Speaker 1: All Zone media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 3: Hello, and welcome to It could happen here. This is
Speaker 3: Sharene and today is part one of a two part
Speaker 3: series where we talked to someone who was on the
Speaker 3: ground in Palestine in both Lesday and the West Bank.
Speaker 3: I'm going to say Lesday because that's how you say
Speaker 3: in Arabic, but that means Gaza for those who are unfamiliar.
Speaker 3: Ever since Israel began bombing the people of Lesday in
Speaker 3: October of last year, it has been virtually impossible for
Speaker 3: aid to get into Lensday. Both the Israeli government and
Speaker 3: its citizens, acting on their own initiative, have blocked AID convoys,
Speaker 3: destroyed life saving medical and food aid, and harassed people
Speaker 3: for supplying aid. AID workers who even can get into
Speaker 3: Leze have been bombed, shot at and killed. And it's
Speaker 3: not just AID that can't get into Lese. It's extraordinarily
Speaker 3: hard for information to even get out. Cell Phone signal
Speaker 3: is scarce, and understandably people there use it to contact
Speaker 3: their families, not foreign journalists, so to get a good
Speaker 3: sense of what life is like on the ground. In
Speaker 3: the Dafa, we spoke to Ava, one of the Mutual
Speaker 3: Aid volunteers who, at great risk to her own life,
Speaker 3: traveled into Lesse to help the people there.
Speaker 4: My name is Ava. I am a nurse and street medic.
Speaker 4: I'm Jewish of European ancestry and was raised in Pacific
Speaker 4: Northwest on the traditional lands of the Chinook, Tualitan and
Speaker 4: Clacamus and many other First nations what is commonly called
Speaker 4: Portland organ.
Speaker 3: Ava was able to send us some voice notes to
Speaker 3: scribe having her day to day back in April. She
Speaker 3: told us what she saw, what she experienced, what she heard. Understandably,
Speaker 3: there's some background noise in some of this audio, but
Speaker 3: I personally think it helps ground us in the moment
Speaker 3: that she's experiencing.
Speaker 4: So here I am the morning of Friday, April nineteenth.
Speaker 4: This is the start of my second day in Laza.
Speaker 4: I spent a full day yesterday at a Najadre hospital
Speaker 4: in the emergency department, getting introduced to the staff there,
Speaker 4: the work, the equipment, the patterns of illness and injury,
Speaker 4: the shortages, struggles, the pain, the happiness was really quite
Speaker 4: beautiful and hard and a mashup of everything I've experienced
Speaker 4: in occupation, things I've experienced as a new nurse to
Speaker 4: a floor, and things I haven't experienced before, which is
Speaker 4: being in a site of an active war zone and
Speaker 4: genocide on The Jahre hospital is located very close to
Speaker 4: the Rafa border crossing. It's also, I guess, one of
Speaker 4: the areas more heavily impacted by violence right now in Rapha,
Speaker 4: which is still much less so than areas to the
Speaker 4: north like hon Yunis, et cetera.
Speaker 3: We asked Ava to explain the situation in the Dapha
Speaker 3: at the time of this recording and where she was
Speaker 3: within it. The following conversation with Ava took place on
Speaker 3: April twenty ninth.
Speaker 4: I mean, I will first locate myself in Pa, which
Speaker 4: is the only part of Plaza that I have ever seen,
Speaker 4: and I have only been in the Gaza during the
Speaker 4: last two weeks.
Speaker 5: I've been Palestine twice.
Speaker 4: This is my first time in this area, and I
Speaker 4: haven't seen Adinda Haraza. I haven't seen a honeyness. I
Speaker 4: haven't seen the destruction up there. And I think that
Speaker 4: that is from the people who I've met who are
Speaker 4: roughie cheese, from those areas, healthcare workers, members of the public.
Speaker 5: There's really oh yeah, there's just a moto. Sorry.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of rumblings and things that happened periodically,
Speaker 4: and a lot of them are explosions that I think
Speaker 4: is just a motor But yeah, I mean it's really
Speaker 4: interesting because I arrived at a moment when food stuffs
Speaker 4: had just started to cross in a little bit more regularly,
Speaker 4: and I was told that basically in the week before,
Speaker 4: like street markets had reoccurred, which hadn't been a thing
Speaker 4: for months.
Speaker 5: And that's like a big part of my experience in
Speaker 5: the West Bank.
Speaker 4: And so it was really great to see people, even
Speaker 4: if it was just like a little bit of food
Speaker 4: selling food on the street, starting to see bread being
Speaker 4: baked and distributed, seeing people out and about was exciting.
Speaker 4: There is rampant signs of destruction everywhere. There are lots
Speaker 4: of standing buildings, but there are lots of piles of
Speaker 4: rubble in streets the sites of former buildings. People have
Speaker 4: in a remarkable job clearing space, but there's sense of
Speaker 4: destruction everywhere, and I think in some ways the most
Speaker 4: painful sites are where buildings aren't completely destroyed and you
Speaker 4: can see into people's bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms, things like that,
Speaker 4: see artwork still hanging, seek fragments of their homes and lives.
Speaker 4: There are tent cities everywhere. I am currently speaking to
Speaker 4: from within a house that is one of the houses
Speaker 4: that are rented by NGOs in the area from generally
Speaker 4: people who have managed to escape that's h and who
Speaker 4: are renting their homes for a bit of income and
Speaker 4: to decrease the likelihood their house will be bombed. And
Speaker 4: in this particular house, we're in the neighborhood of Telsutan,
Speaker 4: and there are tent cities all around us. So it's
Speaker 4: one of those weird situations of staying in a somewhat
Speaker 4: palatial home where there are people sleeping in very rudimentary
Speaker 4: tents and structures, sometimes completely uncovered in one hundred plus
Speaker 4: degree weather. I think the highest temperatures we've seen a
Speaker 4: couple of days where it was about four to eight
Speaker 4: degrees center grade, which is about one oh seven sarrenheit.
Speaker 4: There are a lot of sick people, a lot of
Speaker 4: struggling people.
Speaker 3: Longtime listeners of the podcast will remember our interview with
Speaker 3: toddic Lobani, one of the inventors of the three D
Speaker 3: printed tourniquet, as well as the founder of Glia, a
Speaker 3: medical aid charity, Ava who was also a medical professional,
Speaker 3: is working with them.
Speaker 4: I've been working with an organization called Glia that works
Speaker 4: with primary care clinics and with Martrinity and like natal clinics,
Speaker 4: and has also been starting to work with at least
Speaker 4: one emergency department. And I've been working at the hospital
Speaker 4: on the new shod, which is used to basically be a
Speaker 4: community tertiary hospital with basically an urgent care clinic, that
Speaker 4: has basically become the only remaining general public emergency department
Speaker 4: in the RAA. There are other there's like an eternity
Speaker 4: emergency department, hospital department, there's an emergency department run by
Speaker 4: MSF and like these other ones, but like this is
Speaker 4: the only like general public one. And I've been there
Speaker 4: just you know, for two weeks most every day, it's
Speaker 4: a day off. When I was sick and took off
Speaker 4: the day today to see some different parts of some
Speaker 4: other clinics, which is really good comparison.
Speaker 3: We asked Ava what kind of injuries she sees and
Speaker 3: what the medical situation is like in LA But.
Speaker 4: I will say that it's while the variety of you know,
Speaker 4: injuries and illnesses that you'll see in that space.
Speaker 5: That is true of any emergency department.
Speaker 4: But depending on the hours I have foundering the day,
Speaker 4: most of the illnesses and injuries are more usual except
Speaker 4: exacerbated by the lack of resources, lack of primary character
Speaker 4: resources celebated by the lack of medications, exacerbated by the
Speaker 4: lack of clean water and sanitation. Occasionally injuries like from
Speaker 4: bombings or shootings at night when I have not been there.
Speaker 4: I have heard of many missile strikes wiping out entire families,
Speaker 4: large numbers of people murdered. I have seen, you know,
Speaker 4: several people killed in that way come to the emergency department,
Speaker 4: but in no way representative of what's been happening, And
Speaker 4: it's been a vile account, better these weeks than it
Speaker 4: has been before. Though the number of missile strikes and
Speaker 4: things are kind of increasing. There has been word given
Speaker 4: that there is likely going to be evacuation orders starting
Speaker 4: in the next in this next few days to a
Speaker 4: week from the Israelis, but no signs of and in
Speaker 4: me it's inclusion that said, we don't know. Most people
Speaker 4: are pretty hopeful of that that I've talked to, that
Speaker 4: a ceasefire will be reached, although it's unclear what that
Speaker 4: would mean. But I can say from my time working
Speaker 4: in these hospitals that and just being in the community
Speaker 4: that like most people are hanging on by a thread,
Speaker 4: whether they have just gotten something very loosely resembling a
Speaker 4: hint of stability, of like having a place where they
Speaker 4: are having access to food. There are children playing, there
Speaker 4: are you know, some some of the signs of life
Speaker 4: that I'm used to seeing in Palestine. There are emergency
Speaker 4: departments that are somewhat functional. They're like my colleagues working
Speaker 4: at a NICU where it's always full, but they are
Speaker 4: able to care for the babies that are there, even
Speaker 4: not as well as they would like to, but like
Speaker 4: they are able to if this population is displaced again,
Speaker 4: which is what the Israelis are suggesting in this case
Speaker 4: towards hon units, which they've leveled, and they are trying
Speaker 4: to get the international community to set up tense cities
Speaker 4: there that will kill a lot of people, that will
Speaker 4: tear apart a lot of what little people had left.
Speaker 4: So very very difficult in that way. That said, it's
Speaker 4: also more alive than I expected. There's more signs of
Speaker 4: daily life, of children playing, of people making and serving
Speaker 4: coffee in the street, of a couple of bakeries are producing,
Speaker 4: you know, all those pieces like flawfel sands like those
Speaker 4: things exist. A cost of food or atrocious We don't
Speaker 4: you know, buy food here, but I'm aware of some
Speaker 4: of the prices and they are much higher than they
Speaker 4: would be in the West Bank, where food is you know,
Speaker 4: not on Embarco.
Speaker 3: For those who aren't super familiar, the West Bank refers
Speaker 3: to the West Bank of Jordan. It stretches across the
Speaker 3: eastern border of Israel, along the west banks of the
Speaker 3: Jordan River and most of the Dead Sea. It was
Speaker 3: designated as its own region when Israel established itself and
Speaker 3: ethnically cleansed Palestine in nineteen forty eight, but it has
Speaker 3: been eaten away to a massive amount in nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 3: It was occupied during the Six Day War, and during
Speaker 3: the nineteen seventies and eighties, Israel began establishing settlements there,
Speaker 3: which was and is still illegal under international law, and
Speaker 3: even with protests from the international community, Israel continues still
Speaker 3: today to establish settlements on Palestinian land. The first major
Speaker 3: Arab uprising aka the First Intifada, also referred to as
Speaker 3: the Stone Intifada, began in nineteen eighty seven in the
Speaker 3: Gaza Strip and spread to the West Bank. It ended
Speaker 3: in nineteen ninety three with the signing of the First
Speaker 3: Oslo Accords. The Second Intifada, also known as the Alusa Antifada,
Speaker 3: was another major Arab uprising by Palestinians against the Israeli occupation.
Speaker 3: During the twenty tens, the Fatah dominated Palestinian authority worked
Speaker 3: toward established itself as an independent government in the urban
Speaker 3: Palestinian areas of the West Bank. At the same time,
Speaker 3: Israel expanded its settlement activity in the territory. Tutta, formerly
Speaker 3: the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, is a Palestinian nationalist and
Speaker 3: social democratic political party. It is the largest faction of
Speaker 3: the confederated multi party Palestine Liberation organization and the second
Speaker 3: largest party in the Palestinian Legislative Council. PUTTA has been
Speaker 3: closely identified with the leadership of its founder and chairman,
Speaker 3: Yasser Arafat, who was elected chairman of the PLO in
Speaker 3: Cairo in February nineteen sixty nine until his death in
Speaker 3: two thousand and four. In May twenty twenty one, Palestine
Speaker 3: families in Schechtradra, a neighborhood and occupied East Jerusalem, began
Speaker 3: protesting against Israel's plan to forcibly evict them from their
Speaker 3: homes to make way for Jewish settlers. Many of the
Speaker 3: families were refugees who had settled in Schechtradra after being
Speaker 3: forcibly displaced around the time of Israel's establishment as a
Speaker 3: state in nineteen forty eight. Since Israel occupied East Jerusalem
Speaker 3: and the rest of the West Bank in nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 3: Palestinians and Schektradra had been continuously targeted by Israeli authorities,
Speaker 3: who used discriminatory laws to systematically dispossess Palestinians of their
Speaker 3: land and homes for the benefit of Jewish Israelis. The
Speaker 3: events of May twenty twenty one were emblematic of the
Speaker 3: oppression which Palestinians have faced every day for decades. The discrimination,
Speaker 3: the dispossession, and the repression of descent, the killings and injuries.
Speaker 3: They are all a part of a system which is
Speaker 3: designed to privilege Jewish Israelis at the expense of Palestinians.
Speaker 3: This is apartheid, which is, as you should know, prohibited
Speaker 3: an international law. In twenty twenty one, Amnesty International reported
Speaker 3: that Israel imposes a system of oppression and domination against
Speaker 3: Palestinians across all areas under its control in Israel and
Speaker 3: the occupied Palestinian territories, and against Palestinian refugees in order
Speaker 3: to benefit Israelis laws, policies, and practices which are intended
Speaker 3: to maintain a violent system of control over Palestinians have
Speaker 3: left them fragmented geographically and politically, frequently impoverished, and in
Speaker 3: a constant state of fear and insecurity, with no freedom
Speaker 3: of movement or freedom's period. And then there's Israel's apartheid Wall,
Speaker 3: which began as a fence along the border between the
Speaker 3: West Bank and what is called Israel. It was first
Speaker 3: constructed by Israel in nineteen seventy one as a security barrier,
Speaker 3: and it has been rebuilt and upgraded since it was
Speaker 3: constructed by Israel to control the movement of the Palestinian
Speaker 3: population as well as goods between the Gaza Strip and Israel.
Speaker 3: So that's some history on the West Bank and just
Speaker 3: for some context. Twenty twenty three was the deadliest year
Speaker 3: for Palestinians since the United Nations Office for the Coordination
Speaker 3: of Humanitarian Affairs AOCHA began recording casualties in two thousand
Speaker 3: and five. Since the Gaza genocide began, Israel has stepped
Speaker 3: up military raids in the West Bank, where violence had
Speaker 3: already been surging for over a year. UN records show
Speaker 3: that Israeli forces or settlers have killed hundreds of Palestinians
Speaker 3: in the West Bank since October seventh. In twenty twenty three,
Speaker 3: at least five hundred and seven Palestinians were killed, including
Speaker 3: at least eighty one children. Between October seventh and December
Speaker 3: thirty one, twenty twenty three, two hundred and ninety nine
Speaker 3: Palestinians were killed in the West Bank, marking a fifty
Speaker 3: percent increase compared to the first nine months of the year.
Speaker 3: According to the World Health Organization, since October seventh, four
Speaker 3: hundred and seventy four Palestinians, including one hundred and sixteen children,
Speaker 3: have been killed in the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem,
Speaker 3: and about five thousand were injured. There are many days
Speaker 3: where Israeli forces killed Palestinians, but I'm going to refer
Speaker 3: to a couple just to give you a general idea
Speaker 3: of the violence the Palestinians experience. On March twenty first,
Speaker 3: there was a day when Israeli forces killed three Palestinians
Speaker 3: and separate incidents in the occupied West Bank, resulting in
Speaker 3: ten Palestinians killed in the territory over a twenty four
Speaker 3: hour period. This was reported by the Palestinian news agency WUFFA.
Speaker 3: On April twentieth, Israeli forces killed fourteen Palestinians during a
Speaker 3: raid in the occupied West Bank, including an ambulance driver
Speaker 3: who was killed as he went to pick up wounded
Speaker 3: Palestinians from a separate attack by violent Israeli settlers. Erica
Speaker 3: Guavera Rosas, Amnesty International's director of Global Research, Advocacy and Policy.
Speaker 1: Said under the cover of the l Lentist bombardment and
Speaker 1: atrosty crimes in Gaza, Israeli forces have unleashed unlawful lethal
Speaker 1: force against Palestinians and the occupied West Bank, carrying out
Speaker 1: unlawful killings and displaying a chilling disregard for Palestinian lives.
Speaker 1: These unlawful killings are in blatant violation of international human
Speaker 1: rights law and are committed with impunity in the context
Speaker 1: of maintaining Israel's institutionalized regime, the systematic oppression and domination
Speaker 1: over Palestinians.
Speaker 3: Because Ava has experience in both cluds in the West Bank,
Speaker 3: I wanted to ask what she witnessed while in the
Speaker 3: West Bank. Here's Ava telling us about her experience.
Speaker 4: Specifically, I was working with the International Solidarity Movement, which
Speaker 4: is the same group I worked with when I was
Speaker 4: in Palestine twelve years ago. And that's basically exactly what
Speaker 4: it sounds like. It's a vaguely kiss androsocialist and our
Speaker 4: Communists informed assembly of most the internationals with this s
Speaker 4: mattering of Palestinians and a couple Israeli activists. I was
Speaker 4: in the West Bank this round from the end of
Speaker 4: January until I came to Gaza, which was halfway through April,
Speaker 4: so basically two and a half months. Most people who
Speaker 4: volunteer there, it's anywhere from like two or three weeks
Speaker 4: to two or three months. Because of tourist visa lasts
Speaker 4: that long, and that's usually the most you can expect.
