Terraform: Search for Common Ground

The Terraform series is when we at hood politics introduce you to people actually making the world more livable. today we talk to Shamil Idriss. CEO of Search for Common Ground, a peace building org active in 32 countries where there is extreme conflict. We discuss their local model and top down bottom up approach. Learn more at Sfcg.org 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Media, So listen, this year is going to be a
ton of wild news that is bleak news.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Flash like this year's any different.

Speaker 1 (00:15):
But what I wanted to do this year was not
just present to y'all the bleakness. I want to bring
to y'all some of the most dopest people I've met
over the years that are actually making the world better,
because it's really hard to see that sometimes in amidst
of all the noise, and even among the people that
you know, actually like really outside trying to do good,

(00:37):
it's always some sort of asterisk next to their name.
I know this firsthand, which we can get into a
little later. This series is called Terraform. Now some of
y'all may know I have a coffee company.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
It's called Terraform Cold Grew.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
But that origin story comes from a poetry book that
I wrote called Terraform Building a Livable World, and out
of that book has.

Speaker 2 (00:59):
Formed us equallyps.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
The last albums I've dropped have been all based around
the book Terraform, and what terraform means Terrorform is the
process of making a planet and livable. And as I
looked around in the world, I'm like, yo, you know
this planet is getting less and less livable. So what
if we saw our own planet, our politics, our culture,
our nations, our environment, our communities, our families, and ultimately

(01:25):
ourselves as terraforming projects. So the poetry and those books
are around those sort of ideas, and then out of
that the Cold Group company. But ultimately it's a call
to action. It's a mission build a livable world and
imagine a better future. Which is why me and cool
Zone Media got along so well, because ultimately this is

(01:47):
our hope. We're not just reporting on how the world sucks.
We're reporting on ways and people that are actually making
it better terraformers. So I'm going to bring you different
people that are really outside building.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
A Liverpool world.

Speaker 1 (02:01):
As always, you can go to my personal website, prophitpop
dot com. You could get the book, you can stream
the records. But right now I want to introduce you
to my man Shamil. Now, Shamil is the CEO of

(02:28):
an org called Search per Common Ground.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
Backstory with that I was for many years.

Speaker 1 (02:34):
I went from a fan to an ambassador, to an
artist of residence to a board member of an organization
called Preemptive Love. Preemptive Love had a very similar vision
to Search for Common Grounds. Matter of fact, it is
almost like it was. If Preemptive Love did everything right
in thirty years, we would look like Search. Preemptive Love
was again a peacemaking organization, right who existed in conflict

(02:59):
regions wherever there's violence, And if you're a piece building org,
that's a little different than peace first response, although that's
a part of what you have to do. Sometimes you
just got to stop the bleeding before you can broker piece.
So we were in and still are in Iraq, Venezuela,
the Juadez, the Mexican border, Israel, Palestine, and then was

(03:22):
moving into Afghanistan. How you build peace varies based on
what the needs are of the community. I've mentioned this
org in multi my music, but a lot of my
music I just believed in what they were trying to
do the way that they were doing it. There was
some drama that happened in Preemptive Love that made it
to where the org had to merge. And it wasn't

(03:43):
that they were not working with refugees. They worked a
lot with refugees, Syrian refugees specifically.

Speaker 2 (03:49):
Problem was internal.

Speaker 1 (03:50):
There was a lot that happened that eventually we had
to take the org and merge it under org that
had a much more established infrastructure internally, and that's how
we got to search for common ground because what they
were doing while we were in five countries, they was
in thirty country while we were still ran by our founder,

(04:11):
they had gone through two CEO transition, was just doing
a lot right, and that's how we.

Speaker 2 (04:18):
Partnered our up. What they were able to do very well,
I'm doing all this just so that we can get
to the meet.

Speaker 1 (04:23):
When we actually talked to Idris or Shamel Idris, that's
his last name, what we were doing well was we
were telling our story well like people saw and knew
exactly what was going on on the ground because we
was telling y'all, like, this is what we was doing.
So as you know how NGL's work, like, you got
to raise money, and that money being raised for us

(04:44):
was like, well, it's real simple if people just see
what we're doing and do that. So we had a
donor base of just like small donors of citizens, community,
people that cared about it. We had a pretty big
donor list. Where we were not good at was getting
the big government grants. So there were certain things that
we couldn't do. We loved about Search for Common Ground,
which I'm now on the board of. Over there was

(05:04):
that they were incredible at getting the big government grants
because receipts they were able to put together.

Speaker 2 (05:14):
For the things that they've done.

Speaker 1 (05:15):
I mean, by god, they're in Darfur right now, my lord,
the part of the Memr civil war down there.

Speaker 2 (05:21):
Like guess who was at the table broker in that piece.
We go talk about it later.

Speaker 1 (05:25):
It's crazy they would get the government grants and they
wouldn't put their logos on stuff because they were like, well,
it's really not about us.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
It's about the peace.

Speaker 1 (05:31):
It's about the peace building may be ten year programs
that they put together, and they felt like, what's lame
to like put our logo on stuff and like shove
cameras in our workers' faces because that sucks, Like let
them just do the work, like it's not about that.
They felt like it was sensationalized and it would cheapen
the work if we was putting it all on social media,

(05:52):
to whereas at primpty level it was like, no, we're
trying to celebrate y'all, like y'all doing the real work.
You feel me like if people want to be a
part of what y'all doing. So there was a mind shift.
So we had what they needed and they had what
we needed. Anyway, that's y'all hear.

Speaker 2 (06:06):
From me all the time. Y'all need to hear from Shamille.

Speaker 1 (06:08):
So people saying, ladies and gentlemen, please say what's up

(06:35):
to the homie hero an incredible person who don't like
his name on stuff, which is part of what I
like about him. Is my man, Shamille, My saying that, right,
Shamille or Shamoh, yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:46):
Shamo Shamo. Okay, I've heard you've heard worse.

Speaker 3 (06:52):
Yeah, I've heard a lot worse. That's fine.

Speaker 2 (06:54):
I tried to I tried to swahiliad.

Speaker 3 (07:00):
Man.

Speaker 2 (07:00):
So first of all, Happy New Year.

Speaker 3 (07:04):
Happy New Year too, Happy holidays. Hope you got a
good break.

Speaker 4 (07:07):
I did.

Speaker 3 (07:07):
Man.

Speaker 2 (07:08):
We had a chance to finally kick it in person.

