Speaker 1: Once the last time you took a time out. I'm
Speaker 1: Ev Rodsky, author of the New York Times bestseller fair
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Speaker 1: expertise in the science of stress, resilience, mental health, and burnout.
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Speaker 1: want more boundaries, this is the place for you for
Speaker 1: people of all family structures. So take this time out
Speaker 1: with us to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, reclaim
Speaker 1: your time. Listen to Time Out, a fair Play podcast
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Speaker 1: you get your podcasts. Executive producer Paris Hilton brings back
Speaker 1: the hit podcast How Men Think. And that's good news
Speaker 1: for anyone that is confused by men, which is basically everyone.
Speaker 1: It's real talk, straight from the source. How Men Think
Speaker 1: podcast is exactly what we need to figure them out.
Speaker 1: It's going to be fun and formative and probably a
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Speaker 1: I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get
Speaker 1: your podcasts. Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted
Speaker 1: to let you know. This is a compilation episode, So
Speaker 1: every episode of the week that just happened is here
Speaker 1: in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for
Speaker 1: you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.
Speaker 1: If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
Speaker 1: can make your own decisions. Welcome to It could Happen
Speaker 1: Here the show where I had to change the introduction
Speaker 1: because Sophie said it would confuse people. So now we're
Speaker 1: just doing the boring thing and saying the actual name
Speaker 1: of the show, which is it could happen here. Um.
Speaker 1: It's a show about the fact that the society is
Speaker 1: kind of falling apart or changing, depending on your perspective
Speaker 1: of things, and people need to prepare for what's coming,
Speaker 1: which is a world of greater instability and economic collapse
Speaker 1: and rising at ratarianism and increasing fights in order to
Speaker 1: reverse and stymy all of those terrible things. UM. And
Speaker 1: you know, one of the things I've seen in some
Speaker 1: early feedback from um other stuff I've done on other shows,
Speaker 1: and also from earlier episodes of this is people who
Speaker 1: will go like, Hey, everything you're saying about mutual aid
Speaker 1: is rad But I live in X town and whatever state,
Speaker 1: and there's there's nothing here. There's not not an organized left.
Speaker 1: I don't I don't know of any mutual aid groups. Um,
Speaker 1: how can I get involved? Or like, how could I
Speaker 1: start my own organization and try to get people involved?
Speaker 1: And then the another thing we get asked a lot
Speaker 1: is like, Hey, what you're saying about building resiliency and
Speaker 1: preparing for difficult times, gardening and whatnot sounds great. But
Speaker 1: I'm poor as ship and I live in a tiny
Speaker 1: apartment um or whatever. I I have no resources or
Speaker 1: no room. Um, even if you're not none of enough money, like,
Speaker 1: I'm in the middle of some horribly dense city. So
Speaker 1: this week we're gonna be talking around those sub objects
Speaker 1: in a number of different ways. And to kind of
Speaker 1: kick us off, I've got, of course, Garrison with me.
Speaker 1: Wokeme up at nine in the morning. How are you doing, Garrison,
Speaker 1: ungodly early? Yeah, it's it's it's hideous, it's hideous. Um.
Speaker 1: And then Margaret Killjoy, who's up at a much more
Speaker 1: reasonable hour because time zones are a wild ass thing. Margaret,
Speaker 1: how do you? How do we how do we introduce you?
Speaker 1: You're an author? Uh, you're a writer of fiction. You
Speaker 1: host a podcast called Live like the World is Dying, right,
Speaker 1: and you've had me on and you talk about a
Speaker 1: lot of the same things we talked about, and it
Speaker 1: could happen here. We're actually shamelessly stealing your your your
Speaker 1: podcast in order to make it corporate and sold out.
Speaker 1: How are you doing, Margaret, I'm excited to be part
Speaker 1: of the corporate sold out its podcast, um, and and
Speaker 1: actually very glad that you all do a wider audience thing.
Speaker 1: But um, I think that is a decent way to
Speaker 1: introduce me. I do a lot of different things, and
Speaker 1: I've been doing also, like organizing and trying to seek
Speaker 1: radical political change for about twenty years, to degrees of success.
Speaker 1: Actually mostly not to any success, because we actually still
Speaker 1: live in maybe a worse society than we were in
Speaker 1: two years ago. I tell people that I dropped out
Speaker 1: of college to ride freight trains and overthrow the government,
Speaker 1: and I wasn't good at either of those things. I mean,
Speaker 1: you have all your limbs, that's true. I do have
Speaker 1: all of my limbs. Yeah. And you're not in prison, um,
Speaker 1: which is really all anyone can ask of the universe. UM.
Speaker 1: So you have started a number of organizations in your
Speaker 1: career as an activist in kind of that hat and
Speaker 1: I guess let's start with like, yes, somebody who lives
Speaker 1: in a place, there's no kind of really really organized left.
Speaker 1: There's probably not in a lot of these places much
Speaker 1: of even like a Democratic party. There's certainly not mutual
Speaker 1: aid efforts UM. And I do think that there's a well, well,
Speaker 1: mutual aid is a concept is is pretty firmly rooted
Speaker 1: an anarchism. There's mutual aid kind of organizations that are
Speaker 1: are not particularly leftist, or at least people doing stuff
Speaker 1: like that. Like I think a good recent example will
Speaker 1: be the Occasion Navy, who did a lot of rescues
Speaker 1: after the most recent set of hurricanes, where certainly not
Speaker 1: a left or an anarchist organization, but a lot of
Speaker 1: what they're doing is um is a community aiding itself. UM. So,
Speaker 1: I don't know where where do we Where? Where do
Speaker 1: you want to start here? Well, I guess I mean
Speaker 1: specifically in disaster times, you don't necessarily work with the
Speaker 1: people that you would assume that you're expecting to work with.
Speaker 1: And you know, one of the one of the stories
Speaker 1: that really sticks with me is like a friend of mine,
Speaker 1: who is this you know, UM train riding anarchistic governed
Speaker 1: in tattoos and and all of that. And during flood
Speaker 1: relief in eastern North Carolina was like flying into storms
Speaker 1: and small planes with libertarians because the people who are
Speaker 1: willing to fly small planes into storms and own planes
Speaker 1: tend to be the more libertarian side of things. And
Speaker 1: so here's anarchists and libertarians working together to get people
Speaker 1: what they need. And one of the things that I try,
Speaker 1: because this is one of the biggest questions I think
Speaker 1: that the left faces, and you know, people trying to
Speaker 1: make the world better faces, is how do we get
Speaker 1: people involved? And also how do people get involved if
Speaker 1: no one's helping them get involved? And um, I don't
Speaker 1: have all the answers about it, but it's something that
Speaker 1: I I think about obsessively some a lot. And one
Speaker 1: of the things that I really try and focus on
Speaker 1: with people as people say, well, I want to be prepared,
Speaker 1: and you talk about community being a very important part
Speaker 1: of apparedness, but I don't feel like I have a
Speaker 1: community because we live in a very isolated society. And
Speaker 1: one of the main things I try and remind people though,
Speaker 1: is that in the same way that property relations break down,
Speaker 1: like someone's like, oh, I don't have any stuff and
Speaker 1: if the apocalypse comes, what will I do? And like, well,
Speaker 1: the kind of the answer is that like whence property
Speaker 1: relations break down, there's a lot of stuff, and it's
Speaker 1: very there will be much stuff around, like wherehouses exist
Speaker 1: all of stuff and yeah, Amazon warehouses are going to
Speaker 1: become like fun boxes. Yeah, exactly, slash fortified outposts alleged. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And community is the same way, not that you would
Speaker 1: go raid community but instead that um some people, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true, And but you can you can create community
Speaker 1: in times of crisis in a way that's actually harder
Speaker 1: to do when the existing social order exists. And and
Speaker 1: the the thing I always say uses my my dumb
Speaker 1: example of this about how people come together during times
Speaker 1: of crisis is you know, when I'm waiting for the
Speaker 1: bus and you know, some city or something, and no
Speaker 1: one talks to each other if you don't know each
Speaker 1: other until the bus is like five minutes late, and
Speaker 1: then everyone is comparing notes about where they think they
Speaker 1: saw the bus last, and everyone's friends and sharing snacks
Speaker 1: and things. You know. So in some ways I'm like,
Speaker 1: be optimistic if you don't already no community, Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I think there's also things you can do that don't
Speaker 1: necessarily cost a lot of money to both kind of
Speaker 1: build resiliency and kind of community connections. Now, one of
Speaker 1: those things I've had a lot of friends in different
Speaker 1: cities work for. There. There will be different farming co ops, right,
Speaker 1: and generally the arrangement is you volunteer some sort of
Speaker 1: time helping them with you know, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: ship work on farms, and in return you generally get
Speaker 1: some amount of produce or whatever. But really what you're
Speaker 1: getting is practical experience growing food, and you're meeting the
Speaker 1: kind of people who are interested in growing their own food,
Speaker 1: and you know, those kind of connections can be really
Speaker 1: helpful when things get worse. And so I think it
Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily it doesn't have to cost much to to
Speaker 1: try building community now, or to at least try putting
Speaker 1: yourself in some of the spaces where the kind of
Speaker 1: people you might want to be in, the kind of
Speaker 1: people you you might want to know when things get
Speaker 1: worse might be. Yeah, and there's a lot of um,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of like opportunities the world kind of
Speaker 1: wants you to volunteer. You there's there's all of these
Speaker 1: things that if you reach out to people and you're like, hey,
Speaker 1: I don't have any connections, but I'm interested in volunteering.
Speaker 1: There are types of organizations that do interesting things that
Speaker 1: are open to that. You know, I kind of maybe
Speaker 1: it's terrible, but whenever my friends, especially my friends were
Speaker 1: in their twenties or something who who don't really feel
Speaker 1: kind of lost and without direction for a while, I'm like,
Speaker 1: go sit in a tree, like, go join direct action
Speaker 1: environmentalist groups that are desperate for people to come live
Speaker 1: their lives in this like self sustaining community. That is
Speaker 1: incredibly traumatic and hard to do. And I don't necessarily
Speaker 1: recommend this to everybody, but you know, it's a thing
Speaker 1: that you can do, is that you can go participate
Speaker 1: in in different movements, some of which do want strangers,
Speaker 1: you know, some of which don't. Write. Um, you can't
Speaker 1: show up to everything and be like why aren't you
Speaker 1: including me? You're a bunch of assholes? Yeah, and um,
Speaker 1: I don't know. So when when it comes to actually
Speaker 1: like trying to start something, um like like like going
Speaker 1: out and accepting, okay, there's not maybe I can't. I
Speaker 1: can't leave my family behind and go do a tree set,
Speaker 1: but I would like to, you know, start a community
Speaker 1: engaging in something direct Maybe that's not illegal direct action,
Speaker 1: maybe it is. It's none of my business. Um, how
Speaker 1: do you recommend people just kind of start organizations? Find
Speaker 1: people avoid pitfalls? Like, you know, if you've got to
Speaker 1: make your own mutual aid group because there's not one
Speaker 1: in your town and you you wanna. I mean, people
Speaker 1: have expressed a desire to understand how to do that.
Speaker 1: So I'm you know, I've never I'm not an organizer.
Speaker 1: I'm barely a journalist. I am curious for your thoughts
Speaker 1: on that. Well, okay, so as my own caveat is,
Speaker 1: I'm no longer an organizer. I spent much of my
Speaker 1: twenties being part of organizations and then I finally, um
Speaker 1: realize that I can just kind of do whatever I
Speaker 1: want and then figure out how to plug that into
Speaker 1: other people's things. But I will say the the main
Speaker 1: way of heard this express and I believe in, is
Speaker 1: that we should do if you want to start getting involved,
Speaker 1: is you think about what you're good at, and where
Speaker 1: you think about what you want to be good at,
Speaker 1: and then you think about the problems that you're facing,
Speaker 1: and then you think about how to apply what you're
Speaker 1: good at to the problems that you're facing. So if
Speaker 1: you're sitting there and you're like, well, i'm a I'm
Speaker 1: a really good illustrator, right, I'm not. I'm a terrible illustrator.
