised in Pacific Northwest on the traditional lands of the Chinook, Tualitan and Clacamus and many other First nations what is commonly called Portland organ.

Speaker 3

Ava was able to send us some voice notes to scribe having her day to day back in April. She told us what she saw, what she experienced, what she heard. Understandably, there's some background noise in some of this audio, but I personally think it helps ground us in the moment that she's experiencing.

Speaker 4

So here I am the morning of Friday, April nineteenth. This is the start of my second day in Laza.

I spent a full day yesterday at a Najadre hospital in the emergency department, getting introduced to the staff there, the work, the equipment, the patterns of illness and injury, the shortages, struggles, the pain, the happiness was really quite beautiful and hard and a mashup of everything I've experienced in occupation, things I've experienced as a new nurse to a floor, and things I haven't experienced before, which is being in a site of an active war zone and

genocide on The Jahre hospital is located very close to the Rafa border crossing. It's also, I guess, one of the areas more heavily impacted by violence right now in Rapha, which is still much less so than areas to the north like hon Yunis, et cetera.

Speaker 3

We asked Ava to explain the situation in the Dapha at the time of this recording and where she was within it. The following conversation with Ava took place on April twenty ninth.

Speaker 4

I mean, I will first locate myself in Pa, which is the only part of Plaza that I have ever seen, and I have only been in the Gaza during the last two weeks.

Speaker 5

I've been Palestine twice.

Speaker 4

This is my first time in this area, and I haven't seen Adinda Haraza. I haven't seen a honeyness. I haven't seen the destruction up there. And I think that that is from the people who I've met who are roughie cheese, from those areas, healthcare workers, members of the public.

Speaker 5

There's really oh yeah, there's just a moto. Sorry.

Speaker 4

There's a lot of rumblings and things that happened periodically, and a lot of them are explosions that I think is just a motor But yeah, I mean it's really interesting because I arrived at a moment when food stuffs had just started to cross in a little bit more regularly, and I was told that basically in the week before, like street markets had reoccurred, which hadn't been a thing for months.

Speaker 5

And that's like a big part of my experience in the West Bank.

Speaker 4

And so it was really great to see people, even if it was just like a little bit of food selling food on the street, starting to see bread being baked and distributed, seeing people out and about was exciting. There is rampant signs of destruction everywhere. There are lots of standing buildings, but there are lots of piles of

rubble in streets the sites of former buildings. People have in a remarkable job clearing space, but there's sense of destruction everywhere, and I think in some ways the most painful sites are where buildings aren't completely destroyed and you can see into people's bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms, things like that, see artwork still hanging, seek fragments of their homes and lives.

There are tent cities everywhere. I am currently speaking to from within a house that is one of the houses that are rented by NGOs in the area from generally people who have managed to escape that's h and who are renting their homes for a bit of income and to decrease the likelihood their house will be bombed. And in this particular house, we're in the neighborhood of Telsutan,

and there are tent cities all around us. So it's one of those weird situations of staying in a somewhat palatial home where there are people sleeping in very rudimentary tents and structures, sometimes completely uncovered in one hundred plus degree weather. I think the highest temperatures we've seen a couple of days where it was about four to eight degrees center grade, which is about one oh seven sarrenheit. There are a lot of sick people, a lot of struggling people.

Speaker 3

Longtime listeners of the podcast will remember our interview with toddic Lobani, one of the inventors of the three D printed tourniquet, as well as the founder of Glia, a medical aid charity, Ava who was also a medical professional, is working with them.

Speaker 4

I've been working with an organization called Glia that works with primary care clinics and with Martrinity and like natal clinics, and has also been starting to work with at least one emergency department. And I've been working at the hospital on the new shod, which is used to basically be a community tertiary hospital with basically an urgent care clinic, that has basically become the only remaining general public emergency department

in the RAA. There are other there's like an eternity emergency department, hospital department, there's an emergency department run by MSF and like these other ones, but like this is the only like general public one. And I've been there just you know, for two weeks most every day, it's a day off. When I was sick and took off the day today to see some different parts of some other clinics, which is really good comparison.

Speaker 3

We asked Ava what kind of injuries she sees and what the medical situation is like in LA But.

Speaker 4

I will say that it's while the variety of you know, injuries and illnesses that you'll see in that space.

Speaker 5

That is true of any emergency department.

Speaker 4

But depending on the hours I have foundering the day, most of the illnesses and injuries are more usual except exacerbated by the lack of resources, lack of primary character resources celebated by the lack of medications, exacerbated by the lack of clean water and sanitation. Occasionally injuries like from bombings or shootings at night when I have not been there. I have heard of many missile strikes wiping out entire families,

large numbers of people murdered. I have seen, you know, several people killed in that way come to the emergency department, but in no way representative of what's been happening, And it's been a vile account, better these weeks than it has been before. Though the number of missile strikes and things are kind of increasing. There has been word given that there is likely going to be evacuation orders starting in the next in this next few days to a week from the Israelis, but no signs of and in

me it's inclusion that said, we don't know. Most people are pretty hopeful of that that I've talked to, that a ceasefire will be reached, although it's unclear what that would mean. But I can say from my time working in these hospitals that and just being in the community that like most people are hanging on by a thread, whether they have just gotten something very loosely resembling a hint of stability, of like having a place where they

are having access to food. There are children playing, there are you know, some some of the signs of life that I'm used to seeing in Palestine. There are emergency

departments that are somewhat functional. They're like my colleagues working at a NICU where it's always full, but they are able to care for the babies that are there, even not as well as they would like to, but like they are able to if this population is displaced again, which is what the Israelis are suggesting in this case towards hon units, which they've leveled, and they are trying to get the international community to set up tense cities there that will kill a lot of people, that will

tear apart a lot of what little people had left. So very very difficult in that way. That said, it's also more alive than I expected. There's more signs of daily life, of children playing, of people making and serving coffee in the street, of a couple of bakeries are producing, you know, all those pieces like flawfel sands like those

things exist. A cost of food or atrocious We don't you know, buy food here, but I'm aware of some of the prices and they are much higher than they would be in the West Bank, where food is you know, not on Embarco.

Speaker 3

For those who aren't super familiar, the West Bank refers to the West Bank of Jordan. It stretches across the eastern border of Israel, along the west banks of the Jordan River and most of the Dead Sea. It was designated as its own region when Israel established itself and ethnically cleansed Palestine in nineteen forty eight, but it has been eaten away to a massive amount in nineteen sixty seven.

It was occupied during the Six Day War, and during the nineteen seventies and eighties, Israel began establishing settlements there, which was and is still illegal under international law, and even with protests from the international community, Israel continues still today to establish settlements on Palestinian land. The first major Arab uprising aka the First Intifada, also referred to as the Stone Intifada, began in nineteen eighty seven in the

Gaza Strip and spread to the West Bank. It ended in nineteen ninety three with the signing of the First Oslo Accords. The Second Intifada, also known as the Alusa Antifada, was another major Arab uprising by Palestinians against the Israeli occupation. During the twenty tens, the Fatah dominated Palestinian authority worked toward established itself as an independent government in the urban Palestinian areas of the West Bank. At the same time,

Israel expanded its settlement activity in the territory. Tutta, formerly the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, is a Palestinian nationalist and social democratic political party. It is the largest faction of the confederated multi party Palestine Liberation organization and the second

largest party in the Palestinian Legislative Council. PUTTA has been closely identified with the leadership of its founder and chairman, Yasser Arafat, who was elected chairman of the PLO in Cairo in February nineteen sixty nine until his death in two thousand and four. In May twenty twenty one, Palestine families in Schechtradra, a neighborhood and occupied East Jerusalem, began protesting against Israel's plan to forcibly evict them from their

homes to make way for Jewish settlers. Many of the families were refugees who had settled in Schechtradra after being forcibly displaced around the time of Israel's establishment as a state in nineteen forty eight. Since Israel occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank in nineteen sixty seven, Palestinians and Schektradra had been continuously targeted by Israeli authorities, who used discriminatory laws to systematically dispossess Palestinians of their

land and homes for the benefit of Jewish Israelis. The events of May twenty twenty one were emblematic of the oppression which Palestinians have faced every day for decades. The discrimination, the dispossession, and the repression of descent, the killings and injuries. They are all a part of a system which is designed to privilege Jewish Israelis at the expense of Palestinians. This is apartheid, which is, as you should know, prohibited

an international law. In twenty twenty one, Amnesty International reported that Israel imposes a system of oppression and domination against Palestinians across all areas under its control in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, and against Palestinian refugees in order to benefit Israelis laws, policies, and practices which are intended to maintain a violent system of control over Palestinians have left them fragmented geographically and politically, frequently impoverished, and in

a constant state of fear and insecurity, with no freedom of movement or freedom's period. And then there's Israel's apartheid Wall, which began as a fence along the border between the West Bank and what is called Israel. It was first constructed by Israel in nineteen seventy one as a security barrier, and it has been rebuilt and upgraded since it was constructed by Israel to control the movement of the Palestinian population as well as goods between the Gaza Strip and Israel.

So that's some history on the West Bank and just for some context. Twenty twenty three was the deadliest year for Palestinians since the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs AOCHA began recording casualties in two thousand and five. Since the Gaza genocide began, Israel has stepped up military raids in the West Bank, where violence had already been surging for over a year. UN records show that Israeli forces or settlers have killed hundreds of Palestinians

in the West Bank since October seventh. In twenty twenty three, at least five hundred and seven Palestinians were killed, including at least eighty one children. Between October seventh and December thirty one, twenty twenty three, two hundred and ninety nine Palestinians were killed in the West Bank, marking a fifty percent increase compared to the first nine months of the year.

According to the World Health Organization, since October seventh, four hundred and seventy four Palestinians, including one hundred and sixteen children, have been killed in the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem, and about five thousand were injured. There are many days where Israeli forces killed Palestinians, but I'm going to refer to a couple just to give you a general idea

of the violence the Palestinians experience. On March twenty first, there was a day when Israeli forces killed three Palestinians and separate incidents in the occupied West Bank, resulting in ten Palestinians killed in the territory over a twenty four hour period. This was reported by the Palestinian news agency WUFFA.

On April twentieth, Israeli forces killed fourteen Palestinians during a raid in the occupied West Bank, including an ambulance driver who was killed as he went to pick up wounded Palestinians from a separate attack by violent Israeli settlers. Erica Guavera Rosas, Amnesty International's director of Global Research, Advocacy and Policy.

Speaker 1

Said under the cover of the l Lentist bombardment and atrosty crimes in Gaza, Israeli forces have unleashed unlawful lethal force against Palestinians and the occupied West Bank, carrying out unlawful killings and displaying a chilling disregard for Palestinian lives.

These unlawful killings are in blatant violation of international human rights law and are committed with impunity in the context of maintaining Israel's institutionalized regime, the systematic oppression and domination over Palestinians.

Speaker 3

Because Ava has experience in both cluds in the West Bank, I wanted to ask what she witnessed while in the West Bank. Here's Ava telling us about her experience.

Speaker 4

Specifically, I was working with the International Solidarity Movement, which is the same group I worked with when I was in Palestine twelve years ago. And that's basically exactly what it sounds like. It's a vaguely kiss androsocialist and our Communists informed assembly of most the internationals with this s mattering of Palestinians and a couple Israeli activists. I was in the West Bank this round from the end of January until I came to Gaza, which was halfway through April,

so basically two and a half months. Most people who volunteer there, it's anywhere from like two or three weeks to two or three months. Because of tourist visa lasts that long, and that's usually the most you can expect. During the time I was there, ism and other solidarity organizations got to be a topic of much discussion in the Israelikan essets, as they got very excited about the dangerous anarchists in the South. There's a lot of interesting converisons between the West Bank and Gaza.

Speaker 3

Palestinian people are divided by the State of Israel into two areas, with two separate governments and two different experiences of occupation. We asked a what people in the cludsday had to say about the situation for those living in the West Bank, where settler colonialism spreads every single day.

Speaker 4

Maybe I'll start by saying, when I rolled into Gaza and met members from the Health of Ministry and like they're like, oh, you speak in Arabic or do you learn Arabic? And I was like in the West Bank and they're like, oh, it's so hard there, and I was like really and they're like yeah, you know, I mean obviously like the war, which is what they call the genocide you usually hear.