Speaker 4: During the time I was there, ism and other solidarity
Speaker 4: organizations got to be a topic of much discussion in
Speaker 4: the Israelikan essets, as they got very excited about the
Speaker 4: dangerous anarchists in the South. There's a lot of interesting
Speaker 4: converisons between the West Bank and Gaza.
Speaker 3: Palestinian people are divided by the State of Israel into
Speaker 3: two areas, with two separate governments and two different experiences
Speaker 3: of occupation. We asked a what people in the cludsday
Speaker 3: had to say about the situation for those living in
Speaker 3: the West Bank, where settler colonialism spreads every single day.
Speaker 4: Maybe I'll start by saying, when I rolled into Gaza
Speaker 4: and met members from the Health of Ministry and like
Speaker 4: they're like, oh, you speak in Arabic or do you
Speaker 4: learn Arabic? And I was like in the West Bank
Speaker 4: and they're like, oh, it's so hard there, and I
Speaker 4: was like really and they're like yeah, you know, I
Speaker 4: mean obviously like the war, which is what they call
Speaker 4: the genocide you usually hear.
Speaker 5: Too has been very hard.
Speaker 4: But like before that, like they have to live under
Speaker 4: a different version of occupation or direct version of occupation
Speaker 4: every day. And I thought that that just like touched
Speaker 4: something intense in me and like was really like a
Speaker 4: big I don't know, it just affected me a lot.
Speaker 4: But as far as like comparisons, there are parts of
Speaker 4: the West Bank that feel independent, that you feel like, oh,
Speaker 4: I'm in an area that is, you know, where ostensibly
Speaker 4: are not supposed to see Israelis, and if they are there,
Speaker 4: they're like my friend who just lives in you know,
Speaker 4: lives with her husband who's Palestinian, and they hang out
Speaker 4: there and are fine most of the time. But a
Speaker 4: lot of these areas that I spent al most of
Speaker 4: my time are areas where there's more direct contact constantly
Speaker 4: between settlers, soldiers and the Palestinian community who are often
Speaker 4: in those areas like we are in rural and it's
Speaker 4: like a very different scale of genocide. I often talk
Speaker 4: about that as like a silver genocide, and this is
Speaker 4: a faster genocide here in Gussa.
Speaker 5: But it's like no less horrible.
Speaker 4: It ends up being like a person, a person and
Speaker 4: like parcel of land, a parcel of land. Palestinian heard
Speaker 4: of sheep, is Raeli heard of sheep, herd of sheep,
Speaker 4: and it sounds like very parallel, except that the Palestinians
Speaker 4: have been shepherding there for generations or hundreds of years.
Speaker 4: And the settlers there, some of them many most of
Speaker 4: them are like teenagers who are dropouts and like get
Speaker 4: in trouble all the time, and then they're brought up
Speaker 4: there as community service. And some of them know how
Speaker 4: to shoprund and some of them don't, but they use
Speaker 4: it as an opportunity to graze their animals on like
Speaker 4: Palasinian wheat fields.
Speaker 3: Settler colonialism isn't just a vague concept or a way
Speaker 3: of looking at the past in Palestine. It's something that
Speaker 3: happens almost every single day. The violent displacement of Palestinian people,
Speaker 3: which began with the Nekba, has never really stopped, and
Speaker 3: the families in the West Bank experience their own nekbas
Speaker 3: every time their land is stolen. That's why volunteers like
Speaker 3: Ava go there to be in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Speaker 3: We asked Ava what the process of appropriation looks like
Speaker 3: on the ground.
Speaker 4: They stand somewhere, get confrontational with the Palestinians, with the
Speaker 4: international and Israeli solidarity activists. They get the police to
Speaker 4: and soldiers who arrest people and harass people. They occasionally
Speaker 4: fire at and sometimes kill or somearely injure Palestinians, less
Speaker 4: commonly at Jena or it was really octivists after the
Speaker 4: seventh all across the West Bank. Initially a lot of
Speaker 4: the settlers, as I understand I responded by kind of
Speaker 4: clamping down security concerns, and then very quickly turned it
Speaker 4: into an opportunity for attack and turned up at villages
Speaker 4: like the village of Zenuta and just were like which
Speaker 4: had like got about one hundred families, and was like,
Speaker 4: you don't leave, We're going to kill you all. And
Speaker 4: so people left and it was a credible threat, and
Speaker 4: they did kill a lot of people. I think that's
Speaker 4: the largest village I've heard of recently. They disappeared other places.
Speaker 4: People ran away and their homes were destroyed, their animals
Speaker 4: were taken. People come back and their cars get torched.
Speaker 4: They get arrested on no charges and held for longer
Speaker 4: than ever, and in many cases or torture to death.
Speaker 4: I have a friend and comrade that I organized up
Speaker 4: a little bit who was in Janine at the start
Speaker 4: right after October seventh, and she witnessed truly horrific you know,
Speaker 4: targeted killings by drone strikes and other things, and basically
Speaker 4: fled south so she would be okay and physically. So
Speaker 4: that's some of what has happened. Most of the villages
Speaker 4: that historically have had the like nonviolent weekly protests, which
Speaker 4: a lot of people who in the past and volunteered,
Speaker 4: like as you know internationals will have experience with, and
Speaker 4: like there's a lot of the popular images of like
Speaker 4: youth in Kafia's drawing stones at some of those sites.
Speaker 4: Since October seventh, almost all of the villages stopped as
Speaker 4: far as I know, because it was too dangerous.
Speaker 5: When I arrived, I was told all of the villages
Speaker 5: had stopped.
Speaker 4: But then we found out part way that there was
Speaker 4: a village that was having protests kofor Katum in the
Speaker 4: northern half of the West Bank, and it turns out
Speaker 4: when I went there, they'd never stopped.
Speaker 5: They protested each week.
Speaker 4: They did scale back with their goals were because whereas
Speaker 4: in the past they had been many of them had
Speaker 4: been shot with live ammunition like twenty two caliber rifles.
Speaker 4: Since the seventh it basically became all lave of ammunition,
Speaker 4: and only by the grace of God or luck were
Speaker 4: none of them murtyered in that time because the soldiers
Speaker 4: were not shooting at ankles as is the conventional guidance.
Speaker 4: I saw videos of them shooting into buildings, into homes,
Speaker 4: shooting at head height, things like that, And like the
Speaker 4: week before I went, the guy was shot in the
Speaker 4: face and he only survived because it deflected so down
Speaker 4: through his johns did it into his skull. So they've
Speaker 4: experienced a lot of severe oppression there. There's been hundreds
Speaker 4: killed in the West Bank just since October seventh. There
Speaker 4: is active fighting in parts of the north of like
Speaker 4: kind of Jinine and I think until Karen and some
Speaker 4: other places between some armed resistance and Asurai soldiers. But
Speaker 4: it's definitely not at the same scale as in Lazza,
Speaker 4: and there aren't like active bombs falling on people. But
Speaker 4: it's you know, still murderous. It's still driving people out,
Speaker 4: it's still squeezing people to they either lash out or leave.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's it honestly sounds like it just a
Speaker 3: repeat in some way of the Nekaba, you know, like
Speaker 3: that's just what happened. It is a little maybe a
Speaker 3: little slower, like you said, like a slower genocide, right, yeah,
Speaker 3: it never really stopped. It's been a slow genocide for
Speaker 3: like seventy six years. In addition to ongoing colonization, the
Speaker 3: economic conditions in the West Bank make life hard for
Speaker 3: people there. But this does not stop people in the
Speaker 3: West Bank from being in solidarity with the people of Ze.
Speaker 4: When I was in the West Bank, I will also say, like,
Speaker 4: and I've shared this with many people here on Gaza,
Speaker 4: like I would be in a tiny one bedroom house
Speaker 4: who are very poor. Like people's incomes disappeared after the
Speaker 4: Seventh That's another thing. Like a lot of people made
Speaker 4: their money by traveling to cities to work, by working
Speaker 4: at settlements, things like that. After the seventh roads were
Speaker 4: shut down, people couldn't move. Palestinian workers were not allowed
Speaker 4: in settlements, not allowed to cross into forty eight. So
Speaker 4: everybody's struggling. But like people are spending twenty four to
Speaker 4: seven with like Algerzeerra or like other Palestinian or Palestinian
Speaker 4: coverage of what's happening in Gaza, like people are right
Speaker 4: there when Ramadan started, I was there doing the of
Speaker 4: the Ramadan, Like people are like, I'm so looking forward
Speaker 4: to feeling hunger along with Gaza, and like that was
Speaker 4: another aspect of hearing from the first Gasms crossing into Gaza,
Speaker 4: like saying like, oh, it's so hard over there. We're
Speaker 4: with them, Like I think there's a lot of attempts
Speaker 4: from the Israelis, from liberal Zionists in the US, from
Speaker 4: the state and everything to be like good Palestinian, bad Palestinian,
Speaker 4: and like all the Palestinians are, you know, like they
Speaker 4: might not all agree politically, Like there's many different positions
Speaker 4: on everything, just as there are many positions and everything
Speaker 4: in every community. There's a lot of them that they
Speaker 4: between them. And that was another reason I was really
Speaker 4: excited to come from the West Bank and bring like
Speaker 4: some olive oil and other gifts on behalf of the community,
Speaker 4: because people need to know how much they are loved
Speaker 4: and thought of. On the other side, I find it's
Speaker 4: sad and beautiful how united of a people are the
Speaker 4: Palestinians across the tremendous distance of a and also incredibly
Speaker 4: short distance of apartheid and occupation that they can't see
Speaker 4: each other or visit each other, but they feel for
Speaker 4: each other and are with each other in their hearts
Speaker 4: and just kind ofrects me a little bit.
Speaker 5: It's also nice to be near the sea.
Speaker 4: I haven't yet seen the sea, but my friend was
Speaker 4: here very close and could see it from their house.
Speaker 4: I just feel being close to the sea and like
Speaker 4: see the sunsets, and that's so incredibly beautiful and sad
Speaker 4: too because most Palestinians don't get to see the sea.
Speaker 3: And that's going to be the end of part one.
Speaker 3: In part two, Ava tells us what the process was
Speaker 3: like traveling from the West Bank until Les, and she
Speaker 3: details her experience being on the ground to the So
Speaker 3: please tune in to tomorrow's episode to hear more from Ava.
Speaker 3: Until then, Rerepalace Done.
Speaker 1: It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 1: cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1: We're back for part two in our conversation with Ava.
Speaker 1: When we left off, Ava was describing her experience in
Speaker 1: the West Bank. I wanted to know what it was
Speaker 1: like traveling into lensday Drapha, in particular from the West Bank.
Speaker 1: So now we are going to jump back into that conversation.
Speaker 1: What was that process of even entering what like from
Speaker 1: the West Bank? So there is no direct way for
Speaker 1: the west thing.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's it's hilarious because, like you know, like
Speaker 4: the conventional wisdom is like, oh, the entire land of
Speaker 4: Palestine is like smaller in New Jersey, but you don't
Speaker 4: really notice it until like I am in Yaffa, I'm
Speaker 4: in Tel Aviv, I am like thirty kilometers or something
Speaker 4: from Gaza. I am in the West Bank. I am
Speaker 4: so close, but you have to go a long way,
Speaker 4: over a long through a lot of like logistical hurdles
Speaker 4: together just kind of like any kind of travel in
Speaker 4: the West Bank or any kind of occupied space. But
Speaker 4: basically my journey looked like leaving Masafriata, the area villages
Speaker 4: in the south Huborn Hills or southern West Bank, going
Speaker 4: north to from Allah, crossing into Koudes and then hanging
Speaker 4: out and then taking and I got to be in
Speaker 4: the Goods for Eed, which was amazing to see that,
Speaker 4: but then hopping on a bus and riding all the
Speaker 4: way down to a lot like a kind of a
Speaker 4: horrible tourist town at the southern end of forty eight,
Speaker 4: then cut a bus into Tapa on the Egyptian side
Speaker 4: in Sinai. Crossing took forever, so I spent basically twelve
Speaker 4: hours overnight circuling the Sinai, which wasn't my original pan,
Speaker 4: but it's what happened. And then I went to Cairo,
Speaker 4: and I spent some time in Cairo. I got there
Speaker 4: a little bit early. Our entry was delayed, so I
Speaker 4: ended up having some basic chirot to do compass, which
Speaker 4: was fine and good, and then went in with a
Speaker 4: UN convoy, which is really the only way that you
Speaker 4: can go in crossing the northern Sinai. There's a lot
Speaker 4: of checks with Egyptian officials without then you get to
Speaker 4: the border, go through a bunch of checks with Egyptian officials,
Speaker 4: then you cross over have a comparatively fewer but still
Speaker 4: plenty checks with Gazan officials. I also almost cried like
Speaker 4: looking at a Palestinian seal crossing in, because I was
Speaker 4: like getting a stamp in my passport the Palestinian authority
Speaker 4: in Gaza, because I was like, I've never like it's
Speaker 4: always every court of entry into Palestine is otherwise controlled
Speaker 4: by the Israelis. This is like the only one that
Speaker 4: is under Palestinian control. Even if it's like Palestinian control
Speaker 4: in a giant open air prison, it's like still something
Speaker 4: under And then we're inside and I have been working
Speaker 4: and you know, driving and in cars and movement is
Speaker 4: pretty limited for security reasons. The murdering of the World
Speaker 4: Central Kitchen workers that happened not long before I came,
Speaker 4: when like basically a targeted drones strike took out three
Speaker 4: vehicles and six four seven people. Still very unclear reasons,
Speaker 4: but it's not an accident, maybe not directed from the top,
Speaker 4: but very scary. So there's a lot of controlled movements,
Speaker 4: so basically you have to kind of have a preapproved
Speaker 4: plan for where you're going to go and what you're
Speaker 4: going to do when you're going to move. But yeah,
Speaker 4: there's a lot of there's for a number of international
Speaker 4: aid workers here right now, and I'm really privileged to
Speaker 4: work with mostly Palestinian ones, but a few good internationals too.
Speaker 3: I wanted to get Avia's perspective about social media and
Speaker 3: the actions of college protesters, how much coverage of the
Speaker 3: protests actually gets to Palestinians.
Speaker 4: I was watching coverage with one of the doctors here
Speaker 4: of campus protests and other international protests just this afternoon.
Speaker 4: People are talking about it. People are talking about global
Speaker 4: resistance and support. I don't know how representative that is
Speaker 4: outside of that space. Like I interact with a lot
Speaker 4: of members of the public who are not healthcare workers,
Speaker 4: but most of my conversations are with healthcare workers. I
Speaker 4: do speak a little bit of Arabic, but not at
Speaker 4: like a deep conversational level, like enough to do some
Speaker 4: basic assessments and pleasantries and you know, meet my needs.
Speaker 4: A lot of people are aware and are feeling hopeful
Speaker 4: in this mode moment with the negotiations, in part because
Speaker 4: of the international pressure. It's interesting a lot. I feel
Speaker 4: like there's a lot more hopefulness in Gaza than I've
Speaker 4: experienced just talking with people that I experienced in the
Speaker 4: West Bank, and I think that partly that might be
Speaker 4: the moment, but also I think it's partly sometimes in
Speaker 4: the fact they noticed in the West Bank too, where
Speaker 4: it's like.
Speaker 5: It's horrible and horrifying and terrifying.
Speaker 4: To be in the eye of the storm or to
Speaker 4: be in the storm, but it's like you're in it
Speaker 4: and you don't have to imagine it elsewhere, if that
Speaker 4: makes sense. When that all started, like I tried to
Speaker 4: plug in as best as I could with you know,
Speaker 4: protest movements around the States, and as I'm sure a
Speaker 4: lot of people with maybe you and a lot of
Speaker 4: people might be listening, could like resonate with. It felt
Speaker 4: very like exciting to have that much motivation or that
Speaker 4: many people caring about Palestine, but also really inadequate and
Speaker 4: really be hopeless, just feel like you're throwing yourself against
Speaker 4: a wall and nothing's going to change, and feels really hopeless.
Speaker 4: And in the West Bank I had Palestinian activists say
Speaker 4: I think this has proven that no protest movements do anything,
Speaker 4: but like in this moment and in this location, I
Speaker 4: don't hear that, and I don't believe that that's the case.
Speaker 4: I think that her test movements have a limited capacity
Speaker 4: to change those people in the policies and just those
Speaker 4: people in power that said it's so little, so late
Speaker 4: as far as like any kind of political change in
Speaker 4: the West and in the US and in Europe, like today,
Speaker 4: I visited a cemetery that was built by like a
Speaker 4: guy and his volunteers he worked with since October seventh,
Speaker 4: and like visited the site of the remains of his family.
Speaker 4: What remains were covered and of like another person's remains
Speaker 4: of her family, and just like a field of some
Speaker 4: quality and a lot of just like pavers stones just
Speaker 4: thrown down with names written on them in the sand,
Speaker 4: surrounded by tent encampments, with children fighting to water the
Speaker 4: plants in order to get a couple of shekels their nation.