Speaker 1: But let's say you're a good illustrator, and then you
Speaker 1: you could basically reach out to organizations that maybe you
Speaker 1: aren't even close and be like, hey, I'm an illustrator.
Speaker 1: Is there anything I can do for you? All? Um?
Speaker 1: But if what you want to do is start an
Speaker 1: organization locally, it's okay to start small and build up.
Speaker 1: It's okay to you know, it's kind of a if
Speaker 1: you build it, they will come kind of thing in general,
Speaker 1: like if you start, if you figure out what you
Speaker 1: need to do, you know, we want to distribute supplies, right,
Speaker 1: then you just do it like you just. Um, even
Speaker 1: if you start by yourself or ideally you kind of
Speaker 1: start with yourself and a couple of friends that you
Speaker 1: drag into it, and then you see what gets inertia
Speaker 1: like rather than like forcing, rather than starting off, don't
Speaker 1: start off by writing your by laws. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe start with an idea of like if you have
Speaker 1: a cool name that you want to use, like sometimes
Speaker 1: that's great to start with, like a hook, and like
Speaker 1: starting a band or something, you know you'd start with
Speaker 1: like the thing that brings everyone together, which is sometimes
Speaker 1: a clever name, but but mostly you just start by
Speaker 1: doing it. And um, you know, one of the one
Speaker 1: of the ways that's longest standing that people can get
Speaker 1: involved with locally or start locally, and there's a lot
Speaker 1: of resources about how to do it is is Food
Speaker 1: not Bombs. Food Not Bombs is a a mutual aid
Speaker 1: project that's existed and I wish I knew off the
Speaker 1: top of my head since when I want to say,
Speaker 1: the late seventies, but I really couldn't tell you. And
Speaker 1: it's just food. It's just organizing food to give to
Speaker 1: people in public. And it's actually wild how illegal it
Speaker 1: is in some places, Like people get arrested for food
Speaker 1: not Bombs all the time in Florida, in a couple
Speaker 1: of other places. But yeah, we talked about them in
Speaker 1: the first part of the season because there have been
Speaker 1: a couple of point. I don't think nationally the FBI
Speaker 1: is talked about them as a terror threat, but like
Speaker 1: in the Austin Field, US, and I think one or
Speaker 1: two other places, they've been like discussed as a terrorist
Speaker 1: threat for handing out food. I've had like helicopters flying
Speaker 1: overhead and like riots around the corner and stuffed for
Speaker 1: for handing out food with food ut bombs. Yeah, it's ah,
Speaker 1: they missed the second half of the name. I guess,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know. I think maybe if
Speaker 1: we were to create bombs, not food, we we might
Speaker 1: not get as much police attention. But that's just a theory. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: what everyone says is that we need food. And no
Speaker 1: one says this, no one would ever say this, no
Speaker 1: one would ever believe this. But we need food and bombs,
Speaker 1: you know, food hand bombs, yea, bombs for some food
Speaker 1: for others. We don't judge. We provide explosives and we
Speaker 1: provide food. Yeah, okay, So if you can, I think
Speaker 1: if you can, you start by working. You figure out
Speaker 1: what you're good at. You find a group of people
Speaker 1: that are interested in accomplishing the same thing, who maybe
Speaker 1: have similar skill sets or different skill sets, and you
Speaker 1: figure out what you can do, and you start doing it,
Speaker 1: and you organize calling people and being like hey, well
Speaker 1: you donate to us, or getting all your friends together
Speaker 1: to give you stuff to to redistribute or whatever, right
Speaker 1: putting out calls on social media for things to redistribute.
Speaker 1: You know, most structures start grassroots, and most of the
Speaker 1: time they kind of tend to do best when they're
Speaker 1: grassroots instead of becoming a little more codified. So if possible,
Speaker 1: do that. But if you're just you, um, sometimes tying
Speaker 1: into existing organizations is a thing worth doing. And if
Speaker 1: there's nothing locally, you can look at things a little
Speaker 1: further away, or you can look at things that are
Speaker 1: on maybe on a national level. But there's a lot
Speaker 1: of dangers in joining existing organizations and structures, and I guess,
Speaker 1: I guess I would say there's like three types of danger,
Speaker 1: and one is that you talked about all the time.
Speaker 1: And thanks for bringing into the leftist vocabulary the word grifter.
Speaker 1: I never heard anyone use the word grifter until your podcasts.
Speaker 1: It's the most important word in the American English for sure.
Speaker 1: We live in a fucking grifter republic. It's incredible and
Speaker 1: we always have this isn't new, Yeah, but we need
Speaker 1: more words because we also need the word for people
Speaker 1: who are looking for useful idiots. And there's a lot
Speaker 1: of social movements and not to be like I I
Speaker 1: support the Left. I think that what we're attempting to
Speaker 1: do is very worthwhile, and I like us more than
Speaker 1: the other side by a fair amount. But there's a
Speaker 1: lot of things that there's a lot of problems with
Speaker 1: the left, and one of them is that people are
Speaker 1: looking either to just have you as a body with
Speaker 1: no decision making power and no autonomy, which doesn't actually
Speaker 1: build a better world because you're just stop being a
Speaker 1: cog in their machine and become a cog in our machine. Right.
Speaker 1: And then there's also people who are kind of um
Speaker 1: looking for useful idiots can and fodder, like people to
Speaker 1: hang around while they while they do stuff or you know,
Speaker 1: and I don't want to go to hard bodies to
Speaker 1: stand out in front of cop shops. Sometimes yeah, and
Speaker 1: even like you know, even like movements that I really
Speaker 1: care about that might do a lot of like non
Speaker 1: violence of this obedience, although I don't I'm not particularly
Speaker 1: I'm not passed us personally, but you know, it's a
Speaker 1: very useful strategy and non violence of those obedience. But
Speaker 1: sometimes they're like, oh, you're young and new, lock yourself
Speaker 1: to this thing. Get arrested, And I would definitely say
Speaker 1: to people, don't get arrested on purpose at your first actions,
Speaker 1: like don't be anyone else's cannon fodder, and so you
Speaker 1: feel like you are part of the decision making and
Speaker 1: part of like like you really matter, and like then
Speaker 1: then don't um do dangerous things for other people's projects
Speaker 1: like the ship that states do. That's so messed up
Speaker 1: is is turn human bodies into resources that then get
Speaker 1: sacrificed for unclear ends. Um, And unless you feel like
Speaker 1: you have some sort of like there are times we're
Speaker 1: being arrested is necessary and helpful, but unless unless you
Speaker 1: feel you fully understand not just why you're doing it,
Speaker 1: but also that like you you you're not being told
Speaker 1: to do it, you have autonomy and like, I'm going
Speaker 1: to do this thing that I know will end in
Speaker 1: my arrest because I like, I don't know. That's probably
Speaker 1: like I think most people in that position know this.
Speaker 1: But I definitely have encountered some uncomfortable situations in the past,
Speaker 1: I'm sure similar to once you have, where it did
Speaker 1: seem like people were kind of being pushed to take
Speaker 1: that risk for reasons they didn't fully understand or in
Speaker 1: a situation they didn't fully rock you know, yeah, which
Speaker 1: which gets at one of the things that when I
Speaker 1: talk about how I think this is the biggest problem
Speaker 1: with not not the cannon fodder issue, but the getting
Speaker 1: people involved is the biggest issue I think we currently
Speaker 1: face because there's so many people who want to be
Speaker 1: involved right now because the world is even worse than
Speaker 1: usual and um, and it's hitting groups of people who
Speaker 1: haven't been hit by before, and people are often also
Speaker 1: looking for a sense of community. And there's a thing
Speaker 1: that people we don't talk about enough when people are
Speaker 1: getting involved. There's two different reasons people get involve aolved,
Speaker 1: and both are entirely valid, and one is to fix
Speaker 1: things and another is to find to break out of
Speaker 1: the isolation that they live in in their daily lives. Um.
Speaker 1: And we need to be aware of that when we
Speaker 1: talk about how to onboard people, and we need to
Speaker 1: be aware about that. If you are getting involved, you
Speaker 1: should think about your own desires. Are you looking for
Speaker 1: community and if so, you can find it within radical
Speaker 1: action right um. But if you are doing that, then
Speaker 1: you especially need to be on guard against peer pressure
Speaker 1: because it's a really easy way to feel like you're
Speaker 1: involved with things is to go hang out with people
Speaker 1: who are all doing a release scary thing and and
Speaker 1: that's beautiful. And I absolutely did that when I when
Speaker 1: I first got involved in anarchism, I I and politics
Speaker 1: in general. I I joined in head first, and you know,
Speaker 1: spend a night in jail within the first couple of months.
Speaker 1: And I don't have any particularly regrets about that. And
Speaker 1: I found community in a way that I had never
Speaker 1: had in my life because of how isolated our society is.
Speaker 1: But that's not the only reason to go do these
Speaker 1: and that is I mean, I think a lot of
Speaker 1: people experienced that last year during the George Floyd protests.
Speaker 1: Is the kind of I mean, it's the thing we've
Speaker 1: talked about on in the first season. If it could
Speaker 1: happen here, that times like that, this war does this too,
Speaker 1: can actually provide meaning that that people have lacked. And
Speaker 1: a lot of it is that community that like community
Speaker 1: of sufferers, the trauma bonding UM that feels like the
Speaker 1: most important thing, even because maybe it is the most
Speaker 1: important thing you've ever done. I think in a lot
Speaker 1: of cases it is UM. But that's also mind altering,
Speaker 1: and it um it can lead to situations that are
Speaker 1: not entirely dissimilar to cults. Um. I'm not saying that
Speaker 1: they are cults, because cults are number one. With cult
Speaker 1: there's generally going to be like a leader and a
Speaker 1: in such but like, there are things that happened that
Speaker 1: that draw people into cults that are just human things,
Speaker 1: their aspects in some cases, as I've said before, of
Speaker 1: like a good party. Um, but there are cult like
Speaker 1: aspects to the kind of groups that form in these
Speaker 1: traumatic situations that can lead people to start making really
Speaker 1: poor decisions. Um. And and so you have to really
Speaker 1: you always have to be kind of analyzing not just
Speaker 1: what you're doing, but what's going on in your own head,
Speaker 1: in the head of the heads of the people around you. UM.
Speaker 1: That's that's just always important. But I think particularly when
Speaker 1: you're when you're trying to do something new and different
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways, bigger than anything you've done before.
Speaker 1: Do you have any specific advice for like kind of
Speaker 1: avoiding the cults of personality that sometimes form in new organizations. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you have both informal and formal structures can both
Speaker 1: cause problems with cult of personality. There are these brilliant
Speaker 1: essays that I haven't read like twenty years that come
Speaker 1: from the feminist movement, and one of them is called
Speaker 1: the Tyranny of structurelessness. And as best as I remember,
Speaker 1: these are very short essays. As best I remember, at
Speaker 1: the tyranny of actuallessness is, if you don't have a
Speaker 1: formal structure in your organization, you're going to have this
Speaker 1: informal leader who basically tells everyone wants to do. And
Speaker 1: that's a problem and and it's a very important piece,
Speaker 1: and I believe it comes from a Marxist feminist perspective,
Speaker 1: but I'm not certain. And then there was an anarchist
Speaker 1: feminist response around the same time, maybe I'm not sure,
Speaker 1: called the tyranny of tyranny that was like, yes, that's true.
Speaker 1: And also when you have a formal structure and put
Speaker 1: someone in charge there in charge, and that has other
Speaker 1: problems too, And I think that it's just we we
Speaker 1: have to be aware of both of these things. That, UM,
Speaker 1: you know, the fact that most movements are very decentralized
Speaker 1: in grassroots as as huge advantages, right, but it does
Speaker 1: have problems of causing informal cults of personality. UM. Podcasting
Speaker 1: is a big part of this problem. Um And actually,
Speaker 1: I really appreciate that you're not an organizer, like frankly,
Speaker 1: and it's part of why I'm not an organizer on
Speaker 1: some level is because when people read the books that
Speaker 1: someone writes or listen to someone's voice all the time,
Speaker 1: it is very influential, right, and being aware of that
Speaker 1: and therefore not exerting that power is a very good thing. Um.