Speaker 1 (07:10):
Uh this past right before the holidays shut down in
New York City with the rest of the board, had
a dope little meeting. I got to meet these people
in person. Super crazy experience and like I'm like everybody
else where, I feel like, why why am I here?

Speaker 3 (07:29):
Like many.

Speaker 4 (07:33):
After we broke up, everyone of the on our senior
leadership team was like, I love that guy, because you
would come in and you know, we'd be having these
conversations about all this stuff, complex stuff whatever. You just
kind of cut right to the g. You have this
like artist's eye yes, enough of something. Yes, Like you
would say in like three clear words, but we said

(07:56):
poor paragraphs.

Speaker 3 (07:57):
So I thought that was great.

Speaker 2 (07:58):
Oh man, that's fun.

Speaker 1 (07:59):
Man. That's actually kind of what we do here on
this show is like, you know, people say a whole
lot of you know, blase bla, wootie woop, a whole
lot of big terms to try to say something that
I'm like, hey, hey, are you are you just saying
you don't want to pay for it?

Speaker 2 (08:15):
That what you're saying, Like, that's all you're trying to say,
right is you don't want pay for it?

Speaker 1 (08:18):
Okay, then say that you know, but yeah, anyway, search
for common Ground one of to me, one of the
most unique NGOs out there because of one there philosophical
approach and to the fact that like if it's a
very much if you know, you know type situation, you know,

(08:39):
and that's for our community to like, we like stuff
like that, Like people like the prophet Lil Wayne. He
has a lyric where he said, real g's moving silence
like lasagna because the G is silent anyway. So yeah,
so like so you know, you real if you move
in in silence, like nobody's there's no you know, your
logos not on all this stuff, you know, flashy, I'm

(09:00):
out here doing the work, you know. And that's what
we really loved about search or common ground. And there's receipts,
the proofs in the pudding, like this is what we do.
Here's examples thirty years of thirty years or forty years,
forty years now forty one, god dog, forty years of
receipts of experience, of proof that like we're really out
here building peace.

Speaker 2 (09:20):
So I'm done talking.

Speaker 1 (09:21):
I'm gonna ask you a couple questions to introduce you
all to the or so that people can see, like
really what they're doing out here. So, first of all,
this ORG is not necessarily a humanitarian or first response thing,
although that's part of what we do. But you your
ORG is a peace building organization, that's right. So can

(09:46):
you break down to them like what you really mean
by that as in terms of it being a distinction
from like humanitarian.

Speaker 4 (09:55):
Sure, well again, well thanks social for having me. I'm
here and maybe not as silent anymore about you getting
a platform, which is.

Speaker 3 (10:04):
So Yeah.

Speaker 4 (10:06):
You know, there's so much going on in the world
that people get kind of overwhelmed with all the causes
and all the needs and whatever. And I guess the
reason prop that doesn't search for common ground is so
committed to piece is it's kind of like the foundation
for everything else. Think about it like oxygen, Like nobody
pays attention to it or recognizes it until it's gone,
and then it's the only thing that matters, you know,
because of the biggest priority and peace is really trying

(10:29):
to create the conditions where you don't have the humanitarian
crisis in the first place. And I think one of
the things that we've seen over the last twenty years
people may or may not. I think people feel this
in their gut, but the numbers unfortunately bear it out.
The last twenty years, conflict has been going up, humanitarian
crisis have been rising every single year, and the gap
between the needs that are out there in the world

(10:51):
and what we're providing to meet them has also grown
every year.

Speaker 3 (10:55):
So it's totally unsustainable.

Speaker 4 (10:56):
Right, you got more and more humanitary crises, bigger and
bigger gas of unmet crisis and the world needs more
than just more humanitarian response. We need that too, But
what we really need to do is get ahead of
this and prevent more of these crises. And the things
that are really driving these humanitarying crises are like climate
and conflict.

Speaker 3 (11:14):
How we deal with conflict, how we deal with our differences.

Speaker 2 (11:18):
That's brilliant.

Speaker 1 (11:19):
So so I love it because it's like you when
you think about like where the crisis come from, like
climate situation is is causing misallocation of resources. There's not
a there's not enough food to go around because there's
not enough formable ground. So then that means that people
are gonna grab for what they can have. And when
you start grabbing and building fences around food, you're gonna

(11:42):
create violence. Right, Yeah, that's gonna happen, you know what
I'm saying. So if you're talking about environmental justice, if
you're talking about you know, food, medical services, all that
has to do with the fact that peace is lost.
But if you come in, I know what's dope about
y'all is again it's a ten year like humanitarian usually
is like, let's not the bleeding right now.

Speaker 2 (12:03):
What you're saying is like, well, let's make sure the
bleeding never starts.

Speaker 1 (12:07):
That's right, you know, And that and that means that
there's some really hard conversations, right, and some really hard
tactics that again, for you guys, it's at least ten
years right when you're going to get to a place.

Speaker 4 (12:23):
Yeah, when we think about it, we make generational long commitments,
so we even go double that's twenty years.

Speaker 3 (12:28):
It's a generation, which.

Speaker 4 (12:29):
Doesn't mean it doesn't mean that you don't accomplish things
in one year, six months. But in terms of really
shifting systems, you know, in terms of really creating piece
at scale where it's not that you're not going to
have crises. You're still going to have crises, but those
crises you can be able to rally to deal with them.
You're not going to fall into violence, you know. And
it's interesting that you talk about climate that way. You know,

(12:51):
we have you know, we've got over a thousand full
time piece builders on the front lines in thirty three
countries around the world, and in Africa as an example,
the one of the biggest conflict dynamics across the entire
continent is the farmer herder conflict, which sounds like a
small little thing.

Speaker 3 (13:09):
You got farmers and you have herders. Okay, people don't
realize all the way from.

Speaker 4 (13:13):
West Africa, Nigeria, all the way through to Sudan in
East Northeast Africa, one of the biggest conflict dynamics is
because of climate.

Speaker 3 (13:24):
Right you have people who are nomadic, the herders, they've.

Speaker 4 (13:30):
Got their livestock that they're moving, you know, and those
livestock have less and less area to graze in because
it's going dry, and so they're.

Speaker 3 (13:38):
Encroaching more and more on the farm land.

Speaker 4 (13:40):
And so the farmers who aren't nomadic, they live in
their spots, they've got their plot of land, are getting
angry at the at the herders. And this is all
exacerbated by the fact that a bunch of national boundaries
were drawn across that continent, you know, tribal communities and
all that kind of stuff on top of it.

Speaker 3 (13:57):
So like that's a climate right there, you got right there.
The only way to.