Speaker 4: Like it also really really sucks, and the fact that
Speaker 4: it's gotten to this point is unimaginably horrific.
Speaker 3: Ava had been on the ground and helping in what
Speaker 3: little remains of Lesa's hospitals. This is what she had
Speaker 3: to say about that experience.
Speaker 5: There is no space.
Speaker 4: Most of the sickest and most seriously injured patients are
Speaker 4: treated on the floor because there's no space, and they
Speaker 4: were brought in screaming, bleeding, dying or dead. First few days,
Speaker 4: I saw several people die on the floor, you know,
Speaker 4: saw several bodies on the floor. It's incredibly hard space.
Speaker 4: Most of the difficulty that I have seen, like I
Speaker 4: said before, has not been direct violence from the genocide,
Speaker 4: such as a missile falling, such as shrapnels, such as conclastiforce,
Speaker 4: such as gunshots. I've seen all of those, but that
Speaker 4: has not been the majority of what I have seen.
Speaker 4: The majority of what I have seen is children who
Speaker 4: do not have access to their anti seazure medications. So
Speaker 4: the child comes in in what's called status apolypticus, which
Speaker 4: is a seizure that lasts longer than thirty minutes, and
Speaker 4: it's gotten to a point where it's self reinforcing and
Speaker 4: it can't be stopped easily, and often it can be
Speaker 4: easily fatal, even with critical care resources. I have seen
Speaker 4: children who whose parents had to sitch to a different
Speaker 4: form of a medication and with a different dosing and things,
Speaker 4: and that got confusing because they were either like find
Speaker 4: someone who's bringing in medication, or like find it from
Speaker 4: another place and it's not written in Arabic and it's
Speaker 4: not clear, and so they end up getting a wrong dose.
Speaker 4: It's like that on the shot is now the only
Speaker 4: provider of dialysis in there. There's another hospital that provides,
Speaker 4: but everywhere is so overly, there's way too many people
Speaker 4: drawing on those resources that they're having to run people
Speaker 4: shorter periods of time, more spread out schedule, so people
Speaker 4: get critically sick. It's like a lack of clean water
Speaker 4: because of destruction of infrastructure, because of mass displacement, because
Speaker 4: of a extended period where in the Israelis were uh
Speaker 4: and the Egyptians were preventing flow of clean water resources
Speaker 4: into Gaza. So children, adults are getting hepatitis, a turning
Speaker 4: yellow with jaundice, having persisting diarrhea, dehydration, incredibly high rates
Speaker 4: of septic shock, and severe systemic infection due to all.
Speaker 5: Kinds of untreated conditions.
Speaker 4: Because it's so much work and so dangerous for people
Speaker 4: to access care, let alone just live that, people put
Speaker 4: things off till they're literally dying. It's not a stable situation,
Speaker 4: but it's like a tenuously like I said, hanging on
Speaker 4: by a thread situation.
Speaker 5: And again I just I am.
Speaker 4: I am terrified of what will happen if then everybody
Speaker 4: has to relocate again, because it's going to be like
Speaker 4: people not going back to square one, It'll be going
Speaker 4: you know, backward in the whole new depths of pain
Speaker 4: and suffering because like if they're pushed out of Raa
Speaker 4: to han Uness, it'll be too an already devastated city
Speaker 4: with now tent cities and people trying to.
Speaker 5: Rebuild a hospital where there is no water infrastructure.
Speaker 3: Despite the terrible suffering, Ava was able to find time
Speaker 3: to connect with her faith and her heritage while she
Speaker 3: was in las.
Speaker 4: I am also Jewish. That is not the reason I
Speaker 4: am here, but it is not not a reason that
Speaker 4: I am here. And during like the first few months
Speaker 4: since the seventh of October, Jews took up a lot
Speaker 4: of space in protest movements, and I think for good reason,
Speaker 4: because frankly, white supremacy and a time with simi Arab
Speaker 4: anti Palestinian bias and people not knowing what to think
Speaker 4: or do about Palestine, and so having voices of Jewish
Speaker 4: Americans saying like, no, actually, this is bad, Like you
Speaker 4: can all see that and just go ahead and acknowledge
Speaker 4: it's bad and we can move forward. I think is important.
Speaker 4: That said, I think that the voices of Jewish people
Speaker 4: the voices of white people. Not all the Jews are white,
Speaker 4: of course, but many Jews experienced whiteness and do not
Speaker 4: generally experience the Islamophobia anti Arabias, although planet some do.
Speaker 3: Here's a voice note Ava shared with us after a
Speaker 3: long day at the hospital in the Deafa.
Speaker 4: Aaker our house, I made some soup with noodles and
Speaker 4: some beans are food sawba scandals. For the first time
Speaker 4: in a long time, I find myself interestingly less estranged
Speaker 4: from my practice than I have been. It feels very
Speaker 4: in line with my faith, practice and my ethics to
Speaker 4: be here, and that feels good. And it's been the
Speaker 4: first time in a long time that I've felt like lighting.
Speaker 4: There's been several times that people have asked me my
Speaker 4: faith and I've answered I'm Jewish. And some of them
Speaker 4: were interested or excited, some of them were surprised or confused.
Speaker 4: Most were like, yeah, no problem. And obviously nobody has
Speaker 4: said anything negative about me for that, or for being
Speaker 4: American for that matter. My experience of Palestinians continues to
Speaker 4: be of the most understanding, welcoming and people in hospitable
Speaker 4: people and people most capable of holding complexity. People here
Speaker 4: obviously are not fans of the US, fans of the
Speaker 4: State of Israel, not fans of Most of their experience
Speaker 4: of Jews but have no problem with people from the
Speaker 4: US or people who are Jewish.
Speaker 5: And that much is my experience in the last bank.
Speaker 4: So there's that I've been offered people's foods so many times,
Speaker 4: and I consistently decline, except when I've just fed them
Speaker 4: and I eat something, and then I'm like, that's enough,
Speaker 4: thank you.
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 4: It's a really magical place and a really hard place
Speaker 4: to be, and I'm grateful I.
Speaker 5: Get to be here.
Speaker 3: It's obvious how much help there is great, but to
Speaker 3: give the people a pleasant With their hospitals bombed and
Speaker 3: their doctors killed, they desperately need medical help. But she
Speaker 3: says they have given her help as well.
Speaker 4: And I think it's really important, like you say, to
Speaker 4: be focused on the people who are experiencing the genocide
Speaker 4: and are assisting the genocide, because truly, in no small part,
Speaker 4: I came to Palestine hoping to be, you know, to
Speaker 4: do something to help, and also to be reinspired. Because
Speaker 4: Palestinians are experts in resisting colonialism, experts in resisting genocide,
Speaker 4: experts in maintaining whatever can be considered hopefulness towards the
Speaker 4: future beyond occupation and colonialism. It is not fair that
Speaker 4: Palasinians have to bear that burden of maintaining that kind
Speaker 4: of optimism and resilience and all that kind of stuff
Speaker 4: in the face of all the horrors that they've experienced,
Speaker 4: like nobody should have to experience that.
Speaker 3: We then asked Ava what the impact of solidarity actions
Speaker 3: around the world have on the people of Palestine.
Speaker 5: I think it is important to talk.
Speaker 4: I think it's really unsatisfying kind of activism, as many
Speaker 4: kinds of activism are, because it's hard to convince people
Speaker 4: who are already decided they're against you, and it's also
Speaker 4: and painful and exhausting and usually not helpful. And also
Speaker 4: it doesn't feel particularly helpful just to like rev up
Speaker 4: people that do agree with you. But I think that
Speaker 4: people continuing to show up and not letting it rest,
Speaker 4: not letting that energy die, not letting this administration feel
Speaker 4: like anyone's forgotten about the ways that they failed. Also, BDS,
Speaker 4: please learn about Boycopa investment and instinction. The Israeli government
Speaker 4: also really is scared of that they view it as
Speaker 4: terrorism to do more of it. Not saying that people
Speaker 4: should do terrorism, but do BDS, which is not terrorism.
Speaker 3: Decidedly no I'm glad you brought that up, because that's
Speaker 3: what the students are protesting. They want their universities to divest.
Speaker 5: I do think that people should learn more about BDS
Speaker 5: because a lot of the public knowledge and information promoted
Speaker 5: about BDS stuff is different from it. And that's fine.
Speaker 4: I think that Starbucks and McDonald's and all these other
Speaker 4: companies that are actually not BDS targets being scared to
Speaker 4: be associated with Israeli occupation state is also good. Don't
Speaker 4: get so much on a high horse about colonialism. Also
Speaker 4: learn about like the colonial history and reality of North
Speaker 4: America and try to work towards like supporting antipeclinial struggle there,
Speaker 4: because it, to me feels like the utmost of hypocrisy
Speaker 4: to be like you know, and the last ongoing occupation
Speaker 4: in the world and ignore the occupation that you might
Speaker 4: be living on and benefit from. Personally, I think that
Speaker 4: I think it insulates. I think it does important work
Speaker 4: towards building international solidarity and building anti colonial resistance around
Speaker 4: the world to talk about the interconnection between different kinds
Speaker 4: of colonialism and anti clinial struggle, and it also insulates
Speaker 4: our movements against claims of anti Semitism and other things
Speaker 4: to be like. No, it's nothing special about the Israeli State.
Speaker 4: Israeli State is a really bad example of settler colonialism
Speaker 4: as is unit. It sits as is Canada and be
Speaker 4: able to talk about all of those things as different
Speaker 4: sides of the same kinds of like genocidal systems.
Speaker 3: In addition to sharing her impressions of Palestine with us,
Speaker 3: Ava also shared some moments of her day to day
Speaker 3: life there. These small moments of joy are something that wore,
Speaker 3: genocide and violence try to take from Palestinian people, and
Speaker 3: so the experience of joy is a form of resistance
Speaker 3: in itself.
Speaker 4: I am here in a tiny courtyard. There are birds
Speaker 4: chirping you can see, or some sounds of the street.
Speaker 4: I can see some flowers and beautiful plants, next to
Speaker 4: an incredibly fancy house that a family fled from and
Speaker 4: is now renting to the organization I'm working with and
Speaker 4: in turn housing also another family of one of the
Speaker 4: doctors here. And so it feels so strangely peaceful, very
Speaker 4: confusing to the senses. Anyway, that's enough for now. I'm
Speaker 4: signing off by.
Speaker 3: If there's anything that you want people to know that
Speaker 3: we haven't seen, or like that hasn't been being showed.
Speaker 3: Like I know, the actual atrocity is far, far greater
Speaker 3: than the snippets we're seeing. But I guess, having been
Speaker 3: on the ground, what is something that maybe you want
Speaker 3: people to know that we aren't getting across on our phones.
Speaker 4: I guess the best way I can answer that is, like,
Speaker 4: it's not particularly original, but remembering that cousins are just people,
Speaker 4: and they're living their lives and trying to exist.
Speaker 5: They're just people, and.
Speaker 4: Everyone and everything that they've known has been irrevocably altered,
Speaker 4: whether they've been murdered, seriously injured, had their entire family
Speaker 4: taken from them and never recovered. All the landmarks they
Speaker 4: grew up around, all the trees that they hung out under,
Speaker 4: all the places that they prayed and ate and got
Speaker 4: into trouble, everything has gone. And thirty some thousand murdered,
Speaker 4: sixty some thousand injured does not represent any part of
Speaker 4: anywhere near the majority of the horror that people are experiencing.
Speaker 4: But I think it's worthwhile remembering that, and also that
Speaker 4: numbers are not at all representative, and also just that
Speaker 4: like some people are political here, some people aren't critical,
Speaker 4: and most of them they'll getty dam I just want
Speaker 4: to live.
Speaker 1: It Could Happen years a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: Well more podcasts and cool Zone Media. Visit our website
Speaker 1: Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or where every was in the.
Speaker 6: Podcast It Could Happen Here. That's the podcast that you're
Speaker 6: listening to. I'm your host, Nia Wong. It's a podcast
Speaker 6: about things falling apart and putting them back together again.
Speaker 6: This is a very very immediate falling apart and then
Speaker 6: trying to put it back together again. Episode Today we're
Speaker 6: talking about something we haven't really talked about on the
Speaker 6: show very much, which is the music industry and the
Speaker 6: absolute fiasco that is streaming services within it. And here
Speaker 6: to talk with me today are two people who are
Speaker 6: trying to fix some of those problems. And those two
Speaker 6: people are Simon and Alex who are co founders and
Speaker 6: worker owners of a new platform project initiative many such
Speaker 6: words called MIRLO. And yeah, both of you two, welcome
Speaker 6: to the show.
Speaker 5: Thanks so much. It's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 7: Yeah, excited to be on here.
Speaker 6: Yeah. So I'm excited to talk with you both first
Speaker 6: about sort of the issues with the existing sort of
Speaker 6: market for music distribution, because there's been over the last
Speaker 6: really twenty years, it's been a sort of seismic shift
Speaker 6: in how music distribution has functioned from a model that
Speaker 6: was previously largely built on things like record sales to
Speaker 6: the sort of streaming platforms.
Speaker 8: So, yeah, can you talk about what the issues you.
Speaker 6: See with the sort of current model are and how
Speaker 6: that kind of led you to do something different?
Speaker 8: Sure?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean for me, that's the story of me
Speaker 5: growing up with music, you know, because I was born
Speaker 5: in the nineteen eighties, so you know, my first connection
Speaker 5: to you know, to music was through playing in my
Speaker 5: elementary school band, learning the trumpet and then the trombone,
Speaker 5: but also you know, beginning to buy CDs and I remember,
Speaker 5: I think it might have been will Smith's Big Willie
Speaker 5: Style or whatever that like in the early nineties. I
Speaker 5: think was the first CD that I bought. But you know,
Speaker 5: that was how I, you know, music came into my world.
Speaker 5: There were also some cassette tapes too, I think, like
Speaker 5: when I was younger, it was cassette tapes and by
Speaker 5: the time I was the one like, you know, spending
Speaker 5: my allowance money. It was CDs. But then you know,
Speaker 5: by the end of the decade, by the time in
Speaker 5: high school, you know, Napster happens. I was, I think
Speaker 5: in middle school when that happened.
Speaker 6: So we should explain what napster is, because I think
Speaker 6: we've outreached a point where it faded.
Speaker 5: Napster is a big deal because all of a sudden,
Speaker 5: I can speak from my you know, memory of it
Speaker 5: as a twelve year old or whatever. I was probably
Speaker 5: fourteen maybe when when when Napster was a thing. I
Speaker 5: remember going over to my neighbor's house who I hung
Speaker 5: out with after school a lot, and he had this
Speaker 5: program on his computer where he could download any song
Speaker 5: that he wanted, and it was just like this incredible,
Speaker 5: mind blowing new thing. Of course, that's just from the
Speaker 5: end point of the distribution, right, that's from that perspective,
Speaker 5: it was this absolutely transformative expert varience. But of course
Speaker 5: all of the steps that got into getting the music
Speaker 5: there was putting some carts before some horses, you know,
Speaker 5: and a lot of it was you know, getting there
Speaker 5: via unauthorized leaks or other ways that because it was
Speaker 5: all of a sudden, so simple to share the physical
Speaker 5: sounds through the new kinds of media channels that were
Speaker 5: available through the Internet obviously and through software. The folks
Speaker 5: at Napster were able to really jump ahead of that
Speaker 5: and in classic Silicon Valley fashion, you know, disrupt the
Speaker 5: industry and all of that was really happening with musicians
Speaker 5: early on, right this was even before the dot com
Speaker 5: bubble burst. You know, Napster was riding that wave and
Speaker 5: a big part of that sort of first arrival of
Speaker 5: Silicon Valley startup technology really arriving in millions of you know,
Speaker 5: living rooms and home office computers and you know all that.
Speaker 5: And so I think historically, you know, with technology, this
Speaker 5: really does play out that oftentimes musicians are the ones
Speaker 5: that get disrupted first. And for decades this has been
Speaker 5: you can look at the history of the twentieth century
Speaker 5: and the history of media in the twentieth century as
Speaker 5: this tension between musicians doing what they do and technologists
Speaker 5: doing what they do, and capitalists using the technology to
Speaker 5: extract value from the musicians, you know. And then there
Speaker 5: have of course been lots of ways that musicians have
Speaker 5: organized and fought back, and you know, wrote their own
Speaker 5: chapters in the story, and I think that we're just
Speaker 5: just starting to get to the point where that is
Speaker 5: happening in this latest episode. Napster is, you know, twenty
Speaker 5: five years old at this point in terms of when
Speaker 5: that moment happened. And of course the reaction to Napster
Speaker 5: from the entrenched music industry, which we're all consolidating under
Speaker 5: these massive media conglomerates at that time, they fought back
Speaker 5: kind of old school, and I remember I was in
Speaker 5: college when they were soon doing college kids for downloading
Speaker 5: stuff on Napster, for having files on your computer that
Speaker 5: you know, weren't authorized or whatever. Those were my peers.
Speaker 5: You know, I didn't actually know anybody personally that this
Speaker 5: was happening to, but this was, you know, this was
Speaker 5: something that we were all aware of and we were
Speaker 5: all kind of figuring out together.
Speaker 6: There's a really good Corey doctor book that's like a
Speaker 6: fictionalized account of what this period was like called Pirate Cinema.