Speaker 1: And but there's okay, So the other thing, like when
Speaker 1: I worry about like people getting involved with like don't
Speaker 1: get peer pressured into stuff when you first join. There's
Speaker 1: also this thing that is needs to be talked about.
Speaker 1: And maybe I'll have talked about this some previously, but entrapment.
Speaker 1: Entrapment is a huge problem, and specifically, the FEDS tend
Speaker 1: to look for young idealist activists who can be peer
Speaker 1: pressured into actions that they may or may not have
Speaker 1: otherwise ideologically agreed with, like hey, let's go blow up
Speaker 1: a bridge or let's go blow up a damn And
Speaker 1: and this doesn't just happen to the left. It happens um.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's all around. Yeah for sure, Like there's
Speaker 1: that case of the guys who are trying to kid
Speaker 1: nap the governor of was it Michigan. A lot of
Speaker 1: that was informants who were there's a lot of there's
Speaker 1: You can debate heavily whether or not it was entrapment. Obviously,
Speaker 1: what we we might consider entrapment morally often isn't entrapment
Speaker 1: legally because the FBI does know where the lines are legally,
Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean it isn't morally entrapment, right, And
Speaker 1: they do that a lot, and they usually succeed um, well,
Speaker 1: they may not usually succeeded, though they usually succeeded the case,
Speaker 1: and entrapment defenses are hard to succeed with. And so
Speaker 1: really just like and thinking about I think developing your
Speaker 1: own moral compass and sticking to it is one of
Speaker 1: the single most important things that a new activist can
Speaker 1: can do. And not to be afraid of radical action
Speaker 1: necessarily like militant action, but but be wary of it. Um.
Speaker 1: But then again I mean in terms of like being
Speaker 1: where are of what the other thing to avoid doing
Speaker 1: is like accusing each other, like fed jacketing, like being like, oh,
Speaker 1: well that person is doing the same thing a FED
Speaker 1: might do, like wink wink, you know, Um, it's a
Speaker 1: really complicated an annoying game to play, and if you're
Speaker 1: just getting involved, you're gonna have to learn how to
Speaker 1: get it play this game of not fed jacketing and
Speaker 1: also not um falling into stuff. And it's annoying because
Speaker 1: you probably have to kind of learn some of the stuff,
Speaker 1: even if all you want to do is give away blankets.
Speaker 1: You know, if you want to tie what you're doing
Speaker 1: to a larger ideological structure, then it's going to come
Speaker 1: up that you need to be aware of how repression
Speaker 1: applies to that larger ideological structure. Yeah, like all this
Speaker 1: is very useful specifically if you're trying to find something
Speaker 1: kind of pre existing um or you know, looking you know,
Speaker 1: or you know, starting something in the bigger city where
Speaker 1: you have like connect This can be made to other
Speaker 1: existing organizations. And I'm trying to think, you know, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of people who live in more like rural areas.
Speaker 1: It's not much like a liberal or like you know,
Speaker 1: especially left is kind of subculture. How would how would
Speaker 1: you recommend people who live in those kind of scenarios
Speaker 1: try to start building this community? Wouldn't say like they
Speaker 1: only have like a few friends, Um, what what steps
Speaker 1: do you think people can take if they have more,
Speaker 1: you know, a secluded set up, So it is harder.
Speaker 1: And I live in a red area close to a
Speaker 1: blue area, right And I do most of my organizing
Speaker 1: and as much as I do organizing within the the
Speaker 1: nearby small hippie city, even though theoretically the thing that
Speaker 1: I care the most about is connections to my immediate neighbors. Right. Um,
Speaker 1: that is harder, And it is harder for a lot
Speaker 1: of different reasons, especially if you have cultural differences between
Speaker 1: you and the people that you're around. Right, Like I'm
Speaker 1: a trans woman and live around a lot of like
Speaker 1: farms and stuff, right And and previously this wasn't a
Speaker 1: problem before Trump. This what kind of just wasn't a
Speaker 1: problem after Trump. Now all of a sudden, the fact
Speaker 1: that I'm trans as like an attack against people in
Speaker 1: a way that it never used to be. And and
Speaker 1: so now they all have an opinion about the fact
Speaker 1: that we're an address. But still, at the end of
Speaker 1: the day, I would say that most of the people
Speaker 1: that I'm around are actually totally chill. Like there's a
Speaker 1: vocal minority of really horrid people, right, Um, But even
Speaker 1: the people who might be and might have even voted
Speaker 1: for Trump or whatever. Um are not necessarily, at least
Speaker 1: along my own identity lines, amoso white, are not necessarily
Speaker 1: going to give me ship. And you know, I can
Speaker 1: go talk to them and address and they might be
Speaker 1: sort of confused, and they might not be. But if
Speaker 1: you have more culturally in common with the people around you,
Speaker 1: then there is a lot of room that you can
Speaker 1: start working on from there. And this actually ties into
Speaker 1: something that I think applies to people across the board,
Speaker 1: which is we have this especially new activists, but also
Speaker 1: including people who've been in it for a long time,
Speaker 1: and there's like real arrogance about the fact that we're
Speaker 1: like right, And when you want to change the world,
Speaker 1: you need a certain amount of arrogance, you need a
Speaker 1: certain amount of like I mean, I literally believe we
Speaker 1: need to not have a government or capitalism, and these
Speaker 1: are very major changes to our existing structure. Just a
Speaker 1: huge amount of arrogance to that. Although not having a
Speaker 1: government is slightly less of a major change now that
Speaker 1: it was a couple of years ago, it's true. And
Speaker 1: also like something like sometimes actually it's funny, I used
Speaker 1: that it more in common with these neighbors. But then
Speaker 1: all the libertarians went goddamn authoritarian. That bummed the funk
Speaker 1: out of me. Yeah, there's there's some good ones. Still,
Speaker 1: there's like again, there's the there's the there's the taking
Speaker 1: your private plane and do a disaster area libertarians, and
Speaker 1: God bless them totally, and you know, they're like they
Speaker 1: just don't want them. You know. It's like my dad
Speaker 1: is sort of on the libertarian side of things and
Speaker 1: keeps twenty dollar bills in the visor of his truck
Speaker 1: to give to people flying signs, and he just doesn't
Speaker 1: want the government redistributing his money. He doesn't mind redistributing
Speaker 1: his money. Yeah, And I'm like, all right, I don't
Speaker 1: have any real objection to that. He's also no longer anyway.
Speaker 1: If you come at people with this attitude of like
Speaker 1: I'm right and you're wrong, the kind of people that
Speaker 1: you can get to join your side by saying I'm
Speaker 1: right and you're wrong are not the people you want.
Speaker 1: You want people who challenge authority, including the authority of
Speaker 1: people who claim there should be authority, and and so
Speaker 1: just actually listening to people and like hearing people out
Speaker 1: and um when possible, avoiding Drawing lines between people is
Speaker 1: one of the main ways to connect with people across
Speaker 1: either cultural divides or especially political divides. And this this
Speaker 1: can't always happen, right, Like I walk down the street
Speaker 1: and address and someone like calls me a bad word,
Speaker 1: like I'm not going to be like. I understand why
Speaker 1: you think to call me that, And I understand how
Speaker 1: like me dressed this way kind of challenges your sense
Speaker 1: of masculinity that you've been brought up into. Is the
Speaker 1: only way that you can hold yourself strong in a
Speaker 1: very hard world. No, I don't do that. I um scream,
Speaker 1: funk you and chase them. Um, I would ever chase
Speaker 1: anyone with a knife. I think that's not legal, So
Speaker 1: I wouldn't do that, but um, you know that might work.
Speaker 1: And you know, like, funk those people. I don't care
Speaker 1: what they have to say. No, of course not. And
Speaker 1: it when I think one of the things that I
Speaker 1: don't know Twitter brain has done is that like when
Speaker 1: you when you talk about reaching out and talking to
Speaker 1: people who you know don't agree with you, aren't aren't
Speaker 1: on your side ideologically, there's folks who will kind of assume, like, oh,
Speaker 1: so you're saying I should like try to be friendly
Speaker 1: with people who would have murder me. Like, no, I'm
Speaker 1: not saying that. I'm not saying that like, as a
Speaker 1: trans person or black person, you should go talk to
Speaker 1: um a militant anti LGBT activist or a fucking klansman
Speaker 1: or something. I'm saying that, like, that's not within the
Speaker 1: broad I'm saying what you need to recognize. But what
Speaker 1: I think is important to recognize, especially if you're when
Speaker 1: we talk about like post you know, collapse or whatever,
Speaker 1: is that within broad political tendency. So I'm not talking
Speaker 1: about like fascist or whatever, but I'm talking about like liberal, conservative, progressive,
Speaker 1: very broad political tendencies. You have roughly the same percentage
Speaker 1: of people who are ship. So in an anarchist group,
Speaker 1: the amount of people who are shitty is going to
Speaker 1: be similar to the amount of the general population that
Speaker 1: are shitty. It's the same with every political tendency. But
Speaker 1: the corollary to that is, again, within broad tendencies, you'll
Speaker 1: find roughly the same amount of people who are basically
Speaker 1: rad and maybe yeah there's some they have their brain
Speaker 1: got poisoned with dis info and they believe some stupid
Speaker 1: shit and they vote like an asshole. But you know,
Speaker 1: they'll stop their car if they see someone in an accident,
Speaker 1: and they keep a fucking medical kit in their bag,
Speaker 1: and you know there that it's the it's the it's
Speaker 1: the ship that you know. I talk a lot about this,
Speaker 1: the stabbing on the Portland Max train. Well, the two
Speaker 1: people who who died confronting that asshole um where a
Speaker 1: Republican retired veteran and a far left social justice activists,
Speaker 1: and they both you know, put their bodies on the lines.
Speaker 1: I think that like when we talk about like being
Speaker 1: willing to kind of talk with people who are who
Speaker 1: are not on the same ideological boat as you, that's
Speaker 1: that's what I mean, Not you should make nice with
Speaker 1: the people who want to exterminate you, Like fuck those people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because the thing you're looking for, the thing I'm looking
Speaker 1: for is the Republican who's going to, hopefully, instead of
Speaker 1: dying to saw alongside me, successfully defeat the you know,
Speaker 1: actual far right person. But yeah, yeah, totally, And and
Speaker 1: I think that that actually is part of the It's
Speaker 1: not always the answer for every person who's isolated, right,
Speaker 1: everyone who's socially isolated, but it is part of it.
Speaker 1: If you're trying to organize with people where you say
Speaker 1: you're the only leftist or the only anarchist in your area,
Speaker 1: then maybe you don't start. And this is actually funny.
Speaker 1: I'm very into being very public about my political ideology
Speaker 1: so that people know what bias is UM coming into
Speaker 1: things with. But but maybe you don't start your rural
Speaker 1: mutuoid project calling it the rural mutu Aid project, or
Speaker 1: maybe you do, and maybe you you just start doing
Speaker 1: it and you find people who are willing to have
Speaker 1: the same goals and means as you, and and I
Speaker 1: think you can do alongside of that, you can also
Speaker 1: just be really public about what you believe. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, UM Again, as an anarchist, I end up
Speaker 1: working with like church groups and things that I don't
Speaker 1: necessarily agree with on a lot of a lot of things.
Speaker 1: But they're not mad when I'm like, oh I'm an anarchist.
Speaker 1: They're just like, huh, okay, I'm a church person or
Speaker 1: what you know, and like, okay, I'm not. I don't
Speaker 1: expect different of them, and they don't expect different of me.