Speaker 5

Too has been very hard.

Speaker 4

But like before that, like they have to live under a different version of occupation or direct version of occupation every day. And I thought that that just like touched something intense in me and like was really like a big I don't know, it just affected me a lot.

But as far as like comparisons, there are parts of the West Bank that feel independent, that you feel like, oh, I'm in an area that is, you know, where ostensibly are not supposed to see Israelis, and if they are there, they're like my friend who just lives in you know, lives with her husband who's Palestinian, and they hang out

there and are fine most of the time. But a lot of these areas that I spent al most of my time are areas where there's more direct contact constantly between settlers, soldiers and the Palestinian community who are often in those areas like we are in rural and it's like a very different scale of genocide. I often talk about that as like a silver genocide, and this is a faster genocide here in Gussa.

Speaker 5

But it's like no less horrible.

Speaker 4

It ends up being like a person, a person and like parcel of land, a parcel of land. Palestinian heard of sheep, is Raeli heard of sheep, herd of sheep, and it sounds like very parallel, except that the Palestinians have been shepherding there for generations or hundreds of years. And the settlers there, some of them many most of them are like teenagers who are dropouts and like get in trouble all the time, and then they're brought up

there as community service. And some of them know how to shoprund and some of them don't, but they use it as an opportunity to graze their animals on like Palasinian wheat fields.

Speaker 3

Settler colonialism isn't just a vague concept or a way of looking at the past in Palestine. It's something that happens almost every single day. The violent displacement of Palestinian people, which began with the Nekba, has never really stopped, and the families in the West Bank experience their own nekbas every time their land is stolen. That's why volunteers like Ava go there to be in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

We asked Ava what the process of appropriation looks like on the ground.

Speaker 4

They stand somewhere, get confrontational with the Palestinians, with the international and Israeli solidarity activists. They get the police to and soldiers who arrest people and harass people. They occasionally fire at and sometimes kill or somearely injure Palestinians, less commonly at Jena or it was really octivists after the

seventh all across the West Bank. Initially a lot of the settlers, as I understand I responded by kind of clamping down security concerns, and then very quickly turned it into an opportunity for attack and turned up at villages like the village of Zenuta and just were like which had like got about one hundred families, and was like, you don't leave, We're going to kill you all. And so people left and it was a credible threat, and they did kill a lot of people. I think that's

the largest village I've heard of recently. They disappeared other places. People ran away and their homes were destroyed, their animals were taken. People come back and their cars get torched. They get arrested on no charges and held for longer than ever, and in many cases or torture to death.

I have a friend and comrade that I organized up a little bit who was in Janine at the start right after October seventh, and she witnessed truly horrific you know, targeted killings by drone strikes and other things, and basically fled south so she would be okay and physically. So

that's some of what has happened. Most of the villages that historically have had the like nonviolent weekly protests, which a lot of people who in the past and volunteered, like as you know internationals will have experience with, and like there's a lot of the popular images of like youth in Kafia's drawing stones at some of those sites. Since October seventh, almost all of the villages stopped as far as I know, because it was too dangerous.

Speaker 5

When I arrived, I was told all of the villages had stopped.

Speaker 4

But then we found out part way that there was a village that was having protests kofor Katum in the northern half of the West Bank, and it turns out when I went there, they'd never stopped.

Speaker 5

They protested each week.

Speaker 4

They did scale back with their goals were because whereas in the past they had been many of them had been shot with live ammunition like twenty two caliber rifles. Since the seventh it basically became all lave of ammunition, and only by the grace of God or luck were none of them murtyered in that time because the soldiers were not shooting at ankles as is the conventional guidance.

I saw videos of them shooting into buildings, into homes, shooting at head height, things like that, And like the week before I went, the guy was shot in the face and he only survived because it deflected so down through his johns did it into his skull. So they've experienced a lot of severe oppression there. There's been hundreds killed in the West Bank just since October seventh. There is active fighting in parts of the north of like kind of Jinine and I think until Karen and some

other places between some armed resistance and Asurai soldiers. But it's definitely not at the same scale as in Lazza, and there aren't like active bombs falling on people. But it's you know, still murderous. It's still driving people out, it's still squeezing people to they either lash out or leave.

Speaker 3

I mean, it's it honestly sounds like it just a repeat in some way of the Nekaba, you know, like that's just what happened. It is a little maybe a little slower, like you said, like a slower genocide, right, yeah, it never really stopped. It's been a slow genocide for like seventy six years. In addition to ongoing colonization, the economic conditions in the West Bank make life hard for people there. But this does not stop people in the West Bank from being in solidarity with the people of Ze.

Speaker 4

When I was in the West Bank, I will also say, like, and I've shared this with many people here on Gaza, like I would be in a tiny one bedroom house who are very poor. Like people's incomes disappeared after the Seventh That's another thing. Like a lot of people made their money by traveling to cities to work, by working at settlements, things like that. After the seventh roads were shut down, people couldn't move. Palestinian workers were not allowed

in settlements, not allowed to cross into forty eight. So everybody's struggling. But like people are spending twenty four to seven with like Algerzeerra or like other Palestinian or Palestinian coverage of what's happening in Gaza, like people are right there when Ramadan started, I was there doing the of the Ramadan, Like people are like, I'm so looking forward to feeling hunger along with Gaza, and like that was another aspect of hearing from the first Gasms crossing into Gaza,

like saying like, oh, it's so hard over there. We're with them, Like I think there's a lot of attempts from the Israelis, from liberal Zionists in the US, from the state and everything to be like good Palestinian, bad Palestinian, and like all the Palestinians are, you know, like they might not all agree politically, Like there's many different positions on everything, just as there are many positions and everything in every community. There's a lot of them that they

between them. And that was another reason I was really excited to come from the West Bank and bring like some olive oil and other gifts on behalf of the community, because people need to know how much they are loved

and thought of. On the other side, I find it's sad and beautiful how united of a people are the Palestinians across the tremendous distance of a and also incredibly short distance of apartheid and occupation that they can't see each other or visit each other, but they feel for each other and are with each other in their hearts and just kind ofrects me a little bit.

Speaker 5

It's also nice to be near the sea.

Speaker 4

I haven't yet seen the sea, but my friend was here very close and could see it from their house. I just feel being close to the sea and like see the sunsets, and that's so incredibly beautiful and sad too because most Palestinians don't get to see the sea.

Speaker 3

And that's going to be the end of part one. In part two, Ava tells us what the process was like traveling from the West Bank until Les, and she details her experience being on the ground to the So please tune in to tomorrow's episode to hear more from Ava. Until then, Rerepalace Done.

Speaker 1

It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. We're back for part two in our conversation with Ava. When we left off, Ava was describing her experience in the West Bank. I wanted to know what it was like traveling into lensday Drapha, in particular from the West Bank.

So now we are going to jump back into that conversation. What was that process of even entering what like from the West Bank? So there is no direct way for the west thing.

Speaker 4

I mean, it's it's hilarious because, like you know, like the conventional wisdom is like, oh, the entire land of Palestine is like smaller in New Jersey, but you don't really notice it until like I am in Yaffa, I'm in Tel Aviv, I am like thirty kilometers or something from Gaza. I am in the West Bank. I am so close, but you have to go a long way, over a long through a lot of like logistical hurdles together just kind of like any kind of travel in

the West Bank or any kind of occupied space. But basically my journey looked like leaving Masafriata, the area villages in the south Huborn Hills or southern West Bank, going north to from Allah, crossing into Koudes and then hanging out and then taking and I got to be in the Goods for Eed, which was amazing to see that, but then hopping on a bus and riding all the way down to a lot like a kind of a horrible tourist town at the southern end of forty eight,

then cut a bus into Tapa on the Egyptian side in Sinai. Crossing took forever, so I spent basically twelve hours overnight circuling the Sinai, which wasn't my original pan, but it's what happened. And then I went to Cairo, and I spent some time in Cairo. I got there a little bit early. Our entry was delayed, so I ended up having some basic chirot to do compass, which was fine and good, and then went in with a UN convoy, which is really the only way that you

can go in crossing the northern Sinai. There's a lot of checks with Egyptian officials without then you get to the border, go through a bunch of checks with Egyptian officials, then you cross over have a comparatively fewer but still

plenty checks with Gazan officials. I also almost cried like looking at a Palestinian seal crossing in, because I was like getting a stamp in my passport the Palestinian authority in Gaza, because I was like, I've never like it's always every court of entry into Palestine is otherwise controlled by the Israelis. This is like the only one that

is under Palestinian control. Even if it's like Palestinian control in a giant open air prison, it's like still something under And then we're inside and I have been working and you know, driving and in cars and movement is pretty limited for security reasons. The murdering of the World Central Kitchen workers that happened not long before I came, when like basically a targeted drones strike took out three

vehicles and six four seven people. Still very unclear reasons, but it's not an accident, maybe not directed from the top, but very scary. So there's a lot of controlled movements, so basically you have to kind of have a preapproved plan for where you're going to go and what you're

going to do when you're going to move. But yeah, there's a lot of there's for a number of international aid workers here right now, and I'm really privileged to work with mostly Palestinian ones, but a few good internationals too.

Speaker 3

I wanted to get Avia's perspective about social media and the actions of college protesters, how much coverage of the protests actually gets to Palestinians.

Speaker 4

I was watching coverage with one of the doctors here of campus protests and other international protests just this afternoon. People are talking about it. People are talking about global resistance and support. I don't know how representative that is outside of that space. Like I interact with a lot of members of the public who are not healthcare workers,

but most of my conversations are with healthcare workers. I do speak a little bit of Arabic, but not at like a deep conversational level, like enough to do some basic assessments and pleasantries and you know, meet my needs. A lot of people are aware and are feeling hopeful in this mode moment with the negotiations, in part because

of the international pressure. It's interesting a lot. I feel like there's a lot more hopefulness in Gaza than I've experienced just talking with people that I experienced in the West Bank, and I think that partly that might be the moment, but also I think it's partly sometimes in the fact they noticed in the West Bank too, where it's like.

Speaker 5

It's horrible and horrifying and terrifying.

Speaker 4

To be in the eye of the storm or to be in the storm, but it's like you're in it and you don't have to imagine it elsewhere, if that makes sense. When that all started, like I tried to plug in as best as I could with you know, protest movements around the States, and as I'm sure a lot of people with maybe you and a lot of

people might be listening, could like resonate with. It felt very like exciting to have that much motivation or that many people caring about Palestine, but also really inadequate and really be hopeless, just feel like you're throwing yourself against a wall and nothing's going to change, and feels really hopeless.

And in the West Bank I had Palestinian activists say I think this has proven that no protest movements do anything, but like in this moment and in this location, I don't hear that, and I don't believe that that's the case.

I think that her test movements have a limited capacity to change those people in the policies and just those people in power that said it's so little, so late as far as like any kind of political change in the West and in the US and in Europe, like today, I visited a cemetery that was built by like a guy and his volunteers he worked with since October seventh, and like visited the site of the remains of his family.

What remains were covered and of like another person's remains of her family, and just like a field of some quality and a lot of just like pavers stones just thrown down with names written on them in the sand, surrounded by tent encampments, with children fighting to water the plants in order to get a couple of shekels their nation. Like it also really really sucks, and the fact that it's gotten to this point is unimaginably horrific.

Speaker 3

Ava had been on the ground and helping in what little remains of Lesa's hospitals. This is what she had to say about that experience.

Speaker 5

There is no space.

Speaker 4

Most of the sickest and most seriously injured patients are treated on the floor because there's no space, and they were brought in screaming, bleeding, dying or dead. First few days, I saw several people die on the floor, you know, saw several bodies on the floor. It's incredibly hard space. Most of the difficulty that I have seen, like I said before, has not been direct violence from the genocide, such as a missile falling, such as shrapnels, such as conclastiforce,

such as gunshots. I've seen all of those, but that has not been the majority of what I have seen. The majority of what I have seen is children who do not have access to their anti seazure medications. So the child comes in in what's called status apolypticus, which is a seizure that lasts longer than thirty minutes, and it's gotten to a point where it's self reinforcing and it can't be stopped easily, and often it can be

easily fatal, even with critical care resources. I have seen children who whose parents had to sitch to a different form of a medication and with a different dosing and things, and that got confusing because they were either like find someone who's bringing in medication, or like find it from another place and it's not written in Arabic and it's not clear, and so they end up getting a wrong dose. It's like that on the shot is now the only

provider of dialysis in there. There's another hospital that provides, but everywhere is so overly, there's way too many people drawing on those resources that they're having to run people shorter periods of time, more spread out schedule, so people get critically sick. It's like a lack of clean water because of destruction of infrastructure, because of mass displacement, because of a extended period where in the Israelis were uh and the Egyptians were preventing flow of clean water resources

into Gaza. So children, adults are getting hepatitis, a turning yellow with jaundice, having persisting diarrhea, dehydration, incredibly high rates of septic shock, and severe systemic infection due to all.

