It Could Happen Here Weekly 2

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Once the last time you took a time out. 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 doctor
Addina Rukar, a Harvard physician and medical correspondent with an
expertise in the science of stress, resilience, mental health, and burnout.

(00:22):
We're so excited to share our podcast, time Out, a
production of I Heart Podcasts and Hello Sunshine, repealing back
the layers around why society makes it so easy to
guard men's time like it's diamonds and treat women's time
like it's infinite like sand. And so whether you're partnered
with or without children, or in a career where you
want more boundaries, this is the place for you for

(00:43):
people of all family structures. So take this time out
with us to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, reclaim
your time. Listen to Time Out, a fair Play podcast
on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or We're
ever you get your podcasts. I'm Colleen with Join Me,

(01:06):
the 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 kidding and Asia. This is the professor.
We're here on Eating Wall Broke, and today I'm gonna
break down my meal that got me through a time

(01:29):
when I was broken. Listen to Eating Wall Broke on
the I Heart Radio app, on Apple podcast or wherever
you get your podcasts. Executive producer Paris Hilton brings back
the hit podcast How Men Think. And that's good news
for anyone that is confused by men, which is basically everyone.
It's real talk, straight from the source. How Men Think

(01:49):
podcast is exactly what we need to figure them out.
It's going to be fun and formative and probably a
bit scary at times because we're literally going inside the
minds of men. Listen to How Men Think on the
I Heart Radio app, 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

(02:11):
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. Welcome to It could Happen

(02:34):
Here the show where I had to change the introduction
because Sophie said it would confuse people. So now we're
just doing the boring thing and saying the actual name
of the show, which is it could happen here. Um.
It's a show about the fact that the society is
kind of falling apart or changing, depending on your perspective
of things, and people need to prepare for what's coming,

(02:54):
which is a world of greater instability and economic collapse
and rising at ratarianism and increasing fights in order to
reverse and stymy all of those terrible things. UM. And
you know, one of the things I've seen in some
early feedback from um other stuff I've done on other shows,
and also from earlier episodes of this is people who

(03:16):
will go like, Hey, everything you're saying about mutual aid
is rad But I live in X town and whatever state,
and there's there's nothing here. There's not not an organized left.
I don't I don't know of any mutual aid groups. Um,
how can I get involved? Or like, how could I
start my own organization and try to get people involved?
And then the another thing we get asked a lot

(03:37):
is like, Hey, what you're saying about building resiliency and
preparing for difficult times, gardening and whatnot sounds great. But
I'm poor as ship and I live in a tiny
apartment um or whatever. I I have no resources or
no room. Um, even if you're not none of enough money, like,
I'm in the middle of some horribly dense city. So
this week we're gonna be talking around those sub objects

(04:00):
in a number of different ways. And to kind of
kick us off, I've got, of course, Garrison with me.
Wokeme up at nine in the morning. How are you doing, Garrison,
ungodly early? Yeah, it's it's it's hideous, it's hideous. Um.
And then Margaret Killjoy, who's up at a much more
reasonable hour because time zones are a wild ass thing. Margaret,
how do you? How do we how do we introduce you?

(04:22):
You're an author? Uh, you're a writer of fiction. You
host a podcast called Live like the World is Dying, right,
and you've had me on and you talk about a
lot of the same things we talked about, and it
could happen here. We're actually shamelessly stealing your your your
podcast in order to make it corporate and sold out.

(04:42):
How are you doing, Margaret, I'm excited to be part
of the corporate sold out its podcast, um, and and
actually very glad that you all do a wider audience thing.
But um, I think that is a decent way to
introduce me. I do a lot of different things, and
I've been doing also, like organizing and trying to seek

(05:03):
radical political change for about twenty years, to degrees of success.
Actually mostly not to any success, because we actually still
live in maybe a worse society than we were in
two years ago. I tell people that I dropped out
of college to ride freight trains and overthrow the government,
and I wasn't good at either of those things. I mean,

(05:26):
you have all your limbs, that's true. I do have
all of my limbs. Yeah. And you're not in prison, um,
which is really all anyone can ask of the universe. UM.
So you have started a number of organizations in your
career as an activist in kind of that hat and

(05:47):
I guess let's start with like, yes, somebody who lives
in a place, there's no kind of really really organized left.
There's probably not in a lot of these places much
of even like a Democratic party. There's certainly not mutual
aid efforts UM. And I do think that there's a well, well,
mutual aid is a concept is is pretty firmly rooted
an anarchism. There's mutual aid kind of organizations that are

(06:07):
are not particularly leftist, or at least people doing stuff
like that. Like I think a good recent example will
be the Occasion Navy, who did a lot of rescues
after the most recent set of hurricanes, where certainly not
a left or an anarchist organization, but a lot of
what they're doing is um is a community aiding itself. UM. So,

(06:27):
I don't know where where do we Where? Where do
you want to start here? Well, I guess I mean
specifically in disaster times, you don't necessarily work with the
people that you would assume that you're expecting to work with.
And you know, one of the one of the stories
that really sticks with me is like a friend of mine,
who is this you know, UM train riding anarchistic governed
in tattoos and and all of that. And during flood

(06:50):
relief in eastern North Carolina was like flying into storms
and small planes with libertarians because the people who are
willing to fly small planes into storms and own planes
tend to be the more libertarian side of things. And
so here's anarchists and libertarians working together to get people
what they need. And one of the things that I try,

(07:10):
because this is one of the biggest questions I think
that the left faces, and you know, people trying to
make the world better faces, is how do we get
people involved? And also how do people get involved if
no one's helping them get involved? And um, I don't
have all the answers about it, but it's something that
I I think about obsessively some a lot. And one
of the things that I really try and focus on

(07:30):
with people as people say, well, I want to be prepared,
and you talk about community being a very important part
of apparedness, but I don't feel like I have a
community because we live in a very isolated society. And
one of the main things I try and remind people though,
is that in the same way that property relations break down,
like someone's like, oh, I don't have any stuff and
if the apocalypse comes, what will I do? And like, well,
the kind of the answer is that like whence property

(07:52):
relations break down, there's a lot of stuff, and it's
very there will be much stuff around, like wherehouses exist
all of stuff and yeah, Amazon warehouses are going to
become like fun boxes. Yeah, exactly, slash fortified outposts alleged. Yeah.
And community is the same way, not that you would

(08:12):
go raid community but instead that um some people, Yeah,
that's true, And but you can you can create community
in times of crisis in a way that's actually harder
to do when the existing social order exists. And and
the the thing I always say uses my my dumb
example of this about how people come together during times
of crisis is you know, when I'm waiting for the

(08:32):
bus and you know, some city or something, and no
one talks to each other if you don't know each
other until the bus is like five minutes late, and
then everyone is comparing notes about where they think they
saw the bus last, and everyone's friends and sharing snacks
and things. You know. So in some ways I'm like,
be optimistic if you don't already no community, Yeah, And

(08:55):
I think there's also things you can do that don't
necessarily cost a lot of money to both kind of
build resiliency and kind of community connections. Now, one of
those things I've had a lot of friends in different
cities work for. There. There will be different farming co ops, right,
and generally the arrangement is you volunteer some sort of
time helping them with you know, there's a lot of
ship work on farms, and in return you generally get

(09:18):
some amount of produce or whatever. But really what you're
getting is practical experience growing food, and you're meeting the
kind of people who are interested in growing their own food,
and you know, those kind of connections can be really
helpful when things get worse. And so I think it
doesn't necessarily it doesn't have to cost much to to

(09:39):
try building community now, or to at least try putting
yourself in some of the spaces where the kind of
people you might want to be in, the kind of
people you you might want to know when things get
worse might be. Yeah, and there's a lot of um,
there's a lot of like opportunities the world kind of
wants you to volunteer. You there's there's all of these

(10:01):
things that if you reach out to people and you're like, hey,
I don't have any connections, but I'm interested in volunteering.
There are types of organizations that do interesting things that
are open to that. You know, I kind of maybe
it's terrible, but whenever my friends, especially my friends were
in their twenties or something who who don't really feel
kind of lost and without direction for a while, I'm like,

(10:21):
go sit in a tree, like, go join direct action
environmentalist groups that are desperate for people to come live
their lives in this like self sustaining community. That is
incredibly traumatic and hard to do. And I don't necessarily
recommend this to everybody, but you know, it's a thing
that you can do, is that you can go participate

(10:42):
in in different movements, some of which do want strangers,
you know, some of which don't. Write. Um, you can't
show up to everything and be like why aren't you
including me? You're a bunch of assholes? Yeah, and um,
I don't know. So when when it comes to actually
like trying to start something, um like like like going

(11:03):
out and accepting, okay, there's not maybe I can't. I
can't leave my family behind and go do a tree set,
but I would like to, you know, start a community
engaging in something direct Maybe that's not illegal direct action,
maybe it is. It's none of my business. Um, how
do you recommend people just kind of start organizations? Find

(11:25):
people avoid pitfalls? Like, you know, if you've got to
make your own mutual aid group because there's not one
in your town and you you wanna. I mean, people
have expressed a desire to understand how to do that.
So I'm you know, I've never I'm not an organizer.
I'm barely a journalist. I am curious for your thoughts
on that. Well, okay, so as my own caveat is,
I'm no longer an organizer. I spent much of my

(11:48):
twenties being part of organizations and then I finally, um
realize that I can just kind of do whatever I
want and then figure out how to plug that into
other people's things. But I will say the the main
way of heard this express and I believe in, is
that we should do if you want to start getting involved,
is you think about what you're good at, and where
you think about what you want to be good at,

(12:08):
and then you think about the problems that you're facing,
and then you think about how to apply what you're
good at to the problems that you're facing. So if
you're sitting there and you're like, well, i'm a I'm
a really good illustrator, right, I'm not. I'm a terrible illustrator.
But let's say you're a good illustrator, and then you
you could basically reach out to organizations that maybe you
aren't even close and be like, hey, I'm an illustrator.
Is there anything I can do for you? All? Um?

(12:32):
But if what you want to do is start an
organization locally, it's okay to start small and build up.
It's okay to you know, it's kind of a if
you build it, they will come kind of thing in general,
like if you start, if you figure out what you
need to do, you know, we want to distribute supplies, right,
then you just do it like you just. Um, even

(12:54):
if you start by yourself or ideally you kind of
start with yourself and a couple of friends that you
drag into it, and then you see what gets inertia
like rather than like forcing, rather than starting off, don't
start off by writing your by laws. Um, you know,
maybe start with an idea of like if you have
a cool name that you want to use, like sometimes
that's great to start with, like a hook, and like
starting a band or something, you know you'd start with

(13:16):
like the thing that brings everyone together, which is sometimes
a clever name, but but mostly you just start by
doing it. And um, you know, one of the one
of the ways that's longest standing that people can get
involved with locally or start locally, and there's a lot
of resources about how to do it is is Food
not Bombs. Food Not Bombs is a a mutual aid
project that's existed and I wish I knew off the
top of my head since when I want to say,

(13:37):
the late seventies, but I really couldn't tell you. And
it's just food. It's just organizing food to give to
people in public. And it's actually wild how illegal it
is in some places, Like people get arrested for food
not Bombs all the time in Florida, in a couple
of other places. But yeah, we talked about them in
the first part of the season because there have been
a couple of point. I don't think nationally the FBI
is talked about them as a terror threat, but like

(13:58):
in the Austin Field, US, and I think one or
two other places, they've been like discussed as a terrorist
threat for handing out food. I've had like helicopters flying
overhead and like riots around the corner and stuffed for
for handing out food with food ut bombs. Yeah, it's ah,
they missed the second half of the name. I guess,
I don't know. I don't know. I think maybe if
we were to create bombs, not food, we we might

(14:20):
not get as much police attention. But that's just a theory. Yeah. Well,
what everyone says is that we need food. And no
one says this, no one would ever say this, no
one would ever believe this. But we need food and bombs,
you know, food hand bombs, yea, bombs for some food
for others. We don't judge. We provide explosives and we
provide food. Yeah, okay, So if you can, I think

(14:43):
if you can, you start by working. You figure out
what you're good at. You find a group of people
that are interested in accomplishing the same thing, who maybe
have similar skill sets or different skill sets, and you
figure out what you can do, and you start doing it,
and you organize calling people and being like hey, well
you donate to us, or getting all your friends together
to give you stuff to to redistribute or whatever, right

(15:04):
putting out calls on social media for things to redistribute.
You know, most structures start grassroots, and most of the
time they kind of tend to do best when they're
grassroots instead of becoming a little more codified. So if possible,
do that. But if you're just you, um, sometimes tying
into existing organizations is a thing worth doing. And if

(15:25):
there's nothing locally, you can look at things a little
further away, or you can look at things that are
on maybe on a national level. But there's a lot
of dangers in joining existing organizations and structures, and I guess,
I guess I would say there's like three types of danger,
and one is that you talked about all the time.
And thanks for bringing into the leftist vocabulary the word grifter.
I never heard anyone use the word grifter until your podcasts.

(15:49):
It's the most important word in the American English for sure.
We live in a fucking grifter republic. It's incredible and
we always have this isn't new, Yeah, but we need
more words because we also need the word for people
who are looking for useful idiots. And there's a lot
of social movements and not to be like I I
support the Left. I think that what we're attempting to

(16:10):
do is very worthwhile, and I like us more than
the other side by a fair amount. But there's a
lot of things that there's a lot of problems with
the left, and one of them is that people are
looking either to just have you as a body with
no decision making power and no autonomy, which doesn't actually
build a better world because you're just stop being a
cog in their machine and become a cog in our machine. Right.

(16:34):
And then there's also people who are kind of um
looking for useful idiots can and fodder, like people to
hang around while they while they do stuff or you know,
and I don't want to go to hard bodies to
stand out in front of cop shops. Sometimes yeah, and
even like you know, even like movements that I really
care about that might do a lot of like non

(16:55):
violence of this obedience, although I don't I'm not particularly
I'm not passed us personally, but you know, it's a
very useful strategy and non violence of those obedience. But
sometimes they're like, oh, you're young and new, lock yourself
to this thing. Get arrested, And I would definitely say
to people, don't get arrested on purpose at your first actions,
like don't be anyone else's cannon fodder, and so you

(17:16):
feel like you are part of the decision making and
part of like like you really matter, and like then
then don't um do dangerous things for other people's projects
like the ship that states do. That's so messed up
is is turn human bodies into resources that then get

(17:38):
sacrificed for unclear ends. Um, And unless you feel like
you have some sort of like there are times we're
being arrested is necessary and helpful, but unless unless you
feel you fully understand not just why you're doing it,
but also that like you you you're not being told
to do it, you have autonomy and like, I'm going
to do this thing that I know will end in

(17:59):
my arrest because I like, I don't know. That's probably
like I think most people in that position know this.
But I definitely have encountered some uncomfortable situations in the past,
I'm sure similar to once you have, where it did
seem like people were kind of being pushed to take
that risk for reasons they didn't fully understand or in

(18:22):
a situation they didn't fully rock you know, yeah, which
which gets at one of the things that when I
talk about how I think this is the biggest problem
with not not the cannon fodder issue, but the getting
people involved is the biggest issue I think we currently
face because there's so many people who want to be
involved right now because the world is even worse than

(18:43):
usual and um, and it's hitting groups of people who
haven't been hit by before, and people are often also
looking for a sense of community. And there's a thing
that people we don't talk about enough when people are
getting involved. There's two different reasons people get involve aolved,
and both are entirely valid, and one is to fix
things and another is to find to break out of

(19:06):
the isolation that they live in in their daily lives. Um.
And we need to be aware of that when we
talk about how to onboard people, and we need to
be aware about that. If you are getting involved, you
should think about your own desires. Are you looking for
community and if so, you can find it within radical
action right um. But if you are doing that, then

(19:29):
you especially need to be on guard against peer pressure
because it's a really easy way to feel like you're
involved with things is to go hang out with people
who are all doing a release scary thing and and
that's beautiful. And I absolutely did that when I when
I first got involved in anarchism, I I and politics
in general. I I joined in head first, and you know,

(19:51):
spend a night in jail within the first couple of months.
And I don't have any particularly regrets about that. And
I found community in a way that I had never
had in my life because of how isolated our society is.
But that's not the only reason to go do these
and that is I mean, I think a lot of
people experienced that last year during the George Floyd protests.

(20:12):
Is the kind of I mean, it's the thing we've
talked about on in the first season. If it could
happen here, that times like that, this war does this too,
can actually provide meaning that that people have lacked. And
a lot of it is that community that like community
of sufferers, the trauma bonding UM that feels like the
most important thing, even because maybe it is the most

(20:33):
important thing you've ever done. I think in a lot
of cases it is UM. But that's also mind altering,
and it um it can lead to situations that are
not entirely dissimilar to cults. Um. I'm not saying that
they are cults, because cults are number one. With cult
there's generally going to be like a leader and a
in such but like, there are things that happened that

(20:54):
that draw people into cults that are just human things,
their aspects in some cases, as I've said before, of
like a good party. Um, but there are cult like
aspects to the kind of groups that form in these
traumatic situations that can lead people to start making really
poor decisions. Um. And and so you have to really
you always have to be kind of analyzing not just

(21:17):
what you're doing, but what's going on in your own head,
in the head of the heads of the people around you. UM.
That's that's just always important. But I think particularly when
you're when you're trying to do something new and different
in a lot of ways, bigger than anything you've done before.
Do you have any specific advice for like kind of
avoiding the cults of personality that sometimes form in new organizations. Yeah,

(21:44):
so you have both informal and formal structures can both
cause problems with cult of personality. There are these brilliant
essays that I haven't read like twenty years that come
from the feminist movement, and one of them is called
the Tyranny of structurelessness. And as best as I remember,
these are very short essays. As best I remember, at
the tyranny of actuallessness is, if you don't have a
formal structure in your organization, you're going to have this

(22:04):
informal leader who basically tells everyone wants to do. And
that's a problem and and it's a very important piece,
and I believe it comes from a Marxist feminist perspective,
but I'm not certain. And then there was an anarchist
feminist response around the same time, maybe I'm not sure,
called the tyranny of tyranny that was like, yes, that's true.