Speaker 1: And we we know what we have in common and
Speaker 1: what we don't to a certain degree, and then we
Speaker 1: work on what we have in common and so airing
Speaker 1: and so this is both true if you're within the
Speaker 1: movement and you're hoping to try and solve this problem
Speaker 1: for other people. But I also think it's going to
Speaker 1: be true for people who are trying to build things
Speaker 1: in areas where they don't have, where they don't feel
Speaker 1: like the part of something larger is airing on the
Speaker 1: side of inclusion versus exclusion and not And like you're
Speaker 1: talking about, it's about airing on the side of not
Speaker 1: always include everyone, not always committing to a hard and
Speaker 1: fast rule. Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, be be open to
Speaker 1: the fact that people can surprise you in ways that
Speaker 1: aren't terrifying. Yeah. Also, because you get terrified enough by
Speaker 1: enough like people who you think are on your side
Speaker 1: that you're like, oh, yeah, I'm sad you all don't
Speaker 1: do the ad pivots in this show, because you can
Speaker 1: do it. We can do it, we can we can
Speaker 1: cut it in during one of the long awkward pauses.
Speaker 1: Go for it, and we'll keep all this up to
Speaker 1: it in, but we'll actually cut the actual so you'll
Speaker 1: hear it. It's like Finnigan's Wake. You're going to hear
Speaker 1: it out of order, okay, and I hopefully you all
Speaker 1: be able to figure out the second half of it,
Speaker 1: but the first the first half is anyone who claims
Speaker 1: to have all the answers is selling you something? Oh
Speaker 1: uh huh yeah, oh oh you know who else is
Speaker 1: selling you something? Is it the ADSs go listen to
Speaker 1: the guy Geico or or Jesus. We've had some bad
Speaker 1: ones lately. Um, there's that s os Cuba show that
Speaker 1: sounds we're rough. Uh. There was that one that was
Speaker 1: just like God. It was just like, there's something the
Speaker 1: concept of gus we are sponsored by God. I think
Speaker 1: I've gotten like Walmart and McDonald's on your show before.
Speaker 1: Remember that's the people's food. Oh yeah, organized actually try
Speaker 1: to organize around the Walmart. That could be very so Anyway,
Speaker 1: here's ads. If someone is trying to start something new
Speaker 1: inside in one of these more secluded areas and like
Speaker 1: they have decided like yeah, I'm willing to do something,
Speaker 1: I'm willing to actually just like start it. How how
Speaker 1: would you recommend they try to figure out what some
Speaker 1: of the like biggest needs of the community are that
Speaker 1: they can actually tackle. Like, how how does someone find
Speaker 1: out what to do with their mutual late because they
Speaker 1: can like commit like, yeah, I can do something around supplies,
Speaker 1: something around this, you know whatever. Really, how does one
Speaker 1: try to actually gauge what is important try to tackle?
Speaker 1: I guess it depends on whether you feel like you're
Speaker 1: totally Like if in my head, if I'm totally inside
Speaker 1: Annissie community but an area, right, I probably kind of
Speaker 1: know because I'm also experiencing whatever the thing is. But
Speaker 1: if I'm if I'm a little bit detached from it,
Speaker 1: then I do need to like do kind of you know.
Speaker 1: The sort of traditional method is I think it's called
Speaker 1: listening projects. I've never actually personally done a listening project.
Speaker 1: I've been around many people who do. Where you basically
Speaker 1: like sometimes you go door to door and you're like, hey,
Speaker 1: what's up, Like what do you need? Like what's going on?
Speaker 1: You know? Um? But like say, for example, in the
Speaker 1: area that I live, there is a a rural organizing
Speaker 1: It's not the actual Rural Organizing project, which is a
Speaker 1: specific structure, but there is a rural mutual aid group
Speaker 1: in the largely red area that I live in that's
Speaker 1: run by by leftists and they I think it largely
Speaker 1: they did a lot of like firewood delivery, for example,
Speaker 1: because a lot of the areas around here are heated
Speaker 1: by wood stoves, and you have a lot of poverty
Speaker 1: in rural areas. And of course poverty looks very different
Speaker 1: in rural areas versus urban areas. And you know, one
Speaker 1: of the advantages of being rural poor. There's many disadvantages,
Speaker 1: like lack of access to certain types of services, right, um,
Speaker 1: But one of the sometimes advantages of rural poverty, as
Speaker 1: I understand it, I'm not specifically an expert, um, is
Speaker 1: do you have space? Right, you just don't have stuff
Speaker 1: for money, and so you can have stuff if people
Speaker 1: give you stuff, so you can like story your firewood
Speaker 1: and so. And then also because it's this very specific
Speaker 1: tangible thing, people can get really excited about, like, oh,
Speaker 1: I can chop firewood, or maybe even I can't chop
Speaker 1: firewood because my legs busted because I work in the
Speaker 1: paper mill or whatever. But I can. But I got
Speaker 1: a trailer on my truck, you know, um, and I
Speaker 1: can haul that. And people get really excited when there's
Speaker 1: like things that they specifically are good at, especially things
Speaker 1: that I kind of have alienated them from other people,
Speaker 1: but they're that they're good at that they can then
Speaker 1: participate in and so, which isn't totally answer your question,
Speaker 1: but I would say, if anyone specifically is in a
Speaker 1: rural situation I was looking to start a mutual a group,
Speaker 1: look at the Rural Organizing Project. I don't believe that
Speaker 1: they specifically do rural mutual aid organizing, but they talk
Speaker 1: a lot about what it means to be an organizer
Speaker 1: within areas that are largely controlled by the far right,
Speaker 1: but are not. It's not like the people are all
Speaker 1: far right. They're just controlled by the far right, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the people actually there, once you talk to them, might
Speaker 1: actually be a lot more reasonable than like the media
Speaker 1: influencers who are part of this you know, same thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it is. It is one of those things. This
Speaker 1: is a topic we're drifting too. But it's when we
Speaker 1: drift to regularly on this show, we're like, when I
Speaker 1: talk with conservatives, it's it's not uncommon that I can
Speaker 1: without especially if I don't start by mentioning anarchy, I
Speaker 1: can get them to agree to a lot of the
Speaker 1: things I believe, which is like, yeah, maybe people don't
Speaker 1: need to be governed. Maybe that doesn't work out good.
Speaker 1: Maybe politicians are corrupt and should have less power, and
Speaker 1: like that doesn't mean that you're gonna you're gonna get
Speaker 1: them on the barricades with you, um, because any productive
Speaker 1: kind of relationship starts from like a base of shared
Speaker 1: interests and it's not a useless endeavor to engage in
Speaker 1: kind of trying to subtly. You know, if you if
Speaker 1: you feel out people around you who are ideologically not
Speaker 1: particularly similar to you, but also decent people, um, you
Speaker 1: can kind of try and work in some some something
Speaker 1: you've not not just some common ground, but you can
Speaker 1: try and get them to see that they agree with
Speaker 1: you one more than they think, um, and that that
Speaker 1: has an effect of changing the way people think about
Speaker 1: the world. It really does. Yeah, and you but you
Speaker 1: also have to go into it open to yes. Maybe
Speaker 1: maybe it's not going to change your opinion about the
Speaker 1: way the economy should be structured or the way that works, right,
Speaker 1: but you know, you definitely have to go into it
Speaker 1: with a I can now understand why you drive a
Speaker 1: big pickup truck that burns a lot of gas or
Speaker 1: whatever whatever thing. You might be coming into it thinking yeah,
Speaker 1: or at least it might help you understand why they
Speaker 1: believe or do certain things outside of you know, Dave
Speaker 1: Reuben broke their brain because they got on YouTube at
Speaker 1: the wrong time. I don't know, Margaret, did you have
Speaker 1: anything else you wanted to really get into. I guess to.
Speaker 1: One of the other questions that you all brought up
Speaker 1: was about preparedness, like maybe kind of almost in the
Speaker 1: inverse situation where let's say that you live in a
Speaker 1: small apartment and you want to be prepared and in
Speaker 1: which case maybe you have better access to community. Maybe
Speaker 1: you don't write a lot of people who live in
Speaker 1: the city are just as isolated socially as people elsewhere,
Speaker 1: But at least you kind of have like there's a
Speaker 1: little bit more easy access to ways to break out
Speaker 1: of certain types of isolation if you put work into it,
Speaker 1: because there's more likely to be groups around that are
Speaker 1: that are public that you can go interface with. UM.
Speaker 1: But in terms of like actual preparedness, you have the
Speaker 1: inverse problem, right of if you live rural you might
Speaker 1: have room to store beans and rice, and if you
Speaker 1: live in the city, you might not write UM. But
Speaker 1: I I will say it's the other thing that I
Speaker 1: find people the two things that people talk to me
Speaker 1: about I think you all run into. Also is that
Speaker 1: people are either I don't have any community or I
Speaker 1: don't have any money in space. Yeah. And so if
Speaker 1: you don't have any money in space, I mean, I
Speaker 1: mean in some ways, it's like, well, maybe your focus
Speaker 1: isn't like stockpiling stuff. Stockpiling and stuff is like the
Speaker 1: single most overrated part of individual or community preparedness. Um.
Speaker 1: I mean I do it, but you know it's because
Speaker 1: I M my brain works that way. Um. But also
Speaker 1: the level of like stuff that you might be looking
Speaker 1: for might be a lot less than like, like you know,
Speaker 1: it's like prepper media is filled with like here's how
Speaker 1: to build a bunker under your pool, And I'm like, what, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there's so many levels I mean, somebody other things
Speaker 1: that you should be doing before you go to that stitch. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, like, don't get me wrong, if I had
Speaker 1: a pool, I'd be stoked, And if I had absolutely
Speaker 1: under it, I'd be even more stoked. I'd be so happy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But but you know what it's like, it's the first
Speaker 1: five gallon bucket of like dried food you store is
Speaker 1: far and away more important than the tent, right, and like,
Speaker 1: so just having a five gallon jerry canful of water
Speaker 1: so that you're like, you know what, if the water
Speaker 1: turns off or we have a boil advisory, which happens
Speaker 1: all the time, I'm good for a couple of days, right,
Speaker 1: because most of the time people think about preparedness as like,
Speaker 1: I'm preparing for the end times, and usually what it
Speaker 1: is is the end times are real slow and chunky
Speaker 1: and crumbles, that's the word, um. And so you're just
Speaker 1: really looking to like smooth out interruptions and all that
Speaker 1: can be done very cheaply and honestly, when when you
Speaker 1: start storing your fifth five gallon jerry can of water,
Speaker 1: you're not storying it for you anymore. You're storying it
Speaker 1: for your neighbor. Yeah. Yeah, and that's good, but not
Speaker 1: exactly not the first step, you know. Yeah, it's better
Speaker 1: to prepare for if you have like a week's worth
Speaker 1: of power outages or a week's worth of the water
Speaker 1: not working, right, And those are more incremental steps, because
Speaker 1: we're not just gonna drop off and have no water
Speaker 1: forever starting in a month, right, probably not, but we
Speaker 1: mean very likely there's gonna be there's enough remaining systems
Speaker 1: that that they want to fix it. You know, it's
Speaker 1: more likely that some some disasters gonna happen that we're
Speaker 1: gonna have, you know, a week worth of stuff gone,
Speaker 1: you know, and that's the thing that's actually more more
Speaker 1: reasonable to prep for. Yeah, that makes sense. Um, well, Margaret,
Speaker 1: where can? Where can the good people and hopefully not
Speaker 1: the bad people, but statistically some of them will suck
Speaker 1: find you? Um, good people can find me on I
Speaker 1: have a podcast called Like the World Is Dying, which
Speaker 1: they can listen to you on if they would like,
Speaker 1: and it's about individual community preparedness. I also am on
Speaker 1: Twitter way too much, at Magpie kill Joy, Instagram, at
Speaker 1: Margaret Killjoy, my websites Birds before the Storm dot net
Speaker 1: or Margaret Killjoy dot com. And that has like a
Speaker 1: list of all the books that I have out. And
Speaker 1: I have a new book, an old book being reissued
Speaker 1: that is coming out in November from a K Press.