Speaker 6: That is great, So if you ever want to yeah,
Speaker 6: if people want to read that, it is very good.
Speaker 6: It's about the sort of film version of the same
Speaker 6: fight that was happening.
Speaker 5: Exactly, and they were I mean, no holds barred, Like,
Speaker 5: they had massive budgets for expensive lawyers, and they just
Speaker 5: sent them after whoever they could, thinking that that would
Speaker 5: stem the tide. And obviously that wasn't going to stop anything,
Speaker 5: because what Napster signaled was this massive, technologically catalyzed paradigm
Speaker 5: shift where the way that people listen to music was
Speaker 5: just radically transforming before everyone one's eyes. And it took
Speaker 5: the music industry side of it a little while to
Speaker 5: catch up to that reality. But once they did, they
Speaker 5: started trying to figure out, Okay, what are the ways
Speaker 5: that we can get a cut right? Obviously if everyone's
Speaker 5: just doing this illegally, and you know this is just
Speaker 5: if everybody is doing something illegal at the same time,
Speaker 5: even we can't send enough lawyers to sue everybody out
Speaker 5: of existence, so we need to figure out how to
Speaker 5: make this work. And that's when you know there started
Speaker 5: to be experiments with other big corporate players in the
Speaker 5: technology industry. I remember from my perspective, it was the
Speaker 5: iTunes store. I remember ripping all of my CDs that
Speaker 5: I bought in high school, like spending a whole weekend
Speaker 5: just ripping them all into my iTunes library. And kind
Speaker 5: of curating it and having my you know, all of
Speaker 5: my MP three's and iTunes, and I had an iPod
Speaker 5: and that was where I would listen to things. And
Speaker 5: I didn't even really purchase a lot of the like
Speaker 5: because they had ninety nine cent tracks. That was kind
Speaker 5: of things like you could pay dollar and you can
Speaker 5: get what you wanted. I didn't buy that much music
Speaker 5: that by that point, because mostly it was transferring files
Speaker 5: that I had burned from CDs. But that was how
Speaker 5: the industry was kind of making its peace with this disruption,
Speaker 5: was to partner with Apple, and then later Spotify comes
Speaker 5: onto the scene with this promise of the Universal Jukebox,
Speaker 5: Right like, we're going to build the tool that is
Speaker 5: going to allow for any listener to just pay a
Speaker 5: subscription and they can listen to anything they want on
Speaker 5: the internet. Because you can hire it anything on the internet.
Speaker 5: We're going to make the legal way to do it,
Speaker 5: and so we're going to let people pay and we're
Speaker 5: going to design all of the back end. We're going
Speaker 5: to centralize it in our you know, technological systems, and
Speaker 5: we're going to build this tool that can allow anybody
Speaker 5: to listen to music anytime without having to in the
Speaker 5: back of their mind be worried about if they're stealing
Speaker 5: from a musician or if you know, they're going to
Speaker 5: get sued a record label or whatever. Right so, and
Speaker 5: of course the record companies were all in on that bet,
Speaker 5: and that is where you know there I haven't seen
Speaker 5: all of the books or whatnot, but it's very clear
Speaker 5: that you know, the major labels were big you know,
Speaker 5: equity owners in Spotify. So they're basically making big bets
Speaker 5: on Spotify. And then the tension that has been navigated is, Okay,
Speaker 5: how do they maintain the value of the catalog, the
Speaker 5: back catalog that the intellectual property rights of all of
Speaker 5: the recordings that throughout you know, the history of recorded
Speaker 5: music they have consolidated into these you know, catalog portfolios
Speaker 5: of sounds and songs. So that's valuable and they need
Speaker 5: to get their piece from that, But then they also
Speaker 5: need to get their piece from Spotify. The business you know,
Speaker 5: continuing to exist and that subscriber revenue from people who
Speaker 5: are paying for the privilege to be able to listen
Speaker 5: to any song that they want at the click of
Speaker 5: a button, and that has Yeah, it's created some weird Incentivesicularly,
Speaker 5: the group of people at the end of the day
Speaker 5: that really gets left out of that are the musicians, right,
Speaker 5: because throughout history, you know, the partnerships with people who
Speaker 5: distribute music have been very exploitive. Right. It's like, Okay,
Speaker 5: i'll give you an advance to go record your music,
Speaker 5: give you all this creative control, you know, set up
Speaker 5: the studio time, do all the legwork to make it
Speaker 5: so you can do whatever you want as a musician.
Speaker 5: But then we're keeping the master recordings. You know, we're
Speaker 5: keeping a percentage of every sale that you make. So
Speaker 5: it does become this kind of deal where the labels,
Speaker 5: over the longer term, benefit much much more than the musicians.
Speaker 5: And then the deal will spotify really amplified that because
Speaker 5: the labels are making sure they get their cut, but
Speaker 5: they're not always making sure that the musicians get their cut.
Speaker 5: And even the musicians getting their cut has to go
Speaker 5: through the labels first, and so the labels have this
Speaker 5: relationship with the technology company that's distributing the files themselves,
Speaker 5: and that's kind of the bargain where it stayed, right
Speaker 5: and then most recently that became even more amplified. It
Speaker 5: sort of turned up the volume on the disparity in
Speaker 5: this dynamic when Spotify made the decision to demonetize many
Speaker 5: of the songs that are on the platform. So it
Speaker 5: used to be that you would get some fraction of
Speaker 5: a cent for every time that someone streamed your song,
Speaker 5: and Spotify had this complex algorithm for determining how you
Speaker 5: got paid out, and they recently tweaked that algorithm so
Speaker 5: that if you don't meet a certain threshold of plays,
Speaker 5: you don't get anything. So you could have your music
Speaker 5: on Spotify, could be music that you worked really hard
Speaker 5: and you know, even invested your own time and money
Speaker 5: and resources into putting out there, and you don't get
Speaker 5: a penny of it, and you don't get you say,
Speaker 5: and why? And that's the starting point from a musicians
Speaker 5: perspective about where things are at.
Speaker 7: I think it's also interesting to think about how the
Speaker 7: way those.
Speaker 9: Technology systems and the way that the music distribution has
Speaker 9: changed has also changed the way that music gets made.
Speaker 9: So you see a lot more, you know, very big
Speaker 9: name musicians releasing single tracks to big acclaim because now
Speaker 9: the incentive, and with the tweaking of the incentive, is
Speaker 9: that you.
Speaker 10: Want individual tracks that are making millions and millions of plays,
Speaker 10: so it really becomes about that rather than and you
Speaker 10: know that can be fairly value neutral, you know, album
Speaker 10: versus track or whatever, but it is really influencing the
Speaker 10: way that you know, the first twenty seconds or so
Speaker 10: of a song are the most important. So the structure
Speaker 10: of songs are changing to suit you know what, what
Speaker 10: actual music gets made because people skip the song, then
Speaker 10: it doesn't make any money. And yeah, So the way
Speaker 10: that the technology and capital and the incentives of capital
Speaker 10: have changed to actually shape the culture that we're consumed,
Speaker 10: I think it's very interesting.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And speaking of the way that capital and capital
Speaker 6: incentives changes the structure of what you're consuming, we need
Speaker 6: to take an ad break and we are back. So
Speaker 6: I think one of the kind of leak things about
Speaker 6: this kind of era of media distribution has been how
Speaker 6: kind of staggeringly impossible it's felt to resist any of
Speaker 6: these forces, largely because you know, now you have the
Speaker 6: power effectively of these massive tech companies and then also
Speaker 6: the power of the existing sort of studio monopolies on
Speaker 6: the same side, sort of wielding a giant hammer and
Speaker 6: hammering everyone else in the line. And this is the
Speaker 6: point where I want to ask, Yeah, I start talking
Speaker 6: about what mer Low is. So can we talk a
Speaker 6: little bit about I guess first how it got started,
Speaker 6: and then we can get more into what is it
Speaker 6: and how it's attempting to change all of this.
Speaker 10: So about two years ago, now, wow, I was doing
Speaker 10: a lot of volunteering with a project called Resonate, which
Speaker 10: is a little bit of a precursor to mirror Low
Speaker 10: in a way. Resonate is trying to be a alternative
Speaker 10: to Spotify. They want to be a streaming service where
Speaker 10: you can basically just create playlists, listen to music, and
Speaker 10: just and what was novel about Resonate was that they
Speaker 10: had a payout structure where every time you played a stream,
Speaker 10: you paid a little bit more. So if you pay once,
Speaker 10: you pay a cent, If you play twice you pay
Speaker 10: two cents, and then it would increase to.
Speaker 7: Paying around a dollar. And once you paid a dollar for.
Speaker 10: A track, so you played it like nine times, you
Speaker 10: owned the track and then it was yours to pay
Speaker 10: for it indefinitely. That was cool I did somewhere there,
Speaker 10: But what became apparent quickly was again these incentive structures
Speaker 10: where if you want to do a streaming platform. You
Speaker 10: want it to be a universal jukebox. People will use
Speaker 10: it for the music that's on it, and they want
Speaker 10: to hear the music that they know. And if you
Speaker 10: want to be a universal jukebox, you have to wade
Speaker 10: into the realm of royalties. And one of the things
Speaker 10: that we didn't mention earlier is that, as far as
Speaker 10: I know, maybe it's changed in the past year or so,
Speaker 10: Spotify is still not profitable. Despite massive payouts to the CEO,
Speaker 10: Spotify doesn't actually turn a profit. It's just investment driven,
Speaker 10: and that is in large part because of the way
Speaker 10: that royalties work on songs.
Speaker 7: It's just really hard to actually make money on top
Speaker 7: of all the costs of the.
Speaker 10: Infrastructure, which was a little bit of a clue for
Speaker 10: us for not working for a bootstrapped, non VC funded
Speaker 10: work or co op with absolutely no money, it was
Speaker 10: unlikely that that would succeed. We started also looking at
Speaker 10: projects that are kind of in the same space and
Speaker 10: we're a little bit more successful. That's how we got
Speaker 10: into contact with Alex and Alex I don't know if
Speaker 10: you want to talk a little bit.
Speaker 5: About Ampled, sure, Yeah, So Sion mentioned that he was
Speaker 5: coming out of Resonate. At the same time, I was
Speaker 5: coming out of AMPLE, which was a platform cooperative initiative
Speaker 5: that was started later part of the Last Second twenty
Speaker 5: eighteen twenty nineteen. I forgot exactly when I joined towards
Speaker 5: the end of twenty twenty one, and the idea behind
Speaker 5: ampled was that it was going to create essentially a
Speaker 5: monthly patronage kind of platform for musicians, so you, you know,
Speaker 5: release exclusive stuff on the platform that's yours and that
Speaker 5: you have the intellectual property rights too, and you have
Speaker 5: supporters who pay a monthly contribution to have access to
Speaker 5: that content. And so they had a little I guess
Speaker 5: it was kind of like a blog post kind of
Speaker 5: format that could you get in bed audio. You could
Speaker 5: embed videos and it would go out and and email
Speaker 5: to your supporters every month, and they could log into
Speaker 5: the platform to listen to your whatever you're releasing there.
Speaker 5: I joined AMPLE because I was actually at the time
Speaker 5: coming out of some other work that I had been
Speaker 5: doing and building democratic workplaces. I had been involved in
Speaker 5: starting another project that was trying to organize itself that way,
Speaker 5: and was also working with my partner who's a therapist,
Speaker 5: to start a mental health worker cooperative at the same time.
Speaker 5: So I was deep in the worker cooperative nerd zone
Speaker 5: at that point. But I had not been playing very
Speaker 5: much music. I'm a trombonist and do jazz and improvised music,
Speaker 5: and I had taken a couple of years off really
Speaker 5: from playing and was starting to get cranky. There was
Speaker 5: just a part of me that needs to make music.
Speaker 5: That's just the part of who I am, and it
Speaker 5: was just becoming really clear to me that that needed
Speaker 5: to happen. So I was starting to look for what
Speaker 5: are some ways that I can start putting some stuff
Speaker 5: out into the world again and ideally doing that work
Speaker 5: in the spirit of cooperation, you know, and finding other
Speaker 5: people who shared my enthusiasm for the idea that doing
Speaker 5: the work together and learning how to actually run things
Speaker 5: cooperatively without you know, a management structure on top of
Speaker 5: it siphoning energy away from it. And so I found
Speaker 5: Ample on the Internet and saw what the proposition was.
Speaker 5: And part of their structure at the time was that
Speaker 5: you could actually become a co owner of the platform
Speaker 5: by being an artist that was using the platform, and
Speaker 5: once you got to a certain number of supporters on
Speaker 5: the platform, then you got to be well. The governance
Speaker 5: rights involved being able to a third of the board members.
Speaker 5: It was a nine person board with three artists representatives
Speaker 5: could run for the board, and there was also sort
Speaker 5: of an extra space and their discord that was sort
Speaker 5: of artist owner, you know, only kind of space to
Speaker 5: connect around that. And so yeah, once I got the
Speaker 5: number of people following my project, this was in twenty
Speaker 5: twenty two, got an email saying congratulations, you're an artist owner,
Speaker 5: and at the same time realized that the party was
Speaker 5: kind of over. I had when I arrived into the space,
Speaker 5: I was like, Hey, everybody, what's up? And it was
Speaker 5: just kind of crickets, you know. And there were a
Speaker 5: couple of the workers who were working on it at
Speaker 5: the time, who I'm pretty sure were still volunteering their time,
Speaker 5: who had had some conversations with and gotten to know
Speaker 5: a little bit, but it was sort of a ghost
Speaker 5: ship by that point. And it turns out I was
Speaker 5: the last artist owner to join yeahs distinction exact. The
Speaker 5: platform wound down entirely at the end of twenty twenty three,
Speaker 5: and so yeah, it was maybe a few months after
Speaker 5: I had joined and started using it. I kind of
Speaker 5: had a monthly flow where I would do something, send
Speaker 5: an update, write something about what I was working on,
Speaker 5: records and trombone sounds, you know, linked to something else
Speaker 5: that was on the internet, you know. And so after
Speaker 5: a few months of doing that, yeah, I got an
Speaker 5: email saying we're winding down, sorry, and that was kind
Speaker 5: of that. But by that point I had met Si
Speaker 5: and we were both kind of starting to compare notes
Speaker 5: about these respective projects that had similar goals, similar ideals,
Speaker 5: similar interest in you know, cooperating, and realizing that neither
Speaker 5: of them was, you know, was going to be a
Speaker 5: place where we could continue the work that we wanted
Speaker 5: to do, And so we started talking about, well, what
Speaker 5: if we were going to start from scratch, what would
Speaker 5: that look like? And so I brought some other friends
Speaker 5: he'd been working with that resonate and these conversations we've
Speaker 5: just started as conversations like similar to the one we're
Speaker 5: having right now, where we're starting to kind of develop
Speaker 5: an analysis together about what's going on in the music industry,
Speaker 5: what might be able to be done differently. And after
Speaker 5: a few months those conversations started turning into wait, yeah,
Speaker 5: we could actually do some of this ourselves and that
Speaker 5: was when the idea of mirla really started to hit
Speaker 5: the ground.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we will talk more about how all of it
Speaker 6: sort of came together and what the structure looks like
Speaker 6: and what it will look like after more of these ads.
Speaker 6: We are back, So let's get into this sort of
Speaker 6: meat of what near low is. So can you talk
Speaker 6: about what is sort of different about mirlaw than the
Speaker 6: other sort of platforms in the market. How is the
Speaker 6: cooperative structure work.
Speaker 7: Yeah, So when we were looking at ways to.
Speaker 10: Actually make a profitable business, which is unfortunately a thing
Speaker 10: that you have to do if you want to or
Speaker 10: at least a revenue making business, if you want to
Speaker 10: be able to pay people, we were looking at other
Speaker 10: platforms and spaces that exist out there that do actually
Speaker 10: make money. So Patreon and band Camp have been profitable.
Speaker 10: Band Camp for a long time actually posted their earnings
Speaker 10: as a report. Then band Camp got sold, and then
Speaker 10: it got sold again, and then band Camp laid off
Speaker 10: half of their staff, including everyone who was part of
Speaker 10: the union organizing committee. And we were already like we
Speaker 10: already had a basically a prototype at that point, but
Speaker 10: that was also a moment where we realized is like oh,
Speaker 10: we gotta go, we gotta press goo on this thing.
Speaker 10: And so what we have, what the product is right
Speaker 10: now is basically it is I would say, a lightweight
Speaker 10: clone of bandcamp. It doesn't have all the functionality with
Speaker 10: the added features of more Patreon stall subscription based things.
Speaker 10: So musicians can go onto mir Low, they upload their albums,
Speaker 10: they can sell their albums as digital copies for whatever
Speaker 10: they want, for free or for money, and then they
Speaker 10: can also set subscription tiers, use it as a mailing
Speaker 10: list basically to send out updates. Two subscribers have specific
Speaker 10: tiers that receive specific content. For example, you could have
Speaker 10: a tier that if someone subscribes, they automatically get any
Speaker 10: new release that you put on the platform. And yeah,
Speaker 10: that's basically the product. It allows music playing, but it's
Speaker 10: not as streaming service. You can't make playlists, it doesn't
Speaker 10: do infinite streaming. The plays are basically promotional plays. So
Speaker 10: we've had two hundred and fifty artists, which includes some
Speaker 10: people who work under several names, but so two hundred
Speaker 10: and fifty entities artists who have uploaded five hundred albums
Speaker 10: to Erolo, which I don't know, I haven't done the
Speaker 10: math on what that is like listening time wise, but
Speaker 10: it's probably already more music that I could consume, and
Speaker 10: we have people buying music. It's really exciting, you know,
Speaker 10: like it's not we're not we're not making enough money
Speaker 10: to bankroll anything, but it's exciting that I think we've
Speaker 10: got about four hundred dollars moving through the platform every
Speaker 10: month at this point. So that's that's really cool. We
Speaker 10: need more obviously, but that goes a long way to
Speaker 10: you know, I guess confirming the ideas that.