(22:24):
And also when you have a formal structure and put
someone in charge there in charge, and that has other
problems too, And I think that it's just we we
have to be aware of both of these things. That, UM,
you know, the fact that most movements are very decentralized
in grassroots as as huge advantages, right, but it does
have problems of causing informal cults of personality. UM. Podcasting

(22:48):
is a big part of this problem. Um And actually,
I really appreciate that you're not an organizer, like frankly,
and it's part of why I'm not an organizer on
some level is because when people read the books that
someone writes or listen to someone's voice all the time,
it is very influential, right, and being aware of that

(23:08):
and therefore not exerting that power is a very good thing. Um.
And but there's okay, So the other thing, like when
I worry about like people getting involved with like don't
get peer pressured into stuff when you first join. There's
also this thing that is needs to be talked about.
And maybe I'll have talked about this some previously, but entrapment.

(23:29):
Entrapment is a huge problem, and specifically, the FEDS tend
to look for young idealist activists who can be peer
pressured into actions that they may or may not have
otherwise ideologically agreed with, like hey, let's go blow up
a bridge or let's go blow up a damn And

(23:50):
and this doesn't just happen to the left. It happens um.
Oh yeah, it's all around. Yeah for sure, Like there's
that case of the guys who are trying to kid
nap the governor of was it Michigan. A lot of
that was informants who were there's a lot of there's
You can debate heavily whether or not it was entrapment. Obviously,

(24:11):
what we we might consider entrapment morally often isn't entrapment
legally because the FBI does know where the lines are legally,
But that doesn't mean it isn't morally entrapment, right, And
they do that a lot, and they usually succeed um, well,
they may not usually succeeded, though they usually succeeded the case,
and entrapment defenses are hard to succeed with. And so

(24:36):
really just like and thinking about I think developing your
own moral compass and sticking to it is one of
the single most important things that a new activist can
can do. And not to be afraid of radical action
necessarily like militant action, but but be wary of it. Um.

(24:57):
But then again I mean in terms of like being
where are of what the other thing to avoid doing
is like accusing each other, like fed jacketing, like being like, oh,
well that person is doing the same thing a FED
might do, like wink wink, you know, Um, it's a
really complicated an annoying game to play, and if you're
just getting involved, you're gonna have to learn how to
get it play this game of not fed jacketing and

(25:20):
also not um falling into stuff. And it's annoying because
you probably have to kind of learn some of the stuff,
even if all you want to do is give away blankets.
You know, if you want to tie what you're doing
to a larger ideological structure, then it's going to come
up that you need to be aware of how repression

(25:41):
applies to that larger ideological structure. Yeah, like all this
is very useful specifically if you're trying to find something
kind of pre existing um or you know, looking you know,
or you know, starting something in the bigger city where
you have like connect This can be made to other
existing organizations. And I'm trying to think, you know, there's

(26:04):
a lot of people who live in more like rural areas.
It's not much like a liberal or like you know,
especially left is kind of subculture. How would how would
you recommend people who live in those kind of scenarios
try to start building this community? Wouldn't say like they
only have like a few friends, Um, what what steps
do you think people can take if they have more,

(26:25):
you know, a secluded set up, So it is harder.
And I live in a red area close to a
blue area, right And I do most of my organizing
and as much as I do organizing within the the
nearby small hippie city, even though theoretically the thing that
I care the most about is connections to my immediate neighbors. Right. Um,

(26:48):
that is harder, And it is harder for a lot
of different reasons, especially if you have cultural differences between
you and the people that you're around. Right, Like I'm
a trans woman and live around a lot of like
farms and stuff, right And and previously this wasn't a
problem before Trump. This what kind of just wasn't a
problem after Trump. Now all of a sudden, the fact
that I'm trans as like an attack against people in

(27:10):
a way that it never used to be. And and
so now they all have an opinion about the fact
that we're an address. But still, at the end of
the day, I would say that most of the people
that I'm around are actually totally chill. Like there's a
vocal minority of really horrid people, right, Um, But even
the people who might be and might have even voted

(27:33):
for Trump or whatever. Um are not necessarily, at least
along my own identity lines, amoso white, are not necessarily
going to give me ship. And you know, I can
go talk to them and address and they might be
sort of confused, and they might not be. But if
you have more culturally in common with the people around you,
then there is a lot of room that you can
start working on from there. And this actually ties into

(27:53):
something that I think applies to people across the board,
which is we have this especially new activists, but also
including people who've been in it for a long time,
and there's like real arrogance about the fact that we're
like right, And when you want to change the world,
you need a certain amount of arrogance, you need a
certain amount of like I mean, I literally believe we
need to not have a government or capitalism, and these
are very major changes to our existing structure. Just a

(28:14):
huge amount of arrogance to that. Although not having a
government is slightly less of a major change now that
it was a couple of years ago, it's true. And
also like something like sometimes actually it's funny, I used
that it more in common with these neighbors. But then
all the libertarians went goddamn authoritarian. That bummed the funk
out of me. Yeah, there's there's some good ones. Still,

(28:36):
there's like again, there's the there's the there's the taking
your private plane and do a disaster area libertarians, and
God bless them totally, and you know, they're like they
just don't want them. You know. It's like my dad
is sort of on the libertarian side of things and
keeps twenty dollar bills in the visor of his truck
to give to people flying signs, and he just doesn't
want the government redistributing his money. He doesn't mind redistributing

(28:57):
his money. Yeah, And I'm like, all right, I don't
have any real objection to that. He's also no longer anyway.
If you come at people with this attitude of like
I'm right and you're wrong, the kind of people that
you can get to join your side by saying I'm
right and you're wrong are not the people you want.
You want people who challenge authority, including the authority of

(29:20):
people who claim there should be authority, and and so
just actually listening to people and like hearing people out
and um when possible, avoiding Drawing lines between people is
one of the main ways to connect with people across
either cultural divides or especially political divides. And this this
can't always happen, right, Like I walk down the street

(29:41):
and address and someone like calls me a bad word,
like I'm not going to be like. I understand why
you think to call me that, And I understand how
like me dressed this way kind of challenges your sense
of masculinity that you've been brought up into. Is the
only way that you can hold yourself strong in a
very hard world. No, I don't do that. I um scream,

(30:01):
funk you and chase them. Um, I would ever chase
anyone with a knife. I think that's not legal, So
I wouldn't do that, but um, you know that might work.
And you know, like, funk those people. I don't care
what they have to say. No, of course not. And
it when I think one of the things that I

(30:23):
don't know Twitter brain has done is that like when
you when you talk about reaching out and talking to
people who you know don't agree with you, aren't aren't
on your side ideologically, there's folks who will kind of assume, like, oh,
so you're saying I should like try to be friendly
with people who would have murder me. Like, no, I'm
not saying that. I'm not saying that like, as a
trans person or black person, you should go talk to
um a militant anti LGBT activist or a fucking klansman

(30:48):
or something. I'm saying that, like, that's not within the
broad I'm saying what you need to recognize. But what
I think is important to recognize, especially if you're when
we talk about like post you know, collapse or whatever,
is that within broad political tendency. So I'm not talking
about like fascist or whatever, but I'm talking about like liberal, conservative, progressive,
very broad political tendencies. You have roughly the same percentage

(31:12):
of people who are ship. So in an anarchist group,
the amount of people who are shitty is going to
be similar to the amount of the general population that
are shitty. It's the same with every political tendency. But
the corollary to that is, again, within broad tendencies, you'll
find roughly the same amount of people who are basically
rad and maybe yeah there's some they have their brain
got poisoned with dis info and they believe some stupid

(31:34):
shit and they vote like an asshole. But you know,
they'll stop their car if they see someone in an accident,
and they keep a fucking medical kit in their bag,
and you know there that it's the it's the it's
the ship that you know. I talk a lot about this,
the stabbing on the Portland Max train. Well, the two
people who who died confronting that asshole um where a

(31:55):
Republican retired veteran and a far left social justice activists,
and they both you know, put their bodies on the lines.
I think that like when we talk about like being
willing to kind of talk with people who are who
are not on the same ideological boat as you, that's
that's what I mean, Not you should make nice with

(32:16):
the people who want to exterminate you, Like fuck those people. Yeah,
because the thing you're looking for, the thing I'm looking
for is the Republican who's going to, hopefully, instead of
dying to saw alongside me, successfully defeat the you know,
actual far right person. But yeah, yeah, totally, And and
I think that that actually is part of the It's

(32:36):
not always the answer for every person who's isolated, right,
everyone who's socially isolated, but it is part of it.
If you're trying to organize with people where you say
you're the only leftist or the only anarchist in your area,
then maybe you don't start. And this is actually funny.
I'm very into being very public about my political ideology
so that people know what bias is UM coming into
things with. But but maybe you don't start your rural

(32:59):
mutuoid project calling it the rural mutu Aid project, or
maybe you do, and maybe you you just start doing
it and you find people who are willing to have
the same goals and means as you, and and I
think you can do alongside of that, you can also
just be really public about what you believe. I mean,
you know, UM Again, as an anarchist, I end up
working with like church groups and things that I don't

(33:21):
necessarily agree with on a lot of a lot of things.
But they're not mad when I'm like, oh I'm an anarchist.
They're just like, huh, okay, I'm a church person or
what you know, and like, okay, I'm not. I don't
expect different of them, and they don't expect different of me.
And we we know what we have in common and
what we don't to a certain degree, and then we

(33:41):
work on what we have in common and so airing
and so this is both true if you're within the
movement and you're hoping to try and solve this problem
for other people. But I also think it's going to
be true for people who are trying to build things
in areas where they don't have, where they don't feel
like the part of something larger is airing on the
side of inclusion versus exclusion and not And like you're
talking about, it's about airing on the side of not

(34:02):
always include everyone, not always committing to a hard and
fast rule. Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, be be open to
the fact that people can surprise you in ways that
aren't terrifying. Yeah. Also, because you get terrified enough by
enough like people who you think are on your side
that you're like, oh, yeah, I'm sad you all don't
do the ad pivots in this show, because you can

(34:25):
do it. We can do it, we can we can
cut it in during one of the long awkward pauses.
Go for it, and we'll keep all this up to
it in, but we'll actually cut the actual so you'll
hear it. It's like Finnigan's Wake. You're going to hear
it out of order, okay, and I hopefully you all
be able to figure out the second half of it,
but the first the first half is anyone who claims

(34:47):
to have all the answers is selling you something? Oh
uh huh yeah, oh oh you know who else is
selling you something? Is it the ADSs go listen to
the guy Geico or or Jesus. We've had some bad
ones lately. Um, there's that s os Cuba show that
sounds we're rough. Uh. There was that one that was

(35:11):
just like God. It was just like, there's something the
concept of gus we are sponsored by God. I think
I've gotten like Walmart and McDonald's on your show before.
Remember that's the people's food. Oh yeah, organized actually try
to organize around the Walmart. That could be very so Anyway,

(35:32):
here's ads. If someone is trying to start something new
inside in one of these more secluded areas and like
they have decided like yeah, I'm willing to do something,
I'm willing to actually just like start it. How how
would you recommend they try to figure out what some
of the like biggest needs of the community are that
they can actually tackle. Like, how how does someone find

(35:55):
out what to do with their mutual late because they
can like commit like, yeah, I can do something around supplies,
something around this, you know whatever. Really, how does one
try to actually gauge what is important try to tackle?
I guess it depends on whether you feel like you're
totally Like if in my head, if I'm totally inside
Annissie community but an area, right, I probably kind of

(36:18):
know because I'm also experiencing whatever the thing is. But
if I'm if I'm a little bit detached from it,
then I do need to like do kind of you know.
The sort of traditional method is I think it's called
listening projects. I've never actually personally done a listening project.
I've been around many people who do. Where you basically
like sometimes you go door to door and you're like, hey,
what's up, Like what do you need? Like what's going on?

(36:40):
You know? Um? But like say, for example, in the
area that I live, there is a a rural organizing
It's not the actual Rural Organizing project, which is a
specific structure, but there is a rural mutual aid group
in the largely red area that I live in that's
run by by leftists and they I think it largely

(37:00):
they did a lot of like firewood delivery, for example,
because a lot of the areas around here are heated
by wood stoves, and you have a lot of poverty
in rural areas. And of course poverty looks very different
in rural areas versus urban areas. And you know, one
of the advantages of being rural poor. There's many disadvantages,
like lack of access to certain types of services, right, um,

(37:21):
But one of the sometimes advantages of rural poverty, as
I understand it, I'm not specifically an expert, um, is
do you have space? Right, you just don't have stuff
for money, and so you can have stuff if people
give you stuff, so you can like story your firewood
and so. And then also because it's this very specific
tangible thing, people can get really excited about, like, oh,

(37:42):
I can chop firewood, or maybe even I can't chop
firewood because my legs busted because I work in the
paper mill or whatever. But I can. But I got
a trailer on my truck, you know, um, and I
can haul that. And people get really excited when there's
like things that they specifically are good at, especially things
that I kind of have alienated them from other people,
but they're that they're good at that they can then

(38:04):
participate in and so, which isn't totally answer your question,
but I would say, if anyone specifically is in a
rural situation I was looking to start a mutual a group,
look at the Rural Organizing Project. I don't believe that
they specifically do rural mutual aid organizing, but they talk
a lot about what it means to be an organizer
within areas that are largely controlled by the far right,

(38:25):
but are not. It's not like the people are all
far right. They're just controlled by the far right, you know. Yeah,
the people actually there, once you talk to them, might
actually be a lot more reasonable than like the media
influencers who are part of this you know, same thing. Yeah,
and it is. It is one of those things. This
is a topic we're drifting too. But it's when we

(38:46):
drift to regularly on this show, we're like, when I
talk with conservatives, it's it's not uncommon that I can
without especially if I don't start by mentioning anarchy, I
can get them to agree to a lot of the
things I believe, which is like, yeah, maybe people don't
need to be governed. Maybe that doesn't work out good.
Maybe politicians are corrupt and should have less power, and

(39:09):
like that doesn't mean that you're gonna you're gonna get
them on the barricades with you, um, because any productive
kind of relationship starts from like a base of shared
interests and it's not a useless endeavor to engage in
kind of trying to subtly. You know, if you if
you feel out people around you who are ideologically not

(39:31):
particularly similar to you, but also decent people, um, you
can kind of try and work in some some something
you've not not just some common ground, but you can
try and get them to see that they agree with
you one more than they think, um, and that that
has an effect of changing the way people think about
the world. It really does. Yeah, and you but you

(39:52):
also have to go into it open to yes. Maybe
maybe it's not going to change your opinion about the
way the economy should be structured or the way that works, right,
but you know, you definitely have to go into it
with a I can now understand why you drive a
big pickup truck that burns a lot of gas or
whatever whatever thing. You might be coming into it thinking yeah,

(40:16):
or at least it might help you understand why they
believe or do certain things outside of you know, Dave
Reuben broke their brain because they got on YouTube at
the wrong time. I don't know, Margaret, did you have
anything else you wanted to really get into. I guess to.
One of the other questions that you all brought up
was about preparedness, like maybe kind of almost in the
inverse situation where let's say that you live in a

(40:39):
small apartment and you want to be prepared and in
which case maybe you have better access to community. Maybe
you don't write a lot of people who live in
the city are just as isolated socially as people elsewhere,
But at least you kind of have like there's a
little bit more easy access to ways to break out
of certain types of isolation if you put work into it,

(40:59):
because there's more likely to be groups around that are
that are public that you can go interface with. UM.
But in terms of like actual preparedness, you have the
inverse problem, right of if you live rural you might
have room to store beans and rice, and if you
live in the city, you might not write UM. But
I I will say it's the other thing that I
find people the two things that people talk to me

(41:22):
about I think you all run into. Also is that
people are either I don't have any community or I
don't have any money in space. Yeah. And so if
you don't have any money in space, I mean, I
mean in some ways, it's like, well, maybe your focus
isn't like stockpiling stuff. Stockpiling and stuff is like the
single most overrated part of individual or community preparedness. Um.