Speaker 1: The book is called a Country of Ghosts and it's
Speaker 1: an anarchist utopian book because I was sick of people
Speaker 1: being like, but how would an anarchist society work? And
Speaker 1: I was like, you know what, I wrote a book,
Speaker 1: damn straight. Um it also has a plot, so it's
Speaker 1: not fancy kind of boogie with yours. If you write
Speaker 1: a plot, you get the wall. No plot allowed, only
Speaker 1: post structural literature. Well, okay, so this has actually happened
Speaker 1: to anarchist fiction writers before U so much. Buda was
Speaker 1: this anarchist fiction writer. Um oh, I can't remember where
Speaker 1: from I'm gonna this is terribly embarrassing. But he moved
Speaker 1: to England from a colonized African country. Um, yeah, what
Speaker 1: did Rhodesia become? This is the most embarrassing. Oh it
Speaker 1: became a Zimbabwe, right, okay, yeah, so yeah, so he
Speaker 1: was from there and then everyone and he moved to
Speaker 1: London until he realized that they're a bunch of racists
Speaker 1: and he would like breaksh it at awards ceremonies and
Speaker 1: then go back home. But when he was a squatter
Speaker 1: for a while in the eighties, but he wasn't writing
Speaker 1: in the proper post colonial like Marxist realist tradition, because
Speaker 1: instead he was writing postmodern fiction, which is stuck getting
Speaker 1: and terrible. So he just like was like I don't care,
Speaker 1: and so he's great. That is anyway. I love to
Speaker 1: see it. Um, that's the episode. That's the episode, Go
Speaker 1: out and right, post modern jump on a train. That yeah,
Speaker 1: probably also a bad idea. I talked to somebody who
Speaker 1: lost their legs doing that once. Anyway, Episodes over. I'm
Speaker 1: Ev Rodsky, author of the New York Times bestseller fair
Speaker 1: Play and Find Your Unicorn Space, activists on the gender
Speaker 1: division of labor, attorney and family mediator. And I'm Dr
Speaker 1: adding A Rucar, a Harvard physician and medical correspondent with
Speaker 1: an expertise and the science of stress, resilience, mental health,
Speaker 1: and burnout. We're so excited to share our podcast Time Out,
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Speaker 1: uncovering why society makes it so hard for women to
Speaker 1: treat their time with the value it deserves. So take
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Speaker 1: the forest dot org brought to you by the United
Speaker 1: States Forest Service and the ad Council. Welcome this is
Speaker 1: it could happen here daily. Uh. This week, we are
Speaker 1: focusing on different ways to actually start doing things. You know,
Speaker 1: we've talked a lot about ideas that we like, you know,
Speaker 1: made some broad recommendations um and you know, had people
Speaker 1: on to give specific insights and to you know, different things.
Speaker 1: But we're trying to focus this week and then you
Speaker 1: know more in the future. Is like, if you're brand
Speaker 1: new to this sort of thing, how to actually start
Speaker 1: doing stuff. And one of the things we talked about
Speaker 1: a lot is a lot almost everyone we've interviewed has
Speaker 1: mentioned this at some point, that trying to get more
Speaker 1: active in the things you're consuming and the things that
Speaker 1: you're eating. And one of the ways to do that
Speaker 1: is by just literally growing your own food. I went
Speaker 1: when I was growing up, I mean my grandparents operate,
Speaker 1: I mean like they stopped right like like like like
Speaker 1: a large, large farm. Now they operate kind of like
Speaker 1: a farm that just like feeds them. So whenever I'm
Speaker 1: at my grandparents in Canada, usually we you know, we
Speaker 1: just eat all the food they grow, whether that be
Speaker 1: like produce. Um. They also do like their own hunting.
Speaker 1: They make their own sausage, like you know, they preserve meats.
Speaker 1: So like, I kind of grew up around this type
Speaker 1: of thing because just how self reliant some of my
Speaker 1: family is. But not everyone may have this kind of background,
Speaker 1: and so you know, this idea of growing your own
Speaker 1: food can feel maybe a little bit daunting. Um. And
Speaker 1: to help us talk about food and then eventually soil
Speaker 1: and other kind of things, I have invited a guest
Speaker 1: on from another kind of podcast in this that operates
Speaker 1: in the same rough, rough framework, I would say probably
Speaker 1: how to how to kind of slowly improve improve the world?
Speaker 1: Um uh do I don't explain who you are and
Speaker 1: what's your what's your what your project is? Sure? So
Speaker 1: my name is Andy. I'm the post of the Poor
Speaker 1: Pole's Almanac. We're a podcast that's focused on thinking about
Speaker 1: after collaps how do we things like climate change and
Speaker 1: collaps impact things like food systems, and what can we
Speaker 1: do today to prepare for what's coming in the future. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel like it's not not a coincidence that all
Speaker 1: of these different kind of projects are getting more popular
Speaker 1: at the same time because we're looking at the world
Speaker 1: and being like, huh, this doesn't seem very sustainable, so
Speaker 1: we better we better start figuring out what to do
Speaker 1: with all these systems kind of slowly, you know, start
Speaker 1: losing parts. I want to talk about kind of food today.
Speaker 1: I want to want to maybe branch off into like
Speaker 1: a few different directions. Branch that's a plant plant plant
Speaker 1: pun um, what a branch off of a few different
Speaker 1: directions both like, you know, what do you do if
Speaker 1: you have like your own house and yard, or maybe
Speaker 1: you're like more rule you have lots of space, and
Speaker 1: then also the kind of the inverse of like let's
Speaker 1: say you lived in, like I don't know, a cramped
Speaker 1: city apartment, different things that you can do. Let's probably
Speaker 1: start with like the rule just to like give a
Speaker 1: you know, a more like base background on you know,
Speaker 1: you have more of like a standard set up for
Speaker 1: what you're able to do. If someone's never grown anything before,
Speaker 1: they've never like maybe they've had like one house plant,
Speaker 1: but like they've never grown anything. What what do you
Speaker 1: think is the best first like preparation and steps before
Speaker 1: you actually, you know, go and start buying seeds and stuff. Sure,
Speaker 1: so when it comes to growing food, it's really not
Speaker 1: that complicated. Chances are if you have a front yard
Speaker 1: we're talking about someplace that's pretty rural, assuming the climate
Speaker 1: is in someplace super dry, you're generally going to be
Speaker 1: thinking about growing food someplace where grass probably already grows.
Speaker 1: So if grass is already growing there, you know things
Speaker 1: can grow there. And really that's that's as simple as
Speaker 1: it can be. It can be more complicated. We can
Speaker 1: start talking about things like soil pH and nutrients and
Speaker 1: all of these other things, but really, when it comes
Speaker 1: down to it, if you put a seed in the
Speaker 1: ground and the temperature is not too warm or cold,
Speaker 1: and it gets rained but not too much rain, the
Speaker 1: plant's going to grow. And if you've got some say
Speaker 1: a couple of acres, and you want to cut out
Speaker 1: a little section of it to grow some food, uh,
Speaker 1: that's that's as simple as it really can be. And
Speaker 1: you can go to whatever store and buy seeds. So
Speaker 1: like that that a good place to start. And obviously
Speaker 1: depending on where you live, you want to think about
Speaker 1: things like lead in the in the soil if you
Speaker 1: live someplace near an old house, or maybe if you're
Speaker 1: near some place where there was manufacturing. And one of
Speaker 1: the things to keep in mind is that a lot
Speaker 1: of older settlements, even if there isn't a factory there now,
Speaker 1: it's very possible there was a factory years ago, it's
Speaker 1: been demoed and you never even knew it was there.
Speaker 1: So it's really important if you do live in someplace
Speaker 1: that has that manufacturing background or an old house to
Speaker 1: really check for things like lead in the soil because
Speaker 1: that can be really dangerous. And there's yeah, very accessible
Speaker 1: like soil testing kits available that star is on online. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like I think fifteen dollars. You can have a
Speaker 1: soil sample taken and you can find out everything that's
Speaker 1: in it, like the pH and you know if it's
Speaker 1: too acidic and things like that. So yeah, you you
Speaker 1: figure out you wanna you want to start growing stuff,
Speaker 1: you have you have some space, whether it be like
Speaker 1: a front yard or maybe like even like an open
Speaker 1: field if you're lucky, Um, what kind of what kind
Speaker 1: of stuff do you think? You know? Should I just
Speaker 1: jump in and buy any kind of seed that looks fun,
Speaker 1: or should I like start with specific things I don't know.
Speaker 1: It's like if I really like potatoes, or just go
Speaker 1: to potatoes, If I really like cauliflowers, just to cauliflower.
Speaker 1: What's kind of the if I'm brand new, what's the
Speaker 1: different things that would be worth first drawing out? So
Speaker 1: generally speaking, you really want to think about what your
Speaker 1: climate is, and I think that's one of the things
Speaker 1: that gets missed a lot of times as you want
Speaker 1: to grow things. So like I live in New England,
Speaker 1: growing say watermelon is really a challenge in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways because you have to think about the length
Speaker 1: of my season versus the length it takes for a
Speaker 1: watermelon to be a full sized fruit for you to eat. So,
Speaker 1: depending on where you live, the one thing you need
Speaker 1: to keep in mind is what that length of your
Speaker 1: season is. Now, to get back to the main subject
Speaker 1: of the podcast, talking about things like climate change and collapse,
Speaker 1: that season is changing rapidly right now. We're adding days,
Speaker 1: so the seasons are getting longer, but also we're having
Speaker 1: weird cold snaps later and later into spring, so what
Speaker 1: might have been a traditional season no longer really applies anymore.
Speaker 1: So if you're thinking about this is your first year,
Speaker 1: you don't want to grow anything that might be right
Speaker 1: at the cusp of um being in your season. Or
Speaker 1: you don't want to start a plant inside and then
Speaker 1: have to move it outside and you have to know
Speaker 1: whether or not it has a tap root and all
Speaker 1: these other things to make sure that you don't damage
Speaker 1: the plant. Then you definitely want to grow something with
Speaker 1: a shorter season, things like um. Cold weather plants, lettuces, broccolis, cauliflowers,
Speaker 1: things like that will generally do pretty good in short seasons,
Speaker 1: but they don't really do well in really warm climates.
Speaker 1: So if you're in say Florida, it's gonna be really
Speaker 1: difficult um. But that that's kind of how you want
Speaker 1: to start thinking about those processes. Learning what the cold
Speaker 1: season plants are, what the warm season plants are, where
Speaker 1: you fit in in terms of the zone that you
Speaker 1: live within, and again starting to think about, okay, the
Speaker 1: last couple of years, when did we get the last frost,
Speaker 1: Because it's not what it might say ten years ago
Speaker 1: is your average last frost. Those days are pretty much gone.
Speaker 1: I know here in Portland we're currently growing a lot
Speaker 1: of potatoes and that's been that's been kind of our
Speaker 1: our our big haul. Also, tomatoes did very good this year,
Speaker 1: particularly because of our big heat domes they got we got.
Speaker 1: The tomatoes did so much better than what they what
Speaker 1: they usually do. We've like canned so many tomatoes just
Speaker 1: because we just we have so many more than what
Speaker 1: we're used to. That if I do find that interesting
Speaker 1: being like, you know, climate change obviously being generally a
Speaker 1: net bad, but you know, in some cases for growing,
Speaker 1: it's gonna make certain crops easier to grow, but you know,
Speaker 1: other crops will be harder to grow. It's something I
Speaker 1: wanted to talk more about in the first five heavily
Speaker 1: scripted It could happen here season two episodes. It's like,
Speaker 1: particularly how different growing regions are going to shift up
Speaker 1: and how like, you know, Canada, for instance, is going
Speaker 1: to have a lot more agriculture in the next years
Speaker 1: just because so many, so many climates are slowly inching upwards.
