It Could Happen Here Weekly 4

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 gonna be nothing new here for you, But you can make your own decisions, all right, Welcome to it could happen here a podcast that is about fifty of the time introduced well and about fifty percent of the time us talking about how we're bad at introductions, and today it is it is just be Christopher, but with me is Hadley and Mike from Labelia Commons, who are here to

talk about many things, one of which is there is the first edition of the earth Bound Farmers Almanac. Hey, how how are you two doing today? I heard I heard there's maybe a thunderstorm rolling in. Yeah, we're doing pretty good. Um, it's gonna be glad for the rain, I guess, yeah, yeah, it'll be good. We're gonna talk a little bit first about Labilia Commons. So how did that project start? I know, I know was something from the beginning of the pandemic, but had you all been

working on this kind of stuff before? And yeah, I just wanted roasty a little bit of that. Yeah, So it kind of started um last year during the pandemic. Basically, UM. Basically at the beginning of the pandemic, we had UM that's like a surge of interest in these like kind of mutual a groups UM and the largest of which that formed in New Orleans specifically, which some of us helped form was called New Orleans Mutual, a group which

was doing like food distribution. It kind of stemmed out of a project that was already UM running like a food share, basically getting excess produce that was coming into the port and distributing it for free in front of like one of the gentrifying grocery stores. UM. But within like I want to say, like a couple of weeks UM, there was such a surge of interest in doing that type of like volunteer or whatever UM where that there was like a ton of labor to make it happen.

And that basically meant buying tons of produce eventually because the ports eventually shut down and there wasn't any produce coming from anywhere at the beginning of the the pandemic, and that basically buying tons of produce from like costco and that labor meant like waiting in lines for you know, wrapping around entire like massive like multi city block where the house stores. UM. And so that was basically doing

like food distribution. So we took the opportunity to since there was so much labor happening, that we could go and start to adjust the question of like food production specifically and and try and do that in interesting ways. UM. So, we felt like it was pretty important to start like experimenting and different forms of food product chain and like

like ways of relating to food production. UM So, I mean this first started with like a, um, we're basically just starting tons of seeds and delivering them all over the city, um, just driving around from we had like one centralized nursery that was run out of a warehouse um and that was a ton of labor as a really time consuming. It was super centralized, and so we

moved from that into a number of other projects. Um. Short shortly thereafter, we put together like a like a collaborative mushroom production group where we were um getting people who had been growing mushrooms and teaching folks and she like doing skill shares to produce oyster mushrooms out of buckets. We started doing some like woodlock production of Chautaukis, which

has like since expanded pretty dramatically. Um And yeah, just like kind of like things that that draw people's interests like that, and and and think about like how you can grow food in an urban or peri urban scenario fairly interestingly and like with joy um. Also, um. You know, after this, we we were reached out to by folks that were like, well, I want to grow herbs, and rather than specifically getting like a lot and covering it in different herbal medicines, we reached out had already had

folks reaching out to us. UM. So someone came up with the idea of, well, let's just all grow in our backyard stuns of herbs, and let's find herbs that already grow abundantly around us to kind of collectively share the experience of harvesting and um and turning those into medicines. UM. And so now there's like this Herb Commons group that the labor is distributed. It's distributed geographically, um, but there's these like meet ups where they're bulk curbs are given up, Yeah,

given out just like in a canal space and um. Yeah, like there's skill shares happening there. And and so there's kind of some community being built around that. Um that that happens in a very decentralized manner. Yeah, it's definitely very decentralized. There are working groups that are part of Lobelia Commons that I'm like, not entirely sure what they're doing any given day or you know, what's going on.

I'm involved in like a couple particular projects within it UM, and I think that it's really flexible for folks who are trying to get involved. They can kind of be involved at whatever level they want. Like, um, if somebody doesn't want to go to a bunch of garden work days or a bunch of meetings or something, which you know are have been a great way for us to like see each other and see our friends during the pandemic and stuff, is to get together for these work

days outdoors or whatnot. But if somebody wants to just like do nothing but sprout plants at their own house and then somebody will come pick up those seedlings and and you know bring them to one of our decentralized nursery spots, that's great. Um. That's one of the other kind of projects we have we call the decentralized nursery, And that's kind of like just something that people already

do at a certain time of year. You know, gardeners will regularly start more plants than they need and then just kind of give them away to friends and neighbors and stuff. And we tried to just make it a little bit more of an intentional thing. Um. And this was also kind of growing out of like at the very beginning of the pandemic, and we were actually doing seedling deliveries to people, which made sense of that time,

but it was like very labor intensive. Um. So we kind of moved to this model of having just like free stands in front of houses on street corners in different places. Um. You know, there's already like a bunch of free fridges around New Orleans and things like that, and so this is kind of like the free plant version of that, and it's really easy for somebody to

just set one up, um. And then that kind of also allows us to like work on this other aspect of of decentralizing food production, because like that's definitely one of our goals, right is to like not have a tiny percentage of the population be the only ones who know how to grow food and giving it under the control of the tiny number of corporations that own all

the land. And you know, obviously we're trying to get away from that food system, and so one of the ways we can think about doing that is finding ways to really decentralize some of the skills that are UM that are necessary. So for example, like if somebody's growing avocados for our nurseries, UM, the thing about growing an avocado from a pit actually is that, uh, that tree

probably won't produce fruit. It actually needs to be grafted. UM. So we can have people starting pits, and then we're also you know, sharing the knowledge of how to graph these things, UM because we kind of like see a future in which a lot more people um will need to be involved in food production. But also, like Mike was saying, like, we want this to be not like a job that it feels like people have, but this joyous kind of thing that's just a part of everyday life. Yeah.

One of the other things that I was I was interested in is you know, so so part of part of what I think the beginning of the Earth Performers Romanac is about is talking about how I guess people people have this tendency to sort of focus on climate change is just like the only sort of climate thing

that's happening. And you know, I mean there's obviously the yeah, there's there's a bunch of sort of stuff that is climate change, But isn't the weather that are sort of you know, things like the phosphor cycle, things like the

nitrogen cycle that are breaking. But simultaneously, I think it's it's also true that you know that that that kind of stuff, and this is also something that's that's talked about in there is is going to have a large impact both on sort of like even just what what kind of biomas exist in the inner very short term. And you know, another product of that is, you know it is that the sort of increasing rate of storms.

And I was wondering if you all could talk a bit about what happened after Ida and how both just sort of in the short term in the long term, that the sort of the increase of just hurricanes. And I hesitate to call natural disasters because you know that there's there's a whole thing about how these disasters are sort of manufactured in a lot of ways, but how how that's been affecting how y'all think are thinking about and working with these kind of mutual aid projects and

food production. Yeah. So I think with IDA, it's kind of complicated because, um, you can almost look at it, look at it as like two different storms. Um, because what happened in New Orleans versus what happened and say like um Homa or the river parishes, UM, these areas that are you know, generally south and west of New Orleans, UM are are are kind of like two different UH animals in some ways, like what happened in New Orleans

specifically relates to infrastructure. So like what you're saying, like the kind of quote unquote natural disasters thing that's UM, you know, that's a pretty commonplace way of looking. I mean, it's not a very radical UM conception that like these aren't natural disasters wherever the disasters is created. As soon as UM there was the attempt to create a colonial

New Orleans in the first place. UM. So this became honestly part of like national discourse as a result of Katrina, most famously because of the Army corp of Engineers failure UM teven five and UM so what happened this year UM was with with Hurricane Ida was one of the main transmission towers UM for the the energy Energy Corporation in New Worlds is called energy outside of the Gulf South aren't familiar with. So the entergy tower fell into

the Mississippi River. You had that happening at the same time that thousands of power lines fell down. The power lines are are are on poles and very prone to getting knocked down even just during the during any day of the week, UM. And so there wasn't actually really much flooding UM that was happening. It was it was primarily wind damage. So that the tower falls into the river,

power lines down. You had something like I believe fifty five barges in the Port of South Louisiana falling into their falling off their moorings and floating around just crashing into things, just crashing Like there's like several ferries that connect the east and west banks of the city. Um,

those fell off their mornings. So, so like the physical infrastructure of the place and and how that relates to beyond New Orleans is New Orleans is located at the very um southern reach of the Mississippi Rivers Port of South Southern Louisiana, which is like a fifty five mile port I believe a fifty two port um that processes like six of all U S grain going to exports. So it's like a massive, really really important piece of

American capitalist infrastructure. So that when when those boats follow their mornings. It's not like, oh this like whatever quaint like byou problem. It's a very serious imperial problem. UM. But so for for the average person living in New Orleans, UM, this looked like I think I think it ended up being for most people around a week and a half without power, which if anyone's lived even with air conditioning in New Orleans for a summer, UM, it's it's extremely

difficult to live here during the summer. UM. It's that it's obviously not impossible when we have modern amenities, but when you're when you're without those, when you without the refrigerator, when we throughout without new freezer air conditioning, it's it's really really really hot, um. You know. So that's what was happening in New Orleans. There was some some damage to people's rooms, there was some you know, fairly fairly

substantial damage to the structures. But what happened to the west, in cities like Laplace, UM, which is about thirty miles west of New Orleans, UM, that's where you started to see like very severe flooding, very severe UM damage to structures, places like Homer Lafitte, um Portchean, all these places that are closer to the coast. That's where you saw the

real heavy destruction. So a lot of people have been framing what's happened down the Bayou and in the river parishes as we would say, um as like those places Katrina, because it's the destruction was was so total in that way. UM, So the way that you relate to UM, that type of again quote unquote disaster is much is much different, whereas what happened in New Orleans, UM is more of a continuation of of what could be called like a

series of apocalypses that have been happening since colonization. UM. I think that's that's an interesting point also that that that I want to talk about a little bit about US grain exports because I think that that's another part of this whole food system question that is important on a scale that I don't think people understand, like, you know,

it's just for furvent background for listeners. So when when all of the sort of giant like free trade agreements went into effect, um, you know, so so the free trade comments are like, okay, you're you're not supposed to be able to like have government subsidies of agricultural products. And there's there's a couple of carve outs that were put into this now almost all of them. There are exceptions, for there's a couple of like weird manufacturing stuff in

like Italy and Germany that have carve outs. And the other big one is that the the the U. S. Government is allowed to just do enormous levels of agricultural subsidies that no one else like really in the world is allowed to like match or I mean do it. Like you know, you know if if if you try to have grand subsidies, right, it's like you know, the I m F will come after you, like you know, you're not allowed to do it. But then you know, sometanious that you have the US producing all of this

like this. I mean it it's it's not it's not really cheap, right, but it's it's you know, this enormously subsidized grain that nobody can actually really compete with. And I think that's that's like an interesting I was wondering what, like how how how do you guys think about that in terms of, you know, try trying to do decentralized

I guess o your culture into play. That's to a large extent, this sort of like conduitive grain to the rest of the world, but in a way that like also inhibits those places from actually you know, having their

own kind of like essentialized agriculture. UM. I mean I can speak a little bit about like what that kind of does to our context of like making it, like especially when I see people in the kind of organic gardening farming world trying to go on this model of like, oh, we're gonna make you know, regenerative agriculture profitable, and we're gonna make it somehow compete with conventional agriculture. UM. And I guess I just don't really think that that is

feasible in that in that terrain. Like you know, if if we're trying to compete on that same terrain and we're competing with these absurd subsidies, it definitely just the same problem that you see around the world where people aren't able to afford to grow their own thing because there's no way they can they can sell it as

cheaply as as us grain. UM. So I think it's more important to sort of like look at like there's there's a piece in the almanac actually that sort of gets into this this issue of like, well, are we really growing enough food in this regenerative way. Like you know, we we don't even hardly grow that many grains or that many high calorie things. A lot of things are just focused on vegetables and things like that. And like,

I think that's a really important critique. And also I think that the way out of it isn't just gonna be us trying harder or something or um. Like the future iron vision for us, like really changing the food system kind of involves like really large scale expropriation of that land where the grain is being produced and of those huge machineries, those huge like satellite powered or satellite directed you know, plows and tractors and whatnot that are

that are doing this stuff. Um. And so like when I'm trying to think about like the impact that a food project is having, or like a food justice project, I don't try to think like we're trying to replace

uh aggro business on its own terms. I think like we're trying to be an ally or an aid to any kind of antagonistic sort of social movement that actually is going to create the conditions where like we can all get together and start to actually address these problems, um without being hindered by you know, things like private property. So I guess that that that that's a good point

to to jump into the Almanac from. I think, yeah, do do you want to just introduce the project a little bit and then we can talk about some of the stuff in it that I thought was really interesting. Yeah. So the Almanac kind of came out of like a little bit of a like partially is like a joke. You know, we're like, everyone gets the Almanac and kind of you know, it doesn't really relate too much to

um like most of us what we would be growing. Um, So we had we had posited something like different, you know, something that that does kind of grapple with some of the questions of you know, growing food and kind of the conditions we live in. Maybe you can speak kind of yeah, I can even just I'll actually just read the back of it because I think it speaks to it pretty well. This is a farmer's almanac for the

end of the world. Growing food used to be a lot more straightforward when you plant your okra at the same time every year like your grandpa did. Now we've got to be ready for anything. Late spring freezes, freak heat waves that bring plants out of dormancy to early fire season longer every year, the polar vortex. And if that wasn't enough, we've also got to contend with the

fallout from breakages in the global supply chain. When millions of gallons of milk get poured down the drain and mountains of potatoes are left to rock, it's a world that calls for a new kind of farmers almanac. Today's crisis has roots in the earliest moments of land theft against Native people's, a process that has continued alongside hundreds

of years of slavery and colonization. The way forward out of this mess will mean grappling with the crimes of the past, as well as charting a new course guided by black and Indigenous knowledge, creative experimentation and food production, and paying attention across generational and species devides. So I mean, what one like very concrete example of like how this farmer's on the neck is different than what you might

see just from the standard almanac. Is um, you know, we we don't have like oh it's it's May, it's time to plant corn or whatever, because I mean, first of all that that was never that useful as for a publication that's meant to be used across this vast continent. You know, it's going to be different everywhere, um, where

you're going to plant things at which time, um. But also like those standard resources that we would go to like for here, for the Southeast for example, or wherever, Like, if you're looking at something that was made a few decades ago, it's not going to actually be accurate or it's going to give you undo certainty about where the

seasons line up and things like that. So you know, instead of telling people exactly when to plant their seeds, we have a chart that has the actual German Nation temperatures of like all the major annual vegetables that people would want to grow, um. And then we also have like the monthly notes from this local farm in New Orleans, so you know, located in this area, you can you can also get a really precise view of like, oh, they were planning this, then they were harvesting this then. Yeah.