Speaker 4 (14:00):
Address that is to get all of those people actually
together and have them figure out a solution, not impose
them from the top or from outside and the process
of bringing people together like that and building enough trust
that they're willing to work together on a solution that'll
help everybody. That's actually a twenty year process.

Speaker 1 (14:18):
Yeah, it takes a while to let some dude come
in here and be like, yeah, what do you know? Yeah, like,
what do you really know about what we're going through?
And one thing that is true about SEARCH is the
fact that like, well ninety percent of the staff are
local born and raised, So like, well, actually we do
know because we're from here, you know. So I think
that that's again a very unique situation. But like in

(14:42):
what you're saying, is is there something that we also
learned in our in our meeting here was the top down,
bottom up approach.

Speaker 2 (14:50):
Yeah, talk a little bit about that.

Speaker 4 (14:52):
Well, you know, it's really popular to say all changes
driven from the bottom up or all change requires good leadership.

Speaker 3 (15:01):
It's all true. You can't do it. You can't do
it just bottom up.

Speaker 4 (15:04):
You can't do it just top down, right, you know,
you need to drive change from the bottom up and
from the top down. And so you talked about the teams,
the search for common ground teams, the really key thing
about the search for common ground teams is two things. Yes,
they're local, you already mentioned that one. But really importantly,
they're also drawn from the communities in conflict, like so

(15:25):
they actually they're not just local, but you've got access
to all the major political groups, ethnic groups.

Speaker 3 (15:31):
You know, if you're dealing with.

Speaker 4 (15:33):
Conflict between like police and young people in a city
anywhere in the world, would help a lot if your
team was made up of retired cops, youth activists, former
gang leaders who are instead of sitting across from each
other seeing each other as the problem, are sitting side
by side facing a common problem together. That sounds simple,

(15:53):
but as everybody knows, like that takes time. So when
you talk and then what they start strategizing about is okay,
look because of your unique insight, Because then I say, look,
if you use that word, nobody's gonna listen to you
in my community. Or you know what, if you can
do something in that neighborhood, you're gonna have credibility for years.

Speaker 3 (16:14):
Yeah. Or you know what, if you can get that partnership,
go for it.

Speaker 4 (16:17):
Or you know what, if you partner with that guy,
nobody's gonna talk to you and you only get those
insights by being both local and we call it multi partial,
drawn from all of the different parties.

Speaker 3 (16:28):
Right, You're not some like outside neutral person. You are
the community.

Speaker 4 (16:32):
And so so when you and those are the kinds
of people who can talk about top down and bottom
up change, they can talk about.

Speaker 3 (16:38):
What needs to happen in the communities to drive the
kind of change.

Speaker 4 (16:40):
We need, and what needs to happen at the level
of politics and powerful institutions to make that change stick.

Speaker 2 (16:46):
Yeah that's good man.

Speaker 1 (16:49):
Yeah, you mentioned like a very real situation that hits
home in the sense that, like, you know, you asked,
like you're trying to broker peace, and like la hood,
you want me to sit across the table from a
person who quite possibly murdered some of my family members,
you know, and of course we don't want more murder
to happen, But like, I feel like if I were

(17:11):
to like sit down and try to talk peace with
this person, I'm spitting on my family member's grade, right,
and he looking at me thinking the same thing. So
I'm like, if you willing to talk to me, I'm
now questioning youry I'm questioning your gangster because I'm like
how was you even willing to talk to me because
I'm not you know what I'm saying, Like, I'm like,

(17:32):
I don't care nothing about your truth until there's too
much bloodshed. Right, So there's that hurdle of sort of
lived experience that again is so interesting for us too,
because I'm like, at the same time, that person sitting
across the table from you, man, we was in the

(17:53):
same after school daycare, We went to the same head start,
you know, probably went the same middle school, probably was
on the same league team. Like they're not strangers, you know,
Like I you live two streets from me, you know,
so in our and our moms probably went to the
same church. Like there's this this like thing about community
that no matter where you put it, like you said,

(18:15):
like nomadic tribes in Sudan, you know, or you know,
east side and west side in Los Angeles. It's like tribalism.
Tribalism and a fight for resources is a fight for resources.
The idea of dignity is still sitting across from there.
And it again for me to be willing to talk
to you, I need somebody, like you said, I need
somebody super certified from my side that I'm like, oh,

(18:38):
this is my og. I like, I'm gonna listen to you,
you know what I'm saying, And they need somebody from
their side that likes when we see r ogs talking,
it's like maybe I don't this is weird to me,
but maybe something's happening here. You know.

Speaker 4 (18:50):
That's really Look, that's really powerful the way you talk
about that, because I don't yet one thing you just
triggered from you when you said that that one thing
we would never do We would ever push or strong
arm or manipulate or like we would never try to
get somebody to sit with somebody that they're not willing to. Like,
that's not how piece is made. That's that's kind of
the worst thing you can do. Like you should really

(19:12):
like empathize with or understand these people who who are
trying to annihilate you, you know, in every other of life. Right,
So that's not So that's a really good point, and
that dynamic exists pretty much everywhere where we work. That Yeah,
like real hurt and real not just historical but oftentimes
like present and ongoing violence and injustice, and so one

(19:34):
of the things that we do.

Speaker 3 (19:34):
You know, we talked about this a little bit when
we were together.

Speaker 4 (19:36):
Like, one of the first things that we do in
any community is instead of asking what's going wrong, because
everything's gone, there's so much is going wrong that it'll
be you'd get overwhelmed by it. In any community that's
in conflict, we ask people like, Okay, if if this
is an ethnic divide, is there anyone is there anyone

(19:58):
in the other ethnicity.

Speaker 3 (19:59):
Who you actually trust? Or if you're dealing with the
corrupt government, you know.

Speaker 4 (20:04):
Is there one minister or even like somebody who who
you actually feel like is trying to serve the people.
Or if it's the example that we were just talking
about with police, if this is about out of control
police force, is there one.

Speaker 3 (20:16):
Captain or even just a beat cop who you feel
like is and to the police to do the same thing.