Speaker 1: But you know, even in places like Georgia and other
Speaker 1: places where different. If we know specific plants are growing,
Speaker 1: all that stuff is going to be changing. Obviously, this
Speaker 1: is affecting coffee and how we're getting less and less
Speaker 1: space and land that's actually able to grow coffee because
Speaker 1: basically plants, you know, growers have to move their plants
Speaker 1: up a mountain every year in order to make the
Speaker 1: coffee actually work, which is why we're it's gonna We're
Speaker 1: just gonna run up a space. Um So yeah, that
Speaker 1: is obviously the more negative sides of things and California
Speaker 1: lack of rain, water and just and just lack of rain.
Speaker 1: Yeah absolutely, rain, yeah, absolutely, And that brings up a
Speaker 1: really important point that you know, you're talking about moving
Speaker 1: the coffee trees further and further up a mountain as
Speaker 1: the areas that are considered prime agricultural areas moves north
Speaker 1: for us, you have to think about the infrastructural challenges
Speaker 1: that brings. So it's not just you're going to grow
Speaker 1: the crops in one place, but the infrastructure, the trains,
Speaker 1: all these different things don't exist in the places where
Speaker 1: we'll be able to grow those foods. So speaking of
Speaker 1: something you know around that rough kind of idea is
Speaker 1: like if someone's never never done this before. They're out
Speaker 1: to go get stuff. Where would you where would someone
Speaker 1: like that find seeds? Um, Let's say that they don't.
Speaker 1: Let's say they don't use the internet's tons um whereabouts
Speaker 1: where you think they'll go and get cauliflower seeds or
Speaker 1: carrot seeds if they if they want to start doing
Speaker 1: this stuff. Yeah, So there's a bunch of different growers
Speaker 1: that offer seeds. And one of the things to keep
Speaker 1: in mind with annuals is that it does make sense
Speaker 1: if you can to buy them locally, because what within
Speaker 1: a couple of generations, plants will start evolving towards local conditions.
Speaker 1: It's it's really beneficial, especially with like I said, with
Speaker 1: climate change, to start thinking about how can we integrate
Speaker 1: our food systems into the ecological conditions where we live,
Speaker 1: and that ecology includes the climate. So we have to
Speaker 1: continuously more thoughtfully start thinking about these things and how
Speaker 1: we grow food and where those foods come from in
Speaker 1: order to really be able to deal with and mitigate
Speaker 1: the effects of climate change. So a great resources Johnny's
Speaker 1: Seed they do a lot of really good work and
Speaker 1: there they have good quality stuff and there's a bunch
Speaker 1: of seed companies out there that have done some really
Speaker 1: problematic stuff that I won't go into or talk about.
Speaker 1: But they're these guys, as far as I'm aware, are
Speaker 1: pretty good. So I would definitely recommend them. Awesome. Yeah,
Speaker 1: their website is just Johnny Seeds dot com, just for
Speaker 1: everyone who's looking at up at Johnny with a Y.
Speaker 1: Good for Johnny with a Y. Great. All right. Let's now,
Speaker 1: let's say someone lives in a downtown apartment in a
Speaker 1: metropolitan area. They don't have immediate access to you know,
Speaker 1: tons of dirt or you know, grass, but they want
Speaker 1: to start kind of growing some stuff. If if you
Speaker 1: were in that position, would you start doing and to that,
Speaker 1: I want to to part that that would be somebody
Speaker 1: with a balcony where they have access to like even
Speaker 1: like a little patti area or those and then without Yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: So there's a bunch of different things you can do.
Speaker 1: Starting with if you have a balcony, you can start
Speaker 1: thinking about getting pots, filling them up with soil, amending
Speaker 1: that soil as needed as you add plants, and again
Speaker 1: the general rule is to think about how big a
Speaker 1: plant gets, and how big a plant gets is how
Speaker 1: big its root system is going to get I mean,
Speaker 1: that's not accurate by any means, but it's just a
Speaker 1: good rule of thumb to think about as you're doing
Speaker 1: something like this, and you know, if you have a
Speaker 1: tiny pot, then something that gets big is not going
Speaker 1: to work. It might be better for a lettuce or whatever.
Speaker 1: And there's a bunch of different places you can look
Speaker 1: online for how to grow things on balconies and things
Speaker 1: like that. You can also, and this is really dependent
Speaker 1: on money, is start thinking about things like grow lights,
Speaker 1: which really are not that complicated once you start learning
Speaker 1: a bit about them, hydroponics which comes with their own
Speaker 1: challenges because at the end of the day, while it's
Speaker 1: nice to be able to grow food in your house,
Speaker 1: you're still relying on extractive processes. So you know your
Speaker 1: nutrients are coming from fossil fuel essentially, So that's just
Speaker 1: something to be aware of. It's probably still better than
Speaker 1: the alternative of buying food on the shelf, but it
Speaker 1: is something to be aware of in that process that
Speaker 1: it's not really a sustainable quote unquote practice. Got it?
Speaker 1: And what are some of the go toos for a
Speaker 1: balcony garden that you would recommend for people that are
Speaker 1: just starting out. Definitely, those leafy greens are a good
Speaker 1: place to start. They grow small, they have smaller roots systems.
Speaker 1: Most times, things like lettuces don't need a ton of
Speaker 1: sun to grow super well. As long as they get
Speaker 1: a decent amount, they'll be fine. They're not like a
Speaker 1: tomato that's gonna like be desperately looking for that that
Speaker 1: sun in that energy. So those smaller greens are generally
Speaker 1: a better option, right. Yeah, I was able to grow
Speaker 1: kale and like a pot this of this winter and
Speaker 1: it was great. Yeah, kale is a great one here
Speaker 1: in New England. It's really nice because you can grow
Speaker 1: it under glass during the winter, so even if you
Speaker 1: have a cold spell, it will stay just warm enough
Speaker 1: to make it pretty much throughout the winter. All right, Now,
Speaker 1: I have no balcony. I only have, you know, two
Speaker 1: small windows, you know I have. I have like a
Speaker 1: counter and stuff, you know, I can like can set
Speaker 1: up stuff, but I do not have tons of outdoor access.
Speaker 1: But I would like to stop buying dill every time
Speaker 1: I go to the store because I use it in
Speaker 1: my homemade ranch dressing. Now, can I just buy those
Speaker 1: like pre pre potted stuff and just water them or
Speaker 1: kind of like if if, if, if I want to
Speaker 1: get more in depth, what are they you know, some
Speaker 1: things that are beyond that, but not you know, making this,
Speaker 1: you know, making this giant set up, so you could
Speaker 1: be creative and do something that's less than eagle. And
Speaker 1: there's this practice known as gorilla gardening. I was I
Speaker 1: was gonna mention girly grilla gardening soon. Yeah. Sure, So
Speaker 1: this is like something that works really well, and there's
Speaker 1: a bunch of different ways you can do it, and
Speaker 1: it really depends on your local conditions and what can
Speaker 1: grow out in the wild and needs a lot of
Speaker 1: maintenance and what doesn't. And I don't know the Pacific
Speaker 1: Northwest that well, but it is warm enough that I
Speaker 1: think Bill would probably do fine, and it is wet
Speaker 1: enough that Bill would probably do fine. So you could
Speaker 1: just go anywhere where there's green space that nobody checks
Speaker 1: things and just drop some plants in. You could start
Speaker 1: seedlings in your house and bring them where you want
Speaker 1: to harvest it later, and it's on your walk to
Speaker 1: work or where you get coffee or whatever. Drop it
Speaker 1: in the ground, make sure the roots are you know,
Speaker 1: not bound up, and make sure it's got a nice
Speaker 1: watered wrench right when you put it in the ground,
Speaker 1: so it starts adjusting and that's you know, that's that's
Speaker 1: the first step in something as simple as guerrilla agriculture.
Speaker 1: One of the first things that we tried to do
Speaker 1: when I got kind of started in you know, the
Speaker 1: you know Portland's kind of more lefty scened, was you know,
Speaker 1: ideas for you know, building a community garden somewhere. And yeah,
Speaker 1: because there is just a lot of dirt, especially like
Speaker 1: Portland's specifically lucky just because we just have so much
Speaker 1: green space. Uh, there's a lot of places to to
Speaker 1: start grilla gardening, to start doing our own little community garden.
Speaker 1: Do you do you have any alleged experience in gorilla gartening. Yes,
Speaker 1: So if you're on Instagram, I post a bit about
Speaker 1: some of the grilla gardening stuff that I do. UM.
Speaker 1: I generally focus on guerrilla gardening, not necessarily for my
Speaker 1: own consumption, but more for ecological mitigation for damage from
Speaker 1: um clear cutting and things like that. So I go
Speaker 1: out and try to plant things that are native to
Speaker 1: regions and try to bring them back a little bit.
Speaker 1: So that's one of the challenges that we see here
Speaker 1: on the East Coast is not only are our city
Speaker 1: is not really designed with green space and mind and
Speaker 1: for community gardens, I almost never recommend them, just because
Speaker 1: in places like Boston they're hard to get into and
Speaker 1: a lot of major cities like you can be on
Speaker 1: waitlists for years, so that's not really a short term
Speaker 1: solution or a solution for a lot of people that
Speaker 1: are rather transient where you might move communities every three
Speaker 1: or four or five years. Um. So, like guerrilla gardening
Speaker 1: works really great for those folks because you can do
Speaker 1: it when you want and how you want. Nothing says
Speaker 1: community like a waitlist, right No. But like in terms
Speaker 1: of community gardens, I think, you know, there's been a
Speaker 1: lot of people asking about how they get involved in
Speaker 1: mutual aiden stuff, especially if they don't have like friends
Speaker 1: or like they don't have many friends or connections to activism.
Speaker 1: I think one of the best ways to start anything
Speaker 1: like that is just all you need is like yourself
Speaker 1: and maybe one or two other people that you know
Speaker 1: to just start a community garden somewhere. And that's a
Speaker 1: very very nice on rep into like community organizing. Absolutely
Speaker 1: Back in Portland when I used to live in the Southwest,
Speaker 1: there was, there's just whole like community plots that are
Speaker 1: like you know, more like official but still pretty like decentralized.
Speaker 1: That you could just basically go up to one of
Speaker 1: the bank at plots and just start planting food in
Speaker 1: this community setting, and like once a month, all of
Speaker 1: the different gardeners would like get together and talk about
Speaker 1: what they're growing and stuff, and they could, you know,
Speaker 1: could trade produce. Be like, I'm growing I'm growing pumpkins,
Speaker 1: You're growing butternut squash. I want one of your squash.
Speaker 1: I want one of your pumpkins. Right, you can like
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff. Um or if you know, if
Speaker 1: you end up having with having like a larger hole,
Speaker 1: you could just give it out to random people. It
Speaker 1: turns out people might like receiving fresh produce. That could
Speaker 1: be another way of making friends and making connections. If
Speaker 1: you're kind of isolated in the city and you only
Speaker 1: have one or two other people, you can't start start
Speaker 1: a new community garden somewhere in the city just like
Speaker 1: scope out of spot, start growing and then and not
Speaker 1: get to speak to that. You know. One of the
Speaker 1: things is that if you act like you're official and
Speaker 1: you're supposed to be there, and you know you're supposed
Speaker 1: to be there. People generally don't really question you, especially
Speaker 1: when it comes to plants, Like if I go to
Speaker 1: like a median and go plant some trees, Like as
Speaker 1: long as I act like I know what I'm doing
Speaker 1: and like don't look like I'm trying to be sneaky,
Speaker 1: no one ever questions me. And that that's the key thing,
Speaker 1: is to really make it clear that like, you know,
Speaker 1: you're supposed to be there when whenever I eventually I'll
Speaker 1: put together an episode on like urban Stealth and stuff,
Speaker 1: And there's nothing more powerful than like a hive is
Speaker 1: vest just an incredibly powerful tool for making people glaze
Speaker 1: over you and think you're a professional. It's amazing. Or
Speaker 1: in this case, like when I'm doing what I do,
Speaker 1: you know, I'll borrow someone's old beat up pickup truck
Speaker 1: and throw a couple of big trees in the back
Speaker 1: and like you see that pulled over on the side
Speaker 1: of the road with its hazard lights on, nobody's going
Speaker 1: to question that. It's like a town or a city,
Speaker 1: and if somebody from the town shows up as I'm
Speaker 1: from the DPW or whatever, Yeah, there's it's incredibly incredibly
Speaker 1: useful um and yeah, but like getting to know you know.