Speaker 7: We've had so far. And there was a second part of.
Speaker 6: That question, Yeah, how does the sort of cooperative structure
Speaker 6: work now? And then we could move on to what
Speaker 6: is it going to look like when the platform is
Speaker 6: sort of more developed, more mature.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I can speak to little bit. So we also,
Speaker 5: in our thinking about this, took a lot of lessons
Speaker 5: from our experiences in Ample and Resonate, also the other
Speaker 5: experiences I've had in you know, cooperative organizing structures. And
Speaker 5: one of the things that we wanted to make sure
Speaker 5: we did was we had kind of a phase one
Speaker 5: and then during that phase one also kind of figure
Speaker 5: out the vision for what we want to see moving
Speaker 5: forward and how we can grow into something that's more
Speaker 5: like what we ultimately want. In other words, we didn't
Speaker 5: want to put the car before the horse was saying like, okay,
Speaker 5: let's draw out like this really spiffy multi stakeholder cooperative
Speaker 5: thing where the artists have these things and the you know,
Speaker 5: listeners have these things, and the coders have you know,
Speaker 5: you know, for starters. We just figured out who among
Speaker 5: us is like ready to our government name to be
Speaker 5: some paper and you know, open an LLC. And that
Speaker 5: ended up being three of us who are based in
Speaker 5: the United States MESI and one other working on our Jodie,
Speaker 5: and then from there the three of us were kind
Speaker 5: of the poor team that is going to build things
Speaker 5: out from here. So we're still very early stages, you know.
Speaker 5: The soft launch and the platform was the beginning of
Speaker 5: this year, just a couple of months ago. We incorporated
Speaker 5: last year in November, so all of this is totally
Speaker 5: brand new, and you know, we're figuring out as we go.
Speaker 5: But the idea with the current group is that we
Speaker 5: start to practice a culture of decision making by consent.
Speaker 5: And that's this idea that particularly anything high level about
Speaker 5: you know, what the business is or how it runs
Speaker 5: is consented to by everybody in the group, and so
Speaker 5: if there's anything that any of us are a no to,
Speaker 5: you know, we're like, hold up, this isn't going to
Speaker 5: work for me. That actually is the way that we
Speaker 5: steer the ship forward. So that's been something that we've
Speaker 5: been working on building together. We're working with a legal
Speaker 5: team to codify this into a sort of worker cooperative
Speaker 5: style LLC operating agreement. You know, we're members of the
Speaker 5: US Federation of Worker Cooperatives. We've been kind of learning
Speaker 5: from the ecosystemative ways that worker cooperative policies and procedures
Speaker 5: can be built into the nucleus of this at the beginning.
Speaker 5: And also, the three of us each come from different places,
Speaker 5: and so we each bring really different perspectives to where
Speaker 5: things need to go. And so that's also been a
Speaker 5: part of you know, where we're starting from is if
Speaker 5: we can get enough unique perspectives into the space, build
Speaker 5: the core practice this culture of consent where even a
Speaker 5: minority of no is a no for the whole group,
Speaker 5: and start to build that in, then that is kind
Speaker 5: of the seed for where things go from here.
Speaker 6: In terms of where things go from here. Things that
Speaker 6: you talk about a lot is the exit to community,
Speaker 6: And yeah, I wanted to ask, can you explain what
Speaker 6: that is and what it sort of means for what
Speaker 6: this platform is going to be going forward.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So this idea of exit to community comes from
Speaker 5: conversations that have been happening in the solid area economy
Speaker 5: world about what would it look like to support essentially
Speaker 5: startup businesses right that the founders are aiming for a
Speaker 5: different kind of exit than how we traditionally think about,
Speaker 5: you know, startup businesses that are aiming for an exit
Speaker 5: to either get bought by a bigger company or get
Speaker 5: listed publicly on a stock market and become essentially instruments
Speaker 5: of financial speculation. And that's really the only kind of
Speaker 5: pathway out. We even saw this with band Camp, that
Speaker 5: you know, this company that was internally profitable and doing
Speaker 5: things the way that regular old businesses to operate, you know,
Speaker 5: and releasing their financials every year and you know, really
Speaker 5: doing it by the book, so to speak. There that
Speaker 5: the endpoint, you know, ten ish years down the road,
Speaker 5: was getting bought by a bigger company because what they
Speaker 5: had built was valuable to Epic Games, and you know,
Speaker 5: there's been speculation about why Epic bought band camp, but
Speaker 5: you know, whatever the reason was, it wasn't because they
Speaker 5: were taking all the boxes as a profitable business, every
Speaker 5: step with the way. That might have been part of it.
Speaker 5: But the idea was that band camp had become something
Speaker 5: more valuable and that they could cash out. You know,
Speaker 5: I think it was two hundred and eighty something million dollars,
Speaker 5: which is a big chunk of change, and that, you know,
Speaker 5: the decision to cash out was made by the founder.
Speaker 5: There was likely other people who had input into the decision,
Speaker 5: but there was certainly wasn't you know, a team that
Speaker 5: was you know, having a deliberation and making a consent
Speaker 5: based decision about how to do that. It was one
Speaker 5: guy and he signed the paperwork and that was it.
Speaker 5: So the idea of exit to the community is essentially
Speaker 5: been an invitation to explore alternatives, alternatives that are more
Speaker 5: in alignment with building the world that we're actually trying
Speaker 5: to see. So for us, that means, you know, first
Speaker 5: of all, creating something that is financially viable, you know,
Speaker 5: that can actually support the work that it takes to
Speaker 5: both maintain the platform and maintain accountability to the people
Speaker 5: who are using platform, particularly the musicians, so that those
Speaker 5: relationships need to get built. There needs to be enough
Speaker 5: trust in order to feel like this is actually a
Speaker 5: thing worth continuing to do together. And then there's also
Speaker 5: the work of having it be essentially used enough that
Speaker 5: the math works out that the work that it takes
Speaker 5: to sustain the platform can be supported and the work
Speaker 5: that it takes to make music can be supported, because ultimately,
Speaker 5: this is a platform that is trying to move money
Speaker 5: into musicians' pockets. So if we can pull that off,
Speaker 5: then the next step is the exit community step, which
Speaker 5: the way I see it, would be essentially co designing
Speaker 5: a set of agreements about how the system will continue
Speaker 5: to be tended to moving forward in ways that are
Speaker 5: directly accountable to the people who are involved in making
Speaker 5: it go themselves. Right, So in this case, you know,
Speaker 5: we see the community as kind of broadly comprised of
Speaker 5: three different groups, not like groups of people that all
Speaker 5: hang out together and do stuff together, but like there's
Speaker 5: kind of three kinds of contributions that are getting made.
Speaker 5: One is the people who are working on developing the software.
Speaker 5: This is an open source software project, so there's been
Speaker 5: a lot of inputs from a lot of different people.
Speaker 5: Of that, of course, the work of maintaining an open
Speaker 5: source software project requires resourcing, but that's one of the groups.
Speaker 5: Another group is the musicians, the people who are you
Speaker 5: making stuff that they put on the platform. And another
Speaker 5: is the people who are listening and the people who
Speaker 5: are supporting with you know, with patronage, with money, right,
Speaker 5: and and some people might be in all three of
Speaker 5: those categories, you know, So it's not like there's your
Speaker 5: one or the other, but those three things all have
Speaker 5: really important and important stake in the sustainability of the
Speaker 5: overall operations. So the exit to community step would be
Speaker 5: essentially designing standards, protocols, agreements, whatever you want to call
Speaker 5: it for how we do this work moving forward, and
Speaker 5: then we can get out of the way if we want,
Speaker 5: you know. So that's the other part of it. The
Speaker 5: other part of it, too, of an exit is how
Speaker 5: do you make sure that the founders are whole, you know,
Speaker 5: so that it's not like we've put all this work
Speaker 5: into making something possible and then it's working and then
Speaker 5: everyone's like, oh yeah, screw you, get out of here.
Speaker 5: We're ready to take this on our ohs and we're
Speaker 5: hoping that doesn't happen either, So figuring out that is
Speaker 5: also a part of the's what's before us. My aspiration
Speaker 5: and my vision for this is that culture of can
Speaker 5: that we're baking into the worker stage of this right
Speaker 5: now can be something that continues to be a core
Speaker 5: aspect of how we move forward. In other words, once
Speaker 5: we really see who all the stakeholders are, let's come
Speaker 5: up with a creative way to figure out how this
Speaker 5: is going to work that everybody can consent to them.
Speaker 6: I think that's a good place of transition to the
Speaker 6: last thing I wanted to ask, which is you know,
Speaker 6: you've both came from projects that kind of fizzled, and
Speaker 6: this is the thing that happens a lot of time
Speaker 6: with projects like this. So what is the sort of
Speaker 6: plan to make sure that this is not like the
Speaker 6: next in a pile of of people who tried to
Speaker 6: do this that did work.
Speaker 10: We've been having a lot of conversations around that because
Speaker 10: there have been like public reflections happening about the final
Speaker 10: years of Ampled, So there's some reflections around those things
Speaker 10: that you can find those on the internet. Well, So
Speaker 10: the things I'm thinking about is you really have to
Speaker 10: think about what it means to be successful, and.
Speaker 7: It's possible to claim that success is.
Speaker 10: You know, we go toe to toe with band camp
Speaker 10: or Patreon and we beat them at the game of
Speaker 10: being a VC funded startup, but we do it with
Speaker 10: volunteer and you know, grassroots money support. And I guess
Speaker 10: that is a way of thinking of success. It's not
Speaker 10: my personal way of thinking of success. So a way
Speaker 10: of thinking of success for me is more, you know,
Speaker 10: what's the end result? What are we hoping to do?
Speaker 10: What are we hoping to prefigure? Is it a more
Speaker 10: resilient community of people who are willing to go into
Speaker 10: a next step together? And in that way, I feel
Speaker 10: like you could say that Resonate and Ampled they fizzled,
Speaker 10: but they both created spaces where people found each other
Speaker 10: and try to do the next thing. And I feel
Speaker 10: like that is very much the project of organizing prior
Speaker 10: to global socialism or whatever, is looking at what we
Speaker 10: did and learning from it and moving forward and trying again.
Speaker 7: Because we have to try again. And I feel like
Speaker 7: that is kind of the big picture question.
Speaker 10: We have some stuff in place that we're doing to
Speaker 10: make our project a bit more resilient. The consen stuff
Speaker 10: is part of that that Alex just described. Other parts
Speaker 10: of that is that we from the get go decided
Speaker 10: to do things publicly and bring in people as quickly
Speaker 10: as possible. I was the original programmer for the platform,
Speaker 10: but in the past month I have been the honestly
Speaker 10: one of the smallest contributors to the platform. We've just
Speaker 10: had people stepping up in really incredible ways. Truly appreciate it.
Speaker 10: We've had people stepping in during this campaign. They've been
Speaker 10: making videos, they've been making art. Yeah, just the way
Speaker 10: that the community is stepping in and like wanting to
Speaker 10: be a success, I think is this great example of
Speaker 10: what it is we can achieve if we if we're
Speaker 10: willing to, you know, let people into the process of
Speaker 10: doing that. There are a lot of questions there about
Speaker 10: who and what is doing that supporting, So that is
Speaker 10: something that we're constantly checking in on. And I think
Speaker 10: also a metric of success is who is interacting with
Speaker 10: the platform. Especially at Resonate, they did a really good
Speaker 10: job of bringing in the folks from Black Socialists of
Speaker 10: America were involved. There were people who had experience of
Speaker 10: cooperation Jackson who were involved. They did a really good
Speaker 10: job of diversifying the crowd of people who were not
Speaker 10: the standard I don't know, like open source tech people,
Speaker 10: which is a very white, you know, susset mail situation.
Speaker 10: And we we're trying to take from those and learn
Speaker 10: from those and thinking about what spaces we present ourselves in,
Speaker 10: like very intentional outreach to people to open up through
Speaker 10: cultural work, through conversations that are very local focused, to
Speaker 10: create space where we're talking about these things.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I think for me, the idea of success
Speaker 5: too has to do with our needs getting met, you know,
Speaker 5: because Spotify is not meeting people's needs. Sorry, it's just
Speaker 5: not I mean, I guess it's meeting some people's needs,
Speaker 5: not meeting very many people.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, I mean they just fired like not literally
Speaker 6: their entire podcasting division, but an unbelievably large number of
Speaker 6: extreuely talented people got fired. Oh really and it yeah,
Speaker 6: it really sucks.
Speaker 7: That's really interesting.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, not operating at the same scale that
Speaker 5: Spotify is actually making it work matters, you know. And
Speaker 5: my hope is that that, first of all, that individual
Speaker 5: artists start to see this as a place that you know,
Speaker 5: they can kind of get their crew around them, and
Speaker 5: that this can be a really a nice reliable source
Speaker 5: of additional income in their careers, help them pay rent.
Speaker 5: Like when I was on Ampled, you know, I was
Speaker 5: bringing in like one hundred dollars a month or something
Speaker 5: like that, which isn't that much because I was doing
Speaker 5: it on a very small scale, but it made a
Speaker 5: big difference in my everyday life in terms of making
Speaker 5: space to make music a part of it. And I
Speaker 5: know how I lean into that a little bit more,
Speaker 5: there could be you know, a significant chunk of change
Speaker 5: coming through something like this to support just the ongoing
Speaker 5: paying rent while making art, which is the thing.
Speaker 10: On that note, another thing that I think is worth
Speaker 10: celebrating is that in the end, AMPLE basically made two
Speaker 10: hundred and fifty thousand dollars available to musicians and did
Speaker 10: do what it was trying to do in a successful way.
Speaker 5: This is the other thing that I want to aspire
Speaker 5: to or you know, define success as, is our local
Speaker 5: scenes starting to work mirror low into the way that
Speaker 5: they operate. You know, can this be something that small
Speaker 5: independent labels, artists, collectives, niche genres in different places, you know,
Speaker 5: DIY spaces, whatever that this can actually be a useful
Speaker 5: tool to make the local space go and to make
Speaker 5: it easier for musicians to do what they do in
Speaker 5: community in real life, you know, at the level of
Speaker 5: local and we'll see how that goes. We're just getting started,
Speaker 5: but I'm really optimistic and looking forward to continuing to
Speaker 5: pour energy into that. Yeah.
Speaker 6: So where can people go to find the platform and
Speaker 6: support it if they're interested or get involved?
Speaker 5: Yeah, so we're at mirrlow dot space. That's the website.
Speaker 5: If you go to mirrlow dot space, you'll see at
Speaker 5: the very top right now, just for a a couple
Speaker 5: more days, we've got a kickstarter going to kind of
Speaker 5: keep the lights on for the rest of the year.
Speaker 5: Be tremendously grateful for any support from anyone who's listening today.
Speaker 5: To get us, it's where I need to get over there,
Speaker 5: and also at the front page, and if you scroll
Speaker 5: down to the bottom, there's links to email us, find
Speaker 5: us on GitHub, find our discord. There's plenty of ways
Speaker 5: to plug in and connect. Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, So hoping this all works for the best, and
Speaker 6: hoping that there's a way for artists to create music
Speaker 6: in ways that are sustainable and not unbelievably exploitative.
Speaker 7: Yeah, thanks so much for having us, man, it's been
Speaker 7: truly a pleasure.
Speaker 5: Yeah, thank you so much.
Speaker 6: Maybe so Yeah, yeah, and this has been It could
Speaker 6: happen here and find us in the usual places. Yeah. Go,
Speaker 6: I don't know, go make trouble for the people who
Speaker 6: have what use it.
Speaker 1: It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 1: cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 8: Hi everyone, it's me James and I'm joined by Scheren today,
Speaker 8: and in a rare instance, we're not discussing something terrible
Speaker 8: and sad. It seems like most of the think is
Speaker 8: serene and I talk about. But it's a fun episode today,
Speaker 8: isn't it, Shreen.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm in a good mood, which is crazy to
Speaker 3: say these days. But I'm happy to be here. I
Speaker 3: love to be the podcast dummy. I love to have
Speaker 3: things talk to me at and I listen too. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 3: that's interest.
Speaker 8: You've chrished it. No, we won't be taking that again.