I think that we hope to make something that was you know, our our original focus was something that was specific to New Orleans in the region, um, you know, in the Gulf South and the Southeast generally, because we are so or of the you know, the differences or what have you between growing through here and growing food in Ohio or something or whatever, and we all get these same seeds you know, out of Walmart or Lows or whatever and try and grow the exact same plants

all over the place to trying to um hone in on some of that local perspective. UM with me really in terms of like getting some like folk tradition, getting some um, you know, anecdotal evidence about you know, things that worked with things that people are trying UM. And I think that that was that was fairly successful. UM. I think I think aside that we weren't really expecting as much was just the amount of national and even

international UM kind of grasp that it had. UM. I think a lot of people like could could use something like this in their area. UM. And it fostered some really interesting connections for people that are experimenting in New York, for people that are are growing things or thinking about maybe UM food systems and how they relate to prisons in California or UM even you know as far away

as Brazil. UM. It's kind of began to foster a connection between Lobelia commons and a group called thee Bovos, which translates roughly to like the Web of People's UM in Brazil, so called Brazil UM, where it's kind of like experimental agroecology project that's very specific UM specifically focused on UM, you know, sovereignty, land stewardship, kind of following a little bit in the tradition of the Landless Workers movement.

If anyone's familiar with mst UM, it's kind of following in that tradition a bit UM, but is heavily stewarded by black and Indigenous knowledges. Yeah, I was something I think of a like a kind of pleasant surprise out

of it. Yeah, I thought that was that was really interesting way of looking at it, because I feel like there's this tendency in the US too, you know when when when when we talk about sort of a relationship to the land, which which something that comes up a lot in in the sort of essays that are are in the All Neck is about you know, like the there there there's a piece that I related to a lot, which is about someone from Guam trying to sort of

deal with like I mean, particularly like legacies is or Japanese imperialism and being driven from their home. And I was like, oh, hey, look like this is yeah, you know, is this this is someone who experienced which when Japan went west. I was like, oh yeah, my family had

this basically very similar thing when they went east. And you know, but but there's there's I think, yeah, and I think it's very smartly you get you get to a point very quickly where you're trying to grapple with you know, how do how do you build connections to land? But then also how how does that work in a context in you know, in a context that's basically defined by southern colonialism and defined by by this by this occupation.

And I think looking at the MSc, looking at a lot of stuff happened Latin America, I mean there there's very similar to what you guys were talking about. In Brazil. There there was a huge movement like this that was indigenous land recormation, sort of agrocology in in Columbia for example too in the nineties, and they they run into this problem of you know, there's there's a civil war growing on in Columbia and they a lot of them getting murdered by sort of state paramilitary is in the army.

But I think it's it's a it's a really interesting way of of looking at what what does what does lampak actually look like? And how how do you deal with interacting with land? And also yeah, the lance workers in particular, they use a lot of methods, but you know they actually do just take a like an enormous amount of land like back from this state and sort

of back from corporate things. So I'm interested in how we all started talking to a lot of these a lot of the Brazilian groups and how that sort of like that that perspective is shaped way that like this,

this this whole sort of project turned out. Um. So we were specifically to their dispos um some previous connections that some of us had UM in Brazil had when talking about what we were doing and just kind of keeping up in exchange of um you know, just like kind of updates from from the Gulf when they would send updates from things going on down there. They kind of drew the connection for us and put us towards them.

And I reached out to day Dispobos and was like, hey, we're you know, we're doing this thing, and I you know, and inspired by what you're doing personally and UM, you know, I I'd be curious to see what what what kind of relationship whatever we can foster, and they took it. UM. You know, also with with some inspirations, seeing that this very clear connection in terms of relationship with land historically,

M this possession historically between the two continents across the Caribbean. UM. The implementation on a wide scale of plantation, monoculture UM. It that was fueled entirely by slavery and genocide. UM. And And I think that having that kind of like shared common history, I think gives us a good bedrock to, like UM exchange notes about where we are now kind of multiplied by the fact that the way that UM, yeah, so called emancipation happened here versus in Brazil radically different.

And UM the UM like the for instance, the existence of PET or the Workers Party in Brazil being such a force after the dictatorship and having that like strong populist movement UM that was you know, rooted a very traditional left UM that that fueled MST. Well, you don't have anything like that here. You know that that happens at the same time that here, actually the workers movement in the US was was kind of getting defeated, I

mean the up in the seventies. So with respect to like um land back specifically, UM, you know, I don't know if you I don't know if you will see it in the same forms. I doubt at least obviously would totally be there cheering it on. And I'm happy to see it. Um. But I think it looks a

lot more like during the uprising last year. You saw in Chicago, for instance, UM, the when when the trains were being expropriated as they were moving, taking goods out of these box cars, um, and just expropriate in tons of goods, taking you know, taking goods that would normally be going you know, just commodities normally going to court, just cut off in the middle of line or you know, UM, these these these these kind of like more um ah, I don't want to say small scale, but UM focus

more on like infrastructural choke points rather than necessarily um like having thousands of people swarming uh, you know, a massive industrial agriculture UM set up in Kansas or something. You know. Yeah, yeah, I think it's great to imagine that.

I think I really love sharing the history of mst with people in America who have never heard it before, because I think it's a great way to kind of expand the imaginary of like what is possible, like what kind of actions are actually at our disposal like it and it truly is not you to look exactly like that. And I think it's also really important for us to like not forget a lot of the similar histories here,

like UM. Part of the inspiration for the Almanac or what kind of drove us to to make it was some of us were doing a reading group of this book called Freedom Farmers that's about kind of like various uh um black projects in the South for food autonomy after slavery, and a lot of it is about Fannie

Lew Hammer and UM freedom Farms. And you know, we were definitely inspired for some of the litbilia things by um Fannie Lee Hammer's pig Bank, which was a really cool thing where they just like started with a bunch of pigs and if you were in the community, like you get you get your pigs from you get a couple of piglets from the pig bank, and then the interest on that is a couple of years later you got to give them a couple of pigs because you're producing your own pigs, and so the pig bank is

like self sustaining. UM. And another thing from that book that was inspiring to us was um reading about George Washington Carver's public education projects out of Tuskegee University that were, um, just really inspiring in terms of like he was doing all of his own kind of independent research about soils and pests and all these different crops and everything, and creating these farm bulletins that were then being distributed to black farmers throughout the region to kind of, you know,

share better practices, and a lot of the stuff was like agro ecology before people had that word. Like he was very far out of his time in terms of understanding soil dynamics and and passing things like that. UM. So yeah, we we definitely try to try to lift up all that history as much as possible. Yeah, I

guess whenever. The ether thing I thought was very interesting that you alluded to you briefly in this was Yeah, because there's there's a session of this is talking about food in prisons, and I wonder if you could talk about that part a little bit more because that's a connection that I that I really don't think it's drawn very often here on me flipped to the piece, right, I mean one of the things that it's kind of

hard to describe. I do love the visual that that we have for this piece, but yeah, I mean it's just like the it's a striking image, you know, it's got like, um in the center, there's a picture of a really high density chicken operation and there's somebody wearing sort of like a full tibex suit suit and just

walking through this like massive herd of chickens. And then that's superimposed over this just like really nasty looking close up photo of a prison food tray and just like the canned veggies and the everything, And like, I mean, I don't I've been to jail a number of times, and the food is always terrible. It's always one of the things that you talk about or you can bond over or whatever. It's just how bad the food is.

But I think people who haven't experienced that don't really think about just how much systematic like starvation is going on and the nutrition is going on, where it's like the only way you can possibly survive in these places is spending a bunch of extra money on commissary to get stuff that also isn't healthy, but at least you can get more calories and stuff. Um. And like I think that that there's like a lot of parallels between kind of the structure of prisons and the structure of

our of our food system. UM. I mean one example that I used to talk about this is like the banana plantation um where like the you know, we have an entire variety of banana that's like basically stanct or it's it can't be grown commercially anymore because the banana industry, you know, functions by putting like warehousing these banas together and these like super tight plantation formations, you know, which really only makes sense if you're just trying to maximize

your profits and get as much out of a a small space as possible. But what it does is is the exact same thing that happens in prisons during COVID or with any kind of uh, you know, pathogen like

tuberculosis or whatever. Um. You know, It's it's like the trees are so close together that the fungus spread so rapidly, and then they're also like pumping all these things into to fight that, and they're actually breeding super funguses all the time, and at some point the banana that we eat now is going to also stop existing because of this.

UM And I guess I don't know if I can draw anything deeper out of those similarities than the fact that there's this like overriding logic of capitalism that is just like has no respect for these beings, like whether it is a per person or a minatory, like it's all just commodities and things to be warehouse. UM. Yeah, I think UM to add on that, I mean this, this is the piece in there which is called the

Struggle for good Food across Walls. UM. I think it does a nice job of talking about how like, um, you know, if we're talking about quote unquote food, food justice or what have you like, UM Like, how can we talk about that on the outside of all forgetting about just the most deplorable um food conditions on the entire continent. UM. And I think that that it's it's

really good at that. I think I would really like to see in the next year all the ways that um, the imaginaries of of inmates kind of go in like attack that UM. The like the logic of of prison and food being completely deplorable. Like you know, you have all these forms of creativity of like making tortillas and stuff and like doing wild things with like stuff that's in the commissary, you know, contraband kind of ways of of making kind of life a little bit more livable

in there. And and if anyone has UM spent time in jail or prison, or or kept up a relationship with someone on the inside or what have you, UM, everyone has a story about a way of UM making making food more um interesting and joyful and and like

there becomes whole cultures around them. One of the things that we're starting to do in one of the farm spaces we work with outside of the city is is um through pre existing relationships with inmates in Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana, which, for those that don't know, UM was a plantation civil war happens two years after the civil War, it becomes a Louisiana scate p potentiary. It's

still a plantation. It's you know, uh this many times descendants of the same enslaved folks who were on that plantation prior UM and you know, it's a it's a guard on a horseback riding around while those UM folks

pulling cotton um. And so so, through some of these relationships with some of these inmates who are UM like kind of uh clandestine organizers, UM, we're starting to come up with ways to like grow food collaboratively with folks that are behind walls and and find ways to get food to either their family or maybe sell and get that into their commissary. Kind of just like trying to um spitball ideas about like different ways of producing food

despite people's um incarceration. Yeah, that that seems that seems like a really I guess we're you can really say it is a a necessary way for for this sort of food politics to go, if it's going to actually deal with sort of both the land conditions and the conditions of just you know, the fact that we haven't in know that there's still just an enormous slafe population the US. And I think that kind of resistance in creativity, I think is how Yeah, y'all, are y'all are on the

right track with with pushing it that way? Yeah, that this is this is sort of a bleak note to end on, I think, but I don't know. I think it's yeah, it's a it's a it's a hopeful one too, and where can people find but basically all of Youll's work. And then also you talked a little bit about trying to get submissions for and everything, So can you talk a little bit about how that how that's gonna work. Yeah, Um, so we're we're it's it's kind of been on hold

a little bit because we've been like very active after IDA. Yeah, and you know, trying to make sure our people are all good and supporting UM in various places, UM kind of doing like different workshops and stuff. And and because that our focus isn't just on food production, it's also

like neighborhood survival or whatever. So we've been um working with an old UM neighbor of one of ours, who um you know, she's already been kind of doing this mutual aid stuff you know by any other name for decades, you know, letting people stay in their house, UM, feeding people. UM. She's like kind of like a block MoMA and she's really one of the last UM black homeowners in her neighborhood.

So we're really trying to like help her achieve some autonomy one way that we've been putting it is UM when all the airbnbs like lose their power because they're still reliant on the colonial world, well, miss Elfie I could still have her lights on because she's going to

be totally autonomous from the system. So UM, I think that that is on our Instagram page if you click on the like UM the link or whatever, there's a go fund me that UM is UH where we've been putting a lot of our effort and really working with her on UM and then also like growing growing a garden like adjacent to her so that their people in that community are are food as as food autonomous as UM as we can get we can we can put

it in the show notes. Yeah, and the the handle for both Twitter and Instagram is at Lobilia Commons and the Almanac. You can find links to the Almanac pdf on through either of those UM if you want to just read it for free. And then UM there's also copies for sale on emergent Goods dot com. And for UM submissions. I mean, yeah, like I said, we've been really behind on this just because of all this stuff, But for submissions, we're really UM looking for folks. UM

to contribute, throw us a pitch. UM. I think if you've seen the first one or I've listened to this, you probably get something of an idea of what we're looking for UM. And we're happy to like talk to people about, like, you know, different ideas and bear with us if we're a little slower to respawn because we're you know, kind of still weigst deep right now. But the submission for deadlines is the end of October UM, and you can email ideas or pitches or whatever to

Lobelia Commons at proton mail dot com. And lastly, the project that I'm most focused on is the front Yard Orchard Initiative, where basically we just propagate as many fruit trees as cheaply as possible, things that are really easy for us to grow from cuttings like figs, s, mulberries, things they're easy to grow from seed, like papaya, maringa,

pecan um. And we basically just have some nice flyers that we put up and we advertise a bit on social media and also just kind of go door to door in neighborhoods where we already have gardens or connections and offer to give free fruit trees out to people, and we're also happy to plant them for people and then kind of offer a consultation on how to take

care of it or whatever. And also, if folks want to hear some of the pieces from the Earthbound Farmers Almanac read by some of the authors and then some interviews with those authors, you can check out this podcast called Partisan Gardens that did a really good episode that's kind of like an audio exploration of the Almanac. Cool. Yeah, people, people definitely definitely go read the Almanac. Is it's it's it's a it's a really good it's a really good

piece of work. Um yeah, thank thank you too so much for joining us. Thank you for I'm Colleen what join me a host of Eating Wall Broke podcast While I eat a meal created by self made entrepreneurs, influencers and celebrities over a meal they once eight when they were broke. Today I have the lovely aj Crimson, the official Princess of comfin Asia Kid and Assia. This is the professor. We're here on Eating Wall Broke and today I'm gonna break down my meal that got me through

the time when I was broken. Listen to Eating wall Broke on the I Heart radio app, on Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I call the Union Hall as this matter of life and death. I think these peeples of planning to kill Dr King. On April four, Dr Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis. A petty criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested. He pled guilty to the crime and spent the rest of his life in prison. Case closed right, James Hill Ray

was upon for the official story. The authorities would parade all we found a gone the James Old Ray bald in Birmingham that killed Dr King, Except it wasn't the gun that killed Dr King. One of the problems that came out when I got the Ray case was that some of the evidence, as far as I was concerned, did not match the circumstances. This is the MLK tapes. The first episodes are available now. Listen on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

After thirty years, it's time to return to the halls of West Beverly High and hang out at the peach pit. On the podcast nine O two one, OMG joined Jenny Garth and Tory Spelling for a rewatch of the hit series Beverly Hills nine O two one oh. From the very beginning, we get to tell the fans all of the behind the scenes stories to actually happen, so they know what happened on camera, obviously, but we can tell

them all the good stuff that happened off camera. Get all the juicy details of every episode that you've been wondering about for decades. As nine O two one oh, super fan and radio host Sissany sits in with Jenny and Tory too reminisce, reflect and relive each moment, from Brandon and Kelly's first kiss to shouting Donna Martin graduates,

you have an amazing memory. You remember everything about the entire ten years that we filmed that show, and you remember absolutely nothing of the ten years that we film that show. Listen to nine O two one OMG on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You suddenly wake up to the loud growling of a tactical vehicle. Must have left your window open. A few streets away. You can hear the troopers doing

their morning patrols. This is closing in on week four of the all day curfew cops and state troopers have put checkpoints at every bridge and on all major streets for about every ten blocks. Your friends and the city's local liberal majority are now calling this what it is. You're a city is functioning as a full on police state.