Speaker 4 (20:21):
Is there anyone in the community you say, the community
won't work with you, they don't want to talk to you.
Is there is there anyone that you see playing a
positive old community that you that you respect. And one
of the things that we found, like one hundred percent
of the time prop like one hundred percent of the
time in every community. First of all, people appreciate those
questions they like not just being talked to like they're
a problem. They like being asked their own views. And

(20:44):
then one hundred percent of the time you get lots
of names. You have lots of names like no matter
how bad and unjust, the situation is people like, you
know what, there's this one guy, or you know what,
there's one organized there's one community organizer that like everyone
you know. And those are the people, the one that
we gravitate towards. We try to understand what they're trying
to make happen, how we can be helpful. Sometimes we

(21:06):
share examples which they can take or leave of how
people in similar situations around the world have kind of
dealt with some similar dynamic system. So you build slowly.
That way, you don't just sort of jump in with
a solution. And to your point, you got to start
with we call it's you know again, it's one of
those clunky terms, appreciative inquiry, right, it's a wholeproach. I

(21:28):
first came across that term in like a Harvard Business
Review article. I had nothing to do with a Warren piece.
It was about how you change culture in your company. Okay,
and I've read this article and I was like this
is actually the best description of what our teams do
that I've seen had nothing And so basically what appreciative
inquiry says, it's this really well researched field that it says,

(21:50):
the worst way to change behavior in your community and
your company, in your family and whatever, the worst way
to change behavior is to punish bad behavior.

Speaker 3 (22:00):
The best way to change behavior.

Speaker 4 (22:02):
Is to identify and amplify and celebrate and incentivize every
step towards the desired behavior, even if it's a tiny step,
even if it's a tiny step. And I've seen this
with my own daughter, Like if if I yelled at
my daughter, you know, for not putting her shoes in
the crate that I got for that specific purpose, it
works a lot worse than if I celebrate her like

(22:24):
crazy because she put one shoe in today, she's much
more likely to put you and tomorrow anyway. So that's
the approach you take with communities and conflict too, Like
you don't go in and attack people. Whatever you try
to understand, Like even if there's one small step someone takes,
that's what you really amplify. You really amplify the good,
and you feed the good and over time, it builds
a momentum that is powerful and relentless.

Speaker 3 (23:16):
Man.

Speaker 1 (23:17):
Yeah, there's that one cop that like whenever he, you know,
see us on a corner, it's like he wraps us
up or you know, like it's never he's never out
here like being crazy about it. It's like if you know,
if we're selling bootleg DVDs, it's like, all right, Homi,
how many you got, I'll just buy the DVDs off you?
And you gotta get out of here, man, like you

(23:38):
know what I mean, Like just like stuff like that
to where it's like okay, like I feel you. It's like, man,
I'm not feel man, how many you need? Okay, give
me this? All right, get out of here, you know
what I mean? And like those things are different, you
know what I'm saying, Like, hey, what you got in
that backpack?

Speaker 2 (23:51):
Don't even tell me? Just give your back you feel
you're like all right?

Speaker 4 (23:54):
You know.

Speaker 1 (23:54):
So there's like there's that one dude that like, you know,
I mean whatever, Like I mean, I don't whatever, but.

Speaker 2 (24:00):
I guess you are right.

Speaker 3 (24:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:01):
So yeah, that's that's that's good. Now let's get into
some examples. Now, like you said, thirty three different countries
and every country, Like you said, you said, these are
like twenty year twenty year at least twenty year processes, right,
So how you actually implement these lofty ideas are can

(24:23):
vary as wild as your imagination can go. The two
that in my head that stick out in my head
are mem r and was it Nigeria with the soccer
where was the soccer.

Speaker 4 (24:37):
At We've done soccer tournaments in countries all around the world.
Of Congo was where what is with the Democratic Republic
of Congo. It's you know, a huge ninety million people
center of Africa where yeah, the team so yeah, I'm happy,
is happy to tell some of those stories?

Speaker 3 (24:54):
Yeah man?

Speaker 2 (24:55):
And yeah the TV show they're like yeah, yeah, yeah,
tell some stories.

Speaker 3 (24:59):
Yeah, you know in Congo just about yeah, I think
it was like twenty ten.

Speaker 4 (25:07):
There was a terrible thing that very senior un like
the most senior United Nations official in the Democratic Republic
of Congo. She said she called the country the rape
capital of the world, which was a horrible thing to say.
But what she was trying to point out was that
like sexual assault was like off the charts in the country,
and more than half of the assaults and the rapes
were committed by people in uniform, so the police or

(25:30):
the military, you know, abusing the very people they're supposed
to be protecting. So you just sort of imagine how
much anger and hatred and fear community had. And our team,
our Congolese team you know, working there, took what we
call the common ground approach. It's a three step process. First,
you build trust, then you turn that trust into cooperation

(25:53):
that actually makes a difference, and over time that cooperation
can trigger breakthroughs. Right, So what they did to build
trust every community, this is different, just like you're saying,
like it would be different in every community. So in Congo,
teams use soccer tournaments to get the police and young
and young people and people in the community actually doing
things together. It was one of the few things they
would get them to do together that wouldn't have them

(26:15):
fighting with each other or getting into an argument. And
then they turned those into community theater performances where they
would like go into communities and literally in the middle
of town square. They'd like bang on drums and call
people together, would come out of their homes and sit
in the town square and they put on a performance
of a play and the play was kind of dramatizing
what was going on, but with a lot of humor

(26:36):
and stuff between the police and the community. And then
they turned and that was one of the few things
that would get the police and the community kind of
sitting together talking together. After those soccer tournaments, after those performances,
those plays, they would open up conversations, right, and they
start these community dialogues that turn in. So that was
the initial step, just try to get people, just figure

(26:56):
out what's people to sit together, right, and different communities
that different things, but in every community there's some stuff
you can do, cultural events that will get people sitting together.

Speaker 3 (27:06):
And then the second step was to turn that into cooperation.

Speaker 4 (27:08):
So those conversations they started having, they started talking about
what they could do together to actually improve the situation
between the police and the community members. There were rallies
against sexual assault that some of the police started participating
in that were organized by the communities and some of
the more progressive police units. They agreed the community to

(27:31):
develop scorecards. So all right, let's do this. Let's develop
a scorecard with the community of the kinds of things
that the community would like to see from the police,
and those scorecards will be completed regularly, like every quarter
right where people would rank how the police were on
these scorecards, and the police captains would use those when
they were doing reviews, promotions, act and stuff. So part

(27:54):
of the feedback that they were getting was what does
the community think of you?

Speaker 3 (27:57):
Right?