Speaker 8: Let's go from there. I don't want everyone to think
Speaker 8: Sharen is dummy. S Shereen, it's very intelligent. But we
Speaker 8: are making a podcast today about touching grass. A thing
Speaker 8: that some people need to do has become apparent. I've
Speaker 8: been on the internet. I think some people need to
Speaker 8: go outside. Yeah, and even if you're not saying the
Speaker 8: stupidest shit imaginable on Twitter, I still think it's actually
Speaker 8: really good for you to go outside. Like I know,
Speaker 8: this seems to be an episode I do every couple
Speaker 8: of months, but every single time I have to go
Speaker 8: and do something traumatic or scary or upsetting for work,
Speaker 8: I just book a few days afterwards to be by
Speaker 8: myself in the mountains camp and sort of just not
Speaker 8: particularly like trying to do massive miles on a trail,
Speaker 8: just being outside. And I find it's the most healing
Speaker 8: thing for me. It's how I process all the things
Speaker 8: that I have to see and hear about for work.
Speaker 8: And I want you to do that too, podcast listeners. Yeah,
Speaker 8: and Serene, I want Sreen to do it.
Speaker 3: Nature is healing, it is, and that makes sense that
Speaker 3: that's where you go. It makes total sense.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I think you have to be comfortable, like you know,
Speaker 8: if you're scared sleeping alone outside in a tent by yourself. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 8: it's not going to be healing for you. And I
Speaker 8: can see that. I'm a white dude, right, and I
Speaker 8: go through the outdoors just like I go through everywhere
Speaker 8: else's white du You know that means that something different experiences. Yes, yes, yeah,
Speaker 8: we have. That's why social is you to think anyway.
Speaker 8: I want to talk today just about hiking or walking
Speaker 8: or rambling or hillwalking or you know, you could call
Speaker 8: it any of the things that you want, just because
Speaker 8: I think it's probably the most successible way to get
Speaker 8: outside for most people. Right, Like I could talk about cycling.
Speaker 8: It's been a lot of my life cycling. It's expensive
Speaker 8: and confusing for people.
Speaker 3: So in your equipment, you know, hiking, you just need
Speaker 3: to get outside.
Speaker 8: Yeah, exactly, like you probably if you're able to move
Speaker 8: under your own power now, then you can probably go
Speaker 8: for a walk. I'm going to talk about equipment in
Speaker 8: the back half, but I think if you're a lot
Speaker 8: of people seem to have a lot of questions about
Speaker 8: backpacking equipment, so we'll cover that. But yeah, I think
Speaker 8: for most people, just like setting the intention of going
Speaker 8: for a walk would be a massively beneficial thing. So
Speaker 8: I want to encourage you to do that to start
Speaker 8: of summer. If you're in the northern hemisphere, if you're
Speaker 8: in the southern hemisphere, it's a start of winter, you know,
Speaker 8: you can still get out there. And so to start
Speaker 8: off with, I wanted to talk about finding a route,
Speaker 8: finding a place, picking a route to go hiking. Did
Speaker 8: you go hiking very much? I actually do.
Speaker 3: I do like a hike. I like a hike. I've
Speaker 3: gone backpacking once and I really liked it.
Speaker 8: Where did you go back back?
Speaker 3: Oh high? Oh yeah wow, Yeah, that's a cute little place.
Speaker 3: But it was so hot and I almost passed out.
Speaker 3: I should have done it in a different day. We
Speaker 3: should have done it a different day. But I do
Speaker 3: love to hike. I like to be outside. I'm not
Speaker 3: like the most outdoors a person. I wish I knew
Speaker 3: how like how to make a fire or something, or
Speaker 3: like I wish I was like a scout.
Speaker 8: There's lots of shit that you don't want to be
Speaker 8: involved within the scouting movement surin.
Speaker 3: Oh really, okay, I take that back.
Speaker 8: Yeah yeah yeah, probably inducing behind the bus just such
Speaker 8: a scout.
Speaker 3: Okay, I will do that.
Speaker 8: I did not.
Speaker 3: But what I mean is like I really like being outside,
Speaker 3: and I have like the bare minimum of like equipment
Speaker 3: that I need for that kind of stuff. I used
Speaker 3: to get really intimidated that I didn't know as much
Speaker 3: as I thought other people did. But I don't think
Speaker 3: anyone knows as much as they think they do.
Speaker 8: Absolutely no.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that made me feel better.
Speaker 8: Yeah, And like the outdoors are super humbling in that sense, right,
Speaker 8: Like you think you know it all, you don't, and
Speaker 8: at some point you'll get humbled or so it's good
Speaker 8: to always have a bit of respect, Yeah, for the
Speaker 8: outdoors and mother nature. I've seen some people who do
Speaker 8: not that it can end messily. Seen some people who
Speaker 8: learn to climb on YouTube really get to grips with
Speaker 8: YouTube not being the same as going outside. I guess
Speaker 8: if I'm starting off, if you're picking a route, and
Speaker 8: I think probably the best way to do it is
Speaker 8: I discovered this recently. Lots of these modern smartphones have
Speaker 8: a step counter in them. Even if you don't have
Speaker 8: a fancy watch that count steps, your phone does it
Speaker 8: for you. I think that's a really good way of ascertaining,
Speaker 8: like how far you walk in a regular day, right,
Speaker 8: I was thinking about, like how far to most people walk?
Speaker 8: I don't know.
Speaker 3: I know a fun fact about me.
Speaker 8: I would love to usering.
Speaker 3: I purposely have never ever opened that app or activated
Speaker 3: it to know how many steps I walk because I
Speaker 3: know myself and I know I would get like hyper
Speaker 3: fixated on it, and I did not want to be
Speaker 3: confronted with the days that I just sit on my
Speaker 3: ass all day, you know, And so I have never
Speaker 3: ever active app.
Speaker 8: That's a great stree.
Speaker 3: I'm proud of you for knowing that that wouldn't be
Speaker 3: good for you. I mean, I just know myself it
Speaker 3: wouldn't be a good thing for me. I think it's
Speaker 3: a good thing for a lot of people to like
Speaker 3: get them motivated and stuff, but sometimes it's also a
Speaker 3: negative to being too focused on the numbers.
Speaker 8: And yeah, totally, especially like if you're someone who's had
Speaker 8: like a relationship with exercise, it wasn't healthy for you before.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess that's also part of it too. That
Speaker 3: was my experience. I'm sorry, are you are the things
Speaker 3: to add it just happened?
Speaker 8: Yeah, okay, Yeah, I'm glad that you have a good
Speaker 8: relationship with it now. But yeah, for people who you know,
Speaker 8: if that's not for you, that's not for you. I'll
Speaker 8: say that.
Speaker 3: But I just think it's a fun fact. I don't
Speaker 3: know anyone else that has not. Like I'm terrified of
Speaker 3: the app. I have not even opened it. When you
Speaker 3: go to my health app, it says welcome, like it
Speaker 3: doesn't even you know what I mean, Like it's not Yeah.
Speaker 8: I did think you've got a brand new phone. I
Speaker 8: was going to suggest to all trails because A it's
Speaker 8: got a very complete list of trails, and B I
Speaker 8: noticed I had a wheelchair for yeah, I was looking
Speaker 8: for wheelchair accessible trails for someone the other day. You
Speaker 8: can just filter on all trails, like you can find
Speaker 8: the ones that don't have steps or excessive rocks or something.
Speaker 8: So like, if that's something you're looking for, I think
Speaker 8: that could be really handy. And other little tips for
Speaker 8: picking your root. If you try and set off early, A,
Speaker 8: you're gonna not deal with big crowds of people. Be
Speaker 8: Animals are almost always more active at dawning dusk. I
Speaker 8: have been trail running a lot recently, and I love
Speaker 8: to trail run right when the sun's coming up. It
Speaker 8: just feels like it's nice and I see little animals,
Speaker 8: don't see as many snakes. I like to see a snake.
Speaker 3: The weather is probably like the best it's going to
Speaker 3: be that day. Yeah, yeah, exactly, especially as it gets hotter.
Speaker 8: Right like if you're not necessarily doing a lot of
Speaker 8: exercise right now, and then you go for you know,
Speaker 8: even a short hike in the middle of the day
Speaker 8: on a hot day, you can put yourself in the box.
Speaker 8: And like I think I've heard before that like the
Speaker 8: vast majority of trail rescues are like on front country trails,
Speaker 8: like five or ten mins.
Speaker 3: I believe that people get confident.
Speaker 8: I guess that in mind. If you're heading out in
Speaker 8: a little front country I would say some things to
Speaker 8: bring would be we'll go over like equipment, boots, stuff
Speaker 8: like that. If you if you're like getting more into it,
Speaker 8: but heading out on a little first hike. If as
Speaker 8: long as you have a bag with some water and
Speaker 8: a phone and some shoes that you like to wear
Speaker 8: that they're comfortable for you, I think you'll be fine.
Speaker 8: And I think they bring a snack. Snack is always
Speaker 8: a good thing to have. It's nice to have a
Speaker 8: little trail snack at yeah, I love a good rectangular food.
Speaker 8: But yeah, if you don't have water, that's like fourth
Speaker 8: of July last year, someone didn't bring water for their dog,
Speaker 8: and I remember their dog was in like severe Yeah, no,
Speaker 8: it was one of the stupider things. But I can't
Speaker 8: think of a year here where I haven't been running
Speaker 8: or riding on trails and seeing someone forget to bring
Speaker 8: water for their dog terrible. I hate that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't like I see like sometimes there's like
Speaker 3: a communal stops for pets, but you can't count on those,
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 8: Yeah, totally. I don't really count any of those things working,
Speaker 8: you know, like water fountains, Like, don't be reliant up
Speaker 8: on a water fountain, take a little water bottle. You'll
Speaker 8: be so much happier. And if you want to find
Speaker 8: people to hike with, I've had pretty good luck with
Speaker 8: a meetup app. I used to climb by some people
Speaker 8: from meet up here in San Diego, and like climbings
Speaker 8: are fairly like high trust endeavor if someone's belaying you right.
Speaker 8: I definitely met some people there who are very capable
Speaker 8: and we had a great time. Climbing outside. Meetup seems
Speaker 8: to be pretty good for that kind of stuff. ARII
Speaker 8: also often has free like I'll just take you out
Speaker 8: for a hike hiking sessions, and I know they have
Speaker 8: like yeah, yeah I can. Yeah, they they seem nice.
Speaker 8: They have like fem ones that women transferm people can
Speaker 8: go and sistudes can't go, which is fine, you know,
Speaker 8: like it's probably a nice thing for some people feel
Speaker 8: a little safer and more comfortable there. They have one,
Speaker 8: so they're just open for everyone. They think that's a
Speaker 8: dude's only hike, which is also fine. So those are
Speaker 8: some places to meet people. I think it's always nice
Speaker 8: to go with someone, especially if you don't feel confident
Speaker 8: or you don't feel like the outdoors are a place
Speaker 8: where you're like comfortable. It's nice to go with even
Speaker 8: if it's someone who has the same degree of knowledge
Speaker 8: and background in it as you. Like, they can help
Speaker 8: you rationalize your fears.
Speaker 3: Yeah, when you're alone and like you get lost or
Speaker 3: you feel panic, it's so much worse than if you
Speaker 3: had like a friend with you. It only happened to
Speaker 3: me once and I was on rooms, so but I
Speaker 3: won't get into that, but it was scary.
Speaker 8: Yeah, then maybe you'd leave those a home if you're
Speaker 8: going out first tike maybe.
Speaker 3: Yeah, No, you don't need those if you're by yourself, especially,
Speaker 3: Just take it from me. Please, don't go on a
Speaker 3: mountain and take too many things and panic the whole
Speaker 3: way home.
Speaker 8: I want to hear this story afterwards.
Speaker 3: It was my thirtieth birthday in twenty twenty, so everything
Speaker 3: was closed. I tried to go and touch grass games
Speaker 3: and I had.
Speaker 8: You nearly touched it with your face as you fell
Speaker 8: down the mountain on your shroom trip. Yeah, your thirtiest
Speaker 8: beft is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was crisis, I suppose anyway.
Speaker 6: Sorry, yeah, unreeling, Yeah, that's okay.
Speaker 8: You know shrims. Do you know what will not make
Speaker 8: you have an existential crisis on top of the mountain
Speaker 8: on your own in the middle of a pandemic? Please
Speaker 8: tell me it is the products and services that support
Speaker 8: this show. Unless we get a shroom sad, I would
Speaker 8: love that the stream will read your shroom sad. If
Speaker 8: you're in the industry, please reach out her Twitter is
Speaker 8: at I write. Okay, all right, we're back in fact
Speaker 8: all the psilocybin. Maybe it's still illegal.
Speaker 3: I don't think they are. Yeah, they're in Oregon.
Speaker 8: They are Yeah, well there you go, right, So I'm
Speaker 8: interested to know what questions you had before you decided
Speaker 8: to embark on your hiking lifestyle or is something you've
Speaker 8: always done.
Speaker 3: I mean my family and I we never really did
Speaker 3: outdoorsy stuff, so it was something I did when I
Speaker 3: was like finishing high school. I started to be like, wow,
Speaker 3: I live in a place where I can go hiking,
Speaker 3: and I've never done this before. So it was a
Speaker 3: learning curve. But I started when I was like seventeen
Speaker 3: and I got my entire family to go hiking with
Speaker 3: me for the first time.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: It was also when I was introducing my mom to
Speaker 3: like Zoomba. That was the vibe back then. So I
Speaker 3: was trying to get active. But I think the most
Speaker 3: important things are I mean, I'm a big skincare person.
Speaker 3: I think some protection cannot be understated, especially if you
Speaker 3: are hiking in the middle of the day, like when
Speaker 3: the sun is at its highest point. You need sunscreen
Speaker 3: and a hat. There is like some protective clothing even
Speaker 3: that could come in handy, but at the bare minimum,
Speaker 3: you need a good hat. Yeah, like not even a
Speaker 3: cat I like those those fishermen looking hats. You got
Speaker 3: to get the whole circumference. But a cap is fine.
Speaker 3: A cap will do. I think that's the most important
Speaker 3: little accessory for me.
Speaker 8: It's a hat. I have one of those, like felted
Speaker 8: wool hats.
Speaker 3: Nice. Don't they get hot?
Speaker 5: No?
Speaker 10: Not really.
Speaker 8: The wool breeze pretty well. Like it was what I
Speaker 8: was out at the body yesterday helping out and it
Speaker 8: was like a nineteen I was wearing it. It was fine,
Speaker 8: and it's wool so you can dip in the water
Speaker 8: and it gets wet. Yeah, I like one of those. Yeah.
Speaker 8: I actually have a little list of of equipment or
Speaker 8: clothing stuff which maybe I could go over. It seems
Speaker 8: like the vast majority of the questions I get people
Speaker 8: like to dm me the question, which is great, by
Speaker 8: the way, I do like it when people ask me
Speaker 8: for like how can I no bad question? Because no,
Speaker 8: there aren't. And like a lot of my career as
Speaker 8: a journalist, like earlier on was doing outdoor media and like, yeah,
Speaker 8: the outdoor media has gone to complete shit, and you know,
Speaker 8: you can't write anything. It's an advertorial now just actually
Speaker 8: like just to if you are looking to buy something,
Speaker 8: and it is basically any product with you read on
Speaker 8: the Internet. I understand that the vast majority of those
Speaker 8: will only be products that pay a certain percentage back
Speaker 8: to the website that refers you to them, and so
Speaker 8: then inherently causes a bias against products which don't do that.
Speaker 8: An editor at Big Men's Magazine suggested that I write
Speaker 8: some reviews about the stuff that I'd never seen.
Speaker 3: They weren't going to send them to you.
Speaker 8: Well, the company would have done, but the editor wanted
Speaker 8: the piece in like fifteen miles, which, like, I know,
Speaker 8: I used to do lots of reviews and buy some stuff,
Speaker 8: and I take it pretty seriously. And because it's a
Speaker 8: lot of someone.
Speaker 3: I look at those reviews all the time, I have
Speaker 3: to weed out the ones I think are like sponsored.
Speaker 3: But I really I really like reviews. Yes, I go
Speaker 3: on Reddit a lot to see what people think, like
Speaker 3: their own experience.
Speaker 8: Redd It's a great place. So I've said that like universally,
Speaker 8: but I do mean with respect to Yeah.
Speaker 3: It's a place where you can find more anecdotal experience
Speaker 3: with stuff versus I don't know, Amazon review.
Speaker 8: Yeah, there are some whoppers on Reddit who in any
Speaker 8: aspect to overestimate their insight into things. But you'll find
Speaker 8: anyone on the internet. So yeah, I'm going to go
Speaker 8: through some different clothing items, stuff I like and stuff
Speaker 8: that I think you can probably find cheap and hopefully
Speaker 8: that will help people kind of especially if you're thinking
Speaker 8: of backpacking. It can be very intimidating and expensive, I think.
Speaker 8: And at the start of the PCT almost once a week,
Speaker 8: right helping out the border, that's one of the areas
Speaker 8: where people cross and I see people with thousands of
Speaker 8: dollars of gear that is all brand new, and I
Speaker 8: know it can be pretty intimidating, but like, you don't
Speaker 8: have to start there, so there's always stuff you have
Speaker 8: a home. Maybe we'll do one on camping later in
Speaker 8: the summer. So you get a hat, any particular hat preferences, Sharen, I.
Speaker 3: Don't know the brands, honestly, I don't know. And unless
Speaker 3: like someone recommended this brand, use this, like my shoes
Speaker 3: are I think we talked about this before Solomon No, yes,
Speaker 3: is that a brand? Yeah, Salmon, And I was like,
Speaker 3: that's a sad Yeah. Yeah, I think you can find
Speaker 3: really cheap hats that are protective. You know, I don't
Speaker 3: think you need a big brand for a hat as
Speaker 3: long as it like covers your head in your face.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, totally. I trail run all the time in
Speaker 8: a hat I got free like five years ago.