National establishment media has been more hesitants to use that term, but your Fox watching conservative family from out of state has been texting you about how good it is that someone is finally establishing law and order and taking back the town. After months of senseless looting and destructive riots, You've been mostly stuck in your downtown apartment. You quit your job when the recent amount of protests started up, which now means you don't qualify for the working hours

exemption of the curfew. You've got enough money saved up for another month, but you're looking to get a grocery delivery job, which would have the added benefit of allowing you to go outside during the day. Luckily, you've been able to sneak out at night to do rooftopping and surveil the police's checkpoints and patrol routes in your neighborhood. You've noticed that the cops rarely look up. You've been feeding your intel into a surveillance database shared on a

telegram channel ran by some various activists. After lying in bed gathering your thoughts for a few minutes, you finally roll out and pick out your clothes. Dark loose pants, a plane shirt, beanie, and a high his jacket. Ordinarily, you'd break into your red bull stache for morning caffeine, but you've already got plenty of energy. Today it's your boyfriend's birthday, and for the past week you've been planning

to surprise him. You think there's finally enough information in the surveillance database to plan a trip across town with little to no law enforcement interaction. Between the in person reconnaissance and hacking into the city's traffic cams, which was surprisingly easy, you've been able to figure out a route using city buses and on foot that should be able to avoid checkpoints and the regular patrol routes from what

you've seen online. Bus drivers won't ask for your work authorization card, and you're hoping the highvis jacket will make it look like you belong. Lastly, before you leave, you grab your small yellow messenger bag and jam in a water bottle plus a ten of a half a dozen cupcakes. Deep breaths, slowly twist the handle of your door and stare down in your apartment hallway. You're on your way,

you keep telling yourself, just act like you belong. After taking the stairs down to ground level, you make your way street side. This part you feel more confident about. You've been able to study the patrol patterns around your media area more carefully. The bus stop you're going to is just four blocks away. You can zig zig through two streets and to avoid the main drags. As you walk through the sidewalks, you keep your head down, but your eyes are darting side to side to get a

lay of the land. Don't walk too fast or too slow. Match the people around you. Obviously, not many people are out right now, but there are enough to mirror their movement and pace. It feels like it took forever, but you get to the bus stop without incident or seeing a single cop waiting at bus stops. It feels like an eternity, but today it's worse. Within a few minutes, the blue metro bus does pull up. The bus driver gestures you want The electronic ticketing system isn't turned on.

You peek up to the driver. The look in her eyes is telling you just a head on back. At least you know she's probably on your side. You picked this bus not because it's the most direct route to your boyfriend's place. It's not, but because he gets you close enough while avoiding the checkpoints you and your internet buddies have mapped out. It's a slower, more jagged route, but at least you get to relax for a while

and enjoy the ride. And hey, you can get an in person look at the rest of the city under the curfew and police occupation. The ride is now closing in on a little over half an hour, About ten more minutes until you get off. Your heart's racing you might actually do this. In your flash of nervous excitement, you look up ahead on the road and your face drops. About half a mile up ahead, you spot a checkpoint. Fuck no, this, this is wrong. This wasn't on the map.

The checkpoint on this street was supposed to be further up the road. After you get off, your mind flashes through different possibilities. Did the cops change the checkpoint this morning? Wait? Did the police find the database map on telegram? And are getting at false info? You stop yourself from thinking. Because you realize you need to act now and think later. You jump out of your seat and sprint up the bus towards the driver. You blurt out, I need to

get off this right now. Please. The driver looks ahead, looks at you, and tilts her head down and pulls over quick. That's all she says to you. You dart out of the bus and into the half residential, half retail labyrinth, and as you're running, you hear sirens. Fuck they saw you. Your head swivels around to catch a glance. One car from the checkpoint is headed your way. You hope the bus driver doesn't get in trouble, but right

now that's not your problem, you think. First thing you need to do is prevent the vehicle from pursuing you. So off the big streets. You take a second to tighten the messenger bag around your body. And here we go to You're right. You see a walled courtyard for a small two story apartment. Estimate the wall is eight feet tall. Doable. You turn out the street and run towards the wall, slowly gaining speed, jump up and plunch your foot on the side. Then your arms reach up

and grab the top. It's a bit of a struggle to pull yourself up. You've got some stuff weighing you down and you're a bit out of practice, but you get up. You hop down onto the other side and keep going for now. You barrow through some dense bushes and vault a few small railings as you traverse the side streets. Soon enough you're far enough away from the car, with plenty of obstacles in between you and it that

you feel like you can catch a quick breather. Now you have a choice hide it out here for a bit or figure out a way to your boyfriends. You still got a decent sense of where you are. The destination should be only about ten blocks away. Now, in a diagonal direction, you'll get plenty of time to rest your boyfriend's place, so you figure you should continue on. As you're about to head on your way to armored state troopers turned the corner on foot. You remember you're

still pretty close to the checkpoint. One look at you with your hands on your knees. As you pant, the cops know you're out of place. Stop, yells the cop. You're being detained. Fuck time to book it, gonna have to think as you run, good news is is that they're in armor. Bad news is that you're tired and your outfit is blown. You can change clothes once you get to your boyfriends, so you decide the best course of action now is to make it hard for two people in armor to follow you. Time to put some

obstacles between you and them. You're already mostly out of the retail area, which means it's time to hop some backyard fencees Ferris Bueller's Day Off Shit. You make a sharp left turn behind the car and into someone's yard, up and over their fence. One hand grabs on top, one hand goes to the far side, and you flip your body over. Next few fences are shorter, regular speed vaults will do. The sound of the clinky tactle boots chasing you gets quieter as you traverse through the yards

and zig zigging around blocks. Before you know it, you're on the back street of your partner's place. Only a few more steps and you can see their backyard in the distance. You quick to in your head and look around. From what you can see, you've lost the State troopers. You scurry through four more yards before you reach your target. You let it a sigh of relief. You jogged past the side yard towards the front. You probably should use the front door before you knock. You take a look

inside your messenger bag. You unclipped the latch, and inside lies a smashed pile of cupcake crumbs with pink frosting coating the insides of your bag. Well, at least I made it in one piece, you say out loud. After an exhausting trek, you finally knock on the door. It could happen in here podcast. Robert Evans. Sophie is not here today, so I get to open the episode with a tonal grunting um because she was unable to stop me. Uh, welcome to the podcast that this is talking about things

falling apart? How to you know, make it not? Maybe? Uh? My guest today, well, my my co host today. First is Garrison Davis. Garrison, how you doing today? I'm doing good good. We have a little bit of a fun update. This actually happened last week, but this will be the first episode we're recording since it happened. Um last week.

We put up some links to ago fund me and a couple of different episodes of Bastards and of It could happen here to try to help a woman named Ruba who lives in Portland, UM and is a community activists save her house. UM. When we started the fundraiser, she'd raised about twenty eight grand to to you know, get basically keep her home. UM, and it's up to the fifty grand she needed. Y'all did that in about

three days. UM. So you've you've you've kept a woman in her home UM and allowed her and her family to stay where they are. And I'm just extremely grateful to everybody who donated, who shared, UM, it's just awesome. UM. You know this comes after earlier in this year you all funded the Portland Diaper Bank. UM. I just continue to be very impressed with with how how much people who listen to these shows are willing to throw down to help people out. So thank you all. UH. And

now I'm going to hand it off to Garrison. Garrison, what are we? What are we? What are we? What are we? What are we? What are we talking about? Today? So today we're gonna be talking about and discussing two of kind of my favorite practical skill sets. Hey been training for I don't know seven eight, I think almost eight years now Um, and it's what, yeah, one of one of my favorite interests. It's useful very practically. It's

also useful for fun. We're talking about uh parkour, which people may have heard me discussed before, but also just kind of like stealth in general, UM, and how to be mindful of your presence among other people. UM. As a big, clumsy guy who's worked extensively with you in aggressive situations, I can confirm that your parkour is very, very effective because you are a fast little set of a bitch, very good at getting away from the cops

and getting to where you need to be. At the film things, it was always, um kind of amazing, as frustrating as it was sometimes when you would when you would start out ahead of everybody, but I can't argue with the results. So and to help us kind of talk about Parkorn stealth, I have brought on a friend of mine who is the person who mostly taught me UM Parker and stealth, my friend Rick, who has been teaching Parker for a long time. UM, say hi, Rick,

that that that's right. Rick is very uh not super social, so it's I think it's amazing that I was able to convince him to come in a podcast pretty funny. Um. First off, Rick, do you want to kind of just like give your definition of like Parker in general, because I know whenever we say Parker, everyone just thinks to the office, um, which I know you find frustrating. But yeah, for people who maybe aren't as into it as us, don't want just give the kind of a brief overview

of of Parker as like a concept. Uh, Parker is a really annoying concept to actually pin down. UM. But basically speaking, it's movement with purpose. You are somewhere, you want to get somewhere, and you're trying to find the best way of doing that. When we're training, we kind of focus on efficiency, safety, speed, and the reason behind

the movement. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's thinking of it more as like the movement with purpose or like like intentional move meant um is much better than thinking of it's like like parkour isn't like flips. Like flips and that kind of stuff is more of what we call like um, free running. It's it's more of like a

creative expression. It's more of like a kind of kind of like a sport where it's like parkorse more usually, I mean there's always gonna people that are going to fight you on this in the park work in the Parker community, but it's generally Parker is kind of more based on utility. So like last last summer at the protests, I I I used you know, Parker in a lot of different ways, both to like you know, get somewhere specifically or park Horse grade. It is like a recovery tool,

like if you get pushed over by cops. Um, park Work could be very useful for like getting up very fast. You know. It's like all that kind of more practical side of things. And I've used Parker you know before I was doing filming at different kind of activism related type things. It's just it's a super useful skill to have, UM.

And today I wanted to talk talk a bit about like Parkorse practical application in you know, conflict ish scenarios, but also wanted to touch on stealth UM as you know, sometimes you don't need Parker and if you can avoid a scenario where you have to use it would be kind of great. So I've asked Rick to kind of prepare a few things on stealth, which then we'll kind of you know, bounce off each other and talk kind of a general discussion of Parker and stealth in general

and how it relates to kind of conflict scenarios. Um. So, Rick, where would you like to start for you know, a stealth overview. Well, in conflict with other people, there's like three different levels of the conflict um and all of these get trained in different places. Usually there's the actual

um like conflict. The combat, which is more of a martial arts or gun training or weapon training of any kind as well, compares you for that beneath that is the Parker level, where you can avoid getting into the conflict in the first place. If you can get away from the situation. Yeah, if you're more of an arm's length of way, then you can create more distance between

you and someone it's trying to hurt you. And in nine percent of conflict situations, that's going to be a better self defense option than literally any weapon you could carry. Getting the hell away is always the preferred There's there's there's a really good comic um It's it's like it's it's like a it's like a like like a comedy comic of like someone someone trying to get into like a knife fight and you're just like, nope, I'm running away because there's no there's no winner in a knife fight.

The only way to win a knife fight is to be oh far away from someone with a knife. Yeah, I mean literally, Again, the only justified situation I can think of to physically getting into a knife fight is like what happened on the Portland Max train. When someone else can't get away, Yeah, you're still gonna stick them. And the two guys who did that died. They died. Yeah yeah, um, not that they did the wrong thing, they did the only thing they could. But that's what

a knife it is. So yeah, it's being able to get the funk away as the best self defense. Yeah. I carry weapons with me wherever I go, but I don't want to ever use them. My first response is always going to be look for an escape path. Yeah yeah. A weapon is only for if you can't get away

or if someone else can't get away. So pretty much like yeah, well yeah, I've always been interested because again I've watched you know, Garrison hop away from cops over fences where I had to like, you know, fall over the fence, essentially because I'm not nearly as good. I'm someone who exercises. But like number one, is it even possible to like learn this stuff without fucking your thirty three year old body up a bunch in the process. That's a lot of scared of is like over sixty,

and he's good, very good. He's actually like one of my high intermediate, low advanced students, honestly, and he started when he was like fifty. How do you uh, I mean like it it just seems like injury, I guess because my my my stereotypical view of it is like a bunch of jumping up on buildings and leaping over stuff like, um, it seems like injuries would be a

pretty common fact. Um. So I guess that's kind of like always been my first concern there, like how do you how do you how do you train people to do this stuff with a minimum of risk? Well, that's kind of always the focus of my teaching. There certainly are other instructors out there, like the guy who taught me Parker was basically this is a con vault. This

is what it looks like. Do it my training? Like I sucked at Parker when I started, So my teaching method has been coming at this as a sort of Okay, I'm gonna try to break this down into as many pieces as I can, and I'm going to try to keep you completely safe. Um, Bumps and bruises do happen when you're training park or that's just unavoidable. It's learning how to do walking but fancy so you get bruised when you're learning how to walk. You get bruised when

you're learning every technique in parker. But I've been doing it for fourteen years now and I've never broken any of my bones. If you do it right, you shouldn't

be able to stay safe when training you. Definitely, if you can get someone who's more experienced, getting them to break down steps for you is very useful, whether that be like a park or gym in your area or just like a friend that that's that's been that's been messing around trying to like train with somebody is probably one of the most important things, um, is to have someone else there both if you want to get hurt and need help, but to to kind of prevent to

help prevent that from even happening in the first place. Because there's a lot of like very simple moves that can be introduced in very safe environments. I've I've I've been wanting to get Roberts down to the gym for like over a year now just to go over like a few basic kind of stuff that's just really really useful, pretty and like pretty easy. Like we're not we're not jumping to like you know, doing like roof topping right

where we're like jumping from one roof to another. We're starting by we're starting by being like, here's like a concrete barricade. What's the safest way of getting over this if you're under pressure? Right? It's it's it's it's that kind of stuff that's specifically useful and like conflict scenarios, right, because like when we're when we're facing in a riot line, I'm not gonna be doing like flips and cart wheels to like get over fences. I'm trying to be like,

what's the safest, fastest way I can get over this thing? Well, making sure I'm not going to get like shot with the rubber bullet, right, that's kind of it's it's, it's, it's it's very different from like what you see on YouTube, right, YouTube is very like showy people are like trying to like basically when what you see on YouTube is people are doing people are doing like a choreographic performance, whereas Parker from a utility standpoint is very different from what

you see online. Yeah, and that's one of the things that we try to train too when we're training Parkore is we just give ourselves an environment and say, okay, I'm going now, yeah, and like do it over and over again and try to figure out what's the best way of getting over this specific path. Right if you can like make a designed path, be like, you know, even doing this at like a playground or like any any place with like logs, you know, you can do

Parker in the forest and stuff. Be like I'm just like set this path and experiment with how many ways can I move through this kind of set set of obstacles, um, And you can kind of figure out Parker on your own, on in in in that kind of way, because because your body knows what it's gonna do, Like, you know, people have been moving like this for thousands and thousands of years. It's only in the past few hundred years where we have like kind of lost this ability or

it's like become it's become less necessary. So like we we know how to interact with our environment in creative ways, like we we we know how to do this. Um, it's just that, you know, we the past, the past few centuries, it's been less important. And I think Parker is really fun because you can kind of rediscover interacting with your environment in these, you know, kind of more wild ways. It's something that we all do as children, just like evolutionarily. For some reason, as children we do

this as play. We climb trees and we try to go over fences. It's just that something in our society has made a shift so that when we become adults, it's suddenly not acceptable for us to do this anymore. Yeah. I mean, I can remember when I was a little kid growing up on the farm. We had a bullpen because we kept the bowl away from the cows, and my my cousin and I would hop over the fence and we would throw stuff at the bowl and then when it started to charge, we would hop back over

the fence. I mean, obviously I'd never do that today because it's mean to throw things at a bowl. I was six, But also I couldn't physically hop over the fence that way today. But I'm guessing within Like, I don't know, even just like a few hours of practice, you could figure out a lot of ways together. I could be back to fucking with bowls. Is what exactly? You don't need to kiss kiss the bull fucking goodbye? You can? We can. We can go back to this.