(41:43):
I mean I do it, but you know it's because
I M my brain works that way. Um. But also
the level of like stuff that you might be looking
for might be a lot less than like, like you know,
it's like prepper media is filled with like here's how
to build a bunker under your pool, And I'm like, what, Yeah,

(42:04):
there's there's so many levels I mean, somebody other things
that you should be doing before you go to that stitch. Yeah. Yeah,
I mean, like, don't get me wrong, if I had
a pool, I'd be stoked, And if I had absolutely
under it, I'd be even more stoked. I'd be so happy. Yeah.
But but you know what it's like, it's the first
five gallon bucket of like dried food you store is

(42:27):
far and away more important than the tent, right, and like,
so just having a five gallon jerry canful of water
so that you're like, you know what, if the water
turns off or we have a boil advisory, which happens
all the time, I'm good for a couple of days, right,
because most of the time people think about preparedness as like,

(42:48):
I'm preparing for the end times, and usually what it
is is the end times are real slow and chunky
and crumbles, that's the word, um. And so you're just
really looking to like smooth out interruptions and all that
can be done very cheaply and honestly, when when you
start storing your fifth five gallon jerry can of water,
you're not storying it for you anymore. You're storying it
for your neighbor. Yeah. Yeah, and that's good, but not

(43:10):
exactly not the first step, you know. Yeah, it's better
to prepare for if you have like a week's worth
of power outages or a week's worth of the water
not working, right, And those are more incremental steps, because
we're not just gonna drop off and have no water
forever starting in a month, right, probably not, but we
mean very likely there's gonna be there's enough remaining systems

(43:32):
that that they want to fix it. You know, it's
more likely that some some disasters gonna happen that we're
gonna have, you know, a week worth of stuff gone,
you know, and that's the thing that's actually more more
reasonable to prep for. Yeah, that makes sense. Um, well, Margaret,
where can? Where can the good people and hopefully not

(43:54):
the bad people, but statistically some of them will suck
find you? Um, good people can find me on I
have a podcast called Like the World Is Dying, which
they can listen to you on if they would like,
and it's about individual community preparedness. I also am on
Twitter way too much, at Magpie kill Joy, Instagram, at

(44:14):
Margaret Killjoy, my websites Birds before the Storm dot net
or Margaret Killjoy dot com. And that has like a
list of all the books that I have out. And
I have a new book, an old book being reissued
that is coming out in November from a K Press.
The book is called a Country of Ghosts and it's
an anarchist utopian book because I was sick of people
being like, but how would an anarchist society work? And

(44:35):
I was like, you know what, I wrote a book,
damn straight. Um it also has a plot, so it's
not fancy kind of boogie with yours. If you write
a plot, you get the wall. No plot allowed, only
post structural literature. Well, okay, so this has actually happened

(44:56):
to anarchist fiction writers before U so much. Buda was
this anarchist fiction writer. Um oh, I can't remember where
from I'm gonna this is terribly embarrassing. But he moved
to England from a colonized African country. Um, yeah, what

(45:17):
did Rhodesia become? This is the most embarrassing. Oh it
became a Zimbabwe, right, okay, yeah, so yeah, so he
was from there and then everyone and he moved to
London until he realized that they're a bunch of racists
and he would like breaksh it at awards ceremonies and
then go back home. But when he was a squatter
for a while in the eighties, but he wasn't writing
in the proper post colonial like Marxist realist tradition, because

(45:40):
instead he was writing postmodern fiction, which is stuck getting
and terrible. So he just like was like I don't care,
and so he's great. That is anyway. I love to
see it. Um, that's the episode. That's the episode, Go
out and right, post modern jump on a train. That yeah,

(46:07):
probably also a bad idea. I talked to somebody who
lost their legs doing that once. Anyway, Episodes over. I'm
Ev Rodsky, author of the New York Times bestseller fair
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(46:28):
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(46:49):
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(48:43):
it could happen here daily. Uh. This week, we are
focusing on different ways to actually start doing things. You know,
we've talked a lot about ideas that we like, you know,
made some broad recommendations um and you know, had people
on to give specific insights and to you know, different things.
But we're trying to focus this week and then you

(49:04):
know more in the future. Is like, if you're brand
new to this sort of thing, how to actually start
doing stuff. And one of the things we talked about
a lot is a lot almost everyone we've interviewed has
mentioned this at some point, that trying to get more
active in the things you're consuming and the things that
you're eating. And one of the ways to do that
is by just literally growing your own food. I went

(49:28):
when I was growing up, I mean my grandparents operate,
I mean like they stopped right like like like like
a large, large farm. Now they operate kind of like
a farm that just like feeds them. So whenever I'm
at my grandparents in Canada, usually we you know, we
just eat all the food they grow, whether that be
like produce. Um. They also do like their own hunting.
They make their own sausage, like you know, they preserve meats.

(49:51):
So like, I kind of grew up around this type
of thing because just how self reliant some of my
family is. But not everyone may have this kind of background,
and so you know, this idea of growing your own
food can feel maybe a little bit daunting. Um. And
to help us talk about food and then eventually soil
and other kind of things, I have invited a guest

(50:14):
on from another kind of podcast in this that operates
in the same rough, rough framework, I would say probably
how to how to kind of slowly improve improve the world?
Um uh do I don't explain who you are and
what's your what's your what your project is? Sure? So
my name is Andy. I'm the post of the Poor

(50:36):
Pole's Almanac. We're a podcast that's focused on thinking about
after collaps how do we things like climate change and
collaps impact things like food systems, and what can we
do today to prepare for what's coming in the future. Yeah,
I feel like it's not not a coincidence that all
of these different kind of projects are getting more popular

(51:01):
at the same time because we're looking at the world
and being like, huh, this doesn't seem very sustainable, so
we better we better start figuring out what to do
with all these systems kind of slowly, you know, start
losing parts. I want to talk about kind of food today.
I want to want to maybe branch off into like
a few different directions. Branch that's a plant plant plant

(51:24):
pun um, what a branch off of a few different
directions both like, you know, what do you do if
you have like your own house and yard, or maybe
you're like more rule you have lots of space, and
then also the kind of the inverse of like let's
say you lived in, like I don't know, a cramped
city apartment, different things that you can do. Let's probably
start with like the rule just to like give a
you know, a more like base background on you know,

(51:46):
you have more of like a standard set up for
what you're able to do. If someone's never grown anything before,
they've never like maybe they've had like one house plant,
but like they've never grown anything. What what do you
think is the best first like preparation and steps before
you actually, you know, go and start buying seeds and stuff. Sure,
so when it comes to growing food, it's really not

(52:07):
that complicated. Chances are if you have a front yard
we're talking about someplace that's pretty rural, assuming the climate
is in someplace super dry, you're generally going to be
thinking about growing food someplace where grass probably already grows.
So if grass is already growing there, you know things
can grow there. And really that's that's as simple as

(52:28):
it can be. It can be more complicated. We can
start talking about things like soil pH and nutrients and
all of these other things, but really, when it comes
down to it, if you put a seed in the
ground and the temperature is not too warm or cold,
and it gets rained but not too much rain, the
plant's going to grow. And if you've got some say
a couple of acres, and you want to cut out

(52:49):
a little section of it to grow some food, uh,
that's that's as simple as it really can be. And
you can go to whatever store and buy seeds. So
like that that a good place to start. And obviously
depending on where you live, you want to think about
things like lead in the in the soil if you
live someplace near an old house, or maybe if you're
near some place where there was manufacturing. And one of

(53:12):
the things to keep in mind is that a lot
of older settlements, even if there isn't a factory there now,
it's very possible there was a factory years ago, it's
been demoed and you never even knew it was there.
So it's really important if you do live in someplace
that has that manufacturing background or an old house to
really check for things like lead in the soil because

(53:33):
that can be really dangerous. And there's yeah, very accessible
like soil testing kits available that star is on online. Okay, yeah,
it's like I think fifteen dollars. You can have a
soil sample taken and you can find out everything that's
in it, like the pH and you know if it's
too acidic and things like that. So yeah, you you

(53:54):
figure out you wanna you want to start growing stuff,
you have you have some space, whether it be like
a front yard or maybe like even like an open
field if you're lucky, Um, what kind of what kind
of stuff do you think? You know? Should I just
jump in and buy any kind of seed that looks fun,
or should I like start with specific things I don't know.
It's like if I really like potatoes, or just go

(54:14):
to potatoes, If I really like cauliflowers, just to cauliflower.
What's kind of the if I'm brand new, what's the
different things that would be worth first drawing out? So
generally speaking, you really want to think about what your
climate is, and I think that's one of the things
that gets missed a lot of times as you want
to grow things. So like I live in New England,
growing say watermelon is really a challenge in a lot

(54:38):
of ways because you have to think about the length
of my season versus the length it takes for a
watermelon to be a full sized fruit for you to eat. So,
depending on where you live, the one thing you need
to keep in mind is what that length of your
season is. Now, to get back to the main subject
of the podcast, talking about things like climate change and collapse,
that season is changing rapidly right now. We're adding days,

(55:01):
so the seasons are getting longer, but also we're having
weird cold snaps later and later into spring, so what
might have been a traditional season no longer really applies anymore.
So if you're thinking about this is your first year,
you don't want to grow anything that might be right
at the cusp of um being in your season. Or
you don't want to start a plant inside and then

(55:23):
have to move it outside and you have to know
whether or not it has a tap root and all
these other things to make sure that you don't damage
the plant. Then you definitely want to grow something with
a shorter season, things like um. Cold weather plants, lettuces, broccolis, cauliflowers,
things like that will generally do pretty good in short seasons,
but they don't really do well in really warm climates.

(55:46):
So if you're in say Florida, it's gonna be really
difficult um. But that that's kind of how you want
to start thinking about those processes. Learning what the cold
season plants are, what the warm season plants are, where
you fit in in terms of the zone that you
live within, and again starting to think about, okay, the
last couple of years, when did we get the last frost,
Because it's not what it might say ten years ago

(56:09):
is your average last frost. Those days are pretty much gone.
I know here in Portland we're currently growing a lot
of potatoes and that's been that's been kind of our
our our big haul. Also, tomatoes did very good this year,
particularly because of our big heat domes they got we got.
The tomatoes did so much better than what they what

(56:29):
they usually do. We've like canned so many tomatoes just
because we just we have so many more than what
we're used to. That if I do find that interesting
being like, you know, climate change obviously being generally a
net bad, but you know, in some cases for growing,
it's gonna make certain crops easier to grow, but you know,
other crops will be harder to grow. It's something I

(56:50):
wanted to talk more about in the first five heavily
scripted It could happen here season two episodes. It's like,
particularly how different growing regions are going to shift up
and how like, you know, Canada, for instance, is going
to have a lot more agriculture in the next years
just because so many, so many climates are slowly inching upwards.
But you know, even in places like Georgia and other

(57:11):
places where different. If we know specific plants are growing,
all that stuff is going to be changing. Obviously, this
is affecting coffee and how we're getting less and less
space and land that's actually able to grow coffee because
basically plants, you know, growers have to move their plants
up a mountain every year in order to make the
coffee actually work, which is why we're it's gonna We're

(57:31):
just gonna run up a space. Um So yeah, that
is obviously the more negative sides of things and California
lack of rain, water and just and just lack of rain.
Yeah absolutely, rain, yeah, absolutely, And that brings up a
really important point that you know, you're talking about moving
the coffee trees further and further up a mountain as
the areas that are considered prime agricultural areas moves north

(57:56):
for us, you have to think about the infrastructural challenges
that brings. So it's not just you're going to grow
the crops in one place, but the infrastructure, the trains,
all these different things don't exist in the places where
we'll be able to grow those foods. So speaking of
something you know around that rough kind of idea is
like if someone's never never done this before. They're out

(58:17):
to go get stuff. Where would you where would someone
like that find seeds? Um, Let's say that they don't.
Let's say they don't use the internet's tons um whereabouts
where you think they'll go and get cauliflower seeds or
carrot seeds if they if they want to start doing
this stuff. Yeah, So there's a bunch of different growers
that offer seeds. And one of the things to keep
in mind with annuals is that it does make sense

(58:40):
if you can to buy them locally, because what within
a couple of generations, plants will start evolving towards local conditions.
It's it's really beneficial, especially with like I said, with
climate change, to start thinking about how can we integrate
our food systems into the ecological conditions where we live,
and that ecology includes the climate. So we have to

(59:00):
continuously more thoughtfully start thinking about these things and how
we grow food and where those foods come from in
order to really be able to deal with and mitigate
the effects of climate change. So a great resources Johnny's
Seed they do a lot of really good work and
there they have good quality stuff and there's a bunch
of seed companies out there that have done some really

(59:21):
problematic stuff that I won't go into or talk about.
But they're these guys, as far as I'm aware, are
pretty good. So I would definitely recommend them. Awesome. Yeah,
their website is just Johnny Seeds dot com, just for
everyone who's looking at up at Johnny with a Y.
Good for Johnny with a Y. Great. All right. Let's now,

(59:44):
let's say someone lives in a downtown apartment in a
metropolitan area. They don't have immediate access to you know,
tons of dirt or you know, grass, but they want
to start kind of growing some stuff. If if you
were in that position, would you start doing and to that,
I want to to part that that would be somebody

(01:00:04):
with a balcony where they have access to like even
like a little patti area or those and then without Yeah, sure,
So there's a bunch of different things you can do.
Starting with if you have a balcony, you can start
thinking about getting pots, filling them up with soil, amending
that soil as needed as you add plants, and again
the general rule is to think about how big a

(01:00:27):
plant gets, and how big a plant gets is how
big its root system is going to get I mean,
that's not accurate by any means, but it's just a
good rule of thumb to think about as you're doing
something like this, and you know, if you have a
tiny pot, then something that gets big is not going
to work. It might be better for a lettuce or whatever.
And there's a bunch of different places you can look
online for how to grow things on balconies and things

(01:00:50):
like that. You can also, and this is really dependent
on money, is start thinking about things like grow lights,
which really are not that complicated once you start learning
a bit about them, hydroponics which comes with their own
challenges because at the end of the day, while it's
nice to be able to grow food in your house,
you're still relying on extractive processes. So you know your

(01:01:11):
nutrients are coming from fossil fuel essentially, So that's just
something to be aware of. It's probably still better than
the alternative of buying food on the shelf, but it
is something to be aware of in that process that
it's not really a sustainable quote unquote practice. Got it?
And what are some of the go toos for a
balcony garden that you would recommend for people that are

(01:01:33):
just starting out. Definitely, those leafy greens are a good
place to start. They grow small, they have smaller roots systems.
Most times, things like lettuces don't need a ton of
sun to grow super well. As long as they get
a decent amount, they'll be fine. They're not like a
tomato that's gonna like be desperately looking for that that
sun in that energy. So those smaller greens are generally

(01:01:57):
a better option, right. Yeah, I was able to grow
kale and like a pot this of this winter and
it was great. Yeah, kale is a great one here
in New England. It's really nice because you can grow
it under glass during the winter, so even if you
have a cold spell, it will stay just warm enough
to make it pretty much throughout the winter. All right, Now,

(01:02:19):
I have no balcony. I only have, you know, two
small windows, you know I have. I have like a
counter and stuff, you know, I can like can set
up stuff, but I do not have tons of outdoor access.
But I would like to stop buying dill every time
I go to the store because I use it in
my homemade ranch dressing. Now, can I just buy those
like pre pre potted stuff and just water them or

(01:02:42):
kind of like if if, if, if I want to
get more in depth, what are they you know, some
things that are beyond that, but not you know, making this,
you know, making this giant set up, so you could
be creative and do something that's less than eagle. And
there's this practice known as gorilla gardening. I was I

(01:03:04):
was gonna mention girly grilla gardening soon. Yeah. Sure, So
this is like something that works really well, and there's
a bunch of different ways you can do it, and
it really depends on your local conditions and what can
grow out in the wild and needs a lot of
maintenance and what doesn't. And I don't know the Pacific
Northwest that well, but it is warm enough that I
think Bill would probably do fine, and it is wet

(01:03:26):
enough that Bill would probably do fine. So you could
just go anywhere where there's green space that nobody checks
things and just drop some plants in. You could start
seedlings in your house and bring them where you want
to harvest it later, and it's on your walk to
work or where you get coffee or whatever. Drop it
in the ground, make sure the roots are you know,
not bound up, and make sure it's got a nice

(01:03:47):
watered wrench right when you put it in the ground,
so it starts adjusting and that's you know, that's that's
the first step in something as simple as guerrilla agriculture.
One of the first things that we tried to do
when I got kind of started in you know, the
you know Portland's kind of more lefty scened, was you know,
ideas for you know, building a community garden somewhere. And yeah,

(01:04:11):
because there is just a lot of dirt, especially like
Portland's specifically lucky just because we just have so much
green space. Uh, there's a lot of places to to
start grilla gardening, to start doing our own little community garden.
Do you do you have any alleged experience in gorilla gartening. Yes,

(01:04:31):
So if you're on Instagram, I post a bit about
some of the grilla gardening stuff that I do. UM.
I generally focus on guerrilla gardening, not necessarily for my
own consumption, but more for ecological mitigation for damage from
um clear cutting and things like that. So I go
out and try to plant things that are native to

(01:04:52):
regions and try to bring them back a little bit.
So that's one of the challenges that we see here
on the East Coast is not only are our city
is not really designed with green space and mind and
for community gardens, I almost never recommend them, just because
in places like Boston they're hard to get into and
a lot of major cities like you can be on
waitlists for years, so that's not really a short term

(01:05:16):
solution or a solution for a lot of people that
are rather transient where you might move communities every three
or four or five years. Um. So, like guerrilla gardening
works really great for those folks because you can do
it when you want and how you want. Nothing says
community like a waitlist, right No. But like in terms

(01:05:36):
of community gardens, I think, you know, there's been a
lot of people asking about how they get involved in
mutual aiden stuff, especially if they don't have like friends
or like they don't have many friends or connections to activism.
I think one of the best ways to start anything
like that is just all you need is like yourself
and maybe one or two other people that you know
to just start a community garden somewhere. And that's a
very very nice on rep into like community organizing. Absolutely

(01:06:00):
Back in Portland when I used to live in the Southwest,
there was, there's just whole like community plots that are
like you know, more like official but still pretty like decentralized.
That you could just basically go up to one of
the bank at plots and just start planting food in
this community setting, and like once a month, all of
the different gardeners would like get together and talk about

(01:06:21):
what they're growing and stuff, and they could, you know,
could trade produce. Be like, I'm growing I'm growing pumpkins,
You're growing butternut squash. I want one of your squash.
I want one of your pumpkins. Right, you can like
that kind of stuff. Um or if you know, if
you end up having with having like a larger hole,
you could just give it out to random people. It
turns out people might like receiving fresh produce. That could

(01:06:44):
be another way of making friends and making connections. If
you're kind of isolated in the city and you only
have one or two other people, you can't start start
a new community garden somewhere in the city just like
scope out of spot, start growing and then and not
get to speak to that. You know. One of the
things is that if you act like you're official and

(01:07:04):
you're supposed to be there, and you know you're supposed
to be there. People generally don't really question you, especially
when it comes to plants, Like if I go to
like a median and go plant some trees, Like as
long as I act like I know what I'm doing
and like don't look like I'm trying to be sneaky,
no one ever questions me. And that that's the key thing,
is to really make it clear that like, you know,

(01:07:25):
you're supposed to be there when whenever I eventually I'll
put together an episode on like urban Stealth and stuff,
And there's nothing more powerful than like a hive is
vest just an incredibly powerful tool for making people glaze
over you and think you're a professional. It's amazing. Or
in this case, like when I'm doing what I do,
you know, I'll borrow someone's old beat up pickup truck

(01:07:48):
and throw a couple of big trees in the back
and like you see that pulled over on the side
of the road with its hazard lights on, nobody's going
to question that. It's like a town or a city,
and if somebody from the town shows up as I'm
from the DPW or whatever, Yeah, there's it's incredibly incredibly
useful um and yeah, but like getting to know you know.
If you're like I don't know where to find a
local you know, I don't know how to like where

(01:08:09):
I would pick a local community garden spot, be like
you should like get to know your local area. In
another great way of figuring out how to start doing
any mutulate or anything. It's like you need to know
where you live and like what's what's around you? Who
others who you know? Maybe in your search to find
a community garden you might find one that already exists.
If you're unfamiliar with your you know, with if you're

(01:08:30):
in a metropolitan area or if you're more out in
the middle of nowhere, you may not know what's around you.
And I mean looking out to see what's actually in
a community. It is one of the first big steps
to have any kind of and that plays out also
in ecology. So you know, if you're in a city,
most cities have public horst parks, whatever it might be.