Speaker 5

Kinds of untreated conditions.

Speaker 4

Because it's so much work and so dangerous for people to access care, let alone just live that, people put things off till they're literally dying. It's not a stable situation, but it's like a tenuously like I said, hanging on by a thread situation.

Speaker 5

And again I just I am.

Speaker 4

I am terrified of what will happen if then everybody has to relocate again, because it's going to be like people not going back to square one, It'll be going you know, backward in the whole new depths of pain and suffering because like if they're pushed out of Raa to han Uness, it'll be too an already devastated city with now tent cities and people trying to.

Speaker 5

Rebuild a hospital where there is no water infrastructure.

Speaker 3

Despite the terrible suffering, Ava was able to find time to connect with her faith and her heritage while she was in las.

Speaker 4

I am also Jewish. That is not the reason I am here, but it is not not a reason that

I am here. And during like the first few months since the seventh of October, Jews took up a lot of space in protest movements, and I think for good reason, because frankly, white supremacy and a time with simi Arab anti Palestinian bias and people not knowing what to think or do about Palestine, and so having voices of Jewish Americans saying like, no, actually, this is bad, Like you can all see that and just go ahead and acknowledge it's bad and we can move forward. I think is important.

That said, I think that the voices of Jewish people the voices of white people. Not all the Jews are white, of course, but many Jews experienced whiteness and do not generally experience the Islamophobia anti Arabias, although planet some do.

Speaker 3

Here's a voice note Ava shared with us after a long day at the hospital in the Deafa.

Speaker 4

Aaker our house, I made some soup with noodles and some beans are food sawba scandals. For the first time in a long time, I find myself interestingly less estranged from my practice than I have been. It feels very in line with my faith, practice and my ethics to be here, and that feels good. And it's been the first time in a long time that I've felt like lighting. There's been several times that people have asked me my

faith and I've answered I'm Jewish. And some of them were interested or excited, some of them were surprised or confused. Most were like, yeah, no problem. And obviously nobody has said anything negative about me for that, or for being American for that matter. My experience of Palestinians continues to be of the most understanding, welcoming and people in hospitable

people and people most capable of holding complexity. People here obviously are not fans of the US, fans of the State of Israel, not fans of Most of their experience of Jews but have no problem with people from the US or people who are Jewish.

Speaker 5

And that much is my experience in the last bank.

Speaker 4

So there's that I've been offered people's foods so many times, and I consistently decline, except when I've just fed them and I eat something, and then I'm like, that's enough, thank you.

Speaker 5

I don't know.

Speaker 4

It's a really magical place and a really hard place to be, and I'm grateful I.

Speaker 5

Get to be here.

Speaker 3

It's obvious how much help there is great, but to give the people a pleasant With their hospitals bombed and their doctors killed, they desperately need medical help. But she says they have given her help as well.

Speaker 4

And I think it's really important, like you say, to be focused on the people who are experiencing the genocide and are assisting the genocide, because truly, in no small part, I came to Palestine hoping to be, you know, to do something to help, and also to be reinspired. Because Palestinians are experts in resisting colonialism, experts in resisting genocide, experts in maintaining whatever can be considered hopefulness towards the

future beyond occupation and colonialism. It is not fair that Palasinians have to bear that burden of maintaining that kind of optimism and resilience and all that kind of stuff in the face of all the horrors that they've experienced, like nobody should have to experience that.

Speaker 3

We then asked Ava what the impact of solidarity actions around the world have on the people of Palestine.

Speaker 5

I think it is important to talk.

Speaker 4

I think it's really unsatisfying kind of activism, as many kinds of activism are, because it's hard to convince people who are already decided they're against you, and it's also and painful and exhausting and usually not helpful. And also it doesn't feel particularly helpful just to like rev up people that do agree with you. But I think that people continuing to show up and not letting it rest, not letting that energy die, not letting this administration feel

like anyone's forgotten about the ways that they failed. Also, BDS, please learn about Boycopa investment and instinction. The Israeli government also really is scared of that they view it as terrorism to do more of it. Not saying that people should do terrorism, but do BDS, which is not terrorism.

Speaker 3

Decidedly no I'm glad you brought that up, because that's what the students are protesting. They want their universities to divest.

Speaker 5

I do think that people should learn more about BDS because a lot of the public knowledge and information promoted about BDS stuff is different from it. And that's fine.

Speaker 4

I think that Starbucks and McDonald's and all these other companies that are actually not BDS targets being scared to be associated with Israeli occupation state is also good. Don't

get so much on a high horse about colonialism. Also learn about like the colonial history and reality of North America and try to work towards like supporting antipeclinial struggle there, because it, to me feels like the utmost of hypocrisy to be like you know, and the last ongoing occupation in the world and ignore the occupation that you might be living on and benefit from. Personally, I think that

I think it insulates. I think it does important work towards building international solidarity and building anti colonial resistance around the world to talk about the interconnection between different kinds of colonialism and anti clinial struggle, and it also insulates our movements against claims of anti Semitism and other things to be like. No, it's nothing special about the Israeli State. Israeli State is a really bad example of settler colonialism

as is unit. It sits as is Canada and be able to talk about all of those things as different sides of the same kinds of like genocidal systems.

Speaker 3

In addition to sharing her impressions of Palestine with us, Ava also shared some moments of her day to day life there. These small moments of joy are something that wore, genocide and violence try to take from Palestinian people, and so the experience of joy is a form of resistance in itself.

Speaker 4

I am here in a tiny courtyard. There are birds chirping you can see, or some sounds of the street. I can see some flowers and beautiful plants, next to an incredibly fancy house that a family fled from and is now renting to the organization I'm working with and in turn housing also another family of one of the doctors here. And so it feels so strangely peaceful, very confusing to the senses. Anyway, that's enough for now. I'm signing off by.

Speaker 3

If there's anything that you want people to know that we haven't seen, or like that hasn't been being showed. Like I know, the actual atrocity is far, far greater than the snippets we're seeing. But I guess, having been on the ground, what is something that maybe you want people to know that we aren't getting across on our phones.

Speaker 4

I guess the best way I can answer that is, like, it's not particularly original, but remembering that cousins are just people, and they're living their lives and trying to exist.

Speaker 5

They're just people, and.

Speaker 4

Everyone and everything that they've known has been irrevocably altered, whether they've been murdered, seriously injured, had their entire family taken from them and never recovered. All the landmarks they grew up around, all the trees that they hung out under, all the places that they prayed and ate and got

into trouble, everything has gone. And thirty some thousand murdered, sixty some thousand injured does not represent any part of anywhere near the majority of the horror that people are experiencing. But I think it's worthwhile remembering that, and also that numbers are not at all representative, and also just that like some people are political here, some people aren't critical, and most of them they'll getty dam I just want to live.

Speaker 1

It Could Happen years a production of cool Zone Media. Well more podcasts and cool Zone Media. Visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or where every was in the.

Speaker 6

Podcast It Could Happen Here. That's the podcast that you're listening to. I'm your host, Nia Wong. It's a podcast about things falling apart and putting them back together again. This is a very very immediate falling apart and then trying to put it back together again. Episode Today we're talking about something we haven't really talked about on the show very much, which is the music industry and the

absolute fiasco that is streaming services within it. And here to talk with me today are two people who are trying to fix some of those problems. And those two people are Simon and Alex who are co founders and worker owners of a new platform project initiative many such words called MIRLO. And yeah, both of you two, welcome to the show.

Speaker 5

Thanks so much. It's a pleasure to be here.

Speaker 7

Yeah, excited to be on here.

Speaker 6

Yeah. So I'm excited to talk with you both first about sort of the issues with the existing sort of market for music distribution, because there's been over the last really twenty years, it's been a sort of seismic shift in how music distribution has functioned from a model that was previously largely built on things like record sales to the sort of streaming platforms.

Speaker 8

So, yeah, can you talk about what the issues you.

Speaker 6

See with the sort of current model are and how that kind of led you to do something different?

Speaker 8

Sure?

Speaker 5

Yeah, I mean for me, that's the story of me growing up with music, you know, because I was born in the nineteen eighties, so you know, my first connection to you know, to music was through playing in my elementary school band, learning the trumpet and then the trombone, but also you know, beginning to buy CDs and I remember, I think it might have been will Smith's Big Willie Style or whatever that like in the early nineties. I

think was the first CD that I bought. But you know, that was how I, you know, music came into my world. There were also some cassette tapes too, I think, like when I was younger, it was cassette tapes and by the time I was the one like, you know, spending my allowance money. It was CDs. But then you know, by the end of the decade, by the time in high school, you know, Napster happens. I was, I think in middle school when that happened.

Speaker 6

So we should explain what napster is, because I think we've outreached a point where it faded.

Speaker 5

Napster is a big deal because all of a sudden, I can speak from my you know, memory of it as a twelve year old or whatever. I was probably fourteen maybe when when when Napster was a thing. I remember going over to my neighbor's house who I hung out with after school a lot, and he had this program on his computer where he could download any song that he wanted, and it was just like this incredible,

mind blowing new thing. Of course, that's just from the end point of the distribution, right, that's from that perspective,

it was this absolutely transformative expert varience. But of course all of the steps that got into getting the music there was putting some carts before some horses, you know, and a lot of it was you know, getting there via unauthorized leaks or other ways that because it was all of a sudden, so simple to share the physical sounds through the new kinds of media channels that were

available through the Internet obviously and through software. The folks at Napster were able to really jump ahead of that and in classic Silicon Valley fashion, you know, disrupt the industry and all of that was really happening with musicians early on, right this was even before the dot com

bubble burst. You know, Napster was riding that wave and a big part of that sort of first arrival of Silicon Valley startup technology really arriving in millions of you know, living rooms and home office computers and you know all that. And so I think historically, you know, with technology, this really does play out that oftentimes musicians are the ones

that get disrupted first. And for decades this has been you can look at the history of the twentieth century and the history of media in the twentieth century as this tension between musicians doing what they do and technologists doing what they do, and capitalists using the technology to

extract value from the musicians, you know. And then there have of course been lots of ways that musicians have organized and fought back, and you know, wrote their own chapters in the story, and I think that we're just just starting to get to the point where that is happening in this latest episode. Napster is, you know, twenty five years old at this point in terms of when

that moment happened. And of course the reaction to Napster from the entrenched music industry, which we're all consolidating under these massive media conglomerates at that time, they fought back kind of old school, and I remember I was in college when they were soon doing college kids for downloading stuff on Napster, for having files on your computer that you know, weren't authorized or whatever. Those were my peers.

You know, I didn't actually know anybody personally that this was happening to, but this was, you know, this was something that we were all aware of and we were all kind of figuring out together.

Speaker 6

There's a really good Corey doctor book that's like a fictionalized account of what this period was like called Pirate Cinema. That is great, So if you ever want to yeah, if people want to read that, it is very good. It's about the sort of film version of the same fight that was happening.

Speaker 5

Exactly, and they were I mean, no holds barred, Like, they had massive budgets for expensive lawyers, and they just sent them after whoever they could, thinking that that would stem the tide. And obviously that wasn't going to stop anything, because what Napster signaled was this massive, technologically catalyzed paradigm shift where the way that people listen to music was just radically transforming before everyone one's eyes. And it took the music industry side of it a little while to

catch up to that reality. But once they did, they started trying to figure out, Okay, what are the ways that we can get a cut right? Obviously if everyone's just doing this illegally, and you know this is just if everybody is doing something illegal at the same time, even we can't send enough lawyers to sue everybody out of existence, so we need to figure out how to make this work. And that's when you know there started to be experiments with other big corporate players in the

technology industry. I remember from my perspective, it was the iTunes store. I remember ripping all of my CDs that I bought in high school, like spending a whole weekend just ripping them all into my iTunes library. And kind of curating it and having my you know, all of my MP three's and iTunes, and I had an iPod and that was where I would listen to things. And I didn't even really purchase a lot of the like

because they had ninety nine cent tracks. That was kind of things like you could pay dollar and you can get what you wanted. I didn't buy that much music that by that point, because mostly it was transferring files

that I had burned from CDs. But that was how the industry was kind of making its peace with this disruption, was to partner with Apple, and then later Spotify comes onto the scene with this promise of the Universal Jukebox, Right like, we're going to build the tool that is going to allow for any listener to just pay a subscription and they can listen to anything they want on the internet. Because you can hire it anything on the internet.