Speaker 1: If you're like I don't know where to find a
Speaker 1: local you know, I don't know how to like where
Speaker 1: I would pick a local community garden spot, be like
Speaker 1: you should like get to know your local area. In
Speaker 1: another great way of figuring out how to start doing
Speaker 1: any mutulate or anything. It's like you need to know
Speaker 1: where you live and like what's what's around you? Who
Speaker 1: others who you know? Maybe in your search to find
Speaker 1: a community garden you might find one that already exists.
Speaker 1: If you're unfamiliar with your you know, with if you're
Speaker 1: in a metropolitan area or if you're more out in
Speaker 1: the middle of nowhere, you may not know what's around you.
Speaker 1: And I mean looking out to see what's actually in
Speaker 1: a community. It is one of the first big steps
Speaker 1: to have any kind of and that plays out also
Speaker 1: in ecology. So you know, if you're in a city,
Speaker 1: most cities have public horst parks, whatever it might be.
Speaker 1: And part of not knowing what's around you, or knowing
Speaker 1: rather what's around you is starting to identify the plants
Speaker 1: that are already around you. And while there's been a
Speaker 1: lot of action and in terms of thinking about things
Speaker 1: like foraging. Um, there's there's a ton of opportunity for
Speaker 1: us to start looking at foods that we don't traditionally
Speaker 1: think of foods but produce a ton of calories. So
Speaker 1: something like oaks. Oaks are across the United States. I
Speaker 1: don't think there's any state without oak trees and acorns
Speaker 1: can be a huge part of anyone's diet if they're
Speaker 1: willing to take the time and warn about them. And
Speaker 1: that's not something that's radical or anything. It's something that's
Speaker 1: been done for thousands of years. It's just in in
Speaker 1: our lifetime, in our parents lifetime, that that knowledge and
Speaker 1: that experience has been mostly lost. But it's not something
Speaker 1: that's weird or unaccessible or any of those types of things. Absolutely, Um,
Speaker 1: I think this is actually a decent cutting off point
Speaker 1: for this episode and then the next in in in
Speaker 1: the In the next episode in the feed here we
Speaker 1: will focus more on ecology, um, books, more on soil,
Speaker 1: and maybe get into permaculture and some other kind of
Speaker 1: stuff because I would love to. Yeah, I learn more
Speaker 1: about you know, specific soil stuff and you know different
Speaker 1: you know, more insight to our current like growing situation.
Speaker 1: Overall as like a country and how you know stuff
Speaker 1: is changing. But um, would you like to plug anything
Speaker 1: really to you or any other resources on this topic
Speaker 1: before we head out? Absolutely so we are a podcast.
Speaker 1: Go check us out or Pearls dot com or Spotify.
Speaker 1: Wherever you're listening to this podcast, you can go check
Speaker 1: out some of our work. We're also on Instagram and
Speaker 1: Facebook like everyone else, and you can go follow us
Speaker 1: over there. Fantastic. Um. If you want to keep up
Speaker 1: to date on stuff for this show, you can follow
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Speaker 1: out when I got the Ray case was that some
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Speaker 1: or wherever you get your podcasts. It's Soil Tom. Hello,
Speaker 1: Welcome to it could happen here. We're talking about We're
Speaker 1: talking about dirt today, big big, big dirt fans here.
Speaker 1: We love we love dirt, we love soil. Um. And
Speaker 1: to help us talk about soil, dirt, ecology, growing, for
Speaker 1: forging all of this kind of stuff, we have Andy
Speaker 1: from the Poor Pearl's Almanac podcast about you know what
Speaker 1: to do after you know, stuff kind of crumbles away slowly,
Speaker 1: kind of kind of like kind of like our podcast. Um,
Speaker 1: and we're not like our soil hopefully. Well I got
Speaker 1: some bad news for you there. Some of us are
Speaker 1: not great at cultivating soil, which is what we are
Speaker 1: talking about today is how to avoid getting a lot
Speaker 1: of void, Like how can we help help against our
Speaker 1: soil just blowing away? Um? Yeah, that is that is
Speaker 1: that is our discussion. I I wrapped up like a
Speaker 1: week of research on California's specific climate and drought and
Speaker 1: what all the farmers are doing. Um, and a lot
Speaker 1: of their soil is blowing away and so far their
Speaker 1: solution to that is just spray more water on it,
Speaker 1: which the problem is there's not tons of water. Um,
Speaker 1: so let's talk about dirt. Let's talk about soil. I
Speaker 1: will hand it over to the residents. Soy boy, the
Speaker 1: soil expert here, because I don't know what I'm talking
Speaker 1: about with dirts are getting famous, I know I have.
Speaker 1: That was that was just that I was just ripping,
Speaker 1: ripping off of a title of one of his episodes.
Speaker 1: So that's not original. Blame him for the pond. Sorry,
Speaker 1: I do that a lot. So in terms of building soil,
Speaker 1: there's it's really a basic idea of how to do it,
Speaker 1: and it generally comes down to understanding what a soil
Speaker 1: needs and how to let the soil build through rest
Speaker 1: and generally speaking, when we plant our annual crops, what
Speaker 1: happens is you put your tomato plants in the ground,
Speaker 1: whatever it might be, you've got a great harvest, you know,
Speaker 1: let them die, clear them out, and then the next
Speaker 1: year maybe you throw some more compost on it, or
Speaker 1: maybe you're like, yeah, I just don't want time, I
Speaker 1: won't do it, and you'll grow and you might have
Speaker 1: a pretty decent crop again. And then usually by like
Speaker 1: the third year, you start to notice that your plants
Speaker 1: just aren't doing as well, like all the nutrients and
Speaker 1: the minerals have started to get taken out of the soil.
Speaker 1: So you can either continuously add new material to it,
Speaker 1: which comes from somewhere. Doesn't seem very sustainable. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: absolutely not sustainable. And the alternative is to think about
Speaker 1: how can I build up that soil without doing that,
Speaker 1: And there's a couple of different ways we can do that.
Speaker 1: The soil can get built from things like cover crops,
Speaker 1: so we can add cover crops generally things like nitrogen
Speaker 1: fixing plants, Clover's hairy vetch and a number of others
Speaker 1: that we can use to help fix nitrogen into the soil.
Speaker 1: Or we can add other things to add biomass. So
Speaker 1: certain grasses and things like that can be planted and
Speaker 1: they'll mind deep into the soil to pull up nutrients
Speaker 1: when they die off, or you can cut them down
Speaker 1: they start breaking down, they return those nutrients back, but
Speaker 1: they're on the top soil now, So that's another way
Speaker 1: we can do it. Alternatively, if we're talking about a
Speaker 1: little bit more land, you can take advantage of using
Speaker 1: animals so chickens, rabbits, cheap cows, whatever it might be,
Speaker 1: reintroduce nutrients back into the soil through things like rotational grazing.
Speaker 1: And there's a you know that, that's a whole other
Speaker 1: subject of you know, how different methods are better or
Speaker 1: worse for fixing nitrogen and all the other nutrients back
Speaker 1: into the soil. And we can talk about it. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you want to spend an hour talking
Speaker 1: about it. I assume that that definitely depends on the
Speaker 1: scale of your operation. I would assume absolutely. And you
Speaker 1: can do that on a smaller scale, not necessarily cows,
Speaker 1: but like chickens. Chickens can be run through chicken tractors,
Speaker 1: which can be as small as you know, three ft
Speaker 1: by six ft. We were making, yeah, we were making
Speaker 1: some fertilizer a few months ago and basically we raked
Speaker 1: up well I didn't. I watched as people did this
Speaker 1: because I was lazy. I watched people just rake up
Speaker 1: tons of sheep shit, um, because there we have there's
Speaker 1: a little sheep set up, um. And they were just
Speaker 1: raking up all the ship and putting into a pile
Speaker 1: of dirt. And now it's been like a it's been
Speaker 1: like a month or two, and we should have some
Speaker 1: okay fertilizer by now, which we can you know, use
Speaker 1: however we see fit. But chickens, chickens, chickens as well
Speaker 1: not not everyone probably has sheep or access to sheep um,
Speaker 1: but chicks are surprisingly easy to get. Yeah, and depending
Speaker 1: on the city or in h you can live in
Speaker 1: pretty dense places and still legally have chickens. You might
Speaker 1: have to get comfortable with the idea of slaughtering a rooster,
Speaker 1: but other than that, you know, there's it's funny because
Speaker 1: what you'll see is like in the early spring everyone
Speaker 1: gets chickens, and then by like July, you on on
Speaker 1: Craigslist or Facebook or Instagram, everyone's like, free rooster to
Speaker 1: good home because they can't slaughter themselves. Yeah, I've had
Speaker 1: I've had to watch a few roosters get the get
Speaker 1: the old old acts. There was there was this one
Speaker 1: rooster that would always wake up as we were all
Speaker 1: going to bed. We would have like we have like
Speaker 1: a movie night, um, and we're like going to bed
Speaker 1: at four am, and that's when the rooster starts. We're like, no,
Speaker 1: we're trying to sleep and we're like we need to
Speaker 1: kill that rooster. It's only time one bad day to
Speaker 1: be like I cannot listen to that sound again. At
Speaker 1: least at least it went to some good use. Yeah,
Speaker 1: anyway back to dirt. Yeah, let's see where we keep
Speaker 1: talking about reintroducing stuff via you know, chemical means, I mean,
Speaker 1: or or just using animals and stuff, or or rotating plants. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So there's a bunch of different ways you can do it,
Speaker 1: and obviously it's all defined by what your site needs.
Speaker 1: You know, the way we're talking at this point has
Speaker 1: been mostly about like you already have a garden and
Speaker 1: that soil needs to be amended to improve it. But
Speaker 1: if you're working with, say a site that has almost
Speaker 1: no top soil. So for example, a friend of mine
Speaker 1: out in California lives near a highway and they had
Speaker 1: scraped all the top soil around the highway to build
Speaker 1: up the highway. So now there's no top soil, it's
Speaker 1: just garbage. So how do you build that soil up?
Speaker 1: And there's a bunch of different ways we can do that,
Speaker 1: whether it's through taking advantage of free resources like um mulch,
Speaker 1: like if you see a tree getting cut down, and
Speaker 1: they it it all up. Those guys have to pay
Speaker 1: to get rid of it most of the time, or
Speaker 1: they get paid just enough to cover their gas. So
Speaker 1: if you see it down the street and say, hey,
Speaker 1: you want to drop it off in my house, they'll
Speaker 1: happily do it. Yeah. We we just found out there
Speaker 1: is this business in Portland that you can email them
Speaker 1: to do a chip drop where they take all of
Speaker 1: their mulchion wood chips and drop them off in your
Speaker 1: driveway and it's completely free you you you you don't
Speaker 1: need to pay for it. You can just schedule them
Speaker 1: to drop it off anywhere. And a short aside, we
Speaker 1: also found out that they don't require address verification, so
Speaker 1: you can do this as a prank. Um. You can
Speaker 1: find out where the mayor lives, um or where I
Speaker 1: don't know a particularly bad person lives. Let's say he
Speaker 1: wears armor and he brutalizes people and threatens them with
Speaker 1: guns while having a bad you can find out if
Speaker 1: you know where it lives, you can just deliver tons
Speaker 1: of wood chips right right on this driveway. Um. And
Speaker 1: and they have a rule on their website is once
Speaker 1: a delivery has been initiated, it's like once the truck leaves,
Speaker 1: you know, their office, it cannot be stopped. There's no way,
Speaker 1: there's no way preventing it, and they don't contact the
Speaker 1: house beforehead, no way preventing it. Just a random, random
Speaker 1: wood chip drop anywhere in any driveway. It's a magical system.