We could go I could, I could return to tradition. Yes, exactly, what is the degree of this that can be done without? Again, like you know we have we have a wide variety of income levels that listen to this show, Um, what is the degree this can be done without like paying for training? You know that? Like, like, how is it even possible to like start on this kind of thing if you're in reasonable shape, you know, on your own without paying someone? Because that that seems like a recipe

for breaking something to me. But again, I don't know. I don't know. Ship It is very much about knowing yourself and knowing what you're ready for. Uh, this was something I mean I say that I never broke a bone in my training, but there were a couple of times I started pushing myself further than I should have, and it would have been really good to have someone there to say, hey, you probably not ready for this.

Yet let's break this down into little pieces. But if you come at it methodically and you don't endanger yourself too much, what I started out with Parker is I would just put a piece of tape on the ground and another piece of tape and jump from one piece

of tape to the other. And went out to parking lots and jumped from just an arbitrary pebble to the curb on the parking lot and found some just railings and learned how to go over those railings safely, and gradually just started building up to higher and higher things. You always want to start at ground level when you're training parkers. Don't go up to high places for your first thing. Yeah. I think there there's a lot of like instructional videos on YouTube too that that are not

just like showing off. It's actually people trying to like break down movements. So you can like get find a specific video and be like, Okay, I want to, you know, bring this on my phone, go out into like a playground, a parking lot, like like a wooded area, and be like, okay, this is this is this one vault. I'mnn watch the video and I'm gonna try to replicate it myself. That's really the the kind of easiest, cheapest way to kind of break that down without having to you know, pay

someone tons of money. Um. You know, if Parker classes aren't the most expensive thing. Um. So that's if you do have a little bit of disposable income. I I like park Wor classes. I did them for a long time, but there was a certain point actually that like I

couldn't afford classes anymore. And luckily I've been doing park wore enough at that point that I was able to become an assistant instructor, which means I've got like a free I got like a free membership in exchange for you know, helping out in classes, like a few hours a week. So that's what that's what I did for years when I couldn't afford classes. Is it's just help is help teach, which I mean eventually I got leveled

up to being like a full time instructor. Um. So that is kind of the other way is you know, once you get enough stuff, there are you know, there's there's ways canna like make friends who know more Parker than you. You can do you know, outdoor training with them, which can be free. Um. But if you if you do really want like a like a gym environment, there is the ways of making class. It's not the most

expensive thing. There's online groups that schedule meetups every now and then, so if you can find an online group in your area, you can go to one of their meetups and ask for advice. Not everyone's going to give the best advice. There are some people in the park or community who are always pushing their boundaries. They'll be in a cast half of the time. Um, the more advanced people, yeah, they generally, so always take advice with a grain of salt. Not everyone knows everything, and no

one knows your body as well as you do. So you've got to keep yourself safe above everything else. You can't get better at park or if you break both of your legs. Yeah, that's always so a couple of questions here. Number one would be, obviously, I don't expect you know, like somebody's in Michigan or whatever. I don't

expect you to know the best parkour instructor there. But if somebody is looking at going the gym route, are there kind of some hard and fast rules for determining whether or not these folks know what they're doing wing, Like, is there any kind of advice you have in terms of picking a gym or is he just kind of like go into Google maps and see see where the parkouri be. That's a little bit tough because especially since COVID,

there's not many options for park origins out there. Um, my best advice would be go and if they let you just watch a class and see what's going on. Um, see how many people have casts? Yeah, yeah, back when I was learning parkour originally we would have basically two people in a cast all the time, just for the class. Yeah, I didn't know that the guy that I was trying to keep up with the whole times span three stints in a cast. Yeah, just funny because I've never got

a serious injury ever. I was. I was always more careful in my training. But like the most I've gotten is like is like you know, like bruises and stuff. I've I've I've and I got to a relatively high level of parker like if years ago only took classes from me, But focus was always on breaking things down and making them accessible and safe. True. True, yeah, yeah, but there is there's definitely people who are more who are more carefree with their body and okay with hurting

themselves to do something cool. Yeah, and some people will get away with that. So for folks who are there don't have the financial means to go to a gym where there's just nothing in their area, because as you've said, there's a plague. Um, if people are gonna you've given some advice on like how to start trying yourself. Are there any specific online resources you would recommend to folks who are you know, looking to get on unless on

their own dip their toes in? Um, you know, YouTube channels or or people who you know do good like writing breakdowns, anything that you would, uh, you would push folks towards. I haven't been up to date on it recently. UM. A lot of the videos out there are garbage. UM. What I recommend you look for is you look for,

first of all, explanation. UM. Second of all, if you can find videos of someone who's training something and they fail to do the move that they're trying to do correctly, and they fail to do the move that they're trying to do correctly, they fail and fail and fail and fail and then succeed. Mhm. That's an honest video. That's one that I would listen to more because they understand the process. The other videos out there are sort of greatest hits compilations and you don't get to see the

whole process that goes into that. So I don't have a sense. I don't have any specific person or channel to recommend. But when you're going out there and looking for resources, just make sure that the person is putting some understanding into the fact that this is the process of training and it's not just this is how it's done.

Do it now, you can do it. There is there is a there's a Parkore wiki which was like you know, Parkore dot fandom dot com that you can you can find like just like lists of all of the moves and they give you very like simple explanations of them, and they and they link to some videos, um and generally like if if you just want to learn more about it, then that's then that can be a good resource, just so you're familiar with all the different types of movement.

But yeah, like make sure you take every video with a grain of salt, and you know, watch other watch other people's explanations and be like, Okay, I kind of like the way this person describes it versus this person, because you know, everyone teaches differently. Everyone teaches for kind of you know, different differently body types for different like you know, body like performance models. Um. So you know, because you can't just apply the same thing to everyone

because everyone's everyone is different. But you know, the Parkore wiki is a decent resource. Um. And then you know there's YouTube is especially since since the two thousands there's been a plethora of content, most of most of it bad, but you know there's lots to at least look for.

All right, Um, anything else you wanted to get into, Yeah, I wanted to kind of branch off of like the parkour discussion into kind of like, uh, the more kind of stealth based discussion of of kind of being aware of your presence in relation to other people and recond I know you were talking about like the different levels

of stealthy. So you've got the combat training which prevents you from getting killed or captured in uh, the worst of scenarios, and then we have Parkore that you can use to prevent the combat in the first place, and stealth is what you use to prevent the chase from happening in the first place. It's kind of a tree of I really don't want to have to fight someone,

so I'm going to run away instead. I really don't want to have to run away from someone, so I'm just going to try and not to be noticed by them instead. And that's been a lot of what my training in Parker has been focused around is just stay deescalated as possible with everything. Yeah, because we me and Rick have focused most of our PARKOURD training on on stealth UM as opposed to being you know, super strong

or super powerful UM. And stealth always a really hard concept to talk about because it's kind of like nebulous in nature, because stealth isn't being invisible, right, It's it's not it's not being totally unnoticed. It's want. It's it's it's wanting to craft the way you're seen in a specific way. Yeah. Um, it's always been very difficult for

me to explain what stealth is. The most recent definition that I've given for it is that everything that you do, everything that you are, gives off a certain amount of noise and a certain type of noise. So the way that you dress, you can dress in a very loud way with the hive is day glow, colors um something that makes you really easy to notice. But if you're in the right environment, that might be the right type of noise to be making to blend into a crowd.

Like a three piece suit is also a very loud outfit to wear, but if you're on the streets of New York, that's normal. If you come into a park origin wearing a three piece suit, it's very abnormal. So that's not the right type of noise if you're trying

to blend in there. Yeah, a lot of it's about kind of constructing the way people see you based on what environment you're in and who you're trying to remain undetected from, right, Because I mean they were like not even necessarily undetected, but just detected in a specific way because people eyes. People's eyes can glaze over a lot of a lot of stuff. If if just that the right puzzle pieces are put into their brain, that it's

like nothing nothing to see here. Every everything is normal, nothing not nothing to be alerted, right, because what you're trying to do is prevent someone from being like alerted to your presence. That is kind of the main thing. So you can be within someone's sitelines, but the way that you're dressed, the way that you're moving, the way that you hold yourself fails to get their attention. They're subconscious registers that you're there, but it doesn't register consciously

to them that you're there. It's the gray Man stuff that we were talking about with Chelsea, which again there's very frustrating chutty dimension to it. But the the original idea, before it got taken over as an entire fashion aesthetic, was if you're prepared, if you're if you're going to make yourself prepared for badge situations, you don't want to wear a bunch of tactical gear. You don't want to

be dressed in like five combat pants. You don't want to be carrying like military backpacks and like the cargo pants with the you know, clearly bulging with weaponry. You don't want to be open carrying a gun. You want to be dressed, however, is going to least to least set you apart from the crowd, And that is, as you said, kind of vary. No, it's not a matter

of like wearing all gray or wearing all black. Um, you're in downtown Salt Lake City, you know, a black hoodie and jeans might stand out more than it does if you're in downtown San Francisco, in which case you're gonna look like a million other people. I mean, and generally, if you're trying to avoid being seen, I recommend against wearing black basically at at all times, especially if you're trying to remain like actually invisible at night. You don't

want to wear black because black is usually too dark. Um, you you want to wear like darker blues or darker greens. Um. Yeah, generally black is should be avoided. Um. Of course, like black block is a whole separate thing because black block are trying to remain anonymous within a crowd context. But you know, in a lot of cases, you don't want to be in black block at protests, or you want to be able to switch from black block to what

we call like normy block very quickly. So like you know, quick changes are another kind of form of stealth um that you can like practice like you you can you can just practice doing quick changes, like in your apartment, be like, how fast can I get from this outfit to this outfit? Um? In like a small space, right, you can? You can you can practice these even like outside but specifically for like black block, changing both in

and out of is a skill that needs to be practiced. Um. But overall, I think like there's a lot of other ways of being anonymous at a protest besides actually black block, Like, there's a lot of other kind of methods. Like black blocks are very specific tactic, but it's not a tactic that needs to get applied all the time. It's it's it's very you should be mindful that it has a lot of downsides. Um And based on what you're trying to do, there's a lot of other ways to dress

that would maybe be better. Um. Yeah, yeah, it's this, um yeah. It's a little bit like angles of it are kind of what we talked about even in like the last week when we were talking about like storing, you know, food and canning food and like the value of paying attention to the cycle of like what is in stock and what is not stocked in stock during

what seasons. It's kind of the same thing at the value of paying attention to how people dress and how people move and like what is a normal way to move about and wherever you live as opposed to like what stands out like it, there's a lot of value and a lot of self defense value, and just kind of paying attention to people wherever you live and getting an eye for what will stand out and what won't stand out. If you're if you, if you are someone for whom being able to blend in is something you

see value in, you know? Yeah, Rick, do do Do you have any things kind of on that side of things or any like exercises people can do to improve their own personal stealth. Yeah, it's very very situational. You have to sort of study many different environments. The biggest advice that I give people for stealth all the time is, um, pay attention. You have to pay attention to the smallest details when I'm even just moving around my house, like the bathroom door lock. Um, when you twist the lock,

the button pops out and makes a huge noise. I actually place my thomb over it and deaden the sound as I'm doing it. And I pay attention to the kind of noise that I make in every situation and try to minimize that as much as possible. I pay attention to which parts of my house make noise when you step on them, and avoid those places, um I UM. Basically, just pay attention to every noise that my body makes,

that my environment makes as I'm moving through it. Also, you have to pay attention and study other people in different environments. You can go to a grocery store and watch the body language of the moms who are shopping with their kids, so that the people that normally you wouldn't pay attention to pay attention to them because they're doing a good job of blending in if you're not normally paying attention to them, and then try to start

mimicking their body language. What I'll do when I go out is I don't directly look at anyone, but I paying attention to if I'm being paid attention to give myself that own that conscious feedback and say, hey, I wasn't all that stealthy this time, I kind of stuck out. Yeah, practicing your peripheral vision is definitely useful for that. I

mean in terms of exercises. Yeah, just go into like parks or the places where there's a lot of people and like people watching and trying to figure out who does your eyes glaze over the most and what what are they doing to cause that. I think one one thing that me and Rick have talked about before is like every part of your body points somewhere, like whether that be your eyes, your nose, your chin, your arms, your hips, your chest, your hands, all of these things

point in a direction. And if you can figure out which direction, you can point them to make people pay less attention to you. That's kind of one of the easier models understanding how to like walk and move in a stealthy manner that I think like out of all the different ways of thinking about and I think that's

the way that's helped me the most. Um. It's being like, you know, if if my head is pointed up and my nose is pointed out and I'm moving my arms around a lot, that's people are gonna like like look at me more. You know, people if if if if eye contact is made, that is like a failure. So you know, if your head's pointed down, your arms are more slouched, they kind of move with your body, but

that's not super exaggerated and it's not super stiff. These are different kind of ways of pointing your body to make you seem more like UM introspective UM and less external. Also walking around with UM ear plugs or like like like uh, earbuds, ear phones. Those are ways people will

pay attention to class to you look at your smartphone. Yeah, one of the back when we back when I took classes with you and taught classes, we we would we would we would have like a weekly a weekly games class um where we'd have different you know games and related to Parkore and you know, stealth would always kind

of be something I would try to do. And you could survive so long in stealth games by just like looking like pretending that you're looking at your phone, like not even actually doing it, just like walking in like a circle around like walking in a circle around the arena as people are trying to like tag and stuff.