(01:08:50):
And part of not knowing what's around you, or knowing
rather what's around you is starting to identify the plants
that are already around you. And while there's been a
lot of action and in terms of thinking about things
like foraging. Um, there's there's a ton of opportunity for
us to start looking at foods that we don't traditionally
think of foods but produce a ton of calories. So

(01:09:13):
something like oaks. Oaks are across the United States. I
don't think there's any state without oak trees and acorns
can be a huge part of anyone's diet if they're
willing to take the time and warn about them. And
that's not something that's radical or anything. It's something that's
been done for thousands of years. It's just in in
our lifetime, in our parents lifetime, that that knowledge and

(01:09:34):
that experience has been mostly lost. But it's not something
that's weird or unaccessible or any of those types of things. Absolutely, Um,
I think this is actually a decent cutting off point
for this episode and then the next in in in
the In the next episode in the feed here we
will focus more on ecology, um, books, more on soil,

(01:09:57):
and maybe get into permaculture and some other kind of
stuff because I would love to. Yeah, I learn more
about you know, specific soil stuff and you know different
you know, more insight to our current like growing situation.
Overall as like a country and how you know stuff
is changing. But um, would you like to plug anything
really to you or any other resources on this topic
before we head out? Absolutely so we are a podcast.

(01:10:20):
Go check us out or Pearls dot com or Spotify.
Wherever you're listening to this podcast, you can go check
out some of our work. We're also on Instagram and
Facebook like everyone else, and you can go follow us
over there. Fantastic. Um. If you want to keep up
to date on stuff for this show, you can follow
cool Zone cool Zone Media and Happen Here pod on
Twitter and Instagram and you can catch more. It could

(01:10:43):
happen here daily in this feed. Uh see you tomorrow.
By the art, it is essentially a money laundering business.
The best fakes are still hanging on people's walls. You

(01:11:05):
know they don't even know or suspect that they're fakes.
I'm Alec Baldwin and this is a podcast about deception,
greed and forgery in the art world. You knew the
painting was fake. Um, Listen to Art Fraud starting February
one on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or

(01:11:28):
wherever you get your podcasts. I call the Union Hall
as it's about life and death. I think these people
of planning to kill Dr King. On April four, Dr
Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis. A

(01:11:50):
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
a pawn For the official story, the authorities would parade, Oh,
we found a gun the James L. Ray bought in
Birmingham that killed Dr King. Except it wasn't the gun

(01:12:13):
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.

(01:12:37):
Raffie is the voice of some of the happiest songs
of our generation, Baby the Luga. So who is the
man behind Baby Bluga? Every human being wants to feel respected.
When we start with all good things can grow from there.
I'm Chris Garcia, comedian, New Dad and host of Finding

(01:12:58):
Raffie a new pod cast from my Heart Radio and
Fatherly Listen every Tuesday on the I Heart Radio app
or wherever you get your podcasts. It's Soil Tom. Hello,
Welcome to it could happen here. We're talking about We're

(01:13:21):
talking about dirt today, big big, big dirt fans here.
We love we love dirt, we love soil. Um. And
to help us talk about soil, dirt, ecology, growing, for
forging all of this kind of stuff, we have Andy
from the Poor Pearl's Almanac podcast about you know what

(01:13:42):
to do after you know, stuff kind of crumbles away slowly,
kind of kind of like kind of like our podcast. Um,
and we're not like our soil hopefully. Well I got
some bad news for you there. Some of us are
not great at cultivating soil, which is what we are
talking about today is how to avoid getting a lot
of void, Like how can we help help against our

(01:14:04):
soil just blowing away? Um? Yeah, that is that is
that is our discussion. I I wrapped up like a
week of research on California's specific climate and drought and
what all the farmers are doing. Um, and a lot
of their soil is blowing away and so far their
solution to that is just spray more water on it,

(01:14:24):
which the problem is there's not tons of water. Um,
so let's talk about dirt. Let's talk about soil. I
will hand it over to the residents. Soy boy, the
soil expert here, because I don't know what I'm talking
about with dirts are getting famous, I know I have.
That was that was just that I was just ripping,

(01:14:46):
ripping off of a title of one of his episodes.
So that's not original. Blame him for the pond. Sorry,
I do that a lot. So in terms of building soil,
there's it's really a basic idea of how to do it,
and it generally comes down to understanding what a soil
needs and how to let the soil build through rest

(01:15:09):
and generally speaking, when we plant our annual crops, what
happens is you put your tomato plants in the ground,
whatever it might be, you've got a great harvest, you know,
let them die, clear them out, and then the next
year maybe you throw some more compost on it, or
maybe you're like, yeah, I just don't want time, I
won't do it, and you'll grow and you might have
a pretty decent crop again. And then usually by like

(01:15:31):
the third year, you start to notice that your plants
just aren't doing as well, like all the nutrients and
the minerals have started to get taken out of the soil.
So you can either continuously add new material to it,
which comes from somewhere. Doesn't seem very sustainable. Yeah, it's
absolutely not sustainable. And the alternative is to think about
how can I build up that soil without doing that,

(01:15:52):
And there's a couple of different ways we can do that.
The soil can get built from things like cover crops,
so we can add cover crops generally things like nitrogen
fixing plants, Clover's hairy vetch and a number of others
that we can use to help fix nitrogen into the soil.
Or we can add other things to add biomass. So

(01:16:14):
certain grasses and things like that can be planted and
they'll mind deep into the soil to pull up nutrients
when they die off, or you can cut them down
they start breaking down, they return those nutrients back, but
they're on the top soil now, So that's another way
we can do it. Alternatively, if we're talking about a
little bit more land, you can take advantage of using
animals so chickens, rabbits, cheap cows, whatever it might be,

(01:16:40):
reintroduce nutrients back into the soil through things like rotational grazing.
And there's a you know that, that's a whole other
subject of you know, how different methods are better or
worse for fixing nitrogen and all the other nutrients back
into the soil. And we can talk about it. I
don't know if you want to spend an hour talking
about it. I assume that that definitely depends on the

(01:17:02):
scale of your operation. I would assume absolutely. And you
can do that on a smaller scale, not necessarily cows,
but like chickens. Chickens can be run through chicken tractors,
which can be as small as you know, three ft
by six ft. We were making, yeah, we were making
some fertilizer a few months ago and basically we raked

(01:17:23):
up well I didn't. I watched as people did this
because I was lazy. I watched people just rake up
tons of sheep shit, um, because there we have there's
a little sheep set up, um. And they were just
raking up all the ship and putting into a pile
of dirt. And now it's been like a it's been

(01:17:44):
like a month or two, and we should have some
okay fertilizer by now, which we can you know, use
however we see fit. But chickens, chickens, chickens as well
not not everyone probably has sheep or access to sheep um,
but chicks are surprisingly easy to get. Yeah, and depending
on the city or in h you can live in

(01:18:05):
pretty dense places and still legally have chickens. You might
have to get comfortable with the idea of slaughtering a rooster,
but other than that, you know, there's it's funny because
what you'll see is like in the early spring everyone
gets chickens, and then by like July, you on on
Craigslist or Facebook or Instagram, everyone's like, free rooster to

(01:18:26):
good home because they can't slaughter themselves. Yeah, I've had
I've had to watch a few roosters get the get
the old old acts. There was there was this one
rooster that would always wake up as we were all
going to bed. We would have like we have like
a movie night, um, and we're like going to bed

(01:18:46):
at four am, and that's when the rooster starts. We're like, no,
we're trying to sleep and we're like we need to
kill that rooster. It's only time one bad day to
be like I cannot listen to that sound again. At
least at least it went to some good use. Yeah,
anyway back to dirt. Yeah, let's see where we keep

(01:19:08):
talking about reintroducing stuff via you know, chemical means, I mean,
or or just using animals and stuff, or or rotating plants. Yeah.
So there's a bunch of different ways you can do it,
and obviously it's all defined by what your site needs.
You know, the way we're talking at this point has
been mostly about like you already have a garden and
that soil needs to be amended to improve it. But

(01:19:30):
if you're working with, say a site that has almost
no top soil. So for example, a friend of mine
out in California lives near a highway and they had
scraped all the top soil around the highway to build
up the highway. So now there's no top soil, it's
just garbage. So how do you build that soil up?
And there's a bunch of different ways we can do that,

(01:19:52):
whether it's through taking advantage of free resources like um mulch,
like if you see a tree getting cut down, and
they it it all up. Those guys have to pay
to get rid of it most of the time, or
they get paid just enough to cover their gas. So
if you see it down the street and say, hey,
you want to drop it off in my house, they'll
happily do it. Yeah. We we just found out there

(01:20:12):
is this business in Portland that you can email them
to do a chip drop where they take all of
their mulchion wood chips and drop them off in your
driveway and it's completely free you you you you don't
need to pay for it. You can just schedule them
to drop it off anywhere. And a short aside, we
also found out that they don't require address verification, so
you can do this as a prank. Um. You can

(01:20:34):
find out where the mayor lives, um or where I
don't know a particularly bad person lives. Let's say he
wears armor and he brutalizes people and threatens them with
guns while having a bad you can find out if
you know where it lives, you can just deliver tons
of wood chips right right on this driveway. Um. And
and they have a rule on their website is once

(01:20:55):
a delivery has been initiated, it's like once the truck leaves,
you know, their office, it cannot be stopped. There's no way,
there's no way preventing it, and they don't contact the
house beforehead, no way preventing it. Just a random, random
wood chip drop anywhere in any driveway. It's a magical system.
But you can also just use this for you know,
getting wood chips to help grow things. Yeah, and we'll

(01:21:16):
just such an underrated medium. It's like really good for
like water retention and helping soil not dry out too fast.
It's it's not just like aesthetically nice looking and accessible,
it's also like really good for the plants. So I'll
add two caveats to that. And the first is that
it's really important to know what species you're dealing with
that are the wood chips, because certain species have chemicals

(01:21:38):
on them that will reduce growth or stop it completely.
So like black walnuts are really well known and on
the East Coast as having what's called juglone, And there's
a bunch of different species that again are probably unique
to where you live that you should just be aware of.
And the second one is that mulch and wood chips

(01:21:58):
are fantastic for your arden However, the one drawback is
that for the wood chips to break down, they actually
utilize a lot of the nitrogen in the soil. So
that's just so you may have a bit of a
nitrogen problem or some kind of nitrogen fixing, So it
would be more important to think about cover crops and
either adding fresh compost or whatever it might be help

(01:22:20):
offset some of that nitrogen absorption. So so it's not
it's a great resource. It's just not perfect. You just
have to be aware of the limitations of it. I
would like to touch on why we're in a bit
of a pickle, like what what what what have we
done agriculturally to kind of make our soil so unfragile?

(01:22:41):
Like what what did we do wrong? Um on? Like
even on like a larger scale, and how how might
someone like me who just has a small set up,
you know, not make the same mistakes in my own
personal garden. Sure, so the beginning of the food system
becoming what it is to day really started with oil.

(01:23:03):
Access to things like petrochemicals allowed us to start rethinking
about how we grew food and forgetting about traditional methods. Summarily,
things like using the newer I mean, you think about it,
you eat, all the nutrients go out the sewer, and
then they never go back into the soil. And we're
constantly taking from the same soils year after year, and

(01:23:27):
the only way we continue to produce is because we're
dumping chemicals and forcing the soil, which is just a
medium at this point, just dirt. It's not soil, and
we're just making it grow food because we're adding the
chemicals the plants need. But we've destroyed things like the
bacterial community, the fungag community, all these different things that
are so crucial for our food systems to be resilient

(01:23:49):
in terms of how can we move forward. Building that
soil is super important and understanding these cycles of where
our food comes from. The biggest challenge really is that
we're trying to create ethical food systems under an inethical
economic model. Sure, so, like you'll see, like perma culture
is like a really big thing today and for a

(01:24:11):
lot of good reasons because it challenges that methodology. However,
because of things like capitalism, we can't really have an
honest conversation about the fact that a lot of people
will tell you you can make money doing perma culture
and you some people do, but it's not it's not
really what people think. Like there's no way to ethically

(01:24:32):
grow food and not have the problems of yeah, you're
you're facing or competing with somebody that doesn't have any
ethical guidelines or framework that you have to compete with.
And I mean, there's plenty of things we can say
that there are problems with perma culture, and if you want,
we can talk about that further. But this is the

(01:24:52):
primary reason why we can't really fundamentally rethink our food
system until things either fall apart or capitalism no longer exists,
or there are major subsidies for these alternatives, whatever it
might be. Yeah, let's see, Like is even something like
would you even say, just like someone buying pre made

(01:25:13):
fertilizers should be avoided in that case, like would you
would you rather you know, someone trying to make it ourselves?
And like what's cheaper you know, like it is just
buying fertilizer or cheaper than I would actually make it yourself.
There's another kind of problem with these types of things
that it turns out, you know, the way to make
things better might cost some people more money, you know,
than people who don't really have as many resources, you know,
just like a regular person who's trying to do this,

(01:25:35):
you know, they don't have as much money and would
would just buying pre made chemicals be you know, easier
and cheaper than doing work to kind of build it
up more like quote unquote naturally. I mean, obviously, I
think under capitalism, anything that's efficient in terms of time
and um, taking advantage of things like scalability, which you know,

(01:25:57):
mining nutrients is always going to be more efficient when
you're doing it on a massive global scale, Like you
really can't compete dollar for dollar. And that's at least
with what I do with the poor pros almanac. We
don't really focus on that and instead say this is
how things should be, and how do we do that
and when do we need to start doing that if

(01:26:17):
we know that what exists today isn't sustainable and that
ultimately this is gonna fall apart in some capacity. Yeah,
you talked more about like trees specifically, and I would
love to love to hear more about that, you know,
outside of just you know, making your own like edible garden,
doing doing other kind of ecology related related work. Sure,

(01:26:40):
so trees have you know, so many benefits outside of
the fact that they can produce food. Um, we could
look at things like how they can manage a landscape
and reduce temperature extremes, the way they can maintain soil
quality because of um reducing things like runoff from major
store arms, which are happening more and more frequently. YEA. Further,

(01:27:03):
like I said, they do produce food, and they sometimes
they produce food for us, sometimes they produce food for
our livestock. Um. Additionally, there's a process called silvil pasture,
which is essentially when you think of a farm, you
think of a cow walking around in a field instead
that cows walking around and a managed forest and the

(01:27:23):
forest floor gets enough sunlight to grow grass, so you're
getting the benefits of the grass as well as the trees.
And you can either be using those trees for lumber
or for food crops or whatever it might be, and
you're getting the best of both worlds. And in a
lot of ways, the civil pasture system more accurately represents
the way the landscape had been managed, especially here in

(01:27:45):
the northeast and generally the East coast by indigenous people. Um.
You know, they weren't using cows, they were doing prescribed
burns and things like that. But those environments are actually
better for things like a deer which like to like
to exist on like the margins of forests where they're
getting the best of both worlds. So that was how
they managed a wild Essentially they're wild grazing the native species. Yeah,

(01:28:11):
and we just I'm just trying to think there's like
we we don't really have anything like that on a
on a large scale anymore. We've we've just jumped right
into like the the field and pastor thing. Yeah, I mean,
you think about it, it it makes sense that we haven't
because of the fact that to do that requires individuality.
In terms of how we manage a landscape. You can't

(01:28:33):
run a machine through SBA pasture. You can't just make
like a template and apply to every situation. Everything is
much more unique based on their individual environment and ecosystem. Yeah,
and then it becomes less efficient to manage in terms
of how we manage things as a successional thing where
we have you go through the field and you seat
it with a giant machine, because you can do it

(01:28:54):
faster that way, you can add whatever amendments you need
more quickly. When it's just a flat piece of land
with nothing in the way, so on and so on.
It's just it doesn't It goes right in the face
of how we think of efficiency, despite the fact, through
its diversity it's more resilient to what's coming in terms
of climate change, especially the logs run. Yeah. Yeah. In

(01:29:15):
the last episode we talked a bit about grilla gardening.
Can this like intersect with with this idea of like
growing in the forest? Um is there? You know? I
assume there's like a decent cross over there. Absolutely. So.
Generally speaking, a lot of people that are into silvil
pasture are also thinking about things like tree crops. And
one of the things that I really focus on is

(01:29:36):
thinking about foods that we don't traditionally think of as foods,
or at least not as like staple crops. So like,
while people might be familiar with kind of the odd
fruits like per simmons, you might know what a persimmon is.
You might have one or two, or maybe make per
simmon bread. That's not usually a large part of anyone's diet, no,
And that's like, that's the challenge that we really have,

(01:29:58):
is while people like to incorporate rate these types of things,
in permaculture into you know, how they think about their
relationship with the environment. Like nobody's giving up their toast
in the morning and that's you know, a third of
your diet or whatever it might be. And that's where
we need to fundamentally shift how we think about food.
So you're saying that we need to change in order
to address these large systemic issues that have caused many problems.