Speaker 4 (27:57):
And eventually they did enough of this work that there
was some There were a couple of big breakthroughs. One
of the biggest is some training that was developed out
of this program. This took twelve years prop but some
training that was helped out of this program became mandatory
in the orientation of both the military and the police.
Over two hundred thousand soldiers and police officers two hundred

(28:17):
thousand in the country have now been through that training.
We produced a TV show with the police, Total Fit
likes a drama called Inda Pisa. It's a bad guy.
He used to be a rebel, you know. He goes
to this un program to put his guns down. Now
he wants to serve his community, so he decides he's
going to become a police officer. He becomes a cadet

(28:40):
and the show picks up just as he's graduated and
he's all excited to service community, except it's very real,
it's very pretty. He hasn't been paid for three months.
The community that he wants, he's surrounded by corrupt cops.
The community that he's supposed to serve hates them or
they're scared of them.

Speaker 3 (28:56):
And so that follows this guy his life. He's actually
trying to.

Speaker 2 (29:00):
Go be a good Yeah.

Speaker 4 (29:02):
Yeah, we suck and and and we use that show
to open up discussions all over the country around the
around the program. And so, I mean, the last evaluation
that we did on this, we had levels of sexual
assault in the most the worst areas in the east.

Speaker 3 (29:16):
Of the country had dropped by more than fifty percent. Yeah,
the it was cool.

Speaker 4 (29:20):
One of the one of the things that the police said,
you know, we had like both written answers and like years.
One of the most common written answers that the police
put in was that people actually call us. Now there
really people call us.

Speaker 3 (29:32):
Now.

Speaker 2 (29:33):
We used to be the last people that yeah, I
don't call it, I don't call lap. I take it
right now. I called him. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (29:40):
So the police were like really, they were like, this
is this is amazing. People actually call us when there's
a problem. So anyway, that's one story. There's another strike
to share with you. I just came back from visiting
our team. I think I mentioned to you when I
saw you in New York. I had just come back
with a couple of the other board members from Kenya.

Speaker 2 (29:56):
Okay, yeah, oh yeah, yeah yeah.

Speaker 4 (29:58):
And like you know, one of the things that's happening
all around the world is, you know, you see more
and more terrorist attacks and attacks by they call them
non state armies, right, so people like you aren't you know.
And so in Keny you had some really bad attacks
from the al Shabab terror group. You know, they blew
up the American embassy and Kenya. They came in with

(30:18):
machine guns and shot up shopping malls, killed so many
people in the country. And oftentimes what happens is that
the government's response to these things in some ways, in
some ways the cure is as bad as the disease.

Speaker 3 (30:32):
Right. They're so heavy handed, they come down, they abuse
the entire population.

Speaker 4 (30:35):
They're just cracking down on everybody because they don't know
what to do, right, they don't know how to fight
these groups. So in Kenya, what they did was they
they realized that these people from al Shabab, from the
terrorist group. They were coming in through the from the shore.
They were pretending to be fishermen. And there's something there's
night fishing.

Speaker 3 (30:53):
People go out. It's a big part of.

Speaker 4 (30:55):
The economy along the coast of Kenya is people go
out fishing at night, they bring the patches in at
dawn and they sell them at the market. Right. Well,
when the government realized that people were posing as night
fishermen so they could infiltrate the country with their weapons,
they just banned it. They banned night fishing. They shut
down night fishing. Yeah, and they destroyed the economy basically
of that whole coastal area as a way to stop terrorism.

(31:17):
And you can imagine what happened, right Like, people lost
their jobs, they got pissed off. There was a lot
of clashes between the police and the communities along the shore.
This went on for six years and are incredibly there's
a woman there named Judy Kamamo who runs all of
our programs there Kenyan women who used to work for

(31:38):
Mongarima Tai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her
Kenyan environmental activism. Anyway, so Judy had this idea. She
started shuttling back and forth between the police, the fishermen,
the youth groups. She went to some of the human
rights organizations that were saving.

Speaker 3 (31:53):
All their money to sue the government.

Speaker 4 (31:55):
Others of them were using their money to organize protests,
and she said, look, why don't you put some of
them money for protests and lawsuits into an idea that
I've got here where we could try to build some
trust between the police and the community and come up
with a solution that would allow us to get the
fishing started again, but would actually prevent some of this terrorism.

(32:15):
And long story short, it took about six six and
a half months of shuttling back and forth creatively listening,
lots of listening, listening with a lot more listening than talking,
and eventually Judy was able to get these groups coming
together and they came up with an idea of getting
these electronic scan cards, Like if you're going to fish
off the coast of Kenyon, you have to be registered anyway, right,

(32:37):
but there was never any way kind of verifying it.
So they got these scan cards that they would say, Okay,
if you're a fisherman and you get registered, you get
this little card, and all the police are equipped with
little scanners and they can just scan. As long as
you've got a card, you're legity. That simple solution only
came about when the groups started talking to each other.
That Judy had brought together the fishermen collective, the youth groups,

(32:58):
the police themselves, and they reopen night fishing after six years,
So the whole economy was revived basically because one.

Speaker 3 (33:05):
Woman was like, this is crazy. You know, where nobody's
being served.

Speaker 1 (33:09):
You know, you're driving us into the hands of the
very people that's trying to Yeah, and that's something that's
actually leads me to the next thing where it's like,
you know, sometimes it's I forget the name of the
Harvard study, but like when the powers that be come
cracked down so hard, so hard that you eventually almost

(33:30):
guarantee the birth of a new resistance or terrorist group,
you know what I'm saying, Like, it's it's almost guarantee.
It's like you just you just prove their point by
coming down.

Speaker 3 (33:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (33:43):
Yeah, this is like a I'm been having this conversation
with a lot of you know, Israelis in supports of
Israel lately in terms of how the war's.

Speaker 3 (33:51):
Going on right now.

Speaker 2 (33:52):
That's exactly what I was gonna ask you.

Speaker 4 (33:54):
Yeah, yeah, if it is, it is not, let's say,
with the word's going on, even if you're only concerned literally,
even if your only concern was israel security, even if
you had no concerns, no humanitarian concerns, no concerns about
human rights, even if your only concern was I got

(34:14):
to assure the security of Israel, if that was all
you cared about, this would not be the way to
get there. Yeah, because it has never been the case
that a massive military assault on a terrorist group or
a violent extremist group that caused huge civilian casualties and
did the threat.

Speaker 3 (34:35):
What it does is it metastasizes it.

Speaker 4 (34:37):
It either like he says, it either gives birth to
Hamas two point zero, whatever that would look like, or
it sort of disperses it and you get a lot
more extremism, you know, and violent extremism that targets people,
you know.

Speaker 3 (34:50):
Israeli's Jews, others outside of Israel.