We're going to make the legal way to do it, and so we're going to let people pay and we're going to design all of the back end. We're going to centralize it in our you know, technological systems, and we're going to build this tool that can allow anybody to listen to music anytime without having to in the back of their mind be worried about if they're stealing from a musician or if you know, they're going to

get sued a record label or whatever. Right so, and of course the record companies were all in on that bet, and that is where you know there I haven't seen all of the books or whatnot, but it's very clear that you know, the major labels were big you know, equity owners in Spotify. So they're basically making big bets

on Spotify. And then the tension that has been navigated is, Okay, how do they maintain the value of the catalog, the back catalog that the intellectual property rights of all of the recordings that throughout you know, the history of recorded music they have consolidated into these you know, catalog portfolios of sounds and songs. So that's valuable and they need to get their piece from that, But then they also

need to get their piece from Spotify. The business you know, continuing to exist and that subscriber revenue from people who are paying for the privilege to be able to listen to any song that they want at the click of a button, and that has Yeah, it's created some weird Incentivesicularly, the group of people at the end of the day that really gets left out of that are the musicians, right, because throughout history, you know, the partnerships with people who

distribute music have been very exploitive. Right. It's like, Okay, i'll give you an advance to go record your music, give you all this creative control, you know, set up the studio time, do all the legwork to make it so you can do whatever you want as a musician. But then we're keeping the master recordings. You know, we're keeping a percentage of every sale that you make. So it does become this kind of deal where the labels, over the longer term, benefit much much more than the musicians.

And then the deal will spotify really amplified that because the labels are making sure they get their cut, but they're not always making sure that the musicians get their cut. And even the musicians getting their cut has to go through the labels first, and so the labels have this relationship with the technology company that's distributing the files themselves, and that's kind of the bargain where it stayed, right

and then most recently that became even more amplified. It sort of turned up the volume on the disparity in this dynamic when Spotify made the decision to demonetize many of the songs that are on the platform. So it used to be that you would get some fraction of a cent for every time that someone streamed your song, and Spotify had this complex algorithm for determining how you got paid out, and they recently tweaked that algorithm so that if you don't meet a certain threshold of plays,

you don't get anything. So you could have your music on Spotify, could be music that you worked really hard and you know, even invested your own time and money and resources into putting out there, and you don't get a penny of it, and you don't get you say, and why? And that's the starting point from a musicians perspective about where things are at.

Speaker 7

I think it's also interesting to think about how the way those.

Speaker 9

Technology systems and the way that the music distribution has changed has also changed the way that music gets made. So you see a lot more, you know, very big name musicians releasing single tracks to big acclaim because now the incentive, and with the tweaking of the incentive, is that you.

Speaker 10

Want individual tracks that are making millions and millions of plays, so it really becomes about that rather than and you know that can be fairly value neutral, you know, album versus track or whatever, but it is really influencing the way that you know, the first twenty seconds or so of a song are the most important. So the structure of songs are changing to suit you know what, what actual music gets made because people skip the song, then

it doesn't make any money. And yeah, So the way that the technology and capital and the incentives of capital have changed to actually shape the culture that we're consumed, I think it's very interesting.

Speaker 6

Yeah, And speaking of the way that capital and capital incentives changes the structure of what you're consuming, we need

to take an ad break and we are back. So I think one of the kind of leak things about this kind of era of media distribution has been how kind of staggeringly impossible it's felt to resist any of these forces, largely because you know, now you have the power effectively of these massive tech companies and then also the power of the existing sort of studio monopolies on the same side, sort of wielding a giant hammer and

hammering everyone else in the line. And this is the point where I want to ask, Yeah, I start talking about what mer Low is. So can we talk a little bit about I guess first how it got started, and then we can get more into what is it and how it's attempting to change all of this.

Speaker 10

So about two years ago, now, wow, I was doing a lot of volunteering with a project called Resonate, which is a little bit of a precursor to mirror Low in a way. Resonate is trying to be a alternative to Spotify. They want to be a streaming service where you can basically just create playlists, listen to music, and just and what was novel about Resonate was that they had a payout structure where every time you played a stream,

you paid a little bit more. So if you pay once, you pay a cent, If you play twice you pay two cents, and then it would increase to.

Speaker 7

Paying around a dollar. And once you paid a dollar for.

Speaker 10

A track, so you played it like nine times, you owned the track and then it was yours to pay for it indefinitely. That was cool I did somewhere there, But what became apparent quickly was again these incentive structures where if you want to do a streaming platform. You want it to be a universal jukebox. People will use it for the music that's on it, and they want to hear the music that they know. And if you want to be a universal jukebox, you have to wade

into the realm of royalties. And one of the things that we didn't mention earlier is that, as far as I know, maybe it's changed in the past year or so, Spotify is still not profitable. Despite massive payouts to the CEO, Spotify doesn't actually turn a profit. It's just investment driven, and that is in large part because of the way that royalties work on songs.

Speaker 7

It's just really hard to actually make money on top of all the costs of the.

Speaker 10

Infrastructure, which was a little bit of a clue for us for not working for a bootstrapped, non VC funded work or co op with absolutely no money, it was unlikely that that would succeed. We started also looking at projects that are kind of in the same space and we're a little bit more successful. That's how we got into contact with Alex and Alex I don't know if you want to talk a little bit.

Speaker 5

About Ampled, sure, Yeah, So Sion mentioned that he was coming out of Resonate. At the same time, I was coming out of AMPLE, which was a platform cooperative initiative that was started later part of the Last Second twenty

eighteen twenty nineteen. I forgot exactly when I joined towards the end of twenty twenty one, and the idea behind ampled was that it was going to create essentially a monthly patronage kind of platform for musicians, so you, you know, release exclusive stuff on the platform that's yours and that you have the intellectual property rights too, and you have supporters who pay a monthly contribution to have access to

that content. And so they had a little I guess it was kind of like a blog post kind of format that could you get in bed audio. You could embed videos and it would go out and and email to your supporters every month, and they could log into the platform to listen to your whatever you're releasing there. I joined AMPLE because I was actually at the time coming out of some other work that I had been

doing and building democratic workplaces. I had been involved in starting another project that was trying to organize itself that way, and was also working with my partner who's a therapist, to start a mental health worker cooperative at the same time. So I was deep in the worker cooperative nerd zone at that point. But I had not been playing very much music. I'm a trombonist and do jazz and improvised music, and I had taken a couple of years off really

from playing and was starting to get cranky. There was just a part of me that needs to make music. That's just the part of who I am, and it was just becoming really clear to me that that needed

to happen. So I was starting to look for what are some ways that I can start putting some stuff out into the world again and ideally doing that work in the spirit of cooperation, you know, and finding other people who shared my enthusiasm for the idea that doing the work together and learning how to actually run things cooperatively without you know, a management structure on top of it siphoning energy away from it. And so I found Ample on the Internet and saw what the proposition was.

And part of their structure at the time was that you could actually become a co owner of the platform by being an artist that was using the platform, and once you got to a certain number of supporters on the platform, then you got to be well. The governance rights involved being able to a third of the board members.

It was a nine person board with three artists representatives could run for the board, and there was also sort of an extra space and their discord that was sort of artist owner, you know, only kind of space to connect around that. And so yeah, once I got the number of people following my project, this was in twenty twenty two, got an email saying congratulations, you're an artist owner, and at the same time realized that the party was kind of over. I had when I arrived into the space,

I was like, Hey, everybody, what's up? And it was just kind of crickets, you know. And there were a couple of the workers who were working on it at the time, who I'm pretty sure were still volunteering their time, who had had some conversations with and gotten to know a little bit, but it was sort of a ghost ship by that point. And it turns out I was

the last artist owner to join yeahs distinction exact. The platform wound down entirely at the end of twenty twenty three, and so yeah, it was maybe a few months after I had joined and started using it. I kind of had a monthly flow where I would do something, send an update, write something about what I was working on, records and trombone sounds, you know, linked to something else

that was on the internet, you know. And so after a few months of doing that, yeah, I got an email saying we're winding down, sorry, and that was kind

of that. But by that point I had met Si and we were both kind of starting to compare notes about these respective projects that had similar goals, similar ideals, similar interest in you know, cooperating, and realizing that neither of them was, you know, was going to be a place where we could continue the work that we wanted to do, And so we started talking about, well, what if we were going to start from scratch, what would

that look like? And so I brought some other friends he'd been working with that resonate and these conversations we've just started as conversations like similar to the one we're having right now, where we're starting to kind of develop an analysis together about what's going on in the music industry,

what might be able to be done differently. And after a few months those conversations started turning into wait, yeah, we could actually do some of this ourselves and that was when the idea of mirla really started to hit the ground.

Speaker 6

Yeah, we will talk more about how all of it sort of came together and what the structure looks like and what it will look like after more of these ads. We are back, So let's get into this sort of meat of what near low is. So can you talk about what is sort of different about mirlaw than the other sort of platforms in the market. How is the cooperative structure work.

Speaker 7

Yeah, So when we were looking at ways to.

Speaker 10

Actually make a profitable business, which is unfortunately a thing that you have to do if you want to or at least a revenue making business, if you want to be able to pay people, we were looking at other platforms and spaces that exist out there that do actually make money. So Patreon and band Camp have been profitable. Band Camp for a long time actually posted their earnings

as a report. Then band Camp got sold, and then it got sold again, and then band Camp laid off half of their staff, including everyone who was part of the union organizing committee. And we were already like we already had a basically a prototype at that point, but that was also a moment where we realized is like oh, we gotta go, we gotta press goo on this thing. And so what we have, what the product is right now is basically it is I would say, a lightweight

clone of bandcamp. It doesn't have all the functionality with the added features of more Patreon stall subscription based things. So musicians can go onto mir Low, they upload their albums, they can sell their albums as digital copies for whatever they want, for free or for money, and then they can also set subscription tiers, use it as a mailing list basically to send out updates. Two subscribers have specific

tiers that receive specific content. For example, you could have a tier that if someone subscribes, they automatically get any new release that you put on the platform. And yeah, that's basically the product. It allows music playing, but it's not as streaming service. You can't make playlists, it doesn't

do infinite streaming. The plays are basically promotional plays. So we've had two hundred and fifty artists, which includes some people who work under several names, but so two hundred and fifty entities artists who have uploaded five hundred albums to Erolo, which I don't know, I haven't done the math on what that is like listening time wise, but it's probably already more music that I could consume, and

we have people buying music. It's really exciting, you know, like it's not we're not we're not making enough money to bankroll anything, but it's exciting that I think we've got about four hundred dollars moving through the platform every month at this point. So that's that's really cool. We need more obviously, but that goes a long way to you know, I guess confirming the ideas that.

Speaker 7

We've had so far. And there was a second part of.

Speaker 6

That question, Yeah, how does the sort of cooperative structure work now? And then we could move on to what is it going to look like when the platform is sort of more developed, more mature.

Speaker 5

Yeah, I can speak to little bit. So we also, in our thinking about this, took a lot of lessons from our experiences in Ample and Resonate, also the other experiences I've had in you know, cooperative organizing structures. And one of the things that we wanted to make sure we did was we had kind of a phase one and then during that phase one also kind of figure out the vision for what we want to see moving forward and how we can grow into something that's more

like what we ultimately want. In other words, we didn't want to put the car before the horse was saying like, okay, let's draw out like this really spiffy multi stakeholder cooperative thing where the artists have these things and the you know, listeners have these things, and the coders have you know, you know, for starters. We just figured out who among us is like ready to our government name to be

some paper and you know, open an LLC. And that ended up being three of us who are based in the United States MESI and one other working on our Jodie, and then from there the three of us were kind of the poor team that is going to build things out from here. So we're still very early stages, you know. The soft launch and the platform was the beginning of

this year, just a couple of months ago. We incorporated last year in November, so all of this is totally brand new, and you know, we're figuring out as we go. But the idea with the current group is that we start to practice a culture of decision making by consent.