(01:30:21):
We need to change the way we extract resources from
the earth and maybe reevaluate how much we do. So yeah,
I mean, you know, it's it's no small feed, is
what I'm saying. I know, I'm just saying, like, you know,
that's the this specific thing around like food and diet
is the same root problem we have with climate change

(01:30:41):
on a larger scale of like just doing you know,
progress for progress's sake without realizing that this is not
a sustainable way to do things. And infinite growing and
like infinite expansion, maybe it is a bad idea and
maybe it has some consequence. Who has some consequences? Who
would have thought that infinite growth on a finite planet

(01:31:02):
wasn't sustainable? Oops? Yeah, The point that I'm really trying
to drive home is that we really need to rethink
what food looks like and it has to be in
a meaningful way that it can't just be those odds
and ends. And that the thing I think people forget
is that food is a huge component of our culture

(01:31:22):
and our identity. Absolutely think about food and identity. The
reason why our identity is surrounded around food is because
food is the byproduct of the environment that we live in.
And it's you know, for it's been a couple of generations,
and we went from the reason why Italians eat x
y z s because that's what grows there. Two I
eat this because my family does, but I don't know why.

(01:31:44):
And that's the way those things relate to one another
is been completely lost, and we need to figure out
how to do that again. Can you point to any
examples of these things you're talking about of like you know,
of systems existing now or in the past out of
kind of shown these methods of viewing food and viewing

(01:32:05):
you know, growing and soil cultivation, so like any indigenous practice,
and like we say indigenous, and we usually mean like
North America or South America or Australia, but even if
you look across Europe, you know, before capitalism kind of
got its clause into the rest of Europe or all

(01:32:25):
of Europe, Like, there were plenty of indigenous practices and
in some places they continue and the way that people
lived um reflected the needs of their ecology and how
people could relate to that ecology. The reason why Nordic
countries have high amounts of meat in their diet is
because of what grows there and what how they can

(01:32:46):
utilize book grows there to feed themselves through animals and
things like that. M hmm, yeah, I mean that is
that is generally what we hear is you know, look
at the various indigenous methods of growing um and how
they how they fed people in their media the area,
and thinking like how can we take those similar ideas
and scale it up? Because I mean, they weren't growing

(01:33:09):
food for seven billion people. But I know, like we
grow way too much food for what for many people,
maybe not too much food, just we distribute it in
a very unefficient way because we don't do it for
what we need. We do it for profits, and like
we we we throw away so much food that we
grow as you know, globally UM. But I you know,
when I think of these more like older methods of

(01:33:29):
growing food. It's it's harder for me to picture that,
you know, feeding an entire city, right, And I don't
know what the solution is here. This isn't really the
thing I focus on a lot. But is there a
way to kind of scale up these like smaller scale
things that you know, people can do in their own
yards on any kind of mass level or is that
just kind of rely back on the same thing. We've

(01:33:49):
need to like re reevaluate how much we consume and
how we consume it. So I think there's a little
bit of both. I think we do need to reevaluate
what we're consuming in the volume that we're consuming as well,
is um, you know, the the waste specifically in terms
of those two things that we tend to lose a
lot of food that otherwise is useful um. But also

(01:34:10):
there is a lot of opportunity and wild places like
maybe New York City because of the development around the
city might not there might not be any way possible
to grow food like within the metropolitan or even the region.
We know that like, and this is something I probably
should have checked before the staff, but it's something like

(01:34:31):
there's four acres of arable land for every person on Earth,
and four acres is like that's plenty, that's plenty, That's
absolutely plenty. Um. But like one of the things that's
really important is to start thinking about how we can
decentralize these systems in order to have those clusters of
places where those things are more um capable of growing

(01:34:55):
and handling the production that's necessary. And so maybe rethink
about what urbanization really should be and what it should
look like. And you know, in the future, while things
may seem like, well, you can't ask people to leave
New York City as climate change worsens in our food
systems start to fall apart, that might be a much
easier conversation to have, while today that seems kind of radical. Yeah,

(01:35:17):
and at the very least, maybe we should maybe we
shouldn't make any more New York cities absolutely, Um. Is
there any like resources online that you can point to
that talks more about these types of topics, or like
books or like anything in this general was growing on
the growing side of things and then like the more
like ecology side of things. So Tom Wessels has this
really great book called The Myth of Progress, which talks

(01:35:41):
about complex system science and essentially what that is is
decentralization and um, the benefits of having diversity within a
community and the fact that any any power that's you know,
centered in one specific place ends up having imbalances and
has less resiliency, and that plays until it's focused around ecology.

(01:36:02):
But I think it's really helpful, especially if you're an anarchist.
I think you can through the lens. Yeah. Yeah, so
that that's definitely one place to look in terms of
like growing food. I don't know if there's really any
books that really address it from this perspective of climate
change and decentralization, but there's plenty of work online about
silver pasture and you know, food force, any of these

(01:36:25):
types of things. YouTube has like a vast array of resources,
and of course if you're interested in this kind of stuff,
you can come check us out on our podcast or
proslamanac we Uh, the entire show is pretty much around
this subject matter, So you want to learn more about
it and check it out, Yeah, absolutely definitely. UM if

(01:36:45):
this specific topic, you have a wonderful catalog of stuff
discussing this UM And I just want to thank you
they and thank you so much for coming on this
show to kind of talk about these topics. You know,
me and Robert and you know Chris Weed more like
a background and like history and that kind of thing.
We are. We are not super avid plant people. Like
we're trying to start growing more stuff to our ourselves personally,

(01:37:09):
but I'm definitely not educated to talk on this, and
I'm very very happy that you were able to when
you're generous with your time and knowledge. So thank you,
Thank you so much. Yeah, definitely check out their show
on you know, wherever you get your podcasts, and you
can follow the show Twitter, on Instagram at cool Zone

(01:37:30):
Media and happen here pod um any any any final
final notes? Grow some food? Yeah, grow some food. Grow
some food. That is what if I've I've asked that
question a lot and that answer has come up many times.
Just growth, grow food. Okay, grow food. Hi. I'm Robert

(01:37:58):
sex Reese, host of The Doctor sex re 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, 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.

(01:38:18):
So join me, won't you? Listen to the Doctor Sex
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Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Hey Leeth
the listeners take here. Last season on Lethal Lit, you
might remember I came to Hollow Falls on a mission
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(01:38:39):
finally served. But I hadn't counted on a rash of
new murders tearing apart the town. My mission put myself
and my friends in danger. Though it wasn't all bad,
I'm going to be reality take I like you, but
now all signs point to a new serial killer in

(01:38:59):
Hollow Falls. If this game is just starting, you better
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(01:39:21):
an episode. Listen to Leave the Lit on the I
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The Black Effect Presents features Honest conversations and exclusive interviews,
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(01:39:42):
listen to The Black Effect Presents podcast on I Heart Radio,
Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. What's Spicy
the Pumpkins? No, it was clipping where it's not clipping.

(01:40:04):
You just don't like me saying what's spicy my pumpkins?
But I said it and it can't be unsaid. It
was because this is it could happen here, a daily
podcast about the end of some things and the beginning
of other things. And right now it's an episode about
the beginning of fall. Because it's officially fall and I'm
drinking a pumpkin spice black coffee. It's also not officially

(01:40:25):
fall yet. It may it may be officially fall by
the time that podcast comes in legally fall when I
have my first pumpkin spice black coffee of the year
and it's cool outside, that's because you're a monster. It's
because I'm a happy man who is enjoying a fault beverage.
On this episode, today, we have, of course Garrison. Garrison, Hello, Hi, Garrison.

(01:40:45):
Are you doing I'm doing fine great. We also have
my friends be in a lane b E lane. You
you you were on the show recently to talk about
terrorism a year ago recently everything before yesterday is a
year ago. And uh and now you're on to talk
about surviving. Yeah, yeah, like crafty surviving punc. We on

(01:41:12):
because you were like two of the most useful skill
filled people that I know. You're both wilderness survival instructors,
primitive skill instructors for a while, and you have a
small farm in a town that I won't name, and
you do all sorts of cool ship like storing food
and making arrows and other things that are alleged. And
what I like about that is that, you know we

(01:41:33):
talk about like collapse and and things falling apart, there's
this kind of like I don't know, almost like mimetic
obsession with like I want to get out into the
woods and away from the city, and that's the only
way to survive, and like the reality of the situations,
that's a terrible way to survive. It's awful. There's nobody
in there's nobody in the woods and people and it's
you know, there's there are there are a small chunk

(01:41:54):
of the human race that is capable with with just themselves,
of like surviving in the middle of nowhere with nobody.
But there's even among that population, there's a small fraction
who are capable of doing that and not shooting themselves
after a long enough period of time, and you wouldn't
want to meet that person generally. Well, and I think
the other the other thing about that is like the

(01:42:15):
sort of fetishization of of you know, individualist survival skills
is based on this idea that what people when people
were like living off the land, that they were doing
it by themselves alone. There's very few people that survived
alone for a long time, and even of the people

(01:42:37):
that had the skills, like even I, she wandered out
of the woods after I think eight years of being
by himself and was finally like fuck it. I was lonely.
He was the last of a indigenous group in California,
where everyone else in his tribe had been basically with
been genocided and him and like the last like five

(01:43:01):
people went off and hid for very good reason um
and then after disease and stuff, then it was just
him and he spent I forget how many years by himself,
and after a while he finally was like, fuck it,
being by myself is not worth it, and he came
out and it was just after the turn of the century,
and so he ended up being adopted by a bunch

(01:43:23):
of anthropologists and spending the rest of his time in
San Francisco. It's actually where we get most of a
lot of like the anthropological knowledge of how to make arrows,
because he was very much like, I'm the last of
my group, so I will actually show people how to
do flint napping and how I make arrows and how
I hunt and yeah, and that's but I mean, and
that's there's kind of the point there that like, with

(01:43:45):
all of those skills, being one of that very small
number of people, who could you drop that guy alone
with nothing in the woods and he'll figure it out.
He didn't want to do that. He in fact went
into San Francisco and was like, well, people wiped out
my entire gonna make friends with these anthropologists that live

(01:44:06):
with them and teach them what I know. Yeah. Again,
a lot of the folks who are kind of reaching
out online being like, hey, I don't have a lot
in the way of money, I'm never gonna be able
to move to the woods and buy a farm or something. Well,
you don't, you don't really need to. And like if
shi it really does hit the fan. Where you live,
there's probably parks, unless it's Detroit Um, in which case
there's abandoned Walmart's. Like you can make it work, like

(01:44:28):
there's it's so so this is an episode about kind
of the skills that you can acquire and build for
not a lot of money, more or less wherever you
live that will help you build resiliency um but also
build resiliency is part of a community, as opposed to
living in the woods with a knife, sleeping under mud.
There's a great short story that you'll turned me onto

(01:44:49):
by Cory Doctor in a book of short stories called Radicalized.
That was was it just called The Mask of the
Red Death? I mean that's called The Master. Yeah. The
original Mask of the Red Death is set obviously during
I'm sure everybody read it in high school, like right,
It's is set during the Bubonic plague with these rich
people who like decided to just hold up in party
to escape the plague and they all die of the plague.

(01:45:10):
And doctors is a bunch of like libertarians survivalist crypto
bros who build a fortress in the desert in order
to survive the end of days. And it turns out
that like a bunch of bad stuff happens, like there's
disease in in in civil conflict, but like people figure
it out, and all of the crypto bros die shooting
themselves to death because the system. It's obvious from the

(01:45:33):
start what's going and everybody who comes along to help them,
they start shooting at you. We'll just wait until you're
dead because you're shooting yourself because your water is bad.
I think we all have, we all have elements of
some libertarian tendencies in us, which you know, it's not
bad to learn self reliance, and it's certainly not not
even bad to want to like live outside of the city.

(01:45:54):
But in a lot of ways, living in a living
in an urban environment surrounded by a community, depending on
the situation, can be even more resilient because like, yeah,
an isolated farm instead there's benefits to but also it's
really easy to surround and just shoot people who were
living on their farm in the middle of nowhere. If
ship really does hit the Fai, hap it happens all
the time. It happened in like Al Salvador and ship

(01:46:16):
when they had their economic crash. So I don't know
where do you want to Where do you guys want
to start? I know you had a couple of different
things that you want that I want to talk about,
Like preserving food is a big one, and then I
mean making stuff and doing things is kind of they're
sort of different. Where would you like to actually start
with that? I think we can start with kind of
the d I Y element, branching off of our original

(01:46:38):
discussion on primitive skills, and then in like part two,
we can go more into like food and like skin,
like in like foraging, um and preservation and stuff. Cool.
I mean, so d I why um? I guess now
there's a lot of stuff about, Like there's I don't know,
there's all this stuff about like survival skills and all

(01:46:59):
this stuff, and both of us kind of came into
the idea of making stuff and doing things by being
punks um and it's kind of funny, yeah, having no money,
but also just their d I Y like do it
yourself was a very like kind of nineties punk thing
that came into the mainstream like I actually was pulling

(01:47:19):
out some of my old books, and I think it's
funny to see the like progression because I have, you know,
the really lovely like Food Not Lawns that goes into
a whole pile of really fantastic things that came out
that I don't know, the first Food Not Lawns house
I saw at the town as in was in like
two thousand five or six, but this book came out

(01:47:42):
in two thousand and six. But it was this entire
movement of like making community and doing and like how
to do stuff yourself on your front lawn. Yeah, and
then I have from eleven the bus d i Y
Guide to Life that includes everything from like how to
do warm composting to how to make your own makeup
and like finance the house. And that's that's like the magazine, right. Yes,

(01:48:04):
So it's kind of interesting because it definitely like was
the thing that I watched come into the mainstream. But
you know, it started as a lot of punks trying
to figure out how to do things because they had
no money, and but also different from a lot of
you know, like woodworking or craft books that really are

(01:48:25):
you know, by these seven thousand dollars worth of tools
and now you too can learn Yes. And there's also
there's also an ethos behind it, right that, like before
I was, I came at it first and foremost through
being like a bike punk in the in the late
nineties early two thousands, being a bike punk, and the

(01:48:45):
idea of like the d I y ethos was less
about the grid is going to collapse and like everything
is going to fall apart and you're going to need
to survive by the skin of your teeth, and it
was a lot more you at the tail end of
the nineties and like the sort of golden era of
neoliberal capitalism and office space and that whole cultural moment,

(01:49:09):
the idea that life was alienated and shitty and it
felt better to know how to do things that you
needed in your day to day life for yourself, using
stuff you had made yourself or gotten from your community members. Um. Yeah,
resiliency is less about knowing you have a pile of
dried food in the house and know more about looking
at fresh food and knowing, I know how to make

(01:49:31):
that last the winter. Yeah, And it's been interesting to
see the way that like as that has gotten kind
of mainstreamed into like, you know, the the what is
it primitive. There's a bunch of different like primitive x
y Z YouTube channels that get lots of show trick
and ship, and as that all gets mainstreamed, there's this
idea of like expertise that creeps back into it. And

(01:49:54):
d I I was like firmly committed to the idea
that everybody could learn stuff and listening to somebody who
said they were an expert was a trapped and a
lot of that was coming out of like the seventies
when there was all of the like you know, CULTI
lifestyle ship that was like, hey, look we're going to
teach you how to change your life, and yeah, we're

(01:50:14):
gonna we're gonna buy up all this land and Antelope,
Oregon and and so d I Y was emphatically not
that it was like there's skills, and you can learn skills,
and the Internet doesn't really exist yet or not really,
so you can read books about it and you can
have skills fare because there wasn't Twitter, we also all
had a lot more time on our hands and like
each other more. But there's also expertise was something that

(01:50:40):
was handy to have you know, like if I needed
to rebuild my wheel on my bike and respoke, it,
wanted somebody who knew how to do it. And so
it's good to have a couple of people who had
really intense, deep knowledge of skills. But the idea that
you would ask someone like I need to change my
bike or two because I popped it with everyone would

(01:51:02):
have been kind of like really really like everyone should
know how to do basic stuff and it's and it's okay,
Like the whole you know, Jack of All Trades was
is as a desirable goal, like it's okay to dabble
in a million little things and be kind of mediocre,
but have a sort of baseline understanding of a bunch
of stuff. Now, you know, there's places that I kind