Speaker 4 (34:53):
And that's a big fear that of God right now
in terms of where this is all heading and saying
that it is not, you know, intended to sort of
negate in any way that the Israelis need to be secure,
But it's just like it's interesting because there's this you know,
the UN Development Program is like the biggest agency in
the UN. So this is the people doing development work
all around the world. And they put out too, like

(35:14):
the biggest reports on what drives people into violent extremist groups.
And they were particularly studying the case of all the
African nations and I think it called it was called
the Pathway to Extremism then it was. They did a
study in twenty seventeen, and then they repeated it I
think five years later and five years later in twenty
twenty two, and they had the same and this is
huge research, right, and they said, look, there are lots

(35:37):
of different factors and lots of different places, but the
number one most common experience of young people who joined
violent extremist groups was being mistreated by security forces. Yeah,
like that, And that goes to the Kenya example too,
like those people who were being you know, getting into
street protests and being beaten up by the police because

(35:58):
the night fishing had been closely Like you said, they're
much more like if I'm an el Schabadev recruiter, that's
right territory for me.

Speaker 3 (36:05):
I can get those guys.

Speaker 2 (36:06):
You know, see what they're doing to you. People don't
care about you, Yoe. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:43):
Man, So uh, I'm I'm gonna dial up the difficulty
of the questions now, you know, because we've been we've
been softballing you.

Speaker 2 (36:52):
So now again in the context of like.

Speaker 1 (36:57):
Kaza and Israel, which like, obviously there's certain things you
can't talk about because it's still going on right now.
You know what I'm saying as far as like what
exactly the step is and the hope for when the
bombing stops, like what we're supposed to do.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
But I think that there are times.

Speaker 1 (37:14):
That there there are moments where like the right and
wrong is pretty clear, like this, who's this is wrong?
You know? And to be still in a position of
saying peace building, it's like to keep people coming to

(37:37):
the table, there may be some things that you can't
say out loud for the purpose of keeping them at
the table. At the same time, the other people you're
trying to keep to the table is looking at you,
going like, but you know this is wrong, right And
with something like like you said, with something like the

(37:58):
response of of the Nation of Israel to this situation,
it's like, well, this is tactically, pragmatically and humanitarian, like
this is wrong, you know now you know this is
the Hamas is a whole other conversation I'm talking about,
like where we are right now, and like you said before,

(38:19):
which you told us earlier, where it's like, well, we
were no closer to a two state solution or a
peace on October sixth than we were October seventh. Like
there's like there was we were, we wasn't making no
progress before, you know what I'm saying. And when you
listen to the leaders of Hamas, they're like, our biggest
thing was like the world stopped talking about us, like

(38:40):
people stopped caring about our situation, Like y'all just like
everybody's normalizing with Israel. But when ten years ago you
were saying they need to figure out this situation, now
y'all not worried about it. So we was like, well,
how do we get y'all to still talk about us,
you know? And then in the middle of all that,
twenty one thousand people are dead, the hospitals failed, there's

(39:00):
no you know what I'm saying, Like, there's there's all
this carnage that happens in the middle of that to
where anyone with a heart, like you say, anybody with
a heart could be like this, this, I mean, this
is wrong, Like how do you stay at the table
or yeah, how do you stay at how do you
not you jamil? But as an org how do you

(39:21):
stay at the table? How do you stay in a
peace building when in your heart there is something that's like, well,
this is wrong, you.

Speaker 4 (39:29):
Know in the all right, our identity, yeah you were
you were nice in your introduction to me of sort
of saying that I'm you know, I don't put myself
out there as much or whatever. But that's that's not

(39:53):
just an issue of being sort of humble, like, yeah,
our power is our identity, and our identity isn't just
because I'm the CEO. In each place where we're working,
our identity is a multi partial team that's drawn from
the community. And they're not doing what they're doing out
of charity. This is life and death for them and
all the places we're working. So when you ask that

(40:13):
really powerful question, just now imagine my Israelian pasting and
colleagues sitting here right and the question is, how the
hell are you all willing to do anything together? Right
in the midst of what's going on, shouldn't you be
calling it out? And you know, these are the hardest times.

(40:38):
The power of work, not surprisingly, is kind of the
most invisible when you're in the midst of massive, horrible,
unacceptable violence and people get really I mean, look, I
don't think that. Let me start from this place. There

(41:00):
are two ways to drive change. I think there are
probably a million ways to drive change, but there are
two ways to drive change.

Speaker 3 (41:07):
What I want to what I want to share.

Speaker 4 (41:09):
There's an adversarial approach, which basically says, I'm going to
find everyone who agrees with me, and I'm going to
identify everyone who disagrees with me on this issue, and
I'm going to organize.

Speaker 3 (41:20):
Myself with the first group against the ladder group. We're
going to go to more literally or figurative.

Speaker 4 (41:25):
And that's an adversarial approach, and it's a wind lose approach, right,
and it's it can be effective in a lot of places.
The other approach to driving change is I'm going to
take an issue I really care about, and I'm going
to find out everybody who has a stake in how
that issue plays out. Everybody, including the people who most.

Speaker 3 (41:45):
Disagree with me.

Speaker 4 (41:46):
Yeah, and then I'm going to figure out how to
build trust between them so that we can come up
with a solution where everyone's dignity is respected. Now it
might sound like I'm avoiding your question, but I'm jumping
to the end state, which is as really as Palestine
is ant going anywhere.

Speaker 3 (42:01):
Yeah, they're not going anywhere.

Speaker 4 (42:03):
This is where they're going to be, And so I
would not push anyone And right now it's kind of
the hardest time to get Israelis and Postings to do
anything together. We would have pushed them to do together,
but we are staying in very close touch with our
teams and then without our partners to provide whatever we
can to sustain them and to make sure their dignity
is intact and that their voices are being heard. And

(42:26):
as soon as the openings are there for us to
start building, we're going to start helping them to build.
But that twenty year clock we talked about is going
to start again when the guns fall silent. That's what
violence does. Like you can have decades, you can have
decades of development that are wiped out in weeks of

(42:48):
vinyl conflict. Yeah, that's why we when we start we
talk about peace being the foundation, being like oxygen, everything else,
everything else depends on it.

Speaker 3 (42:57):
So you know, I don't know if I answer your question,
but it's it's you know, we could we could spend.

Speaker 4 (43:03):
A lot of time with me issuing statements about Israel
and Gaza right now, but frankly might It's not that
they're irrelevant. People need to know that you actually really care,
You give it damn about their dignity and their humanity,
and that's really important. And if there's going to be
a time where we can create a future where that
both Israelis and Pausines can live in real dignity and security,

(43:25):
that's going to have to be created by them collaboratively,
and we are unfortunately decades away from that happening now.