And if you can just like walk with your head down kind of slowly, you can strive a ridiculously long time because people are looking for people that are like running around and being like and being super energy energetic, and if you're not, people aren't detecting you as much. Another thing to practice would be quiet walking, which is

we kind of mentioned before. It's like learning how to move your foot and interact with different surfaces that makes your walking basically silent, which is very fun because you can use this to scare your friends. It's it's it's it's it's very exciting to to to to to like try to try to figure out what's what's ways I can hide in my friend's house to like jump scare them, or like kind of like how close can I get

behind someone with with with without them noticing that. There'd be times I can just like walk up behind someone and wait, like I kid you, not like ten minutes before they noticed I was there. It's hilarious. Um. I feel even better when I can do that to their pets because generally the animals are paying more attention to everything. So if you can successfully sneak up on someone's cat, you're doing it right. Yeah. Oh man, I do really enjoy stealth, and I'll be happy to practice it more

regularly once the plugue is over. Um, if it's over, Um any other kind of stealth notes that you would want to kind of bring up for if someone's trying to like get into stealth and start to start thinking about detection, you know, more often in their everyday life. It's very important that you engage in indirect observations. You you were talking about how everything points and One of the things that we subconsciously noticed the most is people's

eyes were kind of programmed to notice eyes. So if you're looking directly at someone, they're probably gonna notice that you've noticed them. But if you're using your peripheral vision, or if instead of watching them, you're watching a reflection of them, or if you're watching their shadow um, or you're not even looking in their direction instead you're tracking them by sound, it makes it so that you have

a big one up on everyone around you. Yeah, in indirect observation is one of the best tools that you can use, um if you get really clever at it. Now, this this, this, this is harder because it actually if if you if you if you do this wrong, people, people, people will pay more attention to you. But you can get good at it to start using like your phone camera or even just your phone screen, because like your black phone screen is pretty, is pretty, is pretty reflective

in nature, so you can use this as like a mirror. Um. But like, yeah, using like phone cameras and phone screens as a reflective surface or or just as like a camera can be used in indirect observation. But you do have to be careful because if if if it looks like you're filming somebody, they're gonna pay so much more attention to you. So yeah, you have, you have. You have to be very careful with this method, but it

is possible. This is how I kind of this is how I um, this is how it's like documented different like um not sees that rallies. If I don't want to be like super obvious that that I'm taking a picture of them, there's ways of doing indirect observation with my phone that I can get pictures of them from certain angles to be like, okay, so now now I can put you, I can add you to my to my folder of Nazis that have showed up. UM that method. You have to be super careful if you're surrounded by

potentially hostile people. Anyone who's behind you is going to see that your phone camera is on. So it's something that you only want to use if people are on one side of you or you know, you keep you you you use your body as a shield for certain for certain like angles be tricky the hoodie and uh increase your odds of success with that. But but but most often I would recommend against this method, especially if you're just starting out because it is it is a

lot more risky. UM. But when it does work, I can come in very handy. But but more often than not, using using like reflections like windows, mirrors, you know, like a car, windows, puddles on the ground, shadows, sound, all of these different methods of observing someone without looking directly at them are generally much much safer UM and they can be very useful for for trying to track someone or to be aware of what they're looking at without

looking directly at them UM. Kind of more similar to like what I talked about in like the fictional opening we did for stealth is very dependent on what you know is trying to watch you write, like like how you need to be aware of the ways people are

trying to detect you. Of course this canine units. It's very very different than just being being yeah, than being like chased down on foot um or you know, like security cameras of course, like online tracking, which we're not we're not really getting into today, but you know, like being aware of where security cameras are mapped out UM can be can be very useful learning to learning to figure out where they are without looking directly at them can be useful. There's a lot of cities have websites

that like map out where where all the cameras are. Um, I know there's one for Portland that you can like map out all of the cameras in downtown and then you can like plan like a route through downtown that has no cameras watching right there. There's only there's only very few routes that that actually have that, but but

they do exist. Um. So learning to move in ways that make cameras less able to spot you, um those that's definitely another kind of method of learning about stealth and learning about like how surveillance works looking directly at the camera. But that's that's that's definitely useful, which intention to where they are, Yeah, which plays into which plays into indirect observation. Um. But I mean this gets more tricky.

We know when police are using like thermal drones. Uh, this is it's whole whole whole other side of things that it's very hard to info. Sex side of thing is hard to combat and it's yeah, there will be a point in time in which it becomes effectively impossible to the monitor for cameras. Yeah, there's like there's there's like a hierarchy of worry because yeah, if because if, like the n s they wants to find you, they will, but most often they're not. Like most often people are

dealing with their local law enforcement unit. Most often people are not dealing with the FBI. Most people people usually aren't dealing with the FBI, CIA or n s A. If if they want to find you, they will. But if you can learn to only interact with your surroundings in a way that would only concern your local police department, that's much easier too. That's much easier to kind of combat against, um, because it's it's way easier to hide from you know, your local department than it is from

the n s A. All right, um, anything else? I think that pretty much covers everything. Yeah, I think that's a good that's a SDE. Great, it's a cast that we have potted. Um all right, Um, we got any any plugables here to plug at the end before we before we roll out me. Yeah, no, you don't find me alone. Don't don't find him. This is the most

visible you've ever been. Yeah, So is there any um, I don't know, fundraiser chair for someone else that you want to highlight not currently now you are you do try to be uh you do try to be a virtual ninja? All right, well, all plug something. One of our fans is putting together a graphic novel about the famed anarchist militant of the Spanish Civil War when even showed a Durruty. So if you just go to type Druty into Kickstarter, you'll find the graphic novel Kickstarter. UM

check it out. It's cool. Yeah, and I guess other things I'll close with his learned to walk quietly, learn to observe, learn to observe your surroundings. Um, keep these practice, practice, practice with other people. Don't don't don't do this alone. It's really useful to have stealth be a collaborative process because stealth isn't stealth isn't just by itself, isn't just about you. It's about you and your whole environment. Um, collaborate with the CVS clerk when you robbed the CVS stealthily?

That is That is a different podcast I'm working on. Is that how to Shop the Shoplifting Cast? I mean, yeah, that is something I will pitch very soon. Anyway, I've had trouble getting sponsors for the shoplifting podcast. I will tell you that. And it's difficult if you could actually get CVS to sponsor that big shoplifting. I mean, we are giving them a lot of free advertising. If if if it does, if it does happen. Anyway, most people

who shoplift also spend. That's true. That is one of the best ways to shoplift is to buy other things. In this story, I'm seeing I'm already giving out advice. Um, yeah, that that is how I always shoplifted. Back when I shoplifted, Yeah, back when I did that twenty years ago. That's what. That's how I did it as well. I feel like if Sophie were here, she'd be trying to back pedal right now and stop you guys. So if you support shoplifting,

this is a very pro shoplifting podcast. Anyway, that's the podcast. This is Roxande Gay, host of the Roxanne Gay Agenda, the bad feminist podcast of your Dreams. Now, what is the Roxanne Gay Agenda, you might ask what. It's a podcast where I'm going to speak my mind about what's on my mind, and that could be anything. Every week I will be in conversation with an interesting person who

has something to say. We're going to talk about feminism, race, writing in books, and art, food, pop culture, and yes, politics. I started show with a recommendation. Really, I'm just going to share with you a movie or a book, or maybe some music or a comedy set, something that I really want you to be aware of and maybe engage

with as well. Listen to the Luminary original podcast, The Roxanne Gay Agenda, the bad Feminist podcast of your Dreams, every Tuesday on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The art world it is essentially a money laundering business. The best fakes are still hanging on people's walls. You know they don't even know or suspect that their faces. I'm Ale Baldwin and this is a podcast about deception, greed and forgery in

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fast waiting on reparations would beat the podcast soon. In every Thursday Politics and Wordplay, we fight for the people because they got us in the worst way, from the Hill Cooper, the bomb Bay to Kanya, from the left on Clave to what the neo kanza every Thursday cop the head compass to break us off with some break because listen to Waiting on Reparations on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. You were out of town when the last cop left Seattle.

It had been unseasonably cool that week, the seventy degrees of Old and not the n you had come to dread every summer. But you'd already promised you'd visit your family in Montana, and so when the riots started in the National Guard open fire into the crowd, you watched it on Twitter from your couch like everyone else. The Second Battle of Seattle, they were calling it. You wondered

briefly what the first one was. They've been fighting in Portland too, some kind of massacre in Oakland, and no one was quite sure what was happening in that Apple Valley. Couldn't be anything good, you thought, But it was Seattle. Everyone was talking about. The mayor fled the city and the helicopter when it became clear the police were losing after that the cops had simply broken retreated across the Cascades.

No one knew who was running the city now, and you share as hell didn't want to be the one to find out. But after two weeks, you've burned through every vacation day in every favor you'd ever accumulated at the hospital, And besides, the rent was due. No one was sure if the postal service was even still functioning, and with the eviction moratorium lifted, you weren't going to risk getting evicted because you weren't there to hand your landlord a check. So with rarey resignation, you pile into

your battered car and head towards snow Quality Pass. What surprised you most when you hit Seattle was the art you've been expecting. Burnt out buildings and streets filled with burning cars, and there were some A few streets were still blocked by what looked like improvised barricades, but every surface of every building, it seemed, had some kind of

mirror on it. Someone, and no one seemed to be quite sure who had first come up with the idea, had blocked off an entire street up near Capitol Hill, and people were painstakingly painting portraits of every protester killed in the fighting and seattle on it. As you walked past, they were discussing doing the same for the dead in Oakland. The second surprise came when you tried to pay your rent. A woman you've never seen before was sitting at the

office's reception desk. When you tried to handle your check, she laughed and handed it back to you, explaining that after the cops fled, the local tenants union had taking over most of the apartments in the city and placed them in something it called a community land Trust. You didn't quite get the details, but no one was going

to evict you, so you decided to just take the win. Besides, your friend had convinced you to do some child care for the tenants union in college, and they always seemed like a decent sword, so it didn't seem to be any immediate cause for concern. The hospital was another matter. Entirely from what you could gather, there had been some kind of labor disputween the chaos. Management seemed to have fired a group of nurses for giving injured protesters shelter

from the police. Your war had already been understaffed due to COVID and budget cuts. Now the situation was int tolerable. Where still many of the senior administrators had fled the city with the police, no one seemed to know who was in charge, Supplies were starting to run low, and with so many administrators missing in the insurance situation completely

up in the air. On account of nobody being entirely sure if Seattle was even still part of the United States, it wasn't clear if anyone was going to get paid. So when a co worker pulled you aside and asked if you'd be interested in doing something about the management problem, you figured, what the hell, Maybe it was time for a change. It wasn't like it could possibly make anything worse. The fired nurses, it turned out, had started to set up a community health center with the help of the

local neighborhood council. But some of the nurses still working at the hospital had another idea. Why not just turn the hospital into the community health center. After all, the hospital already had more equipment than any new center could possibly symbol. All they needed was some help from the community, and the whole thing could be run by a council of the hospital workers. Insurance companies be damned. Besides, if all the hospitals started pulling their resources together, they might

be able to solve some of the shortages. At the mention of solving the supply shortages, even the more skeptical workers started to come around. By the next morning, the Seattle Hospital Workers Council was marching on the hospital. The remaining management found out somehow and tried one final lockout to hold onto their property. But as you saw yet another column of protesters joining the crowd surrounding the hospital,

you knew this wasn't their city any longer. On April eighteen, two thousand, one, military police in the Cabiliar region of Algeria shot an eighteen year old high school students. Almost immediately, hundreds of thousands of people took to the street, chanting, you can't kill us, we are already dead at the

lines of policemen assembled to attack them. The police would kill over a hundred people and severely wound five thousand more in the months long battle for control of the streets that followed, but protesters burned police stations, government offices, courts, and the offices of Islamic fundamentalist parties until the government agreed to give ethnic minority groups language and cultural rights. The hated military police were driven from the region entirely,

and so few regular police stations survived the uprising. At the regular police likewise ceased to function across broad swaths of Kabilia. They were replaced on a local village level by self organized security committees, which would assemble on the

rare occasion trouble emerged. Contrary to the expectations of the state, crime plummeted, but the Algerian government otherwise continued to function as usual for over a decade until the local government in a small region, cover Bacha, attempted the regular local elections. After banning the most popular political party in the region,

they installed an unpopular coalition governments. The people of Barbaca responded by storming the city hall, seizing control of it and setting up a democratic General Assembly inside the newly dubbed House of the People to replace the existing government. This was dual power in its original sense, a council of the people facing off against an increasingly illegitimate parliamentary representative in a struggle for control over the fate of a new society. If you google dual power, you are

likely to encounter. A pamphlet written by Vladimir Lenin entitled The Dual Power, describing the conundrum of the situation following the First Russian Revolution in February of nineteen seventeen. After the overthrow of the Czar, political power was split between two competing bodies. On the one side, a new provisional government of liberal and social democratic politicians holdovers from the

old Duma from the previous regime. On the other side, revolutionary social forces rallying around assemblies popular power called soviets, which were councils of delegates sent by directly democratic factories, soldiers and sailors committees. Lenin solve this as a situation to be overcome by the seizure of state power by

Socialist Party. For Lenin and his Bolsheviks, dual power was a problem because, after the Czarist state ceased to exist in the middle of the World War, the new provisional government failed to fill the vacuum left in its wake by its collapse. To Lenin, the solution was obvious fill that vacuum with Lenin. For the peasants, soldiers, and workers who made up the majority of Russia's population, However, dual power was their first fleeting taste of freedom and autonomous

control over their lives. Lenon used the Soviets to seize power, but almost immediately began to turn on these democratic assemblies of popular autonomy. Over the course of the Russian Civil War, Lennon and the Bolsheviks strip power away from the workers, peasants, and soldiers, sometimes by bureaucratic fiat, often at the point of a bayonet. Until this Oviet have been stripped of all meeting in the very state named after their democratic

form and became synonymous with dictatorship. Dual power today draws from the potential of that post revolutionary crisis from the bottom up, direct democracy that was so threatening to the social order that Bolshevik revolutionaries and Czari's police by his alike, conspired to wipe them from the historical record. Just as Russia was haunted by the memory of the French communes, so is America today haunted by a memory of dual

power that, against all lodge refuses to die. We are, after all, still ruled by a greedy, bloodthirsty, and out of touch elite who have chosen to march us to our deaths by the hundreds of thousands by forcing us back to work during a plague. But the Russian Revolution is as far away from us today as Napoleon and his brass cannons were from the Russian revolutionaries and their machine guns. Times have changed. There is no Bolshevik party waiting in the wings to seize power as the state crumbles.

The vacuum of the state leaves in its wake as its power deteriorates, be filled by any number of organizations, most even more hostile to the working class and the Bolsheviks had been. It could be war lords with the personal allegiance of the remains of the military. It could be organized crime. It could be religious fundamentalist militias. Most likely, it will be an uneasy combination of all of the above.