(01:51:25):
of think that we went too far, but also, you know,
before the American Healthcare Act, we all definitely did a
lot of at home medcare that we should not have.
But there's also a lot of low stakes places that
I think people have gotten away from just practicing and
trying all sorts of crafty stuff as an ethos that

(01:51:46):
is actually really good and there's no harm to learning things,
like you're not going to quote anything and the only
thing that's going to happen is you will have more
skills and more to offer the people around you. There's
this idea under capitalism that we should all specialized because
that is like the most profit generating thing to do
is just specialize anything that makes you the most money.
But it's like, not only is it like not the

(01:52:08):
best in a dangerous situation to only know how to
do one thing that makes you money, but it's like
it's not particularly good for your soul either. And there's
also lots of different behavioral psychology, like group analysis of
if you present people with a situation that they feel
unprepared for and there's a person that they identify as

(01:52:31):
an expert in a group who they can defer to
pretty much every time, the group that's like, oh, we'll
defer to this one expert because they know everything and
we'll just do whatever they say ends up making worse decisions.
Then if you have a group where everybody feels like, oh, well,
I like I can at least get a handle on
what's going on and we can all talk through it

(01:52:54):
and like make make calls. Deferring to experts doesn't necessary
severally help you know, that there's obviously cases we've mentioned
medical care already, where like there's actually knowledge is very important.
Skill sets are very important. But the idea that there's
people who are just like, yeah, inherently more knowledgeable of

(01:53:15):
things that you couldn't possibly understand. Is so where where
do you recommend? Like people start with, like, like, you've
got a bunch of books right now, and obviously, if
you can afford books, that's a good call. A lot
of these books on a preserving food and like growing
stuff on your lawn, but even if you don't have

(01:53:36):
a lawn, you can still Like there's certain like one
thing that strikes me because we've been canning and pickling
a bunch lately, is you know, different vegetables and fruits
and whatnot are cheaper at different points in the year.
And even if you live in an apartment in the
inner city and will never have more than a garden
box at best, you can buy food when it's cheap
and preserve it um and not only save yourself a

(01:53:59):
little the money, but you can like also, uh, you'll
you'll understand every time you encounter preserved food and like
a grocery store, you'll be looking at a thing that
you know where it comes from. It's not just like
a mystery jar of preserved food that was made by
some process of science. So I don't know. I'm interested in,
like where you guys someone coming in having only uh

(01:54:23):
specialized in whatever it is allowed them to pay the rent?
Where where where's your where's your recommended start point for people? UM,
I think it's picking something that is low stakes that
you enjoy. Like honestly, one of my friends, um, her
entry into doing d I Y stuff was, you know,

(01:54:44):
she had lots of makeup and everything, and she was like,
I'm going to make body scrubs? How do I do that?
And you know, looked up how to make body scrubs,
how to make you know, A lot of it is, oh,
getting salt and grinding up rosemary that she found in
someone's front yard and putting it together, you know. But
just something simple that you enjoy, that you would love

(01:55:06):
to be able to, you know, have a little bit
more say over because it's most basic. A lot of
the d I Y stuff is you can make something
very specific to what you like. So for myself, actually,
one of the first things I ever started doing was
in high school just altering clothing. I had an old yeah,

(01:55:26):
I had an old thirty dollar junk practice uh like
kids sewing machine and just the cheapest one that Sears
used to sell, And could definitely just take that and
start putting scenes in an alter clothing and be like
this shirt is now a T shirt. It was long
sleep before. And that also ties in with you know,

(01:55:50):
d I I just to sound like old punks for
a minute. That d I I definitely also came out
of things like the riot girl scene in a big way,
and like the attention to like body awareness and like
moving away from body negativity and the recognition that as
a general rule, off the rack clothes are not and

(01:56:11):
certainly twenty years ago were extra not actually designed to
fit most people's bodies, and it was hard to find
clothes that fit you right. And yeah, so like sewing
was a big one. Um bikes because we were broken,
didn't have cars, so figuring out how to fix bikes
and you know, everything that mechanically happens on a bike

(01:56:32):
is right there and you can see it happen, and
it maybe requires a screwdriver and then eventually maybe some
other tools. But there's lots of three resources a lot
most cities I've spent any amount of time and you
can find like you can find like a community bike
shop where if you have to pay anything, it's very minimal.
And a lot of cases are just sort of like
show up and you know there's space to use. Yeah

(01:56:54):
when um, Like I know in Santa Cruz there was
the bike Church. In Portland there's the bike Farm and yeah,
and Philly there was also a bike church because it
turns out the basements of churches are are. There were
a couple of spots like that in Dallas and it's
uh yeah. And I think it is like this mix of,
like with the body scrub stuff, like what is something
that appeals to you that you you're interested in? And

(01:57:15):
also what is with the bike stuff, what is something
that's like just doggedly practical, Like you get a bike,
you need a bike to get around, you should probably
know how to fix it on it. I think the
reason I say you should pick something that appeals to
you especially is because a big thing with d I
Y was that you're doing it yourself, and there are

(01:57:37):
so many skills that are valuable to learn from other people.
It is wonderful to craft in community. It is wonderful
to work with other people in community. It's wonderful to
teach skills and gain them. But also I've seen this
growing idea with the as specialization for so many things,
especially services comes in that people are always like, oh, wow, knitting,

(01:58:01):
I've always wanted to learn. I need to take a
class in that, or I need to And it's really important,
I think, for people to realize that you can learn things.
We are very good at learning things, and you don't
necessarily need a teacher for more complex things you do.
But starting with something that you really like and that
you find really interesting, you've already thought about it. So

(01:58:23):
when you start with you know, for my friends, starting
with making bath salts and face masks and stuff, it
was something she had already been thinking about quite a
bit and thinking about stuff. So when she started looking
at recipes to mix and looking on the internet and
looking at ingredients, it was saying she already cared about.
So it's easier to learn something that you are interested in,
and it's easier to learn something that you want to do.

(01:58:46):
But we are all capable of learning for ourselves, not
every single thing, but especially just for craft projects and
so starting with that so that you can pick up
a book, or you can read an article, or you
can watch a YouTube video and you don't need to
take some like hundred and fifty dollar a weekend class
before you can. It's, you know, a big part of

(01:59:09):
the resiliency building. Like something you may scoff, like when
you're thinking about survivalism and talking about like making bath scrubs,
But a lot of the skills you would learn putting
that together are useful in making like a salve or
making like making soap, making soap things that you actually need.
Like when I was traveling, I lived on the road,
like out of a car and out of backpacks for

(01:59:30):
off and on all over the world for years, and
I would make my own medicated because we would get
we would get cuts and scrapes and rashes, and we
were poor as ship and often there weren't doctors where
we were. So I learned how to use things like
plantain and comfrey and yarrow and like bees wax and
stuff in order to to make medicated saves. And it
it was something that interested me. But like there's also
a lot of like there's there's a number of roots

(01:59:52):
into learning that sort of thing. And if you're learning
how to make again something as simple as like a
face scrub, learning where to find that information and for
free learning some of the basic techniques in order to
do that. That learning how to learn is is applicable
in a wider variety of skill sets, and it I
think it's so important to focus on what are you

(02:00:15):
what are you interested in first, as as opposed to
just being like, okay at first, Now I have to
learn how to like splint a broken arm, because like
ship is gonna hit the fans, like, well, maybe focus
on something that's more exciting to you first, and and
and and build time in your life to learn things.
That's an enjoyable process. One of the first things I did,
like years ago, was I learned to sew, specifically to
make a cause play because you know so, so I

(02:00:38):
would just I would make me and my whole family
different outfits for comic Con. So every year I would,
I would sew us whole whole new things. But then
not only taught me sewing, it taught me how to
do like like vacuum forming to molding, how to use
like a heat gun, how to use like all these
other types of tools, Um, how do you like molding
and casting? Like all of these types of things I

(02:00:58):
learned just wanting to make silly costumes. But now they're like,
you know, useful in a lot a lot of other ways.
And that can be that can be expensive at the
high end when you're like vacuum forming and stuff your
storm trooper armor. But the cheapest side of that thing again,
you can get a basic hand sewing kit for like
five dollars from a Walmart. And there's also and there's

(02:01:20):
maker spaces and like YouTube will do the teaching. You
don't have to pay for a teacher. The Taliban learned
how to fly helicopters. On YouTube, you can learn how
to fix your pants. And then I think also you
mentioned specialization before. It's come up a couple of times, um,
and there is you know, the idea of specialization. The
rationale behind specialization is, oh, well, you'll be better at

(02:01:41):
it because that's what you do all the time. But
that cuts both ways, because if you only do one
thing all the time, then as you know, whatever the
maximum threshold of your abilities is that's required of you,
that becomes your baseline like whatever in your day to
day life, whatever it is that you're being asked to do.
That's what you feel capable of. And on the flip side,

(02:02:03):
there's with with the d I I approach with like
teaching yourself ship, learning interesting ship. It's also practical and
important and useful to be like this is a thing
that I'm gonna do on a regular basis so I'll
get better at it. But also it's not you know,
there was you know, the whole idea of there's what
you do and then there's your job, and that these

(02:02:24):
need not be the same thing, because you want to
be able to think think through things in a way
that's not the way you're supposed to process things to
make your boss happy. That it is not just what
you do when you clock in. You are more than
your career, more than your career, and and and your
skill set need not be purely extracted as you know,

(02:02:45):
not just like Okay, I have to go do the
thing in order to make money, and then everything else
is consumption. Like you can you can transition, like we're
and this is not a societal level solution because we
talk a lot about like, well, yeah, you're not gonna
you're not gonna make small person changes to fix climate change,
but changing your own particular attitude on how you approach

(02:03:05):
the world from one that is I I produce and
that I consume to to when we're you're thinking more
about resiliency and what do I know how to do
and what can I learn how to do? UM is
helpful in a variety of ways on the note of
you know, the transferability of skills and recognizing that you

(02:03:26):
already do things on a day to day basis that
requires specialized knowledge and require skill sets. UM. One of
the things that I try and trot out at every
possible opportunity. I worked with somebody in one of those
volunteer bike shop spaces down New Orleans years ago, UM,
and the whole purpose of that particular space was to
make the skill set of bike repare more accessible to

(02:03:50):
a population that relied on bikes to get places. And
one of the folks I worked there with was like
a very familiarity and was great because we would have
young girls come into the shop and be like, my
bike doesn't work. Somebody fixed my bike. My bike doesn't work.
I don't know how to fix a bike. And she
was the one who would just be like, your tires flat,

(02:04:11):
and they're like, yeah, I don't know how to fix it?
Can you fix it? And she'd be like, well, you're
wearing press on nails, right, And I'd be like yeah,
I'm like cool, how do you put on your press
on nails? And they walked through the steps of like, well,
you sand your nails and then you put the glue
on your nails, and then you hold the press on
nails on your fingernails for a little while and let
them set and then you're good to go. And she's like, great,
you've just described exactly how you patch a bike inner tube.

(02:04:34):
So now we just need to get the bike inner
tube out, and here's the part that corresponds to your nail,
and here's the part that corresponds like here's the glue
and here's the you know, it's the same process. We
just have to get the bike inner two out and
then back in again. But you already know how to
do the part where you make the bike tube work again,
and that does hit on another important like you know,
apocalypse or whatever survival point where again all of our

(02:04:55):
like fiction and movies, focuses on like knowing how to
use a gun or like being a wood one of
the most useful skills, maybe the most useful skill you
can have in any disaster situation, is being able to
teach people, like like knowing how to understand figure out
what people know, and how to get them the additional
information they need in order to be more resilient and competent,

(02:05:16):
because you're always better in a community of people who
know to handle their ship than alone. And it builds
on itself too. You know, we both come from different backgrounds,
but as we've been together and with the different trainings
that we've had in just life, the projects that we
take on have become more and more complex. So you know,
where I like to practice gardening and stuff and doing

(02:05:40):
a little bit of woodworking and things, and now you know,
we're doing various construction projects that we're kind of self taught,
and we have some various home depot books on how
to do them. But it's it doesn't feel nearly as
intimidating because we've done steps to go to it, and
because it's not an all or nothing, you don't have
to suddenly be like I'm going to d I why
am I in entire life? Like I definitely get that

(02:06:02):
way sometimes where I'm like, I want to one day
have everything in my house be made by someone that
I know or myself. And it's really lovely to know
crafts people or to you know, make do sit down
at a pottery wheel and make your own bowls or whatever.
But a lot of it is about practicing stuff when
it's not an emergency so that when you later on

(02:06:22):
have need or you have the ability, you have the time,
like you can do a bunch of different things. So
you know, we refloored the room that we're in right
now like a process, but we didn't get there from nothing.
And we've both done lots of different construction and measuring
and other things in little bits just for fun, for work,

(02:06:45):
for other stuff beforehand. And a lot of these projects
are things that are fun to do as a one
off as a project. I've done, you know, embroidery with
my kids just for fun, not because they need too
suddenly embroider all of their clothing or they have two
sew everything, but it's because it's a fun thing to

(02:07:07):
do on a rainy day. Or you know, try fixing
a book, not because there's no ability to go on
Amazon and order another book. But hey, look I just
we didn't add one thing to the landfill waste, and
we don't have to fix all of the stuff we have.
It's a one time craft. But then later on when
stuff is falling apart, or when we have supply chain issues,

(02:07:28):
or when stuff's not there, it's handy to know, like, oh,
you know what, Like we're having water rationing right now,
because during the one of the droughts that grew up
in California, we had water rationing and it was my
mom hauled out of the basement my grandmother's old ringer
machine and we were doing the laundry and that because
it could conserved a hell of a lot of water

(02:07:48):
and you could use the same water for load after load.
It's good to just have those things just kind of
on hand that you've tried, because when an emergency hits,
you don't want to be trying to search the internet
are looking for something because you've never done it before
and now it's necessary. And it's it's again to the
point of like how the how collapse really looks versus

(02:08:10):
how it's often pictured. You're not trying to replicate when
you're when you're doing your own laundry. That way you're
not trying to replace civilization. You're patching a hole, like
and and that's a lot of building resiliency is knowing
that you have. It's like it's being able to fix
a bike tire, it's patching a hole. And I do
want to acknowledge that, like this is a little bit
more outside of the dead center of mainstream in you know,

(02:08:34):
the United States and some other like wealthy industrialized countries.
And it's not like it has never stopped being the
way most people in the world kind of I have
to tell from these people that was billeted with an Iraq.
These these guys were like pulling people out of air
strike craters every day, and we wanted to watch TV.

(02:08:56):
One nine We were in like a bombed out mosque
that Isis had been using and they had a refrigerator
that worked in a TV that Isis had cut the
chords with. And this guy just started pulling chords out
of the fridge in about five minutes, had the TV working,
had like hooked it, lashed everything together. It was like
he wasn't a TV repairment or refrigerate. He just knew
how electricity and ship worked and was able to figure

(02:09:16):
out like, Okay, I can just put all this ship together,
We're good to go. And and just also to loop
back around to the whole like survival mentality a little bit.
One of the things that like people that we've worked with,
people who like have been in emergency situations that require,
you know, complex skill sets and things that one of

(02:09:37):
the big things is to have a role that you
are competent in that you are ready to fulfill. So
you don't have to figure out your first step. You
can get moving. You can figure out your first step.
So for example, in the you know, the supply chain
issues that hit at the start of COVID and are

(02:09:58):
hitting still and are recurring. Um the idea of like
oh there's no way to like there's no laundry soap,
Say okay, well we've got borax and these other making
soda borax, right, we can we can make our own
laundry detergent in a pinch and it'll work well enough. Cool.