Speaker 2 (43:33):
Nah, thank you.

Speaker 1 (43:35):
That's great because it does sort of get you out
of the polarization loop because there is something that's like,
in some senses, it's like, well, we're at the table.

Speaker 2 (43:49):
We're here because.

Speaker 1 (43:51):
Well the violence is wrong as we're here about you
know what I'm saying, Like nobody wants they babies to
die like this. I mean, that's nobody wants their babies
to die. So, like you said, I can issue statements,
I could rally around the team, or I can say
what you said, which I think is beautiful. It's like,
who's invested in this, Who's really invested in this? And

(44:13):
let's build trust around this and have a conversation around
providing dignity for the people invested in here. And like
you said, once the shooting stops, then the other things happen.
So like you know, without without being too trivial, there's
a man out here named Big U former Rolling sixty crip, notorious, notorious,

(44:34):
notorious anyway, he started a football team league for like
Pop warner It's just you know Crenshaw Cougar's you know
what I'm saying to where it's like I am you
all know what's said.

Speaker 2 (44:51):
I'm from.

Speaker 1 (44:51):
I have sworn enemies, don't get me wrong. You know
what I'm saying, like they're there are I am a
crip like that. I don't know what I was able
to say.

Speaker 2 (44:59):
I'm a crip. You know what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 (45:01):
But our children should be able to play outside, and
it's just say it is what it is. Our children
should be able to play outside, you know. And over
the years, like when I did finally I get a
chance to meet him. It was in passing because since
I didn't live on that side of town, I wasn't
really a part of a lot of stuff they did.

Speaker 2 (45:15):
I lived in the Latino community, but I was.

Speaker 1 (45:18):
A part of intervention programs that were inspired by him,
you know, and was able to say, hey, man, like
I lived, I lived with the Latinos, but they was
inspired as Yeah, so can.

Speaker 3 (45:30):
I ask you a question of that? So like before
he did that, would you have ever guessed that he
would do that? Or would anyone never a million years?
I feel like this is what this is the thing about.

Speaker 4 (45:41):
Let's take this to interid Pals sign again if we
want to stay on that hard topic, like, yeah, there's
a lot of things I don't know, and people who
predict the future of this conflict, you know, whatever moral
power to them. But there's one thing I know, which
is that when peace comes here, it's going to be
negogostiated by people you never would have expected, agreeing to

(46:02):
things that you never would believe they would have agreed to.
And we saw that between the British government and the
IRA and people forget the IRA was bombing hotels, they
were bombing they set off. You know, I saw that
between the FARC rebel movement and the Colombian government after
fifty years of civil war, we said, you go out
down the list. Even even in this conflict right between,

(46:25):
you know, when we're being an Arafat signed the Oslo Accords.
Like everything that's being said about Hamas right now was
set about the PLO.

Speaker 1 (46:33):
Got to be a ploy listener as We have an
episode coming up about that backstory of the PLO and
the Oslos.

Speaker 2 (46:40):
But I'm gonna do that history.

Speaker 4 (46:41):
But yeah, go on, yeah, so and and and you know,
the policy and authority which is in the West Bank
is the descendants of the PLO. That's what the PO
turned into when they signed a peace agreement and they
said were laying down our weapons. Now we're going to
administer the West Bank. Right And you take that model,

(47:04):
and no one's saying that there they've turned violent. They
haven't even through all of what's been going on. You know,
you take that model and you compare it to a
model of a military attack when the military, when there's
really military went into Lebanon to get the PLO out
of be Root, which is where they were quartered for
a while. That massive military invasion led to the rise
in Hesbola, which now is seen as a bigger threat

(47:28):
than anyone else. It's like what you said earlier, like that,
if I'm not saying that military action is you know,
you never people never use military actions. I don't know,
but I will say that when you're dealing with an
extremist group, a group that's using violent needs to pursue
political ends, right, and they're embedded in a community, any community,

(47:49):
if you're going to use military tactics that kill a
lot of civilians in that community, it's inevitable that you're
going to create for what you seek to destroy.

Speaker 2 (47:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:59):
Man, even today the uh there was a leader of
MOSTA got popped in Lebanon today.

Speaker 2 (48:06):
So we'll see what comes out. We'll see what comes
out from it.

Speaker 1 (48:10):
Uh But yeah, I think Okay, So lastly, we've been
dancing around it, or not dancing around it.

Speaker 2 (48:16):
We've actually been defining it this whole time.

Speaker 1 (48:19):
But it's this last term that has really stuck out
for me, which is multi partial and multi partial is
not neutral, right, it's not this you know, disinterested. I
think a lot of times people say, well, like I
want I'm neutral in this situation, and it's like, well,
that's doesn't that don't capture it? Like neutral don't help

(48:40):
you know what I'm saying.

Speaker 3 (48:41):
No, they are I love you know this is this
is our core identity.

Speaker 4 (48:46):
Yes, and it's and it's you know, people hear the
term impartial or neutral and they think, oh, you're like
a third party arbitrator, Like you're coming from the outside
and you hear the different proops and you ormediate that's
not who we are, like they're there. There's six things
about being multipartial that I think are uniquely powerful. First,
there's real humanity in it. We were just talking about

(49:08):
it with Israel Plisin. You could talk about in La
with communities. You were just talking about, like, there's a
real humanity when the team is not only local but
represents the divided communities. That means that when they're they're
they're not they're not detached about what's going on. They're
directly feeling it. Their families are future is at stake.
It's a life and death thing for them. So there's

(49:29):
a humanity to it. Second, there's a credibility to it.
You've got unique access and convening power. When if your
team again includes like former youth activists and leaders, former
gang members, retired cops or whatever, and you're trying to
deal with police community violence, there's going to be unique
credibility to that team if they could ever create themselves

(49:50):
as a real team.

Speaker 3 (49:52):
Yeah, there's there's wisdom. And this is where what you
were talking about.

Speaker 4 (49:55):
Before, Like this, this relationship between justice and peace I
think is really misunderstood, really misunderstood. I think the notion
that piece is just you know when Martin Luther King
said that piece is not just the absence of tension,
but the presence of justice.

Speaker 3 (50:07):
Like, I don't think that. I think when you have
people who.

Speaker 4 (50:11):
Represent the different communities themselves, they understand that you can't
get justice without peace, and you can't get peace without justice.

Speaker 3 (50:17):
Right.