Or it could be you. It could be your family, your friends, your neighbors, your co workers, the person you waved to every morning at the bus stop when you're on your way to work. The past to that world, the world run not by capitalists in their cops or by war lords in their armies, but by autonomous communities free to decide for themselves what to produce and how to best use their resources. To care for each other

is dual power in the twenty one century. At its core, dual power is about creating a counterpower against the state. During the Russian Revolution, this counterpower was formed essentially by historical accidents, as two governing bodies emerged from the course of the Febrrian Revolution. But modern dual power does not arise from the whims of the course of revolution or from an innate instinct of the working class. It is something we build together by creating organizations that resist the

power of the structures of violence. Capitalism, racism, homophobia, and the state name a few that control this world. Dual power organizations can take many forms, from tennis unions, the debtors councils, childcare cooperatives, to land occupations, workers councils, to rank and file labor unions, mutual aid networks to community self defense organizations. These organizations seek to build autonomy from

and against capitalism. In the state alone, there are no match for the state's we all power to inflict violence and corporate control over our resources. But by joining together to form federations and pooling their resources and expertise to coordinate their efforts, they can become a powerful enough force to challenge the state, both directly and indirectly. These dual power organizations are designed to be the day its successor.

As the industrial workers of the world famously put it, they form the structure of the new society and the shell of the old. In order to fulfill that task, they take the shape of new society they need to create. Academics called this prefigurative politics, organizing that employs the values and organizational structures that they seek to create in the world.

As we will discuss in the next episode, there are right wing forms of both dual power and profigative politics, but for most of the people who employ it, prefigurative politics means creating direct democratic institutions without bosses, managers, bureaucrats, or party apparatus. The means of creating the new world are thus the same as the ends. Dual power organizations serve multiple purposes. Their long term goal is to replace the state and the corporation with free and autonomous forms

of organization. One's organized and powerful enough to protect themselves and manage the logistical challenges of a new world when previous forms of organization and power no longer exist. But even reaching a point where this is remotely plausible, requires not just the painstaking construction of counterpower and organization out of a fragmented American population, It requires a profound cultural

transformation and how we make decisions. As the anthropologist David Graeber put it, it is assumed in many parts of the world that democracy is a group of people facing a certain problem who come together to solve it in a way where everyone has an equals say. It's true that most Americans think of themselves as living in a democratic country. When was the last time that any Americans

actually sat down and came to a collective decision? Maybe if they were ordering pizza, but basically never Dual power organizations thus also service schools for democracy where people can learn, experiment with, create, and spread their own forms of democracy and collective decision making. When these spaces of democratic experimentation are functioning properly, the very organizational structure serves as a

kind of recruitment tool. This was the original theory behind Occupy Wall Street, that democracy and the experience of autonomy were contagious and would spread rapidly as more and more curious people experienced it for themselves. That experience, in turn would create a new generation of people trained in democratic practices who could go forth and transform the world. Obviously,

this didn't quite happen. Occupies model of democracy was limited in many ways, not the least of which was that it required a public, physical meeting space that could be closed down by police violence. But the initial premise worked. Occupy itself, of course, had been inspired by the mass democratic assemblies in Spain, in Greece in two thousand eleven, and the direct democratic coops and factory occupations that engulfed

Argentina for the better part of the two thousand's. At the most basic, short term level, however, dual power organizations are designed to meet people's needs. The cornerstone of this effortis mutual aid. Probably the most famous example of such a project was the Black Panther Party survival programs. Former Black Panther Janina Irvin describes them in detail. The Black Panther Party survival programs were, in fact an example of an effort, a successful effort, while it lasted to create

dual power in the United States. The Black Panther Party had a school, had free food programs. One of its most respected survival programs was a breakfast for children, which was overall a response to hunger and poverty in the country, particularly among poor, low income Black people. We had free medical clinics in Winston Salem, North Carolina. We had free ambulances, free past control, free shoes, We had free bussing to prison programs, legal aid programs to help people get attorneys

who needed them. And we had a program that was called the Safe Program Seniors Against a Fearful Environment, in which we provided free transportation and escort service the senior citizens who needed to get out and take care of their errands, their business. They were often being attacked, so this was a hore protection for them. The Panthers were able to grow their in fluence by keeping their communities safe, healthy, cared for, and increasingly autonomous from the state. But most importantly,

they were able to keep people alive. As Black Panthers co founder Hue P. Newton famously said, these survival programs satisfy the deep needs of the community, but they are not solutions to our problem. That is why we call them survival programs, meeting survival pending revolution. The existence of the survival programs themselves reflect the necessity of keeping people alive, especially people who the state would rather kill or leave to die for building any kind of power. But these

programs are also necessarily insufficient. No mutual aid program, no autonomous project, no liberated territory can provide for the entire community, while the corporations, capitalists, and states maintain their strangle hold over the resources and production capacity at the working class collectively created over centuries of grueling labor and struggle. Dual power, more than just survival, is about building the counter power to take it back. Building powers withdraws the line between

what is and isn't dual power. Growing food for you and your friends, make cut down on bills, and make some killer pesto, but it's not necessarily challenging the capitalist system. Autonomy for its own sake is not necessarily dual power if it doesn't actively aid in struggle or better organize the community. That from the perspective of building counter power, that autonomy is meaningless. Making food for striking workers to allow them to stay on strike longer is building dual power.

We're simply producing it for general consumption is not. While dual power organizations necessarily serve the needs of the community, they must also be able to pivot and attack the state in capital and provide solidarity and mutual aid to those in the community who are already in struggle, or they simply aren't dual power organizations at all. The simplest solution to this problem, of course, is to organize around a specific side of resistance. Organizations that build up the

capacity to fight can emerge from almost anywhere. The Symbiosis Research Collective described how dual power organizations emerge from Palestinian prison organizing bring the First into Fata and uprising against the Israeli governments in late nineteen eighties. Most discussion of the First into Fata focuses on the role of mass protests in making Palestinian society ungovernable for the Israeli occupying forces.

Less discussed is the role of community organizations of mutual aid and confederated participatory democracy and making such mass protests possible. Organizing from within the political system was a political incubator of the Palestinian resistance movement and offers a microcosmic example of the developments of dual power in the much larger

prison of the occupation. With hunger strikes, political prisoners eventually won concessions for their own self administration within the prisons, they assembled structures of political organization and representation, forced prison authorities to recognize their representatives, and developed a division of labor around hygiene, education and other daily tasks. Palestinian prisoners described this arrangement as internal organization, similar to the concept

of dual power. Even the least free of circumstances, these prisoners carved out space for self governments and created the preconditions to revolutionary struggle. Prisoners taught and studied everything from Palestinian history to marks the political economy, often from eight to fourteen hours per day. As freshly educated and trained political activists were released back into society, the resistance movement

was galvanized. Illiterate teenage boys arrested for throwing stones re entered the fray months later as committed competent organizers who had studied movement building, strategic resistance, and dialectical materialism. Meanwhile, the organizing context outside of the prison transformed dramatically. Saleh Abou laban of Palestinian political prisoners from nineteen seventy until nine, stated, when I entered the prison, there wasn't a national movement.

There were only underground cells that performed clandestine lee. When I got out, I found a world full of organizers, committees, and community institutions. Central to this new world of community organizing was the Palestinian labor movement. Unions re formed out of workers places of residents rather than workplaces because vigrant labor was prevalent in Palestinian Unionism within Israel had been criminalized.

Unions then formed strong alliances with local organizations in the national movement with rapid growth in the early nineteen eighties. Labor unions found it necessary to centralize and democratize their structures to become more resilient as Israeli repression intensified against

union leaders and organizers. These local unions were networked together through the Palestinian Communist Party and the Workers Unity Block, creating a web of labor organizers and community groups that linked their class struggle to the larger projects of national liberation. This wave of resistance, carried out largely outside the purview of the major Palestinian political parties, showed that even communities and the most dire circumstances can assemble astounding levels of

organization and resistance. As was also true in the United States, although today the memory of these prison radicals is largely forgotten. Palestinian organizing emerged from the sites of deepest depression in their society. But this kind and level of organization is not just the property of the left, and in Part two we'll see what happens when the right gets hold of it. From Cavalry Audio comes the new true crime podcast, The Shadow Girls. I always wanted to know what it

felt like kill somebody and started laughing. Prosecutors described him as a serial killer, savant kicking up these girls, getting him in a position of vulnerability. When he got hold of their neck, that was it. I'm Carolinasia, a journalist and lifelong resident at the Pacific north West. I grew up near the banks of the Green River and in the shadow of the killer that bears its name. The camera time just one. He started fantasizing about having sex

with his mother, and he fantasized about killing her. But this podcast isn't only about tracking down the killer. It's about the victims. We stayed in the woods. He always liked to go into woods, all the kind of strange you know how it feels about prostitutes. Listen to The Shadow Girls on the I Heart Radio app, on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Robert

sex Reese, host of The Doctor Sex Reese Show. And every episode I listened to people talk about their sex and intimacy issues, and yes, I despise every minute of it. And she she made mistakes too? Did she kill everyone at her wedding? But hell is real. We're all trapped here and there's nothing any of us can do about it. So join me, won't you? Listen to The Doctor's Sex ray Show every Tuesday on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, I'm

Robert Laud and I'm Joe McCormick. And where the hosts of the science podcast Stuff to Blow Your Mind, where every week we get to explore some of the weirdest questions in the universe, like if sci fi teleportation was possible, how would it square with the multitudes of organisms that inhabit our human bodies? Can we find evidence of emotions in animals like bees, ants, and crayfish? How would it

interplanetary civilization function? Just free will exist? Stuff to Blow Your Mind examines neurological quandaries, cosmic mysteries, evolutionary marvels, and the wonders of techno history. Basically, this show is the altar where we worship the weirdness of reality. If anybody ever told you you ask the weirdest questions, it is time to come join us in the place where you belong. The Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast New episodes publish

every Tuesday and Thursday, with bonus episode on Saturdays. Listen to Stuff to Blow Your Mind on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's been three months since you and your co workers took control of the hospital. Things aren't back to normal yet. You're not even really sure what normal is anymore, but

the days have fallen into a kind of routine. It's Thursday, which means it's your turn to go report back to what a friend jokingly referred to as the Endless Meeting Assembly was now forever known as the e m A. The e m A is technically the closest thing left to a central government in Seattle. It was formed as a sort of coordinating council between the various organizations and workers councils that had emerged or simply emerged from the woodworks. In the wake of the collapse of the police. Two

things have become clear very quickly. One there was need for some kind of coordinating committee between the different bodies to The only people who had any idea what was going on in their portion of the city or in their workplace were the members of the local council, which meant there was no way in hell any kind of central apparatus could dictate to them what actually needed to be done. There just wasn't a way to move the

information around. The solution had been decentralization. Let the councils do their work, let them work out who they needed to talk to, but make sure there was some kind of daily council that people could show up to. Were the various groups who do report backs and what they were doing and what they needed. The structure was messy, but it mostly worked, and at least someone had had the idea to make sure if the delegate to the e m A rotated so one person wasn't stuck spending

after life showing up every day. The problem really was the same problem you've been dealing with for months now. Even with the pooling of resources and people donating their last precious American dollars to paying people to import more supplies. The blockade was taking its toll. Nobody wanted to try to force their way through the blockades and the cascades. There's been some attempts to get in touch with groups in Portland's but the control map was so ugly there

was no real ants of getting any assistance. Besides, the real problem was the port. When the cops had fled, the ships should simply stopped coming. They'd be routed further south, many of them to Oakland, or so you'd heard. The logistics lines were collapsing faster than anyone could piece them back together. What the long term consequences would be no one knew, but something was going to have to change. The calls to start engaging in piracy were only half

oaks now. A week later, an answer of sorts arrived. It wasn't precisely what anyone had been expecting. You'd heard about negotiations between workers councils, shipping companies, and a couple of governments to try to prevent a bloodbath. The docks with the porter to Seattle already at a commission. No one could afford another stoppage. You hadn't really been sure what to make of it, but the representatives were here now.

What they proposed in front of the largest assembly you'd ever seen was a kind of under the table deal. In essence, the port workers would go back to work in both Oakland at Seattle in exchange for seeding part of Oakland itself to a newly formed federation. No one was sure how any of this was actually supposed to work, but it was the first chance you'd seen in months to start solving the supply problem. That didn't mean everyone

else would agree to it. Democracy is still democracy, after all, But maybe, just maybe, with a toe hold in Oakland's, the Council's would start to spread, and that so called government in California was looking shakier every day. Who knew, maybe next time you wouldn't be negotiating at all. In March of two thousand four, American occupation forces in a Rock attempted to shut down the newspaper of a Shiite cleric named mata El Solder. The Americans had expected Solder

to simply fold under the weight of the coalition's pressure. Instead, they triggered mass protest that quickly turned into an armed uprising. This was a new force in Iraq. The American occupation force, whopenakes affecting to be fighting al Qaeda, and maybe the rump of the remaining Baptists were stunned to suddenly be facing a working class uprising among a Rock she At population. This new body Army, as it began to call itself, was extremely well organized and were initially able to route

coalition forces. So what was this body army that had so thoroughly rewritten the rules of Rock? Shortly after the U S deposted on Musse in two thousand and three, Bootato Sauder, the son of another famous Rocky sh At religious figure. Both Sauders had been famous for this support and care for the poor. So when Sauder returned to a Rock, he began to build a political base among the Rocks working class, particularly in Solder City, a working

class suburb of Baghdad. He used his organization to redistribute wealth, providing form of welfare states in an almost completely shattered country, but are In his allies also began to set up a network of freak clinics for pregnant and nursing mothers. They used these clinics, which were enormously popular to build

a base of support. It is, after all, extremely difficult, no matter what your ideological or political disagreements with the group, to attack them when they're running free clinics for pregnant mothers. They protected these clinics with militias, which allowed them to transform the community organizations and good will that they had gained from the clinic into the military power necessary for self governance and eventually for resistance against the American occupation.

Strategy proved enormously successful. Matadoro Sauder is still today one of the most important political figures in Iraq, despite sustained Coalition and Occupation Force attempts to stamp them out. But for all their working class support, the Solderists for by

no means leftists. In late twenty nineteen, massive anti austerity, anti imperialists, and anti sectarian protests erupted in Iraq as a reaction to the murderous incompetence of the Iraqi government, who, among other crimes, managed to poison a hundred and eighteen thousand people in Oza through the mismanagement and subsequent contamination

of the water supply. Also are initially backed the protest but turned on them in early at which point Souterist the militias begin to carry out a brutal campaign of repression against the protest camps that culminated in outrent massacres of protesters. These massacres became semi regular features of Soterist mass mobilizations, and alongside state and paramilitary disappearances of activists,

the attacks essentially crushed the uprising. The violent homophobia and sexism of the Soderists may see met odds with their anti imperialism and concern for the poor, but right wing organizations have often adapted specific policies, positions, and organizational structures from the left, and in this case the Soderus moobilizations have been extremely effective. Indeed, writing organizations are often more effective at utilizing dual power tactics and organizations and leftist movements.