(02:10:21):
Don't have to have that be the thing that stresses
us out and like adds to our like paralysis. Yeah,
and again, a huge part of is even how you
approach the problem. It's not freaking out, like oh my god,
there's no laundry soap. Hell am I going to clean
the clothes? It's being like, oh, there's no laundry soap,
I'm gonna go online because we still have that and
try to figure out either other things that can make

(02:10:41):
laundry soap that there are, and like it's it's accepting.
Like you talk about like wanting to be competent in
a role, you don't have to know what that is
from the start, as long as like the starting point
isn't I'm going to be the medic I'm gonna be this,
I'm gonna be the food or it's like no, I'm
going to start learning how to do things I don't
know how to do, and over a period of time,

(02:11:02):
if I am dedicated that I will figure out the
thing that I want to get most competent at. Yeah,
because I mean none of none of what we've been
talking about in terms of the various crafts and projects
that we've undertaken, are things that are like our primary
function in the world. It's just like, well, at some
point it seemed like it was worth doing, and so

(02:11:24):
we did some of it, and then we kept doing
it now and there's always pretty good at something literally
everything we've talked about. There's the you're a I don't know,
bougie hipster version of like doing it expensively. Even with
like woodworking, there could be a dirt cheap. I built
a table for almost nothing when I was younger, because
it was like, well, I found this would that the
city chopped down, and I bought sand paper and staying

(02:11:47):
for fifteen dollars, and then I got like a fucking
base from Ikea, and I had a functional table and
I figured it out using YouTube. And it's you know,
not as good a table as I could have made
if I had ten or thousands of dollars and woodworking tools.
But I had a table for years because of it
um And it's it's accepting the because I think people
do get freaked out. There's such an emphasis on like

(02:12:09):
having the gear, getting the equipment, stockpiling things, and like
really stockpiling competency is better because yeah, and I think
the Amazon wish list ability to just be like, oh,
I want this specific thing, I can in three seconds
look it up online and find the exact thing that
I want definitely pushes in the opposite direction and makes
people a little less resilient. In that capacity because there's

(02:12:34):
less of that idea that you can just have stuff.
And I would just say, if people want to get
started with it, it's really pick something low stakes, pick
something simple, because you build the abilities, you build the
ability to learn. And um, I had to explained to
me once, it's like a hangar. Every skill you get

(02:12:55):
X as a hangar, and having really basic simple things
is actually super necessary arry because even even the like
hardcore primitive skills. I have some amazing books that I
bought when I was eighteen, and I remember I had
them and I looked through and I read it and
I was like, this is like reading magic. I understand

(02:13:17):
absolutely none of it. And after a few years of
doing things, not even necessarily traditional skills, but just things,
practicing stuff, picking stuff, there was so much more framework
that I had that I looked through and suddenly there
was stuff concepts that I could hang all of these
incredible skills on. And we're like, oh, that never made

(02:13:42):
sense to me. I understand it now because I've done
simpler things and starting with thing that doesn't seem like
overwhelming to learn something simple and something something most steakes,
something that if you utterly mess it up. If you
have a what are the like like the regret see
like craft epic craft fails that it's okay, it's not

(02:14:03):
a big deal because failing is part of learning. And
so pick things that it's okay to fail at as
your as your projects, and and don't as many of
us did in the late nineties and early two thousand's
when we didn't have health insurance of any description, you know,
experiment on ourselves and our friends with herbs because we
didn't have healthcare, access to doctors. Avoid doing that is

(02:14:25):
not low stakes. Yeah, I'm about to go do open
surgery on my own infected wound now that you've told
me this, and I'm really excited, really excited. I got
I got an exact deal, I got some vodka. At
least we're good to go. No, the key is really
hot glue, same as I have similar because then it

(02:14:51):
sterilizes the wound, hardly doesn't stick to anything. This is
how I know you are not a crafter or is
hot glue does not stick to anything. You just you
squirt it in there, You get it in there real good,
and then you cover it with with superglue. I do
have a grand plug in the world. I would put
superglue in first. I do have a grandpa that has

(02:15:11):
used superglue so many times sticklue his body back together.
It is that's very funny, it's effective at that. Anyway,
here's our medical advice. Don't do any of the things
that we just said. But if you do want to
learn how to do suitos, you can find guides where
people do it on chicken, which is how if you're
an E M T you learn how to do it.

(02:15:32):
And it's that's a that is a skill you can
build for very little money. That's useful and you don't
have to start on your friends bodies. And I will
put in a plug for like wilderness first aid courses
are not cheap and there are some real good ones
out there, and as a as like a baseline that
is a real handy and helps you think about things

(02:15:53):
creatively because wilderness first aid unlike an ambulance driver. An
ambulance driver is driving in a box with all the
tools they need, and wilderness first aid the assumption is
don't have a box. You don't have to and so
you have to work it out probably you know, uh,
some plantain or something or some the right fucking kind
of sap. There's like ship you can use which we

(02:16:15):
will not proceed to attempt to lift off here and
provide medical advice. Don't go to a doctor, No use
pine needles, make your own needle t don't go to
the craft books, cure your COVID, find a bee hive
and start sucking. And the other sources are any other

(02:16:37):
sources are you have a great book called Making stuff
and Doing Things from way back in the day, definitely
recommend that one. Um country know how, like there's some
a lot of old craft books actually, um, the entire
back collection of the Mother Earth magazine skills stuff like

(02:16:58):
I have definitely made any steadying magazine, not Emma Goldman's
anarchist newspaper, but I've definitely made solar powered dehydrators out
of cardboard boxes and saran rap from the from Mother
Earth magazine stuff. And it's absolutely fantastically just old school
guide books, um. And but also anything that's listened as
like d I Y guides that have stuff that you

(02:17:20):
would like to make and like to do are great.
The library is great. Use the library. Research librarians at
the library are great. And if you're like I'm trying
to learn how to do this thing? Can you help
me find books on it? Research librarians at the library
they have doctorates in how to help you do that,
and that's they just sit at desks all day waiting

(02:17:40):
for me. And what you'll learn from them about how
to answer those questions for yourself is also useful in
their long run. We'll go out and make a reflux.
Still is that legal? Well, no, not in most places,
but it's easy. You just need a box inside of
a box and you pour old beer in the center box.

(02:18:02):
That's the episode. 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,

(02:18:24):
OMG joined Jenny Garth and Tori 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

(02:18:44):
been wondering about for decades. As nine O two one oh.
Super fan and radio host Sisson E sits in with
Jenny and Tory two 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

(02:19:05):
remember absolutely nothing of the ten years that we filmed
that show. Listen to nine O two one O MG
on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts. Adoption of teens from foster care
is a topic not enough people know about, and we're
here to change that. I'm April Dinuity, host of the
new podcast Navigating Adoption, presented by adopt Us Kids. Each

(02:19:27):
episode brings you compelling, real life adoption stories told by
the families that lived them, with commentary from experts. Visit
adopt us Kids dot org, slash podcast, or subscribe to
Navigating Adoption presented by adopt Us Kids, brought to you
by the U. S Department of Health, that Human Services
Administration for Children and Families, and the ACT Council. What's

(02:19:53):
Avoiding Starvation? My autonomous neighborhood collectives. Uh, this is it
could happen here a podcast about things not being as
good as they are and trying to make them better.
I'm Robert Evans, my co host today as many days,
Garrison Davis Garrison say hello to the people, high people, Garrison.

(02:20:15):
What are we? What are we? What do we? What
do we? What do we? What do we? What do
we do? What do we do? What are we doing today?
Thank you? We are going to be having a discussion
on um food and food preservation and finding you mean

(02:20:38):
like putting in the freezer. Well, what if the freezer
is not working? The freezer is always working. This is America.
Thanks never breaking the power goes out for two weeks. Well,
that's one of our guests for today. My friends be
in a lane um who you've heard earlier this week,

(02:20:58):
and we're going to talk about food storage and particularly
again our focus this week is like we keep getting
a lot of people being like I have no money
or very little money or very little space. I'm not
gonna be able to grow things. How can I possibly
you know, gather food store food, like build resiliency. I
don't have any any kind of farmland. And the good
news is no matter where you live, things that are

(02:21:21):
edible grow and you can get those things and you
can find ways to make them last longer than they
would if you just kept them in a sack. And
that's a pretty cool thing to do. So I'm going
to hand it over to be in a lane. I
love that. Okay, I don't have much space, I don't
have much money. Was kind of how I got into
doing canning in the first place. For myself, I used

(02:21:43):
to be very very poor. I was on food stamps,
I had no money. I was a broke punk. And
one of my friends was like, oh, man, there's this
farmer at the farmer's market, and if you help them
clean up, they'll let you take away whatever leftover produce
they have of that they don't want. So you can
just load up a bag with produce. All you gotta

(02:22:04):
do is help them load the truck at the end
of the day. So that's what I did every single
Wednesday for the next five years, no matter what come,
hell or high water. But with that that also came
there's you started realizing that there's gluts and then lacks
of things. Um much like you know, everything that's happening

(02:22:27):
in society now, just in general, there was seasons when
there was nothing but you were It was easy to
at the end of a farmer's market day walk home
with a fifty pound flat of tomatoes, and you know
times of the year where it was nothing but cabbage
and you might have wanted tomatoes a lot. And canning
was great because it helped to equal out when I

(02:22:49):
could get things without having to dive into the you know,
sixty books a month I got in food stamps and
spend it at the farmers market. On that instead, I
could use it to have a variety of vegetables or
canned goods or other things in order to flavor my raman. Yeah.
I first came at this kind of from working on farms,
where similarly there are gluts. There are times of year

(02:23:12):
where you literally cannot eat melons fast enough, and everybody
who works on farms talked about getting the melon ships
because you're eating as many melons as you possibly can,
and it turns out that doesn't always agree with you.
Um and uh. And then you know there's the time
of year where, well, if you want to eat some

(02:23:33):
month old potatoes and some two month old squash and
maybe some storage cabbage great, and otherwise there's no produce
to be had. So preserving food is well, there's a
lot of different ways to do it, and it seems
really intense a lot of the time because people talk
about like batchul is um, you're going to die of
battulism if you have home canned food. And so first off,

(02:23:57):
there's just to dispel a lot of myths about things.
There's actually really really really low instances of botuli is
um um. I'm not going to say it doesn't happen,
but there's actually very few cases of bauchuli is um
per year, and a lot of them are from industrial
canned goods. Don't eat a can if it's bowing out

(02:24:20):
in the sides of the top, throw the can, well
bury the can, bury it in the woods far away.
But then also beyond canning, there's a lot of different
ways of food preservation. You know, you were joking about, like,
but don't toss it in the freezer. I don't know.
I toss a lot of things in the freezer. Shouldn't
not a bad idea? Yeah, I mean, we got all

(02:24:41):
sorts of animals from the farm in the freezer right now,
We've got a lot of blueberries because a couple of squirrels.
Yeah that was a random thing. Um, just just some
squirrels on the side for squirrel for heat is, but yeah,
they were the trumpet. Having a freezer is a bad idea.
It's just that the freezer depends on, you know, having

(02:25:04):
power or at least having a backup power source or
a generator or or or um. And in the case
that you don't have access to those things, or can't
afford to get a whole extra freezer, and that fills
up a substantial part of or can't afford the power
the freezer. Um. You know, we we definitely saw this

(02:25:28):
past winter with the power outages that were caused by um,
you know, in clement weather, and it suddenly became very
hard to acquire dry ice because dry ice will keep
stuff cold for longer. But everybody who's gone camping and
use dry ice and they're cooler knows that. So as

(02:25:50):
soon as there's an interruption in people's ability to refrigerate
their food, the entire regional stock of dry ice is
going to disappear. So what we're looking at more in
what we're talking about today is a little bit more
like the things that you don't need to keep anywhere,
but like a cabinet that maybe doesn't get boiling hot,

(02:26:10):
and if it's sort of a room temperature cabinet, you
can store a lot of stuff. I've personally found the
backs of closets, like, think about all of the areas
that you don't clean that you're like, I just shove
things back here and hope that they disappear because I
don't actually care about them, or like the backs of
broom closets. Um that actually, for a long time was
my place where I would store canned goods because you

(02:26:32):
can just stack the palettes of jars, the flats of them.
Because if you buy jars from this supermarket, um buy
mar Canning stores anywhere, safe Way has them, Walmart has them,
you can They're not expensive. You can just they come
in a little square flat and so after I would
fill them, I just put them all back in there
and then I could just stack those as a little

(02:26:55):
tower and then you know, hand them out as gifts
for the rest of the year, which is also definitely
saying that you do when you have absolutely no money
and people are like, oh, we're having a New Year's
Eve party. And you're like, I brought you jam, and
they're like, oh, great, blueberry lovely, but it's nice, has
something to be you can give people beyond canning because sometimes,

(02:27:16):
like right now, it's incredibly hard to find the metal
lids that go on canning jars or in some cases
the jars. That's actually was recently looking for more jar
lids and ended up buying flats of jars instead, because
as four different stores told me, there's a supply chain
disruption in getting jar lids. There's also a lot of

(02:27:38):
ways that you can preserve stuff with drying. You can
also do a lot with salt, vinegar and sugar preserving
as well, so that you don't necessarily need the recealable
jars or like new lids for that. So there's a
bunch of different methods um lact of fermentation as well,
like fermenting things. So what would you like to talk

(02:28:00):
about first? Let's start with just like what is what
is the actual process of canning beyond like just dumping
stuff into a can and sealing it. Um. So there's
canning by itself is ceiling jars with heat. So that
was oh God really really came into its own around
like World War two was like industrial canning. And the

(02:28:23):
thing about it is even within canning, there's two different types.
There's low heat and high heat canning. Low heat is
actually just boiling water temperature, and high heat you actually
need to go above the temperature of boiling water so
you can pressure can. Um you need a pressure cooker.

(02:28:43):
They terrify me. I don't pressure can because I haven't
quite gotten over the images of when they explode and
give people steam burns um. I know plenty of people
who do pressure can and it's great for them. You
can pressure can at high heat. Anything. You can toss
raw fish or raw meat in oil and jars or
in water in jars, and you can pressure can it

(02:29:04):
and it will cook and seal the jars and it
is very safe. Low temperature canning is still relying on
one of the other methods like salt, sugar, acid for
the to keep down bacteria. So all it does, though
is it makes the same so you can do this
with or without canning. It just makes the jars keep
a lot longer because it preserves them. So it's the

(02:29:27):
process of you take a jar and then you either
use a clean ring if you're using those latching reusable
jars with these nice rings on them that you can
use over and over again. Really handy when there are
supply chain disruptions to know that you can reuse your
jar and ring. We're talking about like the Mason jars
that you you you would get in uh bars that

(02:29:47):
are too expensive five years ago. They would pour your
terrible I P A in them. Yeah, but you can
use them for other things too. These are the well
there's two. There's the jars that have a lid that
is attached and it latch, oh with the YEA and
so those have a Those have a rubber gas that
you can and as long as you keep those oiled

(02:30:08):
and clean, you can reuse those for years. They do
eventually wear out, but they use a long time. Others
is Mason or Ball canning jars, and those actually have
a two piece top. They have a middle ring that
you just need to make sure it's not like horrifically
dented or rusted throat. It's reusable for a very long time.
And then you have a lid and the lid can

(02:30:29):
only really they are recommended to only use once I've
re used them like twice. May used to can once
you can like once it's canned and you you can
take stuff out put it back on. You don't have
to like replace the lid every time you get some
preserves out. Yeah, but the tiny piece of rubber that
is what steals it is very thin and so it's
not very reusable for multiple can't batches of food and

(02:30:51):
and true to farm. You know, if you go looking
around in you know, rummage sales, vintage stores, whatever, you
will probably find either very cheap or very overpriced some
of those old hinged jars and tons of Mason jars
and tons of Mason jars. You will often need to

(02:31:12):
replace either the lids or the rubber gaskets in order
to make them safe to star food in. But in
either case, whether you're using the little the mason or
ball jars that you'll find in lots of stores or
the big latching ones, um, the jars are the more
expensive spots things. The lids and the rubber rings are

(02:31:33):
more inexpensive to replace. So if you can find them
at Goodwill, if you can find them at Goodwill bins
or the places, it's great, you should always grab them.
Jars are never a bad idea, so canning. There's a
million different ways to can. I do a lot of jams, jellies, pickles,

(02:31:56):
and tomatoes, which are all things that are camped that
are preserved either with acid or sugar. In either case, Um,
James and jella is being sugar and pickles and stuff
being acid. Yes, those are my two favorites. They're very
simple to learn, and then you can always expand recipes
and everything else. Um. But with pickles and tomatoes and
other things, having the PHB very acidic is what actually

(02:32:21):
does the preservation of the food and keeps down fungus is, molds,
bacterias and stuff. And with jams and jellies, the natural
acidity of the fruit mixed with a lot of sugar
is what keeps the fruits from going bad or anything.
And the great thing about canning fruit is that, like
when you when you're thinking about what is the greatest

(02:32:42):
number of free calories available to most people in a
city during the seasons where fruit grows, it's often going
to be fruit, And like you, you'd be surprised. Like
where you can do like Los Angeles where I used
to live, there was much of the year, like seven
eight months you could fill your arms with fruit if
you knew where to go and there's an app falling
fruit that you can use to find people mark like

(02:33:03):
where different trees are a lot of like you'll be
surprised even if you think, like, well, there's no fruit
in my area, to try falling fruit, you you may
find that out. Actually there's a shipload of fruit. And
I just was not looking or as you often find,
I didn't realize that was an edible plant. I assume
those berries were. We're not food and they can be.
And and that's a lot of like free you know

(02:33:23):
when you especially when you're making preserves that's really calorically dense.
And and that also ties in with in the sort
of survival utility aspect of this, because like canning is fun,
and harvesting fruit is fun, and having stuff you made
to feel pomegranates from rich people's houses do it, sure, absolutely,
I mean, but part of part of the other thing

(02:33:44):
to think about here is that like providing yourself with
a reserve of different kinds of nutrition and different like
there's you get an assortment of stuff so you know
you aren't having to constantly buy it because honestly, the
most expensive in terms of carbon output. The most expensive
in terms of cost per calorie in grocery stores tends

(02:34:08):
to come from the stuff that's you know, been shipped
up from Argentina because it's not in season up here.
That's while you're getting grapes in January, right and blueberries,
you can actually watch them move all the way down
the northern hemisphere over the course of the growing season
until they're like growing them down in Chile right before
they start being able to grow them again. So yeah,
So just thinking about like the things that are available

(02:34:31):
when they are available, um. And you'll see this all
the time, like the good forage spots. When they're available,
there will be crowds of people all they're all collecting stuff, um.
And getting to know some of the things that you
like and that grow near you and what time of
year they come into season, and maybe forming some relationships

(02:34:54):
with people and being like, hey, I noticed you have
a chestnut tree in your backyard. Can I come and
harvest chestnuts? Hey, you have this kind of oak, Can
I come and get acorns from you? Because I want
to do a leeching project. Hey, I was grabbing apples
and I noticed that you're harvesting all these acorns. I
didn't know that you could do anything with acorns. What

(02:35:15):
is what are you doing with all those acorns? And
one of the greatest things, too, is that a good
fruit tree makes a lot of fruit. So much so,
you know, we have a little plum that's near our house.
It's a little plum tree. And since this year we
managed to get to it before the raccoon did that
likes to clamber over the roof. We got about two

(02:35:38):
and fifty pounds of plums off of the small fruit tree.
And it is not very big. It has a footprint
of maybe about ten ft in diameter of the widest
part of the tree. But it drops quite a bit
of fruit, especially if we get to it before it
all drops on the ground and our cars and the
driveway and the walkway and the cat and the cat.
But if we get to it, it's a lot. So honestly,