Speaker 4 (50:17):
And it can be hard to say this because it
seems like you're letting oppressors off the hook. But unjust
systems I was always inspired by by Mendela and King
and Tutu and James Baldwin evenough also like who understood
or Gandhi. They understood that unjust systems trap everyone. Yes,
which is not the same thing as saying they oppress

(50:38):
everyone equally. That would be really obscene, but like they
we know that's not the case, but they limit everybody,
and and they what all of those activists created was
a future that uplifted everyone's dignity and humanity. It didn't
just flip the power tables, didn't just okay, you oppressed
this to the group. Now the other group's going to
be in charge. So there's wisdom. There's wisdom. That's the
third thing's humanity, credibility, wisdom. The fourth thing is pragmatism.

(51:01):
Like you know, there are all these international advocates people
issuing statements on the in Israel Paleston.

Speaker 3 (51:06):
You just put your finger on it.

Speaker 4 (51:07):
We're always going to defer to what our Israelian Palasinian
team jointly is willing to say and do. And I'm
not going to override that by saying but wait, our
organization has to say this, whether or not you think
it's no. We either say things because they think we
should say them, or we keep our mouth shut because
they say keep your mouth shut. We're working for something right,
And so there's pragmatism. In that fifth there's authenticity and

(51:28):
I love this. You can't create a more inclusive world
with more like exclusivist advocacy. You can't create a cooperative
role through adversarial advocacy, like you really align your means
and your ends right like you Gandhi's whole thing about
be the change you want to see in the world.
There's real authenticity in that because you're not saying, hey,
we're going to get to this peaceful place, but the

(51:49):
way we're going to get there is really adversarial, and
naturally that doesn't work.

Speaker 2 (51:54):
It doesn't.

Speaker 4 (51:55):
And the sixth thing is there's a real bias towards action,
like when you multi partial, when your team as local
and from the communities, they don't have a lot of
patience for.

Speaker 3 (52:04):
Just having talk shops.

Speaker 4 (52:05):
They're like, look, I'm a dialogue is necessary, but it's
totally insufficient.

Speaker 3 (52:10):
You've got you need dialogue to understand where people are
coming from.

Speaker 4 (52:13):
But if that doesn't translated into action that's meaningful to people,
that actually meets communities' needs and demands, people can get
really negative about dialogue. You see this in the Middle
East about peace process like a dirty word because people
are like, you know what, we've been there, We've done
that in that Yeah, we've done that anyway, those all
those things are all those are like to me. Those
are like the power power, themes of multi partiality, of humanity, credibility, wisdom, pragmatism, authenticity,

(52:40):
and this like bias towards action.

Speaker 2 (52:42):
Are yeah, beautiful. It's peace possible, It's.

Speaker 3 (52:49):
Inevitable, but not without a hell of a lot of work. Right.

(53:13):
I will tell you one thing.

Speaker 4 (53:14):
When I was, you know, sister Helen Praison, she she okay,
so like the author of Dead Men Walking and the
Catholic nun who's she is now she's now accompanied six
men to their death and the uh leading anti death
penalty activists in the country probably, And I had the

(53:37):
honor to meet her recently, and uh somebody said this
is also hopeless, Like what can we do? And I
can never channel her? She used, played you should I
just send you the audio what she said. But she
just said, she said, just do one thing. She said,
when you, when you, because when you're standing on the

(53:57):
sidelines and you're just watching how horrible everything is, you
just go into despair and cynicism. But when you do
just one thing, no matter how small it is, even
if it's even if it's like just very little. It
only makes a little change in your own little community
with one person. You're actually releasing an energy into the
community that gathers momentum, right, and you generate hope in

(54:18):
yourself and in others when you do that one thing,
and you can never understand like how far that hope
is actually going to go.

Speaker 3 (54:27):
So yeah, pieces possible as long as we work for it.

Speaker 4 (54:29):
You don't just and I think she said to the
one of the first men, one of the first men
who she accompanied to the.

Speaker 3 (54:37):
Death chamber.

Speaker 4 (54:38):
They had an argument, a big argument when she was
trying to convince him or encourage him to acknowledge what
he had done to seek forgiveness. And he said, well,
all you do is pray, And she said, no, no, no,
I pray and I work. I pray and I work.
So anyway, pieces possible. But only if we work.

Speaker 3 (54:58):
We pray and we work.

Speaker 1 (55:00):
Hollyluit, dud okay, you are preaching, mail be preaching, y'all.

Speaker 2 (55:05):
Man, Hey, thank you so much for your time.

Speaker 3 (55:09):
Dude.

Speaker 1 (55:09):
I know you're super busy. It's like there's so much
happening on the planet right my lord, Like I know
we're involved in Sudan right now, like I know there's
just so much happening right now. Thank you for taking
your time to holler at us in and present this
to us.

Speaker 4 (55:27):
Thanks so much for having me proud, and thanks for
being such a supportive search for Coming ground.

Speaker 3 (55:30):
It's great to have you on board.

Speaker 1 (55:32):
Of course, guys, please go to the website sf CG
dot org. Uh will take donations and uh yeah so
yeah yeah, please tap in with us man. Like again,
it's people out here, Like I know how bleak the
world is, but it's people out here actually on the
ground doing the good work.

Speaker 3 (55:53):
Thanks thanks man, pace B to you.

Speaker 1 (56:09):
All right now, don't you hit stop on this pod.
You better listen to these credits. I need you to
finish this thing so I can get the download numbers. Okay,
so don't stop it yet, but listen. This was recorded
in East Lost Boil Heights by your boy Propaganda. Tap
in with me at prop hip hop dot com. If

(56:29):
you're in the Coldbrew coffee we got terraform Coldbrew. You
can go there dot com and use promo code hood
get twenty percent off get yourself some coffee. This was mixed,
edited and mastered by your boy Matt Alsowski.

Speaker 2 (56:43):
Killing the beast softly.

Speaker 1 (56:44):
Check out his website Matdowsowski dot com. I'm a spell
it for you because I know M A T T
O s O W s ki dot com Matthowsowski dot com.
He got more music and stuff like that on there,
so gonna check out. The Heat Politics is a member
of cool Zone Media, Executive produced by Sophie Lichterman, part

(57:08):
of the iHeartMedia podcast Network. Your theme music and scoring
is also by the one and overly mattow Sowski. Still
killing the beats softly, So listen. Don't let nobody lie
to you. If you understand urban living, you understand politics.
These people is not smarter than you.

Speaker 2 (57:24):
We'll see y'all next week.