And that's this idea that particularly anything high level about you know, what the business is or how it runs is consented to by everybody in the group, and so if there's anything that any of us are a no to, you know, we're like, hold up, this isn't going to work for me. That actually is the way that we steer the ship forward. So that's been something that we've been working on building together. We're working with a legal team to codify this into a sort of worker cooperative

style LLC operating agreement. You know, we're members of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives. We've been kind of learning from the ecosystemative ways that worker cooperative policies and procedures can be built into the nucleus of this at the beginning. And also, the three of us each come from different places, and so we each bring really different perspectives to where

things need to go. And so that's also been a part of you know, where we're starting from is if we can get enough unique perspectives into the space, build the core practice this culture of consent where even a minority of no is a no for the whole group, and start to build that in, then that is kind of the seed for where things go from here.

Speaker 6

In terms of where things go from here. Things that you talk about a lot is the exit to community, And yeah, I wanted to ask, can you explain what that is and what it sort of means for what this platform is going to be going forward.

Speaker 5

Yeah, So this idea of exit to community comes from conversations that have been happening in the solid area economy world about what would it look like to support essentially startup businesses right that the founders are aiming for a different kind of exit than how we traditionally think about, you know, startup businesses that are aiming for an exit to either get bought by a bigger company or get listed publicly on a stock market and become essentially instruments

of financial speculation. And that's really the only kind of pathway out. We even saw this with band Camp, that you know, this company that was internally profitable and doing things the way that regular old businesses to operate, you know, and releasing their financials every year and you know, really

doing it by the book, so to speak. There that the endpoint, you know, ten ish years down the road, was getting bought by a bigger company because what they had built was valuable to Epic Games, and you know, there's been speculation about why Epic bought band camp, but you know, whatever the reason was, it wasn't because they were taking all the boxes as a profitable business, every step with the way. That might have been part of it. But the idea was that band camp had become something

more valuable and that they could cash out. You know, I think it was two hundred and eighty something million dollars, which is a big chunk of change, and that, you know, the decision to cash out was made by the founder. There was likely other people who had input into the decision, but there was certainly wasn't you know, a team that was you know, having a deliberation and making a consent based decision about how to do that. It was one guy and he signed the paperwork and that was it.

So the idea of exit to the community is essentially been an invitation to explore alternatives, alternatives that are more in alignment with building the world that we're actually trying to see. So for us, that means, you know, first of all, creating something that is financially viable, you know, that can actually support the work that it takes to both maintain the platform and maintain accountability to the people who are using platform, particularly the musicians, so that those

relationships need to get built. There needs to be enough trust in order to feel like this is actually a thing worth continuing to do together. And then there's also the work of having it be essentially used enough that the math works out that the work that it takes to sustain the platform can be supported and the work that it takes to make music can be supported, because ultimately, this is a platform that is trying to move money

into musicians' pockets. So if we can pull that off, then the next step is the exit community step, which the way I see it, would be essentially co designing a set of agreements about how the system will continue to be tended to moving forward in ways that are directly accountable to the people who are involved in making

it go themselves. Right, So in this case, you know, we see the community as kind of broadly comprised of three different groups, not like groups of people that all hang out together and do stuff together, but like there's kind of three kinds of contributions that are getting made. One is the people who are working on developing the software. This is an open source software project, so there's been a lot of inputs from a lot of different people.

Of that, of course, the work of maintaining an open source software project requires resourcing, but that's one of the groups. Another group is the musicians, the people who are you

making stuff that they put on the platform. And another is the people who are listening and the people who are supporting with you know, with patronage, with money, right, and and some people might be in all three of those categories, you know, So it's not like there's your one or the other, but those three things all have really important and important stake in the sustainability of the

overall operations. So the exit to community step would be essentially designing standards, protocols, agreements, whatever you want to call it for how we do this work moving forward, and then we can get out of the way if we want,

you know. So that's the other part of it. The other part of it, too, of an exit is how do you make sure that the founders are whole, you know, so that it's not like we've put all this work into making something possible and then it's working and then everyone's like, oh yeah, screw you, get out of here. We're ready to take this on our ohs and we're hoping that doesn't happen either, So figuring out that is

also a part of the's what's before us. My aspiration and my vision for this is that culture of can that we're baking into the worker stage of this right now can be something that continues to be a core aspect of how we move forward. In other words, once we really see who all the stakeholders are, let's come up with a creative way to figure out how this is going to work that everybody can consent to them.

Speaker 6

I think that's a good place of transition to the last thing I wanted to ask, which is you know, you've both came from projects that kind of fizzled, and this is the thing that happens a lot of time with projects like this. So what is the sort of plan to make sure that this is not like the next in a pile of of people who tried to do this that did work.

Speaker 10

We've been having a lot of conversations around that because there have been like public reflections happening about the final years of Ampled, So there's some reflections around those things that you can find those on the internet. Well, So the things I'm thinking about is you really have to think about what it means to be successful, and.

Speaker 7

It's possible to claim that success is.

Speaker 10

You know, we go toe to toe with band camp or Patreon and we beat them at the game of being a VC funded startup, but we do it with volunteer and you know, grassroots money support. And I guess that is a way of thinking of success. It's not my personal way of thinking of success. So a way of thinking of success for me is more, you know, what's the end result? What are we hoping to do? What are we hoping to prefigure? Is it a more resilient community of people who are willing to go into

a next step together? And in that way, I feel like you could say that Resonate and Ampled they fizzled, but they both created spaces where people found each other and try to do the next thing. And I feel like that is very much the project of organizing prior to global socialism or whatever, is looking at what we did and learning from it and moving forward and trying again.

Speaker 7

Because we have to try again. And I feel like that is kind of the big picture question.

Speaker 10

We have some stuff in place that we're doing to make our project a bit more resilient. The consen stuff is part of that that Alex just described. Other parts of that is that we from the get go decided to do things publicly and bring in people as quickly as possible. I was the original programmer for the platform, but in the past month I have been the honestly one of the smallest contributors to the platform. We've just had people stepping up in really incredible ways. Truly appreciate it.

We've had people stepping in during this campaign. They've been making videos, they've been making art. Yeah, just the way that the community is stepping in and like wanting to be a success, I think is this great example of what it is we can achieve if we if we're willing to, you know, let people into the process of doing that. There are a lot of questions there about who and what is doing that supporting, So that is

something that we're constantly checking in on. And I think also a metric of success is who is interacting with the platform. Especially at Resonate, they did a really good job of bringing in the folks from Black Socialists of America were involved. There were people who had experience of

cooperation Jackson who were involved. They did a really good job of diversifying the crowd of people who were not the standard I don't know, like open source tech people, which is a very white, you know, susset mail situation.

And we we're trying to take from those and learn from those and thinking about what spaces we present ourselves in, like very intentional outreach to people to open up through cultural work, through conversations that are very local focused, to create space where we're talking about these things.

Speaker 5

Yeah, and I think for me, the idea of success too has to do with our needs getting met, you know, because Spotify is not meeting people's needs. Sorry, it's just not I mean, I guess it's meeting some people's needs, not meeting very many people.

Speaker 6

Yeah, yeah, I mean they just fired like not literally their entire podcasting division, but an unbelievably large number of extreuely talented people got fired. Oh really and it yeah, it really sucks.

Speaker 7

That's really interesting.

Speaker 5

Yeah, you know, not operating at the same scale that Spotify is actually making it work matters, you know. And my hope is that that, first of all, that individual artists start to see this as a place that you know, they can kind of get their crew around them, and that this can be a really a nice reliable source of additional income in their careers, help them pay rent.

Like when I was on Ampled, you know, I was bringing in like one hundred dollars a month or something like that, which isn't that much because I was doing it on a very small scale, but it made a big difference in my everyday life in terms of making space to make music a part of it. And I know how I lean into that a little bit more, there could be you know, a significant chunk of change coming through something like this to support just the ongoing paying rent while making art, which is the thing.

Speaker 10

On that note, another thing that I think is worth celebrating is that in the end, AMPLE basically made two hundred and fifty thousand dollars available to musicians and did do what it was trying to do in a successful way.

Speaker 5

This is the other thing that I want to aspire to or you know, define success as, is our local scenes starting to work mirror low into the way that they operate. You know, can this be something that small independent labels, artists, collectives, niche genres in different places, you know, DIY spaces, whatever that this can actually be a useful tool to make the local space go and to make it easier for musicians to do what they do in community in real life, you know, at the level of

local and we'll see how that goes. We're just getting started, but I'm really optimistic and looking forward to continuing to pour energy into that. Yeah.

Speaker 6

So where can people go to find the platform and support it if they're interested or get involved?

Speaker 5

Yeah, so we're at mirrlow dot space. That's the website. If you go to mirrlow dot space, you'll see at the very top right now, just for a a couple more days, we've got a kickstarter going to kind of keep the lights on for the rest of the year. Be tremendously grateful for any support from anyone who's listening today. To get us, it's where I need to get over there, and also at the front page, and if you scroll down to the bottom, there's links to email us, find

us on GitHub, find our discord. There's plenty of ways to plug in and connect. Yeah.

Speaker 6

Yeah, So hoping this all works for the best, and hoping that there's a way for artists to create music in ways that are sustainable and not unbelievably exploitative.

Speaker 7

Yeah, thanks so much for having us, man, it's been truly a pleasure.

Speaker 5

Yeah, thank you so much.

Speaker 6

Maybe so Yeah, yeah, and this has been It could happen here and find us in the usual places. Yeah. Go, I don't know, go make trouble for the people who have what use it.

Speaker 1

It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 8

Hi everyone, it's me James and I'm joined by Scheren today, and in a rare instance, we're not discussing something terrible and sad. It seems like most of the think is serene and I talk about. But it's a fun episode today, isn't it, Shreen.

Speaker 3

Yeah, I'm in a good mood, which is crazy to say these days. But I'm happy to be here. I love to be the podcast dummy. I love to have things talk to me at and I listen too. Yeah, exactly, that's interest.

Speaker 8

You've chrished it. No, we won't be taking that again. Let's go from there. I don't want everyone to think Sharen is dummy. S Shereen, it's very intelligent. But we are making a podcast today about touching grass. A thing that some people need to do has become apparent. I've been on the internet. I think some people need to go outside. Yeah, and even if you're not saying the stupidest shit imaginable on Twitter, I still think it's actually

really good for you to go outside. Like I know, this seems to be an episode I do every couple of months, but every single time I have to go and do something traumatic or scary or upsetting for work, I just book a few days afterwards to be by myself in the mountains camp and sort of just not particularly like trying to do massive miles on a trail, just being outside. And I find it's the most healing thing for me. It's how I process all the things that I have to see and hear about for work.

And I want you to do that too, podcast listeners. Yeah, and Serene, I want Sreen to do it.

Speaker 3

Nature is healing, it is, and that makes sense that that's where you go. It makes total sense.

Speaker 8

Yeah, I think you have to be comfortable, like you know, if you're scared sleeping alone outside in a tent by yourself. Right, Yeah, it's not going to be healing for you. And I can see that. I'm a white dude, right, and I go through the outdoors just like I go through everywhere else's white du You know that means that something different experiences. Yes, yes, yeah, we have. That's why social is you to think anyway.

I want to talk today just about hiking or walking or rambling or hillwalking or you know, you could call it any of the things that you want, just because I think it's probably the most successible way to get outside for most people. Right, Like I could talk about cycling. It's been a lot of my life cycling. It's expensive and confusing for people.

Speaker 3

So in your equipment, you know, hiking, you just need to get outside.

Speaker 8

Yeah, exactly, like you probably if you're able to move under your own power now, then you can probably go for a walk. I'm going to talk about equipment in the back half, but I think if you're a lot of people seem to have a lot of questions about backpacking equipment, so we'll cover that. But yeah, I think for most people, just like setting the intention of going for a walk would be a massively beneficial thing. So I want to encourage you to do that to start

of summer. If you're in the northern hemisphere, if you're in the southern hemisphere, it's a start of winter, you know, you can still get out there. And so to start off with, I wanted to talk about finding a route, finding a place, picking a route to go hiking. Did you go hiking very much? I actually do.