(02:36:01):
I set aside about a fifty pound tub that was like, okay,
we're gonna make some jam. We're gonna dry some of these,
we're going to do things with it, and the rest
we were able to give to friends. We toss some
of the free fridges, We toss some all you know,
we handed out because one good fruit tree makes a lot.
So when you see fruit trees around town, when you
walk under someone's cherry tree, it's okay to ask for

(02:36:23):
fruit too, because I don't know anyone that uses every
single piece of fruit off of any other fruit trees.
And you know, one of the things that you will
see is that um a lot of cities try to
discourage people from planting fruit trees along roads precisely because
when they come into fruit, they produce so much fruit

(02:36:45):
that it causes the problem. Also, it's a good way
to form relationships in your neighborhood. You say like, hey,
we have a whole bunch of plums, we have a
ton of whatever is dropping all over your front yard.
And then your neighbors may be like, oh, those weirdos
who were collecting fruit that one time. This tree in

(02:37:05):
my backyard that's about to drop all this stuff. I'll
let them know and maybe they'll come so I don't
have to clean it up afterwards. Yeah, which is again,
like people, we talk a lot about the importance of
building like community resiliency and community self defense, and folks
act like, well, how do I actually do that? Well,
that's maybe that's a start for you. Maybe the start
is like you get to know what do they have?
What do I have? And then you start talking about like, well,

(02:37:25):
I'm gonna can some stuff. Do you want to learn
how to can? You're like, oh, well, I was going
to dry at East. Do you want to learn it? Like?
Or do you want to borrow a dehydrator? And then
you're making connections that are very practical and also social
in your area. Also one plug, we've talked a little
bit about the process of canning. Dehydrators are great and
are pretty affordable, and they're not expensive. Yeah, like I

(02:37:48):
think you know, for sixty to eighty bucks, you can
usually get a decent dehydrator. And if you don't have one,
but you have an oven, if you put things on
a baking rack very low heat, you can just put it.
I would just turn my oven onto warm and you
can lay out things in your oven. I have a
nicer oven now that won't let me do this. But

(02:38:08):
when I used to live in like my first junkie apartment,
I would literally just stick a metal spoon, like a
one of my big cooking spoons in the door of
the ovens so that it would open and that would
just vent all of the steam of whatever I was
drying in the oven. So and meanwhile, if you live
in say a really dry climate or a climate where

(02:38:28):
you have a really dry stretch of time when fruit
is in season, and you have windows, screens and an
area where you can make sure there's a steady breeze
flowing across your your fruit, cut it thin, lay it
out in the sun. And that's why there's so much
sun dried X, Y and Z. That's really expensive when
you go to dram Joe's or whatever, and it's you know,

(02:38:50):
it's not just a matter we shouldn't just say that
like this is you have to forage for all this stuff,
like it could be a matter of like, well, during
these months, beef is is much cheaper, It's half as
much as it will be later. I'm going to buy
beef when it's cheap, and I'm going to make jerky now,
and then I will have protein when I can't afford
to purchase protein or as much protein later. In the
air speaking of jerky, I mean like one of the

(02:39:13):
just in the vein of you know, building your own
dehydrat or something one other thing that uh that that
I've done is you can just get a you know,
a decent box fan and some furnace filters and strap
them all together, and that can very successfully dry out
jerky um so D dehydrators. There's a lot of different
ways to Yeah, it is literally just kind of warm

(02:39:37):
or less in some cases, and air that is moving,
and it's it's like everything we've been talking about. There's
the you can buy very expensive dehydrators if you want to.
If you want to get a primo jerky making together,
you can you can make that a real expensive thing,
or you can do it for like trash, like with
with discarded crap that you find around in people's like

(02:39:59):
take aisles. And I think also the other thing to
think about we're talking about it's not all foraging, is
to think about we've been talking about supply chain disruptions,
but also one of the things in our current circumstances
is the weird gluts and excesses and surpluses that are
produced by our supply chains. And again, one of the

(02:40:21):
big ways that I learned about food preservation was food
not bombs and food preservation and also just food preparation
was food not bombs. Way back in the day, like
you need a special sound every time on specifically it
could happen here. Someone mentions food not bombs At this
point that was my entry back when I was just
kind of a liberally journalist guy to like anarchist practice.

(02:40:44):
Was like every protest I go to, there's these like
rusty punks handing out sandwiches, um, and then they have
neat stickers. I wonder what's going on here and well,
And one of the important things about food not bombs
is that food not bombs has sort of two different
ways that you obtain food for food not bombs. One
is you form relationships with first farmers, Yeah, people who

(02:41:10):
are going to have a lot of food, a lot
of supply coming in and there's stuff they're not going
to be able to use, either because it's ugly or
you know, it's carrots that look like dicks and they
don't feel comfortable putting the carrots that look like dicks
on the shop. Or Yeah, so you have your relationships

(02:41:30):
with like local businesses and local suppliers who aren't going
to be able to sell or use some of their stuff.
And right day Old Bread we are a bakery and
we pride ourselves on fresh bread. So we're going to
give our day olds and it makes us feel good
as liberals to give it to food not bombs. And
then on the flip side, there's the the fact that

(02:41:52):
the supply chain is designed to produce these excesses. But
then if it can't make money off of them, dispose
of them. That's where you end up with, you know,
cop starting, copscarding dumpsters for example, don't dumpster from the
cops that the cop guarded dumpsters. Those are the other dumpsters.
Go to other dumpsters because it's infuriating, it's very frustrating.

(02:42:12):
I get the desire to yell at the cop, but
there will you can find dumpsters that are not started.
If you are a store or restaurant, you're legally protected
to let people go through your dumpster. Yeah, not to you. Yeah.
During the Clinton administration, there's legislation that was passed that
straight up said, like at a federal level, if you

(02:42:33):
present I think the wording is seemingly wholesome and healthful
food two people for free, even if it has pastic
expiration date, that you are legally protected because it's dumb
to throw out food just because the thing that stamped
on the package has expired. Now that does mean if
you pick up some meat that's expired and the package

(02:42:54):
is puffy, don't eat that. And it also there are
also local ordinances and local laws that do restrict that
more because there are places where people get arrested for
handing out food to like you know, homeless people and whatnot.
But you know, check your local laws before doing anything
is radical and violent as giving out as giving out
free food to poor people. Yeah, there are these gluts

(02:43:15):
um and there are these points where the supply chain
is going to dump huge amounts of stuff into the system.
For example, right now, we just talked about how canning
supplies are kind of in short supply right now, which
is weird. I guarantee you that that means in a
couple of months there's going to be tons of canning
supplies everywhere. Or you know, when there were power outages

(02:43:36):
in Portland then there was a bunch of stuff, even
stuff that doesn't need to be refrigerated was getting thrown
out if it was stored in the refrigerated section because
stores have their specific protocols about like oh well if
this is left, if this freezer is unplugged, we have
to throw out everything in the freezer. Never mind that
a bunch of stuff in the freezer straight up says

(02:43:58):
right there on it does not require refrigeration, or only
refrigerate after opening after opening, So think about, like, where
are your local systems going to produce these huge bloods,
or maybe it's super cheap at certain times of year,
you know, you maybe corn goes down to like cents
an ear or five cents an ear at the end

(02:44:20):
of at the at the end of August, right, so
maybe you can get a whole ton of corn and
then you can dry it. Like you know, when I
was a kid, we lived in California, and we were
not doing a ton of canning. I did not grow
up canning. I didn't grow up preserving food. I didn't
in that type of way. But one thing that my

(02:44:41):
mom would do is when our little mire lemon tree
was covered in lemons, she would just juice a whole
pile of them and then poured into ice cube trays
and then empty the ice cube trays into gallon bags,
and then we had lemon you know, we would make
lemonade all year round. And her recipe literally called for
three lemon cubes to how much sugar and stuff as

(02:45:02):
she had it measured out, and so she would just
pop those in and that would just live in the
refrigerator all year round. Was just constant lemonade. One other
plug in terms of preserving stuff that I want to
talk a little bit about, but with the disclaimer that
I am by no means an expert. Um. One of
the other things that you know, the punks of Yesteryear

(02:45:23):
with their food not bombs houses got really excited about
was things like crowd and kombucha um and there are
some really great resources out there, specifically um wild Fermentation
and the Art of Fermentation, which are both by a
guy named Sander Cats on how to ferment food without
you you know, you're using naturally occurring bacteria, and fermentation

(02:45:47):
as a means of preservation is possibly the oldest means
of deliberate food storage that human beings have, and you
can do it with a wide variety of things. And
so again, if you're faced with one of those gluts
where you have a ton of stuff and nowhere you
can store it in your refrigerated storage areas, there's probably

(02:46:10):
a way you can jam it, you can dry it,
you can ferment it. You can you know, make vinegar
out of it, and you can find guides for all
of this for free online. Like all of this is
accessible if you have a phone. There are people in
people putting up videos on YouTube where you can watch
them do it too to make it. You do not
have to purchase books in order to learn. There's also

(02:46:30):
a lot of ways you know, you can make cold
storages in your backyard. You can definitely, like I have
a lot of guides on how to make your own
roots sellers than very small spaces and do things. Because
as long as you're not having your food produce the
thing that makes it that makes your food go bad,
there's a lot of different ways that you can prevent
food spoilage but that you can learn from. But honestly,

(02:46:53):
crowd and canning are probably some of the quickest and
easiest and as a general rule, um, you know, similarly,
if you don't have access to building a garden, you
probably also don't have access to like digging a root seller.
That being said, if you have a room or a
space in your house where you can reliably keep it

(02:47:15):
cool and dark, like below, I don't know, seventy degrees dark. Yeah,
like closets, there's probably a spot in your basement if
you live in a house where you have a basement,
or if you live in a basement, because if you
live in a situation, yeah, um, it's pretty easy. And
for that matter, when we talk about like roots sellers,
there are totally some d i y schematics for literally

(02:47:39):
digging a like three foot cube hole in your yard
and sinking in something to line it, and then that's
where you store stuff because if you dig down a
few feet below ground, it stays fifty degrees year round.
And I get like when you hear again, we keep
coming back to this, Like, I think a lot of

(02:47:59):
people get overwhelmed or get very anxious when they think
about trying to build resiliency because they live in a
tiny apartment, they don't have much in the way of money.
The important one of the most important things to understand
that like a lot of people, no matter how poor
you are, poorer than you have been doing this kind
of stuff for generations. Like it's why most of our
grandparents survived the thirties. Yeah, And I think one thing

(02:48:22):
that people have a misinterpretation of with canning and stuff
is that they are going to put stuff up, and
they're gonna like put up their cans and their jars
and then they will eventually build this. You know, I
have food for twelve years buried here. Nothing has that
great of a shelf life. I mean, I've definitely pulled
out some jerim that was from definitely didn't do that

(02:48:46):
this year that I had forgotten in the back of
a cupboard and eating it and it's fine. It's fine,
but usually a couple three years couple. But the idea
of canning and preserving was not that you are saving
food in case the eye falls in and everyone is doomed.
The reason that people preserve food was to extend the

(02:49:06):
bounty of a harvest season for a few additional weeks
or months. And if you think about it that way,
you're extending what you have two times when it would
be more enjoyable to eat it when it feels special. No,
I mean, it's like jam. A big part of the
reason for jam is there's really important nutrients in fruit
that maybe you can't get in the dead of winter,
but you can if you have jam. Just to be

(02:49:28):
a farm nerd for a minute, because Robert, I know
that you are a huge fan of pumpkin spice. Oh
the reason that had my first cup of the season today,
amazing monster. The reason that pumpkins and cinnamon and apples
and baking goods, baked goods with reasons in them are
all like a big deal and are all like apples

(02:49:51):
are a fruit that if you put apples in, say
a barrel, there's the saying about one bad apple. Because
if you make sure that an apple isn't rotting and
you put it in a cool, dark space with decent ventilation,
apples will keep for a very long time. Squash are
a big deal. Pumpkins are a big deal around this

(02:50:11):
time of year because buttercup squash, for example, and but
are not squash are both storage squash. They taste better
if they have been sitting in a dark storage area
for like two months. Then they have metabolized more of
their starches into sugars and their tastier. A lot of
a lot of like squash, root, vegetables, all of that

(02:50:32):
sort of stuff that you associate with, you know, all
harvest season is specifically storage crops. Because I'm originally from
New England. That's the time of year where you stop
being able to get food out of the ground, and
everything freezes and dies, and then it doesn't start up
again until April, and you need a way to keep

(02:50:54):
eating in the meantime. And also, though, let's just remember
that a lot of preserved foods are also neat, not
just because they are a substitutor because they're staying the harvest,
but because in order to preserve the food and keep
the nutrients, you have to go through a process. You
want to have the salt be too high, or the

(02:51:14):
acidity be too high, or the sugar content be too high,
or the water content be too low to enable bacterial growth,
and so that the fruits and vegetables and meats or
whatever don't rock. But that means that you get so
many awesome and different flavors that you would never you know, grapes,
grapes are great. Whatever grapes preserved in wine vinegar. That

(02:51:34):
sounds really cool. You can do that, and then you
have a completely different thing that you normally don't eat,
you know, dried dried figs, apple chips, like. You also
get a whole new variety of foods that are not
just extending in harvest but are also other things to eat.
You know, my kids are not going to toss a
whole pile of fresh fruit in their backpacks sometimes because

(02:51:57):
it squishes at the bottom of their backpacks and I
find weeks later, and it's absolutely terrifying fortunate. On the
other hand, a bunch of you know, dried dried prunes,
plums and stuff from the garden that dried out. They'll
take baggies of those, And if I find them a
month later because they didn't eat them, it isn't the
end of the world either. And and again like there's

(02:52:19):
a lot of fun stuff, like you know, yeah, grapes
by themselves are are fine. You can also turn grapes
into stuff that will help you preserve other stuff. And
raisins in baked goods. If you've ever had a loaf
of raisin bread and a loaf of white bread in
the same bread box, the white bread will mold first.

(02:52:42):
Raisins are actually a preservative. It's why people started putting
raisins in bread. Yeah, and I think we should we
should close out, but I kind of wanted to do
that by circling back to the overall topic of this week,
which is like building resiliency when you don't have much
in the way of money or resources. And one of
the things that you may not think of his building
resiliency is exactly what you were talking about. Being in

(02:53:02):
you aline paying attention to what is available, what time
of the year, what is cheap, what time of the year,
what is like, when do the gluts happen, and when
do the shortages happen, Because that doesn't actually cost any money.
You don't even have to buy things like you're already
you're all always going to be going out to the
store to get food occasionally. It's it's it's keeping an
eye on understanding what is available growing naturally and what

(02:53:23):
is available in the economy, because that connects you more
to the environment you live in, to the climate as
it changes, um into your community, all of which make
you more resilient, and none of which costs you a dime.
It just costs you attention. Also just a plug for
you know, people who have access to the ecosystems where
this is relevant. Things like shellfish licenses are great. I'm

(02:53:47):
not going to tell anyone that they should, you know,
seek out sport fishing as a means of obtaining calories.
On the other hand, in Oregon, at least for I
think it's five five bucks, nine bucks. Oh, it's up
to ten bucks now. But so for ten bucks, get
a shellfish license. You go down to a cove and
you rape cockles for an hour and then you have,

(02:54:09):
you know, an enormous amount of food that you can
do all of the preservation that we've talked about. You
can also just make chowder and freeze it, you know whatever.
But there's a lot of ways to to cheaply obtain
calories from out in the world. Yeah, all right, well
that's going to do it for us today. Um, until

(02:54:31):
next time, remember experiment on your friends with different medical
care treatments. Don't do that. Although on the other hand,
look up the if you are in the Pacific Northwest,
there is the Portland Fruit Tree Project up here, which
goes around and connects gleaners with fruit trees that need
to be gleaned. Um, so people who have over abundant

(02:54:52):
trees that they don't want all the stuff. That's a
really great resource. In other cities, I'm sure there's other things.
And also the Falling Fruit Maps map, so you can
go online and if there's not already one in your area.
They also make it really easy to be able to
chart and put in trees in your area. So if
it's saying that you're excited about and you love identifying trees,

(02:55:14):
you can go in and actually start charting your neighborhood.
Also figure out how to identify, you know, five wild
plants that grow in your area that you can eat,
because it's always nice to have more variety and it's
fun to be out on a walk and be like,
oh cool, now I have a thing that I can
toss in with dinner when I get back. Yeah, And

(02:55:36):
we've talked about how there's like the poor version of
the cheap version. There's also like the centrist version and
the radical version of that. The centrist version is like
I just want to know, like what kind of edible
fruits grow naturally in my area. The more radical version
is I'm going to start guerrilla grows of edible foods
on like available in my area. I'm gonna seed ball
some ship. I'm gonna like very get insurgent with my

(02:55:56):
yeah to prepare food. Yeah. Things that grow rise only
take root real easy in the ecosystems they like and
are real hard to get rid of once they get
crime gardens I'm not going to say people should tear
out the random trees that cities plant and then replace.
No one can say that, but it's possible to do

(02:56:17):
trees didn't make food with trees that did make food
in the same spot, probably nobody would notice except the
people who got and there would be more free calories
in your area. If you know the kind of things
that have been happening the last several years, continue to happen.
All right, that's the episode. That's the episode. Hey, We'll

(02:56:46):
be back Monday, with more episodes every week from now
until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen
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(02:57:08):
Thanks for listening. Hi. I'm Robert sex Reese, host of
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