Speaker 3: If anything, I think it's better to have things you
Speaker 3: don't care about getting dirty or ruined, you know, because
Speaker 3: you're sure.
Speaker 8: I've noticed a lot of outdoor stuff really kind of
Speaker 8: moving towards streetwear. There's this thing that I learned about
Speaker 8: recently called gorp core, which is my okay, the test.
Speaker 3: I think it's cute.
Speaker 8: Okay, this is going to be the point of disagreement.
Speaker 8: People like it when the hosts disagree on podcasts.
Speaker 3: How do you define gorp core?
Speaker 8: It's people wearing hiking stuff to go around town, which
Speaker 8: is fine. I do that all the time. I dress
Speaker 8: like a man in ARII catalog. But like, why are
Speaker 8: you making it fashion? And then why have you stolen
Speaker 8: my brands who used to make reliable outdoor gear.
Speaker 3: And now I enread that assessment, I will say, I
Speaker 3: don't think wearing hiking stuff is necessary, but I do
Speaker 3: like to look like I'm going on a safari, you know.
Speaker 3: I like that character for me.
Speaker 8: Do you have like a pith helmet and like a No,
Speaker 8: it's just more it's like fascinating.
Speaker 3: Like shorts that are meant to be hiked in are
Speaker 3: longer usually, and I just think they look better than
Speaker 3: other shorts and you can just wear that and like
Speaker 3: a button down shirt with some leaves on it, it
Speaker 3: looks like I'm going on a safari, but I'm just
Speaker 3: walking around town.
Speaker 8: This this vision of like nineteen twenty sharen, you know,
Speaker 8: like a carriage seeing a lion.
Speaker 3: But yeah, gorf core is it's becoming more and more trendy.
Speaker 3: And I will say that you're you're right about things
Speaker 3: being more expensive because of it, because it shouldn't be
Speaker 3: so expensive to be prepared to go on a hike.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and like so like for most of the stuff
Speaker 8: I look for when I'm hiking, a lot of brands
Speaker 8: I go to, like Outdoor Research, Mountain Hardware. I'll list
Speaker 8: to other stuff as we go through, but like Oarctics
Speaker 8: and Patagonia seem to like taken off in price and
Speaker 8: like decoupled from other stuff which literally uses the same materials. Right,
Speaker 8: One of the things I would suggest if you're trying
Speaker 8: to buy outdoor gerries, look at the materials used, because
Speaker 8: you know you might find the same material used in
Speaker 8: another piece somewhere else, and it might cost less, right
Speaker 8: if it doesn't have that like gorp core appeal. If
Speaker 8: I just go through some stuff I like really quickly.
Speaker 8: I like to wear buttonup shirts when I hike. Wow,
Speaker 8: Forten a whole piece about this. It's like two thousand
Speaker 8: words and it sits on backpack.
Speaker 3: So what's the reason A very shortened version of the reason.
Speaker 8: They're nice. They cover your neck a bit better. They
Speaker 8: have buttons so you can vent your chest if you
Speaker 8: need to get some extra ventilation. Yeah, you can roll
Speaker 8: up the sleeves. You can roll down the sleeves. That
Speaker 8: there was very practical. When I met the president of
Speaker 8: the Marshall Islands, like one of my little hiking buttonup
Speaker 8: shirts because I hadn't been expected to be formal, and
Speaker 8: I put on a little tie that they gave me
Speaker 8: and I went.
Speaker 3: I will say I have worn my button down hiking
Speaker 3: shirts out and about town because I think they look
Speaker 3: so oops.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I agree with you, Srian, I think they look cute.
Speaker 8: You can look cute in them. If you're looking to
Speaker 8: buy some shirts. Outdoor Research has one called the Astroman,
Speaker 8: which is amazing, Like it feels like you're not wearing
Speaker 8: a shirt, which is always the goal with shirt couu.
Speaker 8: The Hunting brand has one called the Tiburon, which is right.
Speaker 3: Are they going to be listed somewhere?
Speaker 8: Yes, Like I did last time, I will make a
Speaker 8: two thousand words show description with links in it for people.
Speaker 8: I also like those T shirts, like running shirts. I
Speaker 8: don't really buy like hiking t shirts. I think often
Speaker 8: they're just cotton T shirts with a picture of a
Speaker 8: river on. But running shirts a nice gore wear, so
Speaker 8: that the people who make gortex there's also really good
Speaker 8: value stuff. Actually it's worth looking at obviously, Like they're
Speaker 8: like in house, so they have all gortex waterproof stuff.
Speaker 8: But they have a shirt called the Contest which I
Speaker 8: always trail running this morning. It's a pretty nice shirt
Speaker 8: and gets hot here in San Diego. And like, I
Speaker 8: don't want to be the guy running with the shit
Speaker 8: out of and so. And also I'm British, so like
Speaker 8: me and the sun are in a constant state of disagreement.
Speaker 8: I'm not a skinware person. Utreen. I didn't believe in
Speaker 8: some to me I do now. I do now, I
Speaker 8: do now. Until my early thirties, I thought that it
Speaker 8: was stopping my skin breathing and affecting my performance as
Speaker 8: a big races that you've cherished changed. Yeah, I never
Speaker 8: had skin on my well like most.
Speaker 3: Of you thought on screen was bad.
Speaker 8: When you have to understand that everything about pro cycling
Speaker 8: is like lies the older people tell you so, like
Speaker 8: when I was coming up in cycling, it was like
Speaker 8: the very end of the like people who had trained
Speaker 8: in East Germany, like before the fall of the Berlin War, right,
Speaker 8: and they had all these bullshit things like I had
Speaker 8: a team director who would make us eat fast animals
Speaker 8: because he thought that would turn us into fasters.
Speaker 3: Like that's a good one, no, I mean the even
Speaker 3: now there is a little subculture of like, don't wear sunscreen.
Speaker 3: The sun is good for you. You should just like
Speaker 3: vitamin D. But y'all know, wear sunscreen, reapply the sunscreen.
Speaker 3: I should make a skincare episode. I'm obsessed with this stuff.
Speaker 3: And sunscreen is so important it is.
Speaker 8: You can get much better sunscreen outside the US.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I do. I use Korean sunscreen. Korean sunscreen is great, Okay.
Speaker 8: Great, Okay. I get European sunscreen when I'm in the airport.
Speaker 3: But also both the European sunscreens and Asian sunscreens. They're
Speaker 3: formulated so much differently than the ones in the US.
Speaker 3: I feel like there are certain things that are they're different.
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 3: America is fucking up.
Speaker 8: It's because the active ingredients, haven't the FDA. Yeah, okay, yeah,
Speaker 8: sunscreen conspiracy divation over sharen. Maybe we should take an
Speaker 8: advertising break here in case we land the Koreans.
Speaker 3: Oh, okay, advertising, Yeah, let's do it. I want to
Speaker 3: get shrooms and Korean sunscreen under my advertising bill. That
Speaker 3: would be great. That's my entire personality.
Speaker 8: All Right, we're back. We hope you enjoyed that advert
Speaker 8: for sund screen. I want to talk about trousers just
Speaker 8: in general, but also with reference to hiking. Sometimes I
Speaker 8: go out and I drop water for people so that
Speaker 8: they don't die in the desert. And that's something that
Speaker 8: I think is one of the coolest fucking things that
Speaker 8: you can do if you live near the border, and
Speaker 8: everyone who does it is a massive legend in my opinion.
Speaker 8: And even if you just come out once, you could
Speaker 8: save someone's life. And that's pretty fucking cool. And I
Speaker 8: want you, if you live near here, to feel like
Speaker 8: you can do that and if what's holding you back,
Speaker 8: if you don't know what to where or want backpack
Speaker 8: to get just like dm me on Twitter, but sometimes
Speaker 8: I come out in jeans. I would not suggest hiking
Speaker 8: in jeans. I would make jeans are great. I love jeans.
Speaker 8: I like to climb in jeans. I know Ian, the
Speaker 8: producer of this show, have some opinions about people who
Speaker 8: want to hear You haven't seen this, yeah, because Ian
Speaker 8: doesn't tweet very much, so I only found his Twitter
Speaker 8: like six months ago. One of his tweets with about
Speaker 8: why people because it's cool yan, No, no, no, it's
Speaker 8: not because you have to climb in jeans. Because you
Speaker 8: have to remind people that you were climbing before the
Speaker 8: fucking Alex Honold's film came out. And the way to
Speaker 8: do that is to be a dirt bag. And the
Speaker 8: way to do that is to go to a second
Speaker 8: hand shop and buy the ladies jeans, sort the stretch.
Speaker 3: The ones that are worn in because like from New genes,
Speaker 3: seem so uncomfortable to do anything in in my opinion.
Speaker 8: No, yeah, you want the stretchy fabric genes, you know,
Speaker 8: the ones. It's okay if they're normal geens. Yeah, they've
Speaker 8: got to be worn in and then you cut them
Speaker 8: off a couple of inches above the ankle so you
Speaker 8: can see your feet, and you go climbing in those
Speaker 8: and a cut off T shirt and you keep climbing grungy,
Speaker 8: because that's important. You can't be letting all the Have
Speaker 8: you seen this film Free Solo? People change it so yeah,
Speaker 8: oh gosh, yeah, that's one of the things that I
Speaker 8: will never back down.
Speaker 1: That run.
Speaker 8: Yeah, they use. The easiest route in my climbing gym
Speaker 8: for years was called Hey, dude, have you seen this film?
Speaker 8: It's called Free Solo, which I thought was great.
Speaker 6: Wow.
Speaker 8: Yeah, you can go climbing in jeans, but don't go
Speaker 8: hiking in jeans. They don't breathe very well, they don't
Speaker 8: move very well, they do chafe very well, and if
Speaker 8: they get wet, they suck. So you can get good
Speaker 8: like Niico or polyester or like even some with like
Speaker 8: spandex or like greens. So they stretch trousers pretty quickly.
Speaker 8: I really like Prana trousers that like the yoga brand.
Speaker 8: I'm wearing some right now. They have a one called
Speaker 8: the stretch Ion, and they have a men's model and
Speaker 8: a women's model, I think, and they're really cheap. They're
Speaker 8: always on sale. I really like those for like a
Speaker 8: cheap go to trouser hiking. Also there's a brand called
Speaker 8: True Work who make like technical work clothes, which I
Speaker 8: like to wear if I'm like when we were constructing
Speaker 8: shelters a lot in Cucumber before the Border of Patrol
Speaker 8: tore them down. It's nice to have the little like
Speaker 8: extra pockets for your tools and for your pencil and
Speaker 8: your tape measure and stuff like that. I wear those
Speaker 8: for hiking as well, and they're kind of dual purpose. Generally,
Speaker 8: if you have trousers that are lightweight, that breathe well
Speaker 8: and have good flexibility, you're good to go. The next
Speaker 8: thing I have here is socks. People really fuck up
Speaker 8: with socks, and it seems like socks and footwear are
Speaker 8: areas where people really get themselves into trouble. Tried this
Speaker 8: out recently and the interest of journalism. Actually, there are
Speaker 8: a couple of brands the things that I do just
Speaker 8: on a whim, darn Tough, you know, down tough sucks Serene, No, okay,
Speaker 8: now you do. They're a company and Vermont, who make
Speaker 8: good socks.
Speaker 3: Well, okay, I do want I need new hiking socks.
Speaker 8: Okay, good, yeah, sit down, Okay. Two brands that I
Speaker 8: would recommend are Features and Done Tough because they fit
Speaker 8: well there will so will still insulates when it's where
Speaker 8: it breethes. Well, it doesn't burn, but that's not a
Speaker 8: big concern for most of us hiking here. It's you're
Speaker 8: in a forest far I guess. But they'll find your feet.
Speaker 8: That'll be great. They also have lifetime warranties, which I
Speaker 8: think is really cool for for socks. Yeah, that's cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 8: So I tested these out in the interest of journalism
Speaker 8: and feature in science and so yeah, I did a
Speaker 8: did a little double blind test, and I contacted Features
Speaker 8: and done toff and said, hi, I have worn holes
Speaker 8: through the front of my socks. And they said, no problems,
Speaker 8: send them back. And I sent them back and Features
Speaker 8: got me the socks. So what they do is they
Speaker 8: send you a coupon, then you go on their website
Speaker 8: and you order whatever socks you want. And it took
Speaker 8: me about a week and I had new socks. Well
Speaker 8: down tuft took a little bit longer, but I had
Speaker 8: new socks. So like if you're a person who doesn't
Speaker 8: want to spend a lot of money, you can spend
Speaker 8: your money once and have socks for life, which I
Speaker 8: thought was pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, it's cool. I heard
Speaker 8: that they had a good warranty. But then I was like,
Speaker 8: you know what, lots of brands say lots of bullshit,
Speaker 8: to let me test it, and tested I did. It
Speaker 8: turned out to be true in both cases.
Speaker 3: I will say for the inexperienced person, I think when
Speaker 3: you hear wool socks, you're like, okay, I'll wear those
Speaker 3: one it's cold, but no, you have to wear them
Speaker 3: for like it's like temperature regulation, right, It's like you.
Speaker 8: Want to let your foot breathe, right, so you don't
Speaker 8: get like blisters you get.
Speaker 3: Do you wear them any weather? That's my point. I
Speaker 3: feel like what I hear wool as someone that grew
Speaker 3: up in Sokel, I'm like, Okay, it's going to be cold,
Speaker 3: No it's not. Just put them on your feet and
Speaker 3: your shoe will be war comfy. Also a comfortable shoe essential. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm sure you're going to get there.
Speaker 8: But yeah, there are different thickness. Is you have will
Speaker 8: socks for cord wear there, but I also have wolf
Speaker 8: socks for hot weather, right, but they're all wool, you know, Well, yeah,
Speaker 8: they're just in Actually I wore a wool shirt when
Speaker 8: I did a couple of years ago. There was a
Speaker 8: heat advisory, so I figured that would be a good
Speaker 8: time to go backpacking on the PCT because no one
Speaker 8: else would be there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, good idea.
Speaker 8: It's great. I had a wonderful time. It was not
Speaker 8: molested by people. He saw some snakes. It was nice
Speaker 8: rescue the dude, did you wear a sunscreen? Yeah? I
Speaker 8: did in that instance. Anah, actually yeah, this was after
Speaker 8: my sunscreen awakening.
Speaker 3: Oh great, I'm so glad.
Speaker 8: Don't go out without water. This dude was out looking
Speaker 8: for Kitchen Creek Falls, which if you're not familiar, as
Speaker 8: a seasonal waterfall in his county, San Diego, and he
Speaker 8: was probably about three or four months late or early,
Speaker 8: depending on how you look at it. And so if
Speaker 8: had gone out without water, which don't be relying on
Speaker 8: that kind of stuff. If it says water on the map,
Speaker 8: that's cool. Still bring water, especially you're in the desert. Yeah,
Speaker 8: let's talk about shoes. I think people want to go
Speaker 8: hiking in boots because that's what like you think of
Speaker 8: when you think of grambling or hiking. But like if
Speaker 8: you don't wear boots for work or habitually, you know,
Speaker 8: for just like crosspunk reasons, then you might be really
Speaker 8: uncomfortable in boots. Like you're not used to hard things
Speaker 8: rubbing your ankles, so would not suggest and unless you're
Speaker 8: putting on load, Like I wear boots if I'm backpacking. Certainly,
Speaker 8: if I'm like pack rafting or something where I've got
Speaker 8: like the raft and everything else, and I'm going to
Speaker 8: do it a long hiking, right, so I've got all
Speaker 8: my camping stuff and the raft, I'm gonna wear boots.
Speaker 8: Or if I'm off trails when we drop water, We're
Speaker 8: not going on trails, right, We're just sort of out
Speaker 8: and about climbing up mountain, So I'll wear boots for that.
Speaker 8: But for almost everyone, especially if you're hiking on trails,
Speaker 8: you're going to be just fine with shoes. I think
Speaker 8: the big thing boots give you more stability, right, they
Speaker 8: stop your ankle from twitch.
Speaker 3: That's why I wear them. I weak ankles.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's genetic. Yeah, you can work on their little
Speaker 8: ankle strength stuff.
Speaker 3: You can do, but that's not happening, I'll just wear
Speaker 3: a boot.
Speaker 8: Boots maximalist for me, like finding shoes sort of stable
Speaker 8: that like you know, like inherently stabilize my foot without
Speaker 8: clamping my ankle has been really good.
Speaker 3: I feel more stable in a boot though you don't
Speaker 3: think so.
Speaker 8: Yeah, but then you're just sort of transferring to me,
Speaker 8: Like sometimes I like to have the ability to move
Speaker 8: my ankles, especially, like I like to trail run as well.
Speaker 8: If I'm to be honest, if I'm just going out,
Speaker 8: I'm probably running at the minute. And like even over
Speaker 8: night city, it's really fun to just run until it
Speaker 8: gets dark and then sleep and then run again. It's
Speaker 8: a fun thing to do.
Speaker 5: Well.
Speaker 3: I'd be curious about your hiking shoe recommendations versus boot.