This is partly because of a fundamental asymmetry between the right and the left. Right wing organizations can almost always depend on financial support from wealthy political backers, who, when push comes to shove, can simply create a movement with pure money, as the Cokes did to create the Tea Party. Leftists the ravings of right wing conspiracy theorists, notwithstanding, have no such backers. This funding and support can go a long way towards explaining the success of groups like Hezbollah.

It is certainly true that without Iranian support, Hezbollah would not be the movement that it is today, but a great deal of their success is simply attributable to the tactics themselves. This does not escaped the notice of the U. S. Army Joint Special Operations Universities. Major James Love wrote a

monograph entitled Hesbllah Social Services a Source of Power. In it, he writes, the most important branch of the Hezbillah organization is a social service section, which can be demonstrated by the allocation of an estimated fifty percent of Hesblah's two thousands seven budget will service efforts. It is through the work of the social service section that all party activities are possible. Hesbalah Social Service Section was designed to influence

all aspects of Lebanzia society. The original intent of providing needed services to an oppressed people appears to have been manipulated by Hesbillah as a vehicle to bolster its ranks provide a humanitarian shield to the organization. Increased influence within the Lebanese government and combat at Shia arrival on Ball. The Social Service Section serves as an equal arm within the organization and is used as much as the military

and political wing in terms of leverage. Hesbillah's Deputy Secretary General describes the purpose and intent of the Social Service Section and the following passage. Hesbalah paid particular attention to social work. Not one aspect of aiding the poor was neglected. As the party work towards achieving joint social responsibility, answering their urgent needs and introducing beneficial programs. Such work was simply considered party due d and concentrated effort towards raising

funds and making available social service resources served. Towards achieving these goals. The party worked the best of its capacities, cooperating with official institutions to respond societal needs. Has Blah's provided medical aid, reconstruction assistance, education programs, and particularly programs that take care of patrons and widows, which have served to solidify their base. These organizations were critical to has Belah's meteoric rise from a political nonentity to arguably the

most powerful factated side of Lebanese politics. Has Bela's state within a state, as it's become known, it's capable of even resisting the Israeli Army. Major Love's frustration with the inability of the American army to either deny has Belah's own aid efforts to replicate them in a way that could strengthen American power are testaments the effectiveness of such a technique and the dangers they posed to the American

imperial and state project. One of those Love's major concerns is that American aid programs are simply caught up in takes. They're unable to respond as fast as community led efforts, which means that those efforts will get off the ground faster, get to the scene faster, and thus route the political benefits. When the state is unwilling or unable to provide services, especially in the wake of disasters, it leaves a power vacuum for organizations to exploit. May not have heard of

the RSS before. It's a paramilitary group affiliated with India's ruling party, the b j P Council. Among its members India's Prime Minister Modi. It's also probably the world's largest fascist organization. The RSS was founded in a group nominally dedicated to protecting and promoting Hindu interests. What this means in practice is that the RSS is dedicated to creating a Hindu state and maintains and promotes a violent hatred of Muslims. The results in RSS members being at the

forefront of anti Muslim programs. The r s s IS pre World War Two leaders were open admirers of Hitler and Mussolini, and while they eventually rely abandoned those positions at the start of World War Two, the rss is politics have remained thoroughly fascist in the intense communal rioting that both preceded and followed the partition of India and Pakistan.

After independence, which saw mass population transfers of Hindus and Muslims and the death of somewhere between two hundred thousand and two million people, the RSS established itself as a protector of Hindi refugees against Muslim violence, provided protection and aid to those trying to survive the chaos the Good World has generated, however, collapse after a former RSS member did the single most famous thing anyone associated with the

RSS has ever done, assassinated Gandhi. The RSS was almost immediately banned, but in light of the terrible pr you get when you're associated with killing Gandhi, the RSS became increasingly involved with disaster relief over half a century of painstaking organizing, It created schools and youth programs to spread its influence and use them to fuel further anti Muslim violence. In two thousand one, the organization gained national acclaim for

its response to a massive earthquake and Gunjarat. The RSS heavily emphasized the non discriminatory nature of their aid work in their propaganda, but in reality, many of the villages the RS s had rebuilt after the devastation had been transformed into miniature versions at the fabled Hindu state that the RSS seeks to impose on all of India. Strategically, this should look familiar to us now. It's essentially a

fascist form of prefigurative politics. The RSS used an earthquake to build the structure of the new Hindu society in the shell of the old. The BJPS dominance over Indian politics while led by a member of the RSS, and the brutal crackdowns body carried out in Kashmir, our bloody testament to the success of their strategy. Christian fundamentalist organizations have also been extremely effective and utilizing their own form of routing profigurative politics the in a somewhat different way.

In the RSS, their new world is defined above all by theocratic patriarchal authoritarianism. Like the radicals that occupy, the religious right was operating off of a form of contagion theory, theory that exposure to their social organizations and forms would essentially be contagious and spread, but the Christian rights preferred form as the patriarchal family, which serves as a microcosm of the kind of hierarchy and patriarchal violence that dominate

their long dreamed of theocratic society. The Christian Right would instill these values into their children and send them off into the world to propagate their ideology. Ettinger, an expert on the Christian Right, wrote this about the second phase of the strategy. In several church leaders came up with a new approach, identifying seven spheres of culture to focus on one after another to try to bring about the lasting change and have a significant impact on the superstructure

of American culture. Lauren kind Ingham, founder of Youth with the Mission, a Christian Missionary Group coordinating International and National mission Church for Young Christians describes these seven areas as such, these are the areas you can go on as missionaries. Here they are. First, it's the institution set up by God. First the family. After the family was the church or the people of God. The third was the area of school or education. The fourth was media public communication in

all forms printed in electronic. The fifth was what I call celebration, the arts, entertainment, sports, where you celebrate within a culture. The six would be the whole area of the economy, which starts with innovation and science and technology, productivity, sales and service. The whole area we often call it business, but we leave out something. We leave up the scientific part which actually raises the wealth of the world. Anything new like making sand and chips for a microchip that

increases wealth in the world. And then of course prediction, sales and service helps to spread the wealth. And so the last area was the area of government. This is a need encapsulation of the rights. Refigurative politics start first with the family, and then with the church, then reshaped school and education and mass media in their image, and from there you can begin to take the entire economy.

Churches have also long used aid programs to proselytize and also expand their control over the population which becomes dependent on their aid. And the places where the left has failed to provide for their community, the far right has stepped in and has been able to rapidly and effectively reshape the political landscape. This does not mean, however, that they can't be beaten. Cooperation Jackson has offered one of the most powerful visions of dual power in the modern US.

A product of the New African People's Organization and the malk of ex grassroots movements, Jackson Cush Plan. Cooperation Jackson has put forward a radical and democratic bottle of dual power with the aim of turning over control of the land and the means of production into Jackson's black working class and allowing it to achieve its own self determination.

Cooperation Jackson has form mutual Aid Networks, started an incubated program to help workers cooperatives get off the ground, and formed a community land trust that purchases abandoned buildings in Jackson it turns them over to the community. They've also somewhat unusually wound up engaged in the electoral process. After the untimely death of Ally and Jackson Mayor Choqua la Boomba, which led to the election of his son, Choqua at

La Bomba. This placed the movement in a somewhat awkward position of having allies, even if constrained by the realities of state power in the state itself. But politics in the real world is never as clean as the models we create to describe it. It is only in our ability to adapt the changing conditions of struggle while maintaining a political principles that we can build the new world in the shell of the old, and we can build it.

The question simply, will we When P. T. Barnum's Great American Museum burned to the ground in eighteen sixty five, what rose from its ashes would change the world? Welcome to Grim and Mild presents an ongoing journey into the strange, the unusual, and the fascinating. For our inaugural season will be giving you a backstage tour of the always complex and often misunderstood cultural artifact that is the American Side Show.

So come along as we visit the shadowy corners of the stage and learn about the people who were at the center of it. All in a place where spectacle was king. We will soon discover there's always more to the story than meets the eye. So step right up and get in line. Listen to Grim and Mile Presents now on the I Heart ratei you app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more over at

Grimm and Mild dot com Slash Presents. I'm Ev Rodsky, author of the New York Times bestseller fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space, activists on the gender division of labor, attorney and family mediator. And I'm Dr Aditya Rucar, a Harvard physician and medical correspondent with an expertise and the science of stress, resilience, mental health and burnout. We're so excited to share our podcast Time Out, a production of

I Heart Podcasts and Hell of Sunshine. We're uncovering why society makes it so hard for women to treat their time with the value it deserves. So take this time out with us. Listen to Time Out, a fair Play podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, that wasn't very good. I'm Robert Evans, host of the podcast You're listening to and ashamed of, probably because that was Jesus Christ. Garrison,

come in here, fix this, Fix this Garrison. Um, this is it could happen here a podcast about the fact that the world was folding apart, as embodied by me falling apart when I try to introduce the show, see I tied it in. Yeah, A good job, thank you, thank you. Well it is it is. It has to rhyme. It's like it's like the Star Wars movies. That's our guest today is Melissa A. Sidera founder and director of Polo's Pantry, a mutual aid food distribution project in Los Angeles, California.

A Melissa, thank you for coming on and talking to us. Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm pleasure to be here. I apologize for the introduction, but I honestly it's better. It was better than I usually do, so

if you can back that up. Okay. So I'm an l A native, and um I've been doing community organizing for probably like close to a decade, doing a lot of community work for a lot of time, and a few years before the pandemic, actually, I started to organize with a lot of grassroots organizations in l A working with a lot of house less folks UM all over l A, and kind of clock pretty early that a lot, you know, a lot of a lot of groups were

burning through their budgets spending it on food. And so since I worked in kind of the food industry, I started to kind of poke around and figure out that we could get a lot of these things donated to us UM and pretty much started building a roster like building, kind of like a rolodex of UM other organizations and snow profits, UM food banks that we could rely on. So almost kind of created sort of like an altera system UM for these groups who are working with houseless

folks to get food every week. UM. I just wanted to figure out a way to make a steady and the reliable system so that our own house neighbors would get food and that organizers across l A wouldn't have to worry about it. And so that's pretty much how POLO started officially started in two thousand eighteen. I was organizing with a group called Katon for All and UH, they do a lot of political advocacy and mostly rooted in like UM kind of you know, human rights for

our houses neighbors. If you don't know Katon for all,

look them up. They're awesome, follow them fantastic. Yeah, And you know, I actually was because I was already doing a lot of mutual aid where in skid Row around that time and really kind of felt at some point, um that you know, like, yes, it was great that I was going out there with teams getting hot meals out and hot beverages whatever people needed to people, but I just was so down on what in the conditions, seeing all the conditions that they were living in, and

I just wanted to meet other activists and other folks um who could really figure out how you connect people to services and and just really you know, anyone working in policy. That's so that's really changing things for people out there. And so I wanted to take sort of my advocacy and like my work a step further and connected with activists all the rail day. And so that's sort of like my organ is really rooted in a

lot of activism and organizing. So I see I see a lot of I'm not sort of your standard kind of order nonprofit. I really see things in the lens when as a community organizer. And so that's why our um our work is pretty much exploded during COVID. I'm kind of interested for for starters because you're you're, you know, this is um a mutual aid project as opposed to kind of a charity project, and what do you what

do you see as being the dividing line there? Well, for you know, for a lot of for us, you know, it's very easy for for folks to kind of see the work that we do as part of the kind of charitable food system because obviously we're you know, UM

mutual aid. It's the difference really is that obviously, UM, you know, there there's a there is a reciprocity between the two of you, UM, between between neighborhoods, between individuals, between organizations of sharing resources with each other UM and charitable obviously is that there's only one way, right, there's only like one person giving. But for us, UM, the way we picked our part nerves. I mean, you're you're ready part of this nucleus of kind of a coalition

of ors doing this work. So it was just ready very easy for us to kind of share resources with each other. So I was doing food and some folks were doing hygiene kits. Other folks were doing tents, other folks were doing types or whatever, and so there was so much you know, kind of mutualid and activity going on.

And so that that's why we're we're really kind of rooted in that COUM in that thinking as far as as opposed to charitable orgs that basically just set up somewhere and give, you know, give give stuff out to people. And so we have look in part and part of my advisory circle are a lot of houseless neighbors UM houses leaders in our community. UM. I also take a lot of advice from UM Indigenous organizers UM black community leaders in different neighborhoods that work in. So our work

is really informed by the community. And so we basically asked we to, hey, you know, like what can we do UM and plug into to work that UM that already exists in those in those areas. I hope, I hope that means sense. But that's kind of how I feel about what we do and and as an as an organizer, because I think we get a lot of questions from people who are interested in starting mutual aid projects in their own areas. And one of the questions we often have it's like, well, how do I how

do I do that? Right? UM? And yeah, I'm interested in like like if you could kind of walk us through the steps when when Polo's pantry got started, Like what is what was the kind of order of operations that you had to go through to get this this up and running. I think the first thing to do is really too for me, it was already kind of being part of grassroots UM or so I was part of a few of them, UM and so it's really important to UM to kind of identify the needs of

a community first before setting up your ORC. So I feel like I already had an idea of you know, of of what certain orcs needed, UM which areas how many and so kind of identifying the needs first kind of UM number one and and and to do that you really have to connect with the grassroots organizations, local ones in your area. So you know, I recommend really just kind of doing researchers. Always folks doing that kind of stuff all over. If you're into political advocacy, there's

folks that do that. There are folks who are more food justice oriented, Like I would recommend going to a local food bank or soup kitchens to have also like I've been doing that for years, and I've met a lot of people with kind of similar values mine UM. So just kind of pretty much identify one what you'd like to do, what you're good at UM, and then essentially research UM, you know, kind of opportunities to tap into a local organ doing that work, and then essentially

start organizing with them. Right. I don't I don't recommend to build, like to build an organ prior to not having this kind of knowledge, because I feel like it's really crucial to sort of kind of map out first what the community needs instead of you building mutual aid organization based on you know whatever, Because I feel like it's it's important to work through things from the ground up UM. That way, you feel like the work is impactful.