Speaker 3

I do like a hike. I like a hike. I've gone backpacking once and I really liked it.

Speaker 8

Where did you go back back?

Speaker 3

Oh high? Oh yeah wow, Yeah, that's a cute little place. But it was so hot and I almost passed out. I should have done it in a different day. We should have done it a different day. But I do love to hike. I like to be outside. I'm not like the most outdoors a person. I wish I knew how like how to make a fire or something, or like I wish I was like a scout.

Speaker 8

There's lots of shit that you don't want to be involved within the scouting movement surin.

Speaker 3

Oh really, okay, I take that back.

Speaker 8

Yeah yeah yeah, probably inducing behind the bus just such a scout.

Speaker 3

Okay, I will do that.

Speaker 8

I did not.

Speaker 3

But what I mean is like I really like being outside, and I have like the bare minimum of like equipment that I need for that kind of stuff. I used to get really intimidated that I didn't know as much as I thought other people did. But I don't think anyone knows as much as they think they do.

Speaker 8

Absolutely no.

Speaker 3

Yeah, so that made me feel better.

Speaker 8

Yeah, And like the outdoors are super humbling in that sense, right, Like you think you know it all, you don't, and at some point you'll get humbled or so it's good to always have a bit of respect, Yeah, for the outdoors and mother nature. I've seen some people who do not that it can end messily. Seen some people who learn to climb on YouTube really get to grips with

YouTube not being the same as going outside. I guess if I'm starting off, if you're picking a route, and I think probably the best way to do it is I discovered this recently. Lots of these modern smartphones have a step counter in them. Even if you don't have a fancy watch that count steps, your phone does it for you. I think that's a really good way of ascertaining, like how far you walk in a regular day, right, I was thinking about, like how far to most people walk? I don't know.

Speaker 3

I know a fun fact about me.

Speaker 8

I would love to usering.

Speaker 3

I purposely have never ever opened that app or activated it to know how many steps I walk because I know myself and I know I would get like hyper fixated on it, and I did not want to be confronted with the days that I just sit on my ass all day, you know, And so I have never ever active app.

Speaker 8

That's a great stree.

Speaker 3

I'm proud of you for knowing that that wouldn't be good for you. I mean, I just know myself it wouldn't be a good thing for me. I think it's a good thing for a lot of people to like get them motivated and stuff, but sometimes it's also a negative to being too focused on the numbers.

Speaker 8

And yeah, totally, especially like if you're someone who's had like a relationship with exercise, it wasn't healthy for you before.

Speaker 3

Yeah, I guess that's also part of it too. That was my experience. I'm sorry, are you are the things to add it just happened?

Speaker 8

Yeah, okay, Yeah, I'm glad that you have a good relationship with it now. But yeah, for people who you know, if that's not for you, that's not for you. I'll say that.

Speaker 3

But I just think it's a fun fact. I don't know anyone else that has not. Like I'm terrified of the app. I have not even opened it. When you go to my health app, it says welcome, like it doesn't even you know what I mean, Like it's not Yeah.

Speaker 8

I did think you've got a brand new phone. I was going to suggest to all trails because A it's got a very complete list of trails, and B I noticed I had a wheelchair for yeah, I was looking for wheelchair accessible trails for someone the other day. You can just filter on all trails, like you can find the ones that don't have steps or excessive rocks or something. So like, if that's something you're looking for, I think that could be really handy. And other little tips for

picking your root. If you try and set off early, A, you're gonna not deal with big crowds of people. Be Animals are almost always more active at dawning dusk. I have been trail running a lot recently, and I love to trail run right when the sun's coming up. It just feels like it's nice and I see little animals, don't see as many snakes. I like to see a snake.

Speaker 3

The weather is probably like the best it's going to be that day. Yeah, yeah, exactly, especially as it gets hotter.

Speaker 8

Right like if you're not necessarily doing a lot of exercise right now, and then you go for you know, even a short hike in the middle of the day on a hot day, you can put yourself in the box. And like I think I've heard before that like the vast majority of trail rescues are like on front country trails, like five or ten mins.

Speaker 3

I believe that people get confident.

Speaker 8

I guess that in mind. If you're heading out in a little front country I would say some things to bring would be we'll go over like equipment, boots, stuff like that. If you if you're like getting more into it, but heading out on a little first hike. If as long as you have a bag with some water and a phone and some shoes that you like to wear that they're comfortable for you, I think you'll be fine. And I think they bring a snack. Snack is always

a good thing to have. It's nice to have a little trail snack at yeah, I love a good rectangular food. But yeah, if you don't have water, that's like fourth of July last year, someone didn't bring water for their dog, and I remember their dog was in like severe Yeah, no, it was one of the stupider things. But I can't think of a year here where I haven't been running or riding on trails and seeing someone forget to bring water for their dog terrible. I hate that.

Speaker 3

Yeah, I don't like I see like sometimes there's like a communal stops for pets, but you can't count on those, you know.

Speaker 8

Yeah, totally. I don't really count any of those things working, you know, like water fountains, Like, don't be reliant up on a water fountain, take a little water bottle. You'll be so much happier. And if you want to find people to hike with, I've had pretty good luck with a meetup app. I used to climb by some people from meet up here in San Diego, and like climbings are fairly like high trust endeavor if someone's belaying you right. I definitely met some people there who are very capable

and we had a great time. Climbing outside. Meetup seems to be pretty good for that kind of stuff. ARII also often has free like I'll just take you out for a hike hiking sessions, and I know they have like yeah, yeah I can. Yeah, they they seem nice. They have like fem ones that women transferm people can go and sistudes can't go, which is fine, you know, like it's probably a nice thing for some people feel a little safer and more comfortable there. They have one,

so they're just open for everyone. They think that's a dude's only hike, which is also fine. So those are some places to meet people. I think it's always nice to go with someone, especially if you don't feel confident or you don't feel like the outdoors are a place where you're like comfortable. It's nice to go with even if it's someone who has the same degree of knowledge and background in it as you. Like, they can help you rationalize your fears.

Speaker 3

Yeah, when you're alone and like you get lost or you feel panic, it's so much worse than if you had like a friend with you. It only happened to me once and I was on rooms, so but I won't get into that, but it was scary.

Speaker 8

Yeah, then maybe you'd leave those a home if you're going out first tike maybe.

Speaker 3

Yeah, No, you don't need those if you're by yourself, especially, Just take it from me. Please, don't go on a mountain and take too many things and panic the whole way home.

Speaker 8

I want to hear this story afterwards.

Speaker 3

It was my thirtieth birthday in twenty twenty, so everything was closed. I tried to go and touch grass games and I had.

Speaker 8

You nearly touched it with your face as you fell down the mountain on your shroom trip. Yeah, your thirtiest beft is.

Speaker 3

Yeah, it was crisis, I suppose anyway.

Speaker 6

Sorry, yeah, unreeling, Yeah, that's okay.

Speaker 8

You know shrims. Do you know what will not make you have an existential crisis on top of the mountain on your own in the middle of a pandemic? Please tell me it is the products and services that support this show. Unless we get a shroom sad, I would love that the stream will read your shroom sad. If you're in the industry, please reach out her Twitter is at I write. Okay, all right, we're back in fact all the psilocybin. Maybe it's still illegal.

Speaker 3

I don't think they are. Yeah, they're in Oregon.

Speaker 8

They are Yeah, well there you go, right, So I'm interested to know what questions you had before you decided to embark on your hiking lifestyle or is something you've always done.

Speaker 3

I mean my family and I we never really did outdoorsy stuff, so it was something I did when I was like finishing high school. I started to be like, wow, I live in a place where I can go hiking, and I've never done this before. So it was a learning curve. But I started when I was like seventeen and I got my entire family to go hiking with me for the first time.

Speaker 6

Yeah.

Speaker 3

It was also when I was introducing my mom to like Zoomba. That was the vibe back then. So I was trying to get active. But I think the most important things are I mean, I'm a big skincare person. I think some protection cannot be understated, especially if you are hiking in the middle of the day, like when the sun is at its highest point. You need sunscreen and a hat. There is like some protective clothing even that could come in handy, but at the bare minimum,

you need a good hat. Yeah, like not even a cat I like those those fishermen looking hats. You got to get the whole circumference. But a cap is fine. A cap will do. I think that's the most important little accessory for me.

Speaker 8

It's a hat. I have one of those, like felted wool hats.

Speaker 3

Nice. Don't they get hot?

Speaker 5

No?

Speaker 10

Not really.

Speaker 8

The wool breeze pretty well. Like it was what I was out at the body yesterday helping out and it was like a nineteen I was wearing it. It was fine, and it's wool so you can dip in the water and it gets wet. Yeah, I like one of those. Yeah. I actually have a little list of of equipment or clothing stuff which maybe I could go over. It seems like the vast majority of the questions I get people like to dm me the question, which is great, by the way, I do like it when people ask me

for like how can I no bad question? Because no, there aren't. And like a lot of my career as a journalist, like earlier on was doing outdoor media and like, yeah, the outdoor media has gone to complete shit, and you know, you can't write anything. It's an advertorial now just actually like just to if you are looking to buy something, and it is basically any product with you read on

the Internet. I understand that the vast majority of those will only be products that pay a certain percentage back to the website that refers you to them, and so then inherently causes a bias against products which don't do that. An editor at Big Men's Magazine suggested that I write some reviews about the stuff that I'd never seen.

Speaker 3

They weren't going to send them to you.

Speaker 8

Well, the company would have done, but the editor wanted the piece in like fifteen miles, which, like, I know, I used to do lots of reviews and buy some stuff, and I take it pretty seriously. And because it's a lot of someone.

Speaker 3

I look at those reviews all the time, I have to weed out the ones I think are like sponsored. But I really I really like reviews. Yes, I go on Reddit a lot to see what people think, like their own experience.

Speaker 8

Redd It's a great place. So I've said that like universally, but I do mean with respect to Yeah.

Speaker 3

It's a place where you can find more anecdotal experience with stuff versus I don't know, Amazon review.

Speaker 8

Yeah, there are some whoppers on Reddit who in any aspect to overestimate their insight into things. But you'll find anyone on the internet. So yeah, I'm going to go through some different clothing items, stuff I like and stuff that I think you can probably find cheap and hopefully that will help people kind of especially if you're thinking of backpacking. It can be very intimidating and expensive, I think.

And at the start of the PCT almost once a week, right helping out the border, that's one of the areas where people cross and I see people with thousands of dollars of gear that is all brand new, and I know it can be pretty intimidating, but like, you don't have to start there, so there's always stuff you have a home. Maybe we'll do one on camping later in the summer. So you get a hat, any particular hat preferences, Sharen, I.

Speaker 3

Don't know the brands, honestly, I don't know. And unless like someone recommended this brand, use this, like my shoes are I think we talked about this before Solomon No, yes, is that a brand? Yeah, Salmon, And I was like, that's a sad Yeah. Yeah, I think you can find really cheap hats that are protective. You know, I don't think you need a big brand for a hat as long as it like covers your head in your face.

Speaker 8

Yeah, yeah, totally. I trail run all the time in a hat I got free like five years ago.

Speaker 3

If anything, I think it's better to have things you don't care about getting dirty or ruined, you know, because you're sure.

Speaker 8

I've noticed a lot of outdoor stuff really kind of moving towards streetwear. There's this thing that I learned about recently called gorp core, which is my okay, the test.

Speaker 3

I think it's cute.

Speaker 8

Okay, this is going to be the point of disagreement. People like it when the hosts disagree on podcasts.

Speaker 3

How do you define gorp core?

Speaker 8

It's people wearing hiking stuff to go around town, which is fine. I do that all the time. I dress like a man in ARII catalog. But like, why are you making it fashion? And then why have you stolen my brands who used to make reliable outdoor gear.

Speaker 3

And now I enread that assessment, I will say, I don't think wearing hiking stuff is necessary, but I do like to look like I'm going on a safari, you know. I like that character for me.

Speaker 8

Do you have like a pith helmet and like a No, it's just more it's like fascinating.