Speaker 8: So I got three. They're all like they have little
Speaker 8: kind of your foots like sitting in the insole, not
Speaker 8: on the insult, if that makes sense. So it's like
Speaker 8: cupped a little bit in that CUsing possibility. One is
Speaker 8: the Salomon Genesis. It's the cheapest one they make in
Speaker 8: that line. I think it's a really good shoe. I
Speaker 8: trail running in them all the time. Two the other
Speaker 8: one is a Soccany Exodus Ultra two, which it's really cool.
Speaker 8: It has like a softer foam in the middle and
Speaker 8: then a stiffer foam around the outside of your heel.
Speaker 8: I could talk about the shit for hours, but it
Speaker 8: feels very comfortable and soft. But also you're very stable,
Speaker 8: and they're about to be phased out, so you can
Speaker 8: find them really cheap.
Speaker 3: Why are they both to be phased out?
Speaker 8: Running shoe companies make a new shoe every year because
Speaker 8: they feel like they need to.
Speaker 3: Human foot has been the same, I would argue for
Speaker 3: a while. Yeah, it's not changing.
Speaker 8: Technology advances, right, Like shoe foams have come up, even
Speaker 8: in the past five or six years. Like if you
Speaker 8: have more running shoes in the past five or six years,
Speaker 8: and you have the means to buy some more running shoes,
Speaker 8: Piba foams and things like that, like these like high
Speaker 8: energy return phones make running a lot more pleasant. But
Speaker 8: often it's just like a different color scheme or you know,
Speaker 8: slightly different upper Yeah, and I think in that case
Speaker 8: you're just fine. The other ones that Meryl kind of
Speaker 8: had a reputation for making, like old man hiking boots
Speaker 8: for a while, but they're trail running shoes really great.
Speaker 3: That's cool. Yeah, my friend has Meryl shoes and they're cute.
Speaker 8: See they used to be cute. They used to be
Speaker 8: very like dad coded.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think they've turned a corner.
Speaker 8: Yeah they have. I'm a big fan. Now I'm wearing
Speaker 8: some right now. Actually, Alex to wear Meryl. The Agidity
Speaker 8: Peak one is good. The long Sky is when I
Speaker 8: like when I'm like trail running in burlier terrain. If
Speaker 8: you're going to buy boots or shoes, please try it on,
Speaker 8: or at least sort of them from a website that
Speaker 8: lets you send them back. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I really think that's essential. I messed up the first
Speaker 3: time I really invested in expensive boots. I got them
Speaker 3: after all reading all these reviews and I hated them.
Speaker 3: Like I walked around my house and I was like,
Speaker 3: these are terrible. But I was able to return them
Speaker 3: to my ARII that was vocal, And I tried on
Speaker 3: the other shoe I wanted to try on that they
Speaker 3: had and that was great. I walked around in Aria
Speaker 3: and I was like, this is the one you have
Speaker 3: to try them on.
Speaker 8: Yeah, take the socks you're going to wear when you're
Speaker 8: hiking as well. Like they don't just take socks and
Speaker 8: don't feel the same. And then we walk around and
Speaker 8: the next thing I had was backpacked. Actually, and I'm
Speaker 8: going to say the same thing, like, the most important
Speaker 8: thing for a backpack is that it fits your body,
Speaker 8: and that it is fitted to your body. Ari I
Speaker 8: will do that for free, which is great. Lots of
Speaker 8: other outdoor shops for San Diego used to have Adventure sixteen.
Speaker 8: It's sadly closed rip. But anyone who's trying to sell
Speaker 8: your backpack in person and won't fit it to you
Speaker 8: is probably someone you shouldn't buy a backpack from. So
Speaker 8: if you google around enough and you have enough google for,
Speaker 8: you will find a video of me teaching you how
Speaker 8: to wear your backpack. Someone will find Yes, I know,
Speaker 8: and yeah, I've got a broken arm in that video,
Speaker 8: which you can't tell. I haven't sought medical attention at
Speaker 8: the time of the video. Got hit by a car
Speaker 8: and then I knew I had to eat a video
Speaker 8: the next day, so I went to do the video.
Speaker 8: I have to make money. It was broke.
Speaker 3: I will say that as someone who is it the
Speaker 3: most knowledgeable about the stuff, But I like it, and
Speaker 3: I would consider myself like a I don't know, intermediate,
Speaker 3: not advanced, but go into ARII and getting a backpack fit.
Speaker 3: And that's what I did. Don't shy away from asking questions.
Speaker 3: They're there to help and I think as soon as
Speaker 3: you get over that, you'll be fine. I feel like
Speaker 3: as soon as I just like accept that these people
Speaker 3: are there to help you and not to shame you,
Speaker 3: hopefully that's great and like, yeah, they're trying to sell
Speaker 3: you things, but I don't know, just go in with
Speaker 3: a smart head on your shoulders.
Speaker 8: Yeah, expect people to be well meaning, like we all
Speaker 8: just want you to be happy and enjoying the outdoors
Speaker 8: with us. It's not a competition with backpacks. Real quickly,
Speaker 8: you've got basically three distinct types. You have ultra light backpacks,
Speaker 8: which you don't have a frame at all. Imagine a
Speaker 8: bucket made of fabric with two straps so attached to
Speaker 8: your back. I wouldn't suggest starting there. You have external
Speaker 8: frame that's where the frame is external and the back
Speaker 8: is clipped onto the frame. And you have internal frame
Speaker 8: where the frame is integral to the back right to
Speaker 8: the bags. You're probably going to look at an internal
Speaker 8: frame to start with the heavier the bag gets. The
Speaker 8: more structure you get and the more little pockets an
Speaker 8: organization you get, those can seem super tempting, especially when
Speaker 8: you're looking online and you're seeing like different specs and
Speaker 8: trying to compare them. If you're a person who has
Speaker 8: access to ziplock bags, you don't need all the pockets, right, Like, yeah,
Speaker 8: what I do every single time they go back back
Speaker 8: and so I put a bin bag in it that
Speaker 8: waterproofs it. Right, Yeah, it's cool if your bags it's waterproof,
Speaker 8: I don't trust it to be waterproof, and it doesn't
Speaker 8: need to be because I'm going to put a bin
Speaker 8: bag in there anyway, and I put everything in stuff
Speaker 8: sacks as zip block bags in there. Likewise, you'll find
Speaker 8: lots of bags with like seventy five ways to access
Speaker 8: the main pocket. Most of the time you're going to
Speaker 8: have your stuff inside a waterproof bag anyway, It's not
Speaker 8: such a big deal.
Speaker 3: I think the most important aspect of a bag that
Speaker 3: used to look at first is just the weight.
Speaker 8: Yeah, you can fuck yourself up with a heavy bag.
Speaker 8: Although that said, like one of the bags that I
Speaker 8: use the most for water drop stuff is a Mystery
Speaker 8: Ranch Blackjacke it's a military bag. It's heavy. It's like
Speaker 8: a I think it's five point seven pounds for the bag,
Speaker 8: but I'm not trying to be light. What I'm trying
Speaker 8: to do is fill it with gallons of water, right,
Speaker 8: and then haul them up and down a mounted So
Speaker 8: I might as well make the bag comfortable because it's
Speaker 8: a negligible percentage of the overall weight of shit I'm carrying.
Speaker 3: That's fair.
Speaker 8: There's a bag for the Radix, the Mystery Ranch make
Speaker 8: that I've been using a lot recently, and it's made
Speaker 8: of like very lightweight material, like an ultrolyte bag. But
Speaker 8: I like their frames. They have like a yoke that
Speaker 8: kind of wraps around your body as opposed to frame
Speaker 8: that sits on top of your body, and that works
Speaker 8: really well for me. Their warranty is good, their products
Speaker 8: are good. I've used their bags in like every continent
Speaker 8: apart from the Antarctic and never had anything break. Especially
Speaker 8: like if you're a person who gets actious about your
Speaker 8: ship breaking, then you can't go wrong with them. They
Speaker 8: also have incredible discount If you want one but you
Speaker 8: think it's too expensive, take your time and you'll find
Speaker 8: them way cheaper. That's a good bag to get. I
Speaker 8: like Gregory bags, Osprey or a good brand. Osprey bags can.
Speaker 3: Tell to what I have backpacking backpack is an Osprey.
Speaker 8: Yeah, They're very comfortable. They have a lot going on
Speaker 8: sometimes and they have that mesh. Do you have the
Speaker 8: one with a mesh? Like? Yeah, they are very comfortable.
Speaker 8: I have an Osprey bag that I really like. I
Speaker 8: took it pack rafting and Alaska and it was great.
Speaker 8: It was bomba. If you're just going on a day hike,
Speaker 8: you don't need very much backpack, right, twenty liters or
Speaker 8: whatever is fine, even ten. I really like those running
Speaker 8: vesttile backpacks where you have like pockets on the front.
Speaker 8: Have you seen those? You don't have to pick? Oh,
Speaker 8: it's cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Do I have one?
Speaker 8: Send your pictulator shat things?
Speaker 9: Yeah?
Speaker 8: I mean you're looking forward to it. When I ran,
Speaker 8: I like to have a little water flasks down there,
Speaker 8: and then that makes sense. Yeah, And then I was like,
Speaker 8: why don't have this on my normal backpack? Why am
Speaker 8: I having to like reach around for my snacks? I'm
Speaker 8: all about a fishency. So running vestile backpacks are cool.
Speaker 8: Camelback has some good ones. Everyone called the octane. I
Speaker 8: use a lot, and then when you're buying a backpack,
Speaker 8: you'll want to pile a little water reservoir to go
Speaker 8: in it. One of the reasons you're going to waterproof
Speaker 8: everything in your bag is because every single water reservoir
Speaker 8: that you put in your backpack will break at some point,
Speaker 8: and when it does, it will send its contents into
Speaker 8: your bag and it will be a bad day. Un
Speaker 8: As you've water proved everything, this will happen to you,
Speaker 8: especially if you like sit down and lean back and
Speaker 8: then you crush it. So that's where you're gonna water
Speaker 8: with everything. But I think hydro pack like the best ones.
Speaker 8: I really like that insulated ones. Even if you don't
Speaker 8: get an insulated bladder, get an insulated sucky cue SUSA worcherine.
Speaker 8: Thank you, last podcast of the day here, guys. Yeah,
Speaker 8: getting intated straw because when it's really cold, otherwise your
Speaker 8: straw will freeze because it's like a small amount of
Speaker 8: water right when it freezes more quickly.
Speaker 3: I never thought of that. I've only backpacked and highten
Speaker 3: really hot weather.
Speaker 8: Yeah, when it's below freezing, like even like I was
Speaker 8: out on Palomar in October A Ferry turned from Curtis
Speaker 8: Dan So it was you know, below freezing top of
Speaker 8: the mountain and know my water froze. You can blow
Speaker 8: your water back out again, but you're just going to
Speaker 8: forget to do that realistic. And then yeah, the last
Speaker 8: thing I had was hiking poles. Hiking poles are great.
Speaker 8: You've never had a pole, You never had a pole,
Speaker 8: if you ever had a stick, I mean.
Speaker 3: It's like fine ones. And I guess I don't hike
Speaker 3: on the things I might need a poll for. I
Speaker 3: guess I don't know.
Speaker 8: Yeah, they're great if you're someone who's like maybe has
Speaker 8: some injuries or you're worried about your knees just because
Speaker 8: they hurt in general life. They were a great way
Speaker 8: to take this strain.
Speaker 3: Off of the I'm trying to give innce my mom
Speaker 3: to get a pair of poles because I think she
Speaker 3: would really benefit from them because she wants to go
Speaker 3: on all these hikes and yeah, just needs help. So
Speaker 3: there's no shame in getting a pole or two.
Speaker 8: I will donate your mom some poles. Sarene Oh, it's
Speaker 8: my Gift's my gift you. Saren's mom helped me translate
Speaker 8: for some migrants the other day. My mom's the best
Speaker 8: I'll send you. Don't be afraid of using them. Don't
Speaker 8: be thinking that like anyone's going to judge you for
Speaker 8: using them. Like, if that makes you feel more stable
Speaker 8: and comfortable, go for it. Don't buy the ones that
Speaker 8: telescope I mean by telescope, like, yeah, because they collapse.
Speaker 8: And I remember I was up in the Sierras six
Speaker 8: or seven years ago now and it was fucking snowyer
Speaker 8: than I'd expected. Then my stupid hiking pole collapsed into itself.
Speaker 8: It just just made the day like less fun.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I can imagine that.
Speaker 8: But otherwise it stick is great, right, find a nice stick,
Speaker 8: fine with a nice notch your thumb. Get it from
Speaker 8: a nice type of wood. Used to love making sticks
Speaker 8: when it was little. You can get a stick topper.
Speaker 8: You can order them online. You know, it's got like
Speaker 8: a head of a dog or a pheasant.
Speaker 3: Or a cane. It's like a fancy little cane.
Speaker 8: Yeah, we had crooks, you know, a crook no for
Speaker 8: like when you're catching your sheep.
Speaker 3: James, Why you mean, like there's the hook looking thing.
Speaker 8: Yes, yeah, it's called a croak.
Speaker 5: I did not know that.
Speaker 3: I know what you're talking now that you mentioned sheep,
Speaker 3: I know what that is, but I've never known. Yeah,
Speaker 3: because you're sheep eggs. But yeah, it's got a crook.
Speaker 3: We said that's great for walking.
Speaker 8: I can see that. Yeah, yeah, so we we used
Speaker 8: to use those a lot when I was a kid.
Speaker 8: But yeah, having one is great. And I think, especially
Speaker 8: like if you're nervous about falling going with your person
Speaker 8: who worries about their knees, if you're picking your first route,
Speaker 8: keep it pretty flat. If you're going up and down
Speaker 8: a lot of elevation and you're worried about how that's
Speaker 8: going to feel, the pole's a very good way to
Speaker 8: mitigate someone worried that I'm going to fall on my knees.
Speaker 8: But yeah, don't feel afraid of using that stuff. Oh,
Speaker 8: I forgot to say one thing. In my shoes. Think
Speaker 8: chacos are the best sandals. Fuck all other sandals. That's
Speaker 8: what I have to say about that. You know when
Speaker 8: you're cool because you have the z from the chaco's
Speaker 8: burned onto your feet. Well, unless you practice foot skincare,
Speaker 8: which I've not upgraded to that level yet.
Speaker 3: I was thinking about getting those. I remember I was
Speaker 3: signing between those and something else, and I go off
Speaker 3: for something else, But now I have to go back
Speaker 3: and get those.
Speaker 8: A couple of years ago, I rafted with some people
Speaker 8: who listened to the podcast. They invited me and I
Speaker 8: went and we did a week on the Colorado.
Speaker 3: Oh that's so cool.
Speaker 8: You're so trusting little irl. I like to go.
Speaker 5: So it was cool.
Speaker 8: I like people. So some of them reached out and
Speaker 8: I said, yeah, let let's go for a rafting trip.
Speaker 8: So we went on a rafting trip on the Colorado River.
Speaker 8: And now I wore my chackos the whole time while
Speaker 8: sun cream.
Speaker 4: None of the time.
Speaker 8: Feet were just roasted, just red, but with a little
Speaker 8: z from the chat. But for the whole summer anyways,
Speaker 8: they are very comfortable sandals. One of my friends, another
Speaker 8: podcast listener, is hiking the PCT in his chackos right now.
Speaker 8: Thanks go to Canada. So yeah, I hope you're doing well.
Speaker 8: They know who they are. Surprisingly enough, I've gone long
Speaker 8: talking about outdoor things.
Speaker 3: But no, I'm glad you took the time to make
Speaker 3: this little list. I realized I don't have to be
Speaker 3: as big of a dummy as I thought. I thought
Speaker 3: I was going to come in here and being a
Speaker 3: huge dummy. I know more than I think I do.
Speaker 3: You know, and I know what to do outside most
Speaker 3: of the time.
Speaker 8: Yes, sure, yes you do. Thank you for listening to
Speaker 8: me talking about going outside. If you have any questions,
Speaker 8: you can DM me on Twitter. That is the only
Speaker 8: way I community with anyone. Now, don't have a DM me,
Speaker 8: and I'll send you my email. But really, like, I
Speaker 8: just want people to feel that the outdoors is for
Speaker 8: them and feel safe and feel comfortable, and feel like
Speaker 8: they know all the things they need to know, and
Speaker 8: to not buy stuff because someone's getting three percent back
Speaker 8: on it even though they've never touched it in their
Speaker 8: whole lives. And also, like, I know that we're all
Speaker 8: fucking poor and spending your money is hard. So I've
Speaker 8: tried to suggest stuff it's not crazy expensive or that
Speaker 8: you can find on sale, but if you have questions.
Speaker 8: Oh one more thing, There's a company called Outdoor Vitals
Speaker 8: which has a subscription. You can be a member and
Speaker 8: then you can get a lot of their stuff cheaping
Speaker 8: for backpacking. It's a good company and they make some
Speaker 8: good stuff, and they do some good stuff the outdoors
Speaker 8: as well. But yeah, if you have questions, you can
Speaker 8: message me. We will do one about what to put
Speaker 8: in your bag when you get backpacking. Eventually. Yeah, go outside.
Speaker 8: Send us your photos if you're going outside, if they're
Speaker 8: not weird, we would like that.
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