That way, the community is leading and informing your work. And so that's that's kind of like how I I approached the line. So look for a local organ so kind of sit in organizing for a little bit, and then from there once he once you guys identify what it is UM and start to kind of have an idea of the demand or the need in that area, then start to reach out to say for me for

for food. A lot of local. Um, local chains will well, well pretty much if you if you tell them what you're doing, um, a lot of them will support you. So I actually have I started with just going literally to my local Ralphs and telling the manager. They're like, hey,

this is what I'm doing. I'm starting this or you know, wasn't Ralph's being a local grocery store in Likes Angeles, Harry or a lot of I didn't know what Ralph's was before I moved to l A. So I just wanted to be like, she's not just like rolling over

to where buddy Ralph's house, like, guess you've got some food? Yeah? Sorry, yeah, so that Ralph's out here in l A. So most places yeah yeah yeah and will more folks said not everyone is down for that kind of stuff, but somehow you'll you'll really end up on one that's really you know,

that is really unkind. I think most folks have to realize that this this this kind of work is not it didn't happen overnight like building like building uh, you know, like a reliable network of people to donate to you is. It takes time. So but I think if if you hit kind of larger chains, you will get UM. You know, you'll you'll you'll get you'll start to get a steady

supply from them. Do you have any kind of advice for UM, when you're actually approaching you know, manager at Ralphs or something somebody actually who works for Like, what do you have like I don't know, like a script, but kind of a rough guy to like here's how I try to start these conversations here. Some ways I try to phrase for things because that could be useful for folks. You know, I actually have like a form

letters that I could share later. Maybe you can show, Yeah, that would be great, UM that you know that they can use to UM you know, if they're if they're going to UM solicit folks with that stuff. And I think a lot of mutual aid organizations to have that kind of UM kind of literature, that kind of form so UM, I think just basically kind of letting them know who you are, who you're serving, UM, how often

which demographic is going to that's usually really important. UM. What what helped me though, was I was as I started to get more serious about about doing the food work, I connected to you know, some some community partners and I actually UM turned Polos into a fiscally sponsored organ so we moved from being just fully grassroots to being physically sponsored. That basically means we're operating under the five O one C three number of another organization, of a

larger organization. So that that was that open, so so many opportunities for us. It really allowed us to be able to access larger amounts of food and really help out a lot of a lot of a lot of smaller organs. I needed to get their food programs off the ground and so UM that is something I recommend if you're if people are serious about it, to define a community of community partner who who isn't established five one C three that they trust UM to see if they if they you know, if they can sign on

to to be a physical sponsor UM. That I think is one of the quickest ways to be able to UM to really kind of establish yourself as as far as getting larger amounts of food. But then and by that, I mean getting pallets of food, not just cases, but literally pallets of food delivered to wherever you are. As soon as we did that, that completely changed the game UM.

And and I think I did that because I knew I had so many friends who were doing mutual aid that needed so you know, just so much stuff from from groceries to um, you know, fresh produce, and it wasn't and it wasn't you know, it didn't stop in food. We were getting you know, hand sanitizer, we were getting tense, we were getting all sorts of stuff, know and so um.

So yeah, that's what I recommend for folks were serious about food is to really again start to build a relationship with local businesses, um that they that they like food businesses, and really telling people this is what I'm doing.

If you're if you know, if you're if you're you know, if you are what support us, you know, like this is um, you know, these are these are the days that we need food or whatever, or these are the times that we'll need food and just let them know that you know, you're you're happy to pick it up or that you're happy to because there's there's I think at least for California, we're starting to change law like policy and law behind food waste, and so I think, um,

something's going to change in the January of two where a lot of food waste basically going to decrease because it's gonna be much more difficult. The city is gonna make it much more difficult for for businesses to just carry this stuff. Um they're they're really pushing them to

uh um to separate them. But anyway, regardless, you're helping the business really um move, you know, move food waste, and and most of them, and a lot of employees too that I've talked to UM just you know, just our heartbreak and every time they have to clear out you know, a full full tray or just trays and trays of of of of you know, of a perfectly

fine food. So yeah, there's there's a video going viral on Twitter right now of of like someone working at Dunking Donuts and just like dumping just like hundreds and hundreds of donuts into the garbage and then and that happens. That happens every single day. You know. I have I have friends who used to work on Whole Foods and they would tell me just just how heartbreaking it was, just the amount, just the massive amount of who that's

being wasted out. Yeah, it's evil, it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's a thing in the more difficult days ahead, as you know, things like well like we under in a lot of areas, like the crop was half of what it normally is this year. That's going to continue. One day we will look at videos of Duncan Donuts dropping an entire day's worth of donuts into the trash and use it as a pretext to bring executives to trial. And it's going to be like

like like a war crime. Yeah is I mean, I mean honestly though, as someone in food um um, you know, like the food system is changing massively in so many ways. I feel like the one kind of good thing that happened in the pandemic is that lawmakers were able to identify that the white snap or orm cal Fresh pretty much food stamps were not enough really to um, you know, to feed families a few people. It's not nearly enough though, but at least it kind of pushes the needles where

we need where we needed to go. Um. And I think I think, having having been so focused and so like in the center of mutual aid work in l A, I'm able to kind of broadly tell you know, tell um really tell lawmakers too that hey, you know, there's so much um, there's so much meat out there, but the community themselves have built alternate food systems to be able to care for themselves. I feel like my hope really is to be able to to kind of hyperlocalize

our food systems that way. Neighborhoods and really like communities are are essentially dictating their own you know, their own needs. They're they're basically bringing in the resources that they want. They're bringing in the kind of food that they want, you know, and um, and really just working towards the real kind of food food sovereignty where people are able

to to get the resources themselves. And and for me, I feel like mutual aid scares a lot of people because again it really is the sort of like, um, the reason why we were able to a lot of communities were able to to survive COVID. You know, we're still doing it and it still ours so deep in it and and even like I try to tell students to and like, you know, um, mutual aid isn't just

food or whatever. It's also like say your dad is a pickup truck and your neighbor needs to move, I don't know their dining room table across town like that is a form of mutual aid UM or Like there's there's so many things that especially a lot of immigrant communities that I that I work with. This this form of care, community care, you know, has existed forever, and it's just somehow elevated itself during the pandemic because, as

we know, the safety net just wasn't enough. It didn't it didn't it really didn't help me, you know, it didn't really help a lot of communities, and so this system essentially kept people afloat. And now we're trying to figure out how to really create better ways to sustain it and to really create better ways to get the resources directly to communities that need them. So that's kind

of where I'm adam. I'm working with other folks trying to figure out how to how to keep the sustainable and really have more agency over what kind of food and what kind of aid you want. How have people that have been needing to access the mutual aiding the food, how have they been learning about your organization? UM I think honestly, all this stuff really happened by word of mouth. I think because I was I was already part of this huge coalition UM that's part of the Sophie knows that.

For all, there's a group called street Watch, there's a group called Old Crowd Game, there's a group called like There's there's all these different folks that basically are in

our wide coalition. I haven't had to really advertise much like people just sort of like just kept telling others like, hey, you know, like Melissa Polos and her team were doing this and um Also as a COVID response, I created another um um uh like COVID initiative called Homemade Meals and and that is the partnership with another organization called YIS. And so as of today, I think we're close to seventy meals UM that's all community lad. Yes, so we

so we the smart of UM. We essentially created a system where we uh we work with people who are who are cooking homade meals in their homes and connecting them to drivers. And so we have about six different um OR partners, so one of them is always it's the same people, Kaytown, street Watch, Covenant House. They work a lot with Homeless Youth um L a can or in skid Row UM and a bunch of other mutual aid groups in different areas of l A, so I

recognize UM. At the beginning of COVID, a lot of my houseless neighbors were telling us that they were scared, like because a lot of a lot of businesses were closing, a lot of corner stores, restaurants, UM that the food access completely shut off for them during at the beginning, and I started to freak out. I was like, how we're going to get food to people? And so UM some friends who run UM basically they were kind of like a youth kind of youth focus or UM wanted

to activate their you know, activate their community. They're like, hey, how can you help? What can we do? So we created this program basically that you know, figure out like, okay, well a lot of people want to have volunteer, but they can't leave home, So why don't they cooked meals at home? And then we'll just pair him with drivers we could pick it up safely, and so we just

start doing that. We created this system too, and and I think we honestly, I thought we were just gonna do it for two months, but now we're what like, in nineteen months later, seventy five thousand meals, over a thousand volunteers, like it's been wild. Actually, Jamie friend dog experts she would be angry if we didn't state that. So Jamie, UM, Jamie actually is UM. It's one of our o G like like cooks, Like she started with

home and made meals from the very beginning. UM, she's kind of one of our That's kind of how we know her. UM. It's because she found she found that program UM. And it's been a while, it's been it's been so amazing to to really activate so many people across l A to cook for our houses neighbors. And so I haven't even fully digested our our team hasn't even full digested that the real impact of that. But it's been seven five thousand meals UM made by the

community for our for our houses neighbors. So so so that's yeah, so that I don't know, like I feel like and I truly believe they're just so much just so much power and the people and really trying to figure out ways to continue to you know, to create UM better systems where where we can redirect those resources you know, UM to us to us and UM you know like really kind kind of break down these systems where you know, because because even people were telling me,

like folks who are like, you know, these sort of big institutions for institutions have been around for decades or even folks UM from like yeah, from like running food dogs since the eighties were like, you know, how are you able to move so fast? I'm like, that's mutual aid.

That's like, that's mutual aid. Then our ability to not have to run through so much bureaucratic crap and red tape is a reason why we were able to, you know, to to to create such huge impact because people believed in what we did and you know, and helped support us, funded us UM and we essentially just you know, just hit the ground running. We're able to figure out what people needed on the ground and just just got it to them. That's what that's it, you know, and we'll

figure out. If we don't have it, we're gonna keep you know, we'll ask around for folks who have it, Like like UM, there's a group called SILA there. It's silver like UM and my friend Cat who's one of the co founders. She they also worked with with UM with Houseless Folks and they do uh incredible work, like you know, providing showers, providing hot meals, providing reference services for folks. Um she she was great, I getting hygiene kids, and so that's that was started me to wild between

each other. Like she needed hot meals, so I gave that to her on Saturdays, and then I needed like hygiene kids, and so that's kind of like the basis, yeah, correctly, like I literally will give her two hundred meals, She'll give me two hundred hygen kids. And that was like that throughout the pandemic, Like we just would share resources and people thought we were this huge org, but essentially it was just you know, literally like our friends and I talking to each other like hey, what do you

have today? What do they have coming in today? And we just essentially kind of built this sort of cloud like sort of inventory. Right, so it's like Polos has a thousand meals and like Seela's got five hundred hygien kits, and like you know, street Watch as like fifteen tents and like a hundred tarps. So it's like we all were like, hey, you know, there's there's a houseless van on the corner of like Sunset or whatever that needs

like blah blah blah. And so essentially just you know, just grab and go like Poles has meals and like Streetwatch has tents, and like k Towns got like the tarps.

So y'all just again beautifully just sort of started to like build this sort of sort of cloud like inventory of stuff and it just worked and it's still working so um and it's to assistant, Like is what what we're bringing up or at the beginning is talking about how consistently you're able to you're able to have done this work, which is if you're an l A resident, you know that you know the city's support is never consistent.

So having that consistency is so vital. Yes, yes, right, yeah, I'm not thank you know, it's it's a lot of hard work. There's so much that people don't see. Obviously, there's so many, so many things that people don't see. There's a lot of organizing behind it. Just literally a lot of community building, a lot of meetings. I think that again, like the bulk of mutual aid is relationships and trust, you know, like that that's that's really it.

That's how you breathe life into your system. And it's like you know, you have to have you have to continue to like nourish your relationships, you know, between yourself and other organizers, between yourself if you're running an order between yourself and another organ UM. And and really that's how we've been able to, you know, to to reach so many people is because we focused on making sure that you know, UM, it's so easy to to burn out in this work. But again, we also have to

make sure that we take care of each other. UM. And we we focused on making sure that we're checking out other two and so I, you know, it's it's hard to fully explain what how do you even teach that you know, how to how to how to properly build relationships? But I feel like that's that's such a key part of creating a really robust mutual aid network. UM.

And that's at least experience that you had. Yeah, those are the work that you've done, and what you've been able to accomplish is very impressive and is is something that people lot of people can aspire to. UM. Is there any like resources online that you can point to if someone's wanting to get into this type of work, UM, or any any like any kind of like advice to get started in your own city or to like look for stuff that's doing this similar that that's like, that's

doing a similar thing. Um uh wow, let's see who has um gosh, that's a really really really good question. Um. Well, well, first I hope that people have read Mutual Aid by Dean Spade. Um. That's a really good book. Um. And and from there I would read I would read The Black Panthers Social Programs. I get a lot of I get a lot of my um my inspiration from there. Um. And really that's that's really those those two things to kind of start as just sort of like your um,

your primers um. And then if you want to kind of get deeper into food justice. Um uh, there's a really good book I get ready years ago. It's a I think it's literally called food Justice one on one. Okay, let me see it's really called Yeah, it's call food Justice one on one. Yeah, there's there's quite a few, but but one that's one. And then there's another. There's a one book um I read called More Than Just

Food um. And then and it's it's pretty by Yeah, I'll give you guys my top five and that really can help sort of, um like shape my thinking or

in food justice. So that's It's written by a guy named Garrett Broad and he essentially like kind of lays out sort of how the industrial food system kind of created this huge crisis that we're in and you know, like how there's there's really kind of an abundance of food everywhere, but obviously yes, exactly and so and and and it also kind of lays out how food justice activists UM who are in mostly low income communities of color help really build community based kind of solutions to

these problems. And so that's really kind of where my thinking and my my lens comes from is because I am a child of l A, I'm able to understand what different neighborhoods need UM based on because I either grew up there, work there, have family there, you know, what's school there, or just have friends or other organizers who live there. And so say, if you know, I didn't grow up in Ball Heights, but I have friends

who did. And so like, if I'm trying to build out a food program or mutual aid program and Ball Heights, I'm not going to just walk in there and be like, all right, we're gonna do it at you know, yeah, You're not gonna take over their their their saying exactly.

But I think that's one thing I think I really want to for people to really especially for for for young people who want to get to food justice, Like you really have to really honestly do your research first and let the media leaders lead, um lead lead your program with you. Right. And then there's a difference between like making community connections and then trying to take over. Right,

there's a very very two very different things exactly. Yeah, you don't want to be extractive, right, you don't want to be extractive. You don't want to be coming in and you know, and and and really like you know, try to like show up with like, you know, solutions where there they weren't informed at all by the community. And I keep trying to stress that, Yeah, is there anywhere that people can support you or at least follow you online to keep up with the work. Yes, Um,

I'm very active on Twitter. Um it's uh, we're at Polos pantry, so it's p O l O, s um p A and t R Y. And then I'm also tweeting as myself as an organizer. It's under m E smelling music as m E l l E music um. And that actually that handled for me everywhere like my personal so I I tweet from there a lot. I tweet a lot about food, just this work I feel, and all our all our work in l A I tweet, I retweet a lot of our movem network and coalition work. Just thank you for coming on to the show to

talk about through justice and the work you've been doing. Um, it's great to hear more examples of people from around the country and then hopefully you know, around the world getting involved in in this type of work. UM. Anyway, I think that it wraps up us today. You can follow this show on Twitter and Instagram at happen Here pod and cool Zone Media. UM, subscribe to the feed, leave a five star review or whatever. Anyway, that's that's that's the show. Bye bye, everybody, say say bye everybone

Bye bye everyone, by everyone. It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone Media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zone Media dot com. Slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from

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