Speaker 3

Like shorts that are meant to be hiked in are longer usually, and I just think they look better than other shorts and you can just wear that and like a button down shirt with some leaves on it, it looks like I'm going on a safari, but I'm just walking around town.

Speaker 8

This this vision of like nineteen twenty sharen, you know, like a carriage seeing a lion.

Speaker 3

But yeah, gorf core is it's becoming more and more trendy. And I will say that you're you're right about things being more expensive because of it, because it shouldn't be so expensive to be prepared to go on a hike.

Speaker 8

Yeah, and like so like for most of the stuff I look for when I'm hiking, a lot of brands I go to, like Outdoor Research, Mountain Hardware. I'll list to other stuff as we go through, but like Oarctics and Patagonia seem to like taken off in price and

like decoupled from other stuff which literally uses the same materials. Right, One of the things I would suggest if you're trying to buy outdoor gerries, look at the materials used, because you know you might find the same material used in another piece somewhere else, and it might cost less, right if it doesn't have that like gorp core appeal. If I just go through some stuff I like really quickly. I like to wear buttonup shirts when I hike. Wow,

Forten a whole piece about this. It's like two thousand words and it sits on backpack.

Speaker 3

So what's the reason A very shortened version of the reason.

Speaker 8

They're nice. They cover your neck a bit better. They have buttons so you can vent your chest if you need to get some extra ventilation. Yeah, you can roll up the sleeves. You can roll down the sleeves. That there was very practical. When I met the president of the Marshall Islands, like one of my little hiking buttonup shirts because I hadn't been expected to be formal, and I put on a little tie that they gave me and I went.

Speaker 3

I will say I have worn my button down hiking shirts out and about town because I think they look so oops.

Speaker 8

Yeah, I agree with you, Srian, I think they look cute. You can look cute in them. If you're looking to buy some shirts. Outdoor Research has one called the Astroman, which is amazing, Like it feels like you're not wearing a shirt, which is always the goal with shirt couu. The Hunting brand has one called the Tiburon, which is right.

Speaker 3

Are they going to be listed somewhere?

Speaker 8

Yes, Like I did last time, I will make a two thousand words show description with links in it for people. I also like those T shirts, like running shirts. I don't really buy like hiking t shirts. I think often they're just cotton T shirts with a picture of a river on. But running shirts a nice gore wear, so that the people who make gortex there's also really good value stuff. Actually it's worth looking at obviously, Like they're like in house, so they have all gortex waterproof stuff.

But they have a shirt called the Contest which I always trail running this morning. It's a pretty nice shirt and gets hot here in San Diego. And like, I don't want to be the guy running with the shit out of and so. And also I'm British, so like me and the sun are in a constant state of disagreement. I'm not a skinware person. Utreen. I didn't believe in some to me I do now. I do now, I

do now. Until my early thirties, I thought that it was stopping my skin breathing and affecting my performance as a big races that you've cherished changed. Yeah, I never had skin on my well like most.

Speaker 3

Of you thought on screen was bad.

Speaker 8

When you have to understand that everything about pro cycling is like lies the older people tell you so, like when I was coming up in cycling, it was like the very end of the like people who had trained in East Germany, like before the fall of the Berlin War, right, and they had all these bullshit things like I had a team director who would make us eat fast animals because he thought that would turn us into fasters.

Speaker 3

Like that's a good one, no, I mean the even now there is a little subculture of like, don't wear sunscreen. The sun is good for you. You should just like vitamin D. But y'all know, wear sunscreen, reapply the sunscreen. I should make a skincare episode. I'm obsessed with this stuff. And sunscreen is so important it is.

Speaker 8

You can get much better sunscreen outside the US.

Speaker 3

Yeah, I do. I use Korean sunscreen. Korean sunscreen is great, Okay.

Speaker 8

Great, Okay. I get European sunscreen when I'm in the airport.

Speaker 3

But also both the European sunscreens and Asian sunscreens. They're formulated so much differently than the ones in the US. I feel like there are certain things that are they're different.

Speaker 5

I don't know.

Speaker 3

America is fucking up.

Speaker 8

It's because the active ingredients, haven't the FDA. Yeah, okay, yeah, sunscreen conspiracy divation over sharen. Maybe we should take an advertising break here in case we land the Koreans.

Speaker 3

Oh, okay, advertising, Yeah, let's do it. I want to get shrooms and Korean sunscreen under my advertising bill. That would be great. That's my entire personality.

Speaker 8

All Right, we're back. We hope you enjoyed that advert for sund screen. I want to talk about trousers just in general, but also with reference to hiking. Sometimes I go out and I drop water for people so that they don't die in the desert. And that's something that I think is one of the coolest fucking things that you can do if you live near the border, and everyone who does it is a massive legend in my opinion. And even if you just come out once, you could

save someone's life. And that's pretty fucking cool. And I want you, if you live near here, to feel like you can do that and if what's holding you back, if you don't know what to where or want backpack to get just like dm me on Twitter, but sometimes I come out in jeans. I would not suggest hiking in jeans. I would make jeans are great. I love jeans.

I like to climb in jeans. I know Ian, the producer of this show, have some opinions about people who want to hear You haven't seen this, yeah, because Ian doesn't tweet very much, so I only found his Twitter like six months ago. One of his tweets with about why people because it's cool yan, No, no, no, it's not because you have to climb in jeans. Because you have to remind people that you were climbing before the fucking Alex Honold's film came out. And the way to

do that is to be a dirt bag. And the way to do that is to go to a second hand shop and buy the ladies jeans, sort the stretch.

Speaker 3

The ones that are worn in because like from New genes, seem so uncomfortable to do anything in in my opinion.

Speaker 8

No, yeah, you want the stretchy fabric genes, you know, the ones. It's okay if they're normal geens. Yeah, they've got to be worn in and then you cut them off a couple of inches above the ankle so you can see your feet, and you go climbing in those and a cut off T shirt and you keep climbing grungy, because that's important. You can't be letting all the Have you seen this film Free Solo? People change it so yeah, oh gosh, yeah, that's one of the things that I will never back down.

Speaker 1

That run.

Speaker 8

Yeah, they use. The easiest route in my climbing gym for years was called Hey, dude, have you seen this film? It's called Free Solo, which I thought was great.

Speaker 6

Wow.

Speaker 8

Yeah, you can go climbing in jeans, but don't go hiking in jeans. They don't breathe very well, they don't move very well, they do chafe very well, and if they get wet, they suck. So you can get good like Niico or polyester or like even some with like spandex or like greens. So they stretch trousers pretty quickly. I really like Prana trousers that like the yoga brand. I'm wearing some right now. They have a one called the stretch Ion, and they have a men's model and

a women's model, I think, and they're really cheap. They're always on sale. I really like those for like a cheap go to trouser hiking. Also there's a brand called True Work who make like technical work clothes, which I like to wear if I'm like when we were constructing shelters a lot in Cucumber before the Border of Patrol tore them down. It's nice to have the little like extra pockets for your tools and for your pencil and your tape measure and stuff like that. I wear those

for hiking as well, and they're kind of dual purpose. Generally, if you have trousers that are lightweight, that breathe well and have good flexibility, you're good to go. The next thing I have here is socks. People really fuck up with socks, and it seems like socks and footwear are areas where people really get themselves into trouble. Tried this

out recently and the interest of journalism. Actually, there are a couple of brands the things that I do just on a whim, darn Tough, you know, down tough sucks Serene, No, okay, now you do. They're a company and Vermont, who make good socks.

Speaker 3

Well, okay, I do want I need new hiking socks.

Speaker 8

Okay, good, yeah, sit down, Okay. Two brands that I would recommend are Features and Done Tough because they fit well there will so will still insulates when it's where it breethes. Well, it doesn't burn, but that's not a big concern for most of us hiking here. It's you're in a forest far I guess. But they'll find your feet. That'll be great. They also have lifetime warranties, which I think is really cool for for socks. Yeah, that's cool.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 8

So I tested these out in the interest of journalism and feature in science and so yeah, I did a did a little double blind test, and I contacted Features and done toff and said, hi, I have worn holes through the front of my socks. And they said, no problems, send them back. And I sent them back and Features got me the socks. So what they do is they send you a coupon, then you go on their website and you order whatever socks you want. And it took

me about a week and I had new socks. Well down tuft took a little bit longer, but I had new socks. So like if you're a person who doesn't want to spend a lot of money, you can spend your money once and have socks for life, which I thought was pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, it's cool. I heard that they had a good warranty. But then I was like, you know what, lots of brands say lots of bullshit, to let me test it, and tested I did. It turned out to be true in both cases.

Speaker 3

I will say for the inexperienced person, I think when you hear wool socks, you're like, okay, I'll wear those one it's cold, but no, you have to wear them for like it's like temperature regulation, right, It's like you.

Speaker 8

Want to let your foot breathe, right, so you don't get like blisters you get.

Speaker 3

Do you wear them any weather? That's my point. I feel like what I hear wool as someone that grew up in Sokel, I'm like, Okay, it's going to be cold, No it's not. Just put them on your feet and your shoe will be war comfy. Also a comfortable shoe essential. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure you're going to get there.

Speaker 8

But yeah, there are different thickness. Is you have will socks for cord wear there, but I also have wolf socks for hot weather, right, but they're all wool, you know, Well, yeah, they're just in Actually I wore a wool shirt when I did a couple of years ago. There was a heat advisory, so I figured that would be a good time to go backpacking on the PCT because no one else would be there.

Speaker 3

Yeah, good idea.

Speaker 8

It's great. I had a wonderful time. It was not molested by people. He saw some snakes. It was nice rescue the dude, did you wear a sunscreen? Yeah? I did in that instance. Anah, actually yeah, this was after my sunscreen awakening.

Speaker 3

Oh great, I'm so glad.

Speaker 8

Don't go out without water. This dude was out looking for Kitchen Creek Falls, which if you're not familiar, as a seasonal waterfall in his county, San Diego, and he was probably about three or four months late or early, depending on how you look at it. And so if had gone out without water, which don't be relying on that kind of stuff. If it says water on the map, that's cool. Still bring water, especially you're in the desert. Yeah,

let's talk about shoes. I think people want to go hiking in boots because that's what like you think of when you think of grambling or hiking. But like if you don't wear boots for work or habitually, you know, for just like crosspunk reasons, then you might be really uncomfortable in boots. Like you're not used to hard things rubbing your ankles, so would not suggest and unless you're

putting on load, Like I wear boots if I'm backpacking. Certainly, if I'm like pack rafting or something where I've got like the raft and everything else, and I'm going to do it a long hiking, right, so I've got all my camping stuff and the raft, I'm gonna wear boots. Or if I'm off trails when we drop water, We're not going on trails, right, We're just sort of out and about climbing up mountain, So I'll wear boots for that. But for almost everyone, especially if you're hiking on trails,

you're going to be just fine with shoes. I think the big thing boots give you more stability, right, they stop your ankle from twitch.

Speaker 3

That's why I wear them. I weak ankles.

Speaker 8

Yeah, it's genetic. Yeah, you can work on their little ankle strength stuff.

Speaker 3

You can do, but that's not happening, I'll just wear a boot.

Speaker 8

Boots maximalist for me, like finding shoes sort of stable that like you know, like inherently stabilize my foot without clamping my ankle has been really good.

Speaker 3

I feel more stable in a boot though you don't think so.

Speaker 8

Yeah, but then you're just sort of transferring to me, Like sometimes I like to have the ability to move my ankles, especially, like I like to trail run as well. If I'm to be honest, if I'm just going out, I'm probably running at the minute. And like even over night city, it's really fun to just run until it gets dark and then sleep and then run again. It's a fun thing to do.

Speaker 5

Well.

Speaker 3

I'd be curious about your hiking shoe recommendations versus boot.

Speaker 8

So I got three. They're all like they have little kind of your foots like sitting in the insole, not on the insult, if that makes sense. So it's like cupped a little bit in that CUsing possibility. One is the Salomon Genesis. It's the cheapest one they make in that line. I think it's a really good shoe. I trail running in them all the time. Two the other one is a Soccany Exodus Ultra two, which it's really cool.

It has like a softer foam in the middle and then a stiffer foam around the outside of your heel. I could talk about the shit for hours, but it feels very comfortable and soft. But also you're very stable, and they're about to be phased out, so you can find them really cheap.

Speaker 3

Why are they both to be phased out?

Speaker 8

Running shoe companies make a new shoe every year because they feel like they need to.

Speaker 3

Human foot has been the same, I would argue for a while. Yeah, it's not changing.

Speaker 8

Technology advances, right, Like shoe foams have come up, even in the past five or six years. Like if you have more running shoes in the past five or six years, and you have the means to buy some more running shoes, Piba foams and things like that, like these like high energy return phones make running a lot more pleasant. But often it's just like a different color scheme or you know, slightly different upper Yeah, and I think in that case

you're just fine. The other ones that Meryl kind of had a reputation for making, like old man hiking boots for a while, but they're trail running shoes really great.

Speaker 3

That's cool. Yeah, my friend has Meryl shoes and they're cute.

Speaker 8

See they used to be cute. They used to be very like dad coded.

Speaker 3

Yeah, I think they've turned a corner.

Speaker 8

Yeah they have. I'm a big fan. Now I'm wearing some right now. Actually, Alex to wear Meryl. The Agidity Peak one is good. The long Sky is when I like when I'm like trail running in burlier terrain. If you're going to buy boots or shoes, please try it on, or at least sort of them from a website that lets you send them back. Yeah.

Speaker 3

I really think that's essential. I messed up the first time I really invested in expensive boots. I got them after all reading all these reviews and I hated them. Like I walked around my house and I was like, these are terrible. But I was able to return them to my ARII that was vocal, And I tried on the other shoe I wanted to try on that they had and that was great. I walked around in Aria and I was like, this is the one you have to try them on.

Speaker 8

Yeah, take the socks you're going to wear when you're hiking as well. Like they don't just take socks and don't feel the same. And then we walk around and the next thing I had was backpacked. Actually, and I'm going to say the same thing, like, the most important thing for a backpack is that it fits your body, and that it is fitted to your body. Ari I will do that for free, which is great. Lots of other outdoor shops for San Diego used to have Adventure sixteen.

It's sadly closed rip. But anyone who's trying to sell your backpack in person and won't fit it to you is probably someone you shouldn't buy a backpack from. So if you google around enough and you have enough google for, you will find a video of me teaching you how to wear your backpack. Someone will find Yes, I know, and yeah, I've got a broken arm in that video, which you can't tell. I haven't sought medical attention at

the time of the video. Got hit by a car and then I knew I had to eat a video the next day, so I went to do the video. I have to make money. It was broke.

Speaker 3

I will say that as someone who is it the most knowledgeable about the stuff, But I like it, and I would consider myself like a I don't know, intermediate, not advanced, but go into ARII and getting a backpack fit. And that's what I did. Don't shy away from asking questions. They're there to help and I think as soon as

you get over that, you'll be fine. I feel like as soon as I just like accept that these people are there to help you and not to shame you, hopefully that's great and like, yeah, they're trying to sell you things, but I don't know, just go in with a smart head on your shoulders.

Speaker 8

Yeah, expect people to be well meaning, like we all just want you to be happy and enjoying the outdoors with us. It's not a competition with backpacks. Real quickly, you've got basically three distinct types. You have ultra light backpacks, which you don't have a frame at all. Imagine a bucket made of fabric with two straps so attached to your back. I wouldn't suggest starting there. You have external frame that's where the frame is external and the back

is clipped onto the frame. And you have internal frame where the frame is integral to the back right to the bags. You're probably going to look at an internal frame to start with the heavier the bag gets. The more structure you get and the more little pockets an organization you get, those can seem super tempting, especially when you're looking online and you're seeing like different specs and

trying to compare them. If you're a person who has access to ziplock bags, you don't need all the pockets, right, Like, yeah, what I do every single time they go back back and so I put a bin bag in it that waterproofs it. Right, Yeah, it's cool if your bags it's waterproof, I don't trust it to be waterproof, and it doesn't need to be because I'm going to put a bin bag in there anyway, and I put everything in stuff

sacks as zip block bags in there. Likewise, you'll find lots of bags with like seventy five ways to access the main pocket. Most of the time you're going to have your stuff inside a waterproof bag anyway, It's not such a big deal.

Speaker 3

I think the most important aspect of a bag that used to look at first is just the weight.

Speaker 8

Yeah, you can fuck yourself up with a heavy bag. Although that said, like one of the bags that I use the most for water drop stuff is a Mystery Ranch Blackjacke it's a military bag. It's heavy. It's like a I think it's five point seven pounds for the bag,

but I'm not trying to be light. What I'm trying to do is fill it with gallons of water, right, and then haul them up and down a mounted So I might as well make the bag comfortable because it's a negligible percentage of the overall weight of shit I'm carrying.

Speaker 3

That's fair.

Speaker 8

There's a bag for the Radix, the Mystery Ranch make that I've been using a lot recently, and it's made of like very lightweight material, like an ultrolyte bag. But I like their frames. They have like a yoke that kind of wraps around your body as opposed to frame that sits on top of your body, and that works really well for me. Their warranty is good, their products are good. I've used their bags in like every continent

apart from the Antarctic and never had anything break. Especially like if you're a person who gets actious about your ship breaking, then you can't go wrong with them. They also have incredible discount If you want one but you think it's too expensive, take your time and you'll find them way cheaper. That's a good bag to get. I like Gregory bags, Osprey or a good brand. Osprey bags can.

Speaker 3

Tell to what I have backpacking backpack is an Osprey.

Speaker 8

Yeah, They're very comfortable. They have a lot going on sometimes and they have that mesh. Do you have the one with a mesh? Like? Yeah, they are very comfortable. I have an Osprey bag that I really like. I took it pack rafting and Alaska and it was great. It was bomba. If you're just going on a day hike, you don't need very much backpack, right, twenty liters or whatever is fine, even ten. I really like those running vesttile backpacks where you have like pockets on the front.

Have you seen those? You don't have to pick? Oh, it's cool.

Speaker 1

Yeah?

Speaker 5

Do I have one?

Speaker 8

Send your pictulator shat things?

Speaker 9

Yeah?

Speaker 8

I mean you're looking forward to it. When I ran, I like to have a little water flasks down there, and then that makes sense. Yeah, And then I was like, why don't have this on my normal backpack? Why am I having to like reach around for my snacks? I'm all about a fishency. So running vestile backpacks are cool. Camelback has some good ones. Everyone called the octane. I use a lot, and then when you're buying a backpack, you'll want to pile a little water reservoir to go

in it. One of the reasons you're going to waterproof everything in your bag is because every single water reservoir that you put in your backpack will break at some point, and when it does, it will send its contents into your bag and it will be a bad day. Un As you've water proved everything, this will happen to you, especially if you like sit down and lean back and then you crush it. So that's where you're gonna water with everything. But I think hydro pack like the best ones.

I really like that insulated ones. Even if you don't get an insulated bladder, get an insulated sucky cue SUSA worcherine. Thank you, last podcast of the day here, guys. Yeah, getting intated straw because when it's really cold, otherwise your straw will freeze because it's like a small amount of water right when it freezes more quickly.

Speaker 3

I never thought of that. I've only backpacked and highten really hot weather.

Speaker 8

Yeah, when it's below freezing, like even like I was out on Palomar in October A Ferry turned from Curtis Dan So it was you know, below freezing top of the mountain and know my water froze. You can blow your water back out again, but you're just going to forget to do that realistic. And then yeah, the last thing I had was hiking poles. Hiking poles are great. You've never had a pole, You never had a pole, if you ever had a stick, I mean.

Speaker 3

It's like fine ones. And I guess I don't hike on the things I might need a poll for. I guess I don't know.

Speaker 8

Yeah, they're great if you're someone who's like maybe has some injuries or you're worried about your knees just because they hurt in general life. They were a great way to take this strain.

Speaker 3

Off of the I'm trying to give innce my mom to get a pair of poles because I think she would really benefit from them because she wants to go on all these hikes and yeah, just needs help. So there's no shame in getting a pole or two.

Speaker 8

I will donate your mom some poles. Sarene Oh, it's my Gift's my gift you. Saren's mom helped me translate for some migrants the other day. My mom's the best I'll send you. Don't be afraid of using them. Don't be thinking that like anyone's going to judge you for using them. Like, if that makes you feel more stable and comfortable, go for it. Don't buy the ones that telescope I mean by telescope, like, yeah, because they collapse.

And I remember I was up in the Sierras six or seven years ago now and it was fucking snowyer than I'd expected. Then my stupid hiking pole collapsed into itself. It just just made the day like less fun.

Speaker 3

Yeah, I can imagine that.

Speaker 8

But otherwise it stick is great, right, find a nice stick, fine with a nice notch your thumb. Get it from a nice type of wood. Used to love making sticks when it was little. You can get a stick topper. You can order them online. You know, it's got like a head of a dog or a pheasant.

Speaker 3

Or a cane. It's like a fancy little cane.

Speaker 8

Yeah, we had crooks, you know, a crook no for like when you're catching your sheep.

Speaker 3

James, Why you mean, like there's the hook looking thing.

Speaker 8

Yes, yeah, it's called a croak.

Speaker 5

I did not know that.

Speaker 3

I know what you're talking now that you mentioned sheep, I know what that is, but I've never known. Yeah, because you're sheep eggs. But yeah, it's got a crook. We said that's great for walking.

Speaker 8

I can see that. Yeah, yeah, so we we used to use those a lot when I was a kid. But yeah, having one is great. And I think, especially like if you're nervous about falling going with your person who worries about their knees, if you're picking your first route, keep it pretty flat. If you're going up and down a lot of elevation and you're worried about how that's going to feel, the pole's a very good way to mitigate someone worried that I'm going to fall on my knees.

But yeah, don't feel afraid of using that stuff. Oh, I forgot to say one thing. In my shoes. Think chacos are the best sandals. Fuck all other sandals. That's what I have to say about that. You know when you're cool because you have the z from the chaco's burned onto your feet. Well, unless you practice foot skincare, which I've not upgraded to that level yet.

Speaker 3

I was thinking about getting those. I remember I was signing between those and something else, and I go off for something else, But now I have to go back and get those.

Speaker 8

A couple of years ago, I rafted with some people who listened to the podcast. They invited me and I went and we did a week on the Colorado.

Speaker 3

Oh that's so cool.

Speaker 8

You're so trusting little irl. I like to go.

Speaker 5

So it was cool.

Speaker 8

I like people. So some of them reached out and I said, yeah, let let's go for a rafting trip. So we went on a rafting trip on the Colorado River. And now I wore my chackos the whole time while sun cream.

Speaker 4

None of the time.

Speaker 8

Feet were just roasted, just red, but with a little z from the chat. But for the whole summer anyways, they are very comfortable sandals. One of my friends, another podcast listener, is hiking the PCT in his chackos right now. Thanks go to Canada. So yeah, I hope you're doing well. They know who they are. Surprisingly enough, I've gone long talking about outdoor things.

Speaker 3

But no, I'm glad you took the time to make this little list. I realized I don't have to be as big of a dummy as I thought. I thought I was going to come in here and being a huge dummy. I know more than I think I do. You know, and I know what to do outside most of the time.

Speaker 8

Yes, sure, yes you do. Thank you for listening to me talking about going outside. If you have any questions, you can DM me on Twitter. That is the only way I community with anyone. Now, don't have a DM me,

and I'll send you my email. But really, like, I just want people to feel that the outdoors is for them and feel safe and feel comfortable, and feel like they know all the things they need to know, and to not buy stuff because someone's getting three percent back on it even though they've never touched it in their whole lives. And also, like, I know that we're all

fucking poor and spending your money is hard. So I've tried to suggest stuff it's not crazy expensive or that you can find on sale, but if you have questions. Oh one more thing, There's a company called Outdoor Vitals which has a subscription. You can be a member and then you can get a lot of their stuff cheaping for backpacking. It's a good company and they make some good stuff, and they do some good stuff the outdoors as well. But yeah, if you have questions, you can

message me. We will do one about what to put in your bag when you get backpacking. Eventually. Yeah, go outside. Send us your photos if you're going outside, if they're not weird, we would like that.

Speaker 1

It could happen here as a production of polls on media. For more podcasts, we call Zone Media. Visitor a website, cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 2

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 1

It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visitor a website, cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It could happen here, updated monthly at cool zonemedia dot com, slash sources. Thanks for listening.

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