Speaker 1: But you can also just use this for you know,
Speaker 1: getting wood chips to help grow things. Yeah, and we'll
Speaker 1: just such an underrated medium. It's like really good for
Speaker 1: like water retention and helping soil not dry out too fast.
Speaker 1: It's it's not just like aesthetically nice looking and accessible,
Speaker 1: it's also like really good for the plants. So I'll
Speaker 1: add two caveats to that. And the first is that
Speaker 1: it's really important to know what species you're dealing with
Speaker 1: that are the wood chips, because certain species have chemicals
Speaker 1: on them that will reduce growth or stop it completely.
Speaker 1: So like black walnuts are really well known and on
Speaker 1: the East Coast as having what's called juglone, And there's
Speaker 1: a bunch of different species that again are probably unique
Speaker 1: to where you live that you should just be aware of.
Speaker 1: And the second one is that mulch and wood chips
Speaker 1: are fantastic for your arden However, the one drawback is
Speaker 1: that for the wood chips to break down, they actually
Speaker 1: utilize a lot of the nitrogen in the soil. So
Speaker 1: that's just so you may have a bit of a
Speaker 1: nitrogen problem or some kind of nitrogen fixing, So it
Speaker 1: would be more important to think about cover crops and
Speaker 1: either adding fresh compost or whatever it might be help
Speaker 1: offset some of that nitrogen absorption. So so it's not
Speaker 1: it's a great resource. It's just not perfect. You just
Speaker 1: have to be aware of the limitations of it. I
Speaker 1: would like to touch on why we're in a bit
Speaker 1: of a pickle, like what what what what have we
Speaker 1: done agriculturally to kind of make our soil so unfragile?
Speaker 1: Like what what did we do wrong? Um on? Like
Speaker 1: even on like a larger scale, and how how might
Speaker 1: someone like me who just has a small set up,
Speaker 1: you know, not make the same mistakes in my own
Speaker 1: personal garden. Sure, so the beginning of the food system
Speaker 1: becoming what it is to day really started with oil.
Speaker 1: Access to things like petrochemicals allowed us to start rethinking
Speaker 1: about how we grew food and forgetting about traditional methods. Summarily,
Speaker 1: things like using the newer I mean, you think about it,
Speaker 1: you eat, all the nutrients go out the sewer, and
Speaker 1: then they never go back into the soil. And we're
Speaker 1: constantly taking from the same soils year after year, and
Speaker 1: the only way we continue to produce is because we're
Speaker 1: dumping chemicals and forcing the soil, which is just a
Speaker 1: medium at this point, just dirt. It's not soil, and
Speaker 1: we're just making it grow food because we're adding the
Speaker 1: chemicals the plants need. But we've destroyed things like the
Speaker 1: bacterial community, the fungag community, all these different things that
Speaker 1: are so crucial for our food systems to be resilient
Speaker 1: in terms of how can we move forward. Building that
Speaker 1: soil is super important and understanding these cycles of where
Speaker 1: our food comes from. The biggest challenge really is that
Speaker 1: we're trying to create ethical food systems under an inethical
Speaker 1: economic model. Sure, so, like you'll see, like perma culture
Speaker 1: is like a really big thing today and for a
Speaker 1: lot of good reasons because it challenges that methodology. However,
Speaker 1: because of things like capitalism, we can't really have an
Speaker 1: honest conversation about the fact that a lot of people
Speaker 1: will tell you you can make money doing perma culture
Speaker 1: and you some people do, but it's not it's not
Speaker 1: really what people think. Like there's no way to ethically
Speaker 1: grow food and not have the problems of yeah, you're
Speaker 1: you're facing or competing with somebody that doesn't have any
Speaker 1: ethical guidelines or framework that you have to compete with.
Speaker 1: And I mean, there's plenty of things we can say
Speaker 1: that there are problems with perma culture, and if you want,
Speaker 1: we can talk about that further. But this is the
Speaker 1: primary reason why we can't really fundamentally rethink our food
Speaker 1: system until things either fall apart or capitalism no longer exists,
Speaker 1: or there are major subsidies for these alternatives, whatever it
Speaker 1: might be. Yeah, let's see, Like is even something like
Speaker 1: would you even say, just like someone buying pre made
Speaker 1: fertilizers should be avoided in that case, like would you
Speaker 1: would you rather you know, someone trying to make it ourselves?
Speaker 1: And like what's cheaper you know, like it is just
Speaker 1: buying fertilizer or cheaper than I would actually make it yourself.
Speaker 1: There's another kind of problem with these types of things
Speaker 1: that it turns out, you know, the way to make
Speaker 1: things better might cost some people more money, you know,
Speaker 1: than people who don't really have as many resources, you know,
Speaker 1: just like a regular person who's trying to do this,
Speaker 1: you know, they don't have as much money and would
Speaker 1: would just buying pre made chemicals be you know, easier
Speaker 1: and cheaper than doing work to kind of build it
Speaker 1: up more like quote unquote naturally. I mean, obviously, I
Speaker 1: think under capitalism, anything that's efficient in terms of time
Speaker 1: and um, taking advantage of things like scalability, which you know,
Speaker 1: mining nutrients is always going to be more efficient when
Speaker 1: you're doing it on a massive global scale, Like you
Speaker 1: really can't compete dollar for dollar. And that's at least
Speaker 1: with what I do with the poor pros almanac. We
Speaker 1: don't really focus on that and instead say this is
Speaker 1: how things should be, and how do we do that
Speaker 1: and when do we need to start doing that if
Speaker 1: we know that what exists today isn't sustainable and that
Speaker 1: ultimately this is gonna fall apart in some capacity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you talked more about like trees specifically, and I would
Speaker 1: love to love to hear more about that, you know,
Speaker 1: outside of just you know, making your own like edible garden,
Speaker 1: doing doing other kind of ecology related related work. Sure,
Speaker 1: so trees have you know, so many benefits outside of
Speaker 1: the fact that they can produce food. Um, we could
Speaker 1: look at things like how they can manage a landscape
Speaker 1: and reduce temperature extremes, the way they can maintain soil
Speaker 1: quality because of um reducing things like runoff from major
Speaker 1: store arms, which are happening more and more frequently. YEA. Further,
Speaker 1: like I said, they do produce food, and they sometimes
Speaker 1: they produce food for us, sometimes they produce food for
Speaker 1: our livestock. Um. Additionally, there's a process called silvil pasture,
Speaker 1: which is essentially when you think of a farm, you
Speaker 1: think of a cow walking around in a field instead
Speaker 1: that cows walking around and a managed forest and the
Speaker 1: forest floor gets enough sunlight to grow grass, so you're
Speaker 1: getting the benefits of the grass as well as the trees.
Speaker 1: And you can either be using those trees for lumber
Speaker 1: or for food crops or whatever it might be, and
Speaker 1: you're getting the best of both worlds. And in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways, the civil pasture system more accurately represents
Speaker 1: the way the landscape had been managed, especially here in
Speaker 1: the northeast and generally the East coast by indigenous people. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, they weren't using cows, they were doing prescribed
Speaker 1: burns and things like that. But those environments are actually
Speaker 1: better for things like a deer which like to like
Speaker 1: to exist on like the margins of forests where they're
Speaker 1: getting the best of both worlds. So that was how
Speaker 1: they managed a wild Essentially they're wild grazing the native species. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we just I'm just trying to think there's like
Speaker 1: we we don't really have anything like that on a
Speaker 1: on a large scale anymore. We've we've just jumped right
Speaker 1: into like the the field and pastor thing. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: you think about it, it it makes sense that we haven't
Speaker 1: because of the fact that to do that requires individuality.
Speaker 1: In terms of how we manage a landscape. You can't
Speaker 1: run a machine through SBA pasture. You can't just make
Speaker 1: like a template and apply to every situation. Everything is
Speaker 1: much more unique based on their individual environment and ecosystem. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then it becomes less efficient to manage in terms
Speaker 1: of how we manage things as a successional thing where
Speaker 1: we have you go through the field and you seat
Speaker 1: it with a giant machine, because you can do it
Speaker 1: faster that way, you can add whatever amendments you need
Speaker 1: more quickly. When it's just a flat piece of land
Speaker 1: with nothing in the way, so on and so on.
Speaker 1: It's just it doesn't It goes right in the face
Speaker 1: of how we think of efficiency, despite the fact, through
Speaker 1: its diversity it's more resilient to what's coming in terms
Speaker 1: of climate change, especially the logs run. Yeah. Yeah. In
Speaker 1: the last episode we talked a bit about grilla gardening.
Speaker 1: Can this like intersect with with this idea of like
Speaker 1: growing in the forest? Um is there? You know? I
Speaker 1: assume there's like a decent cross over there. Absolutely. So.
Speaker 1: Generally speaking, a lot of people that are into silvil
Speaker 1: pasture are also thinking about things like tree crops. And
Speaker 1: one of the things that I really focus on is
Speaker 1: thinking about foods that we don't traditionally think of as foods,
Speaker 1: or at least not as like staple crops. So like,
Speaker 1: while people might be familiar with kind of the odd
Speaker 1: fruits like per simmons, you might know what a persimmon is.
Speaker 1: You might have one or two, or maybe make per
Speaker 1: simmon bread. That's not usually a large part of anyone's diet, no,
Speaker 1: And that's like, that's the challenge that we really have,
Speaker 1: is while people like to incorporate rate these types of things,
Speaker 1: in permaculture into you know, how they think about their
Speaker 1: relationship with the environment. Like nobody's giving up their toast
Speaker 1: in the morning and that's you know, a third of
Speaker 1: your diet or whatever it might be. And that's where
Speaker 1: we need to fundamentally shift how we think about food.
Speaker 1: So you're saying that we need to change in order
Speaker 1: to address these large systemic issues that have caused many problems.
Speaker 1: We need to change the way we extract resources from
Speaker 1: the earth and maybe reevaluate how much we do. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, it's it's no small feed, is
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. I know, I'm just saying, like, you know,
Speaker 1: that's the this specific thing around like food and diet
Speaker 1: is the same root problem we have with climate change
Speaker 1: on a larger scale of like just doing you know,
Speaker 1: progress for progress's sake without realizing that this is not
Speaker 1: a sustainable way to do things. And infinite growing and
Speaker 1: like infinite expansion, maybe it is a bad idea and
Speaker 1: maybe it has some consequence. Who has some consequences? Who
Speaker 1: would have thought that infinite growth on a finite planet
Speaker 1: wasn't sustainable? Oops? Yeah, The point that I'm really trying
Speaker 1: to drive home is that we really need to rethink
Speaker 1: what food looks like and it has to be in
Speaker 1: a meaningful way that it can't just be those odds
Speaker 1: and ends. And that the thing I think people forget
Speaker 1: is that food is a huge component of our culture
Speaker 1: and our identity. Absolutely think about food and identity. The
Speaker 1: reason why our identity is surrounded around food is because
Speaker 1: food is the byproduct of the environment that we live in.
Speaker 1: And it's you know, for it's been a couple of generations,
Speaker 1: and we went from the reason why Italians eat x
Speaker 1: y z s because that's what grows there. Two I
Speaker 1: eat this because my family does, but I don't know why.
Speaker 1: And that's the way those things relate to one another
Speaker 1: is been completely lost, and we need to figure out
Speaker 1: how to do that again. Can you point to any
Speaker 1: examples of these things you're talking about of like you know,
Speaker 1: of systems existing now or in the past out of
Speaker 1: kind of shown these methods of viewing food and viewing
Speaker 1: you know, growing and soil cultivation, so like any indigenous practice,
Speaker 1: and like we say indigenous, and we usually mean like
Speaker 1: North America or South America or Australia, but even if
Speaker 1: you look across Europe, you know, before capitalism kind of
Speaker 1: got its clause into the rest of Europe or all
Speaker 1: of Europe, Like, there were plenty of indigenous practices and
Speaker 1: in some places they continue and the way that people
Speaker 1: lived um reflected the needs of their ecology and how
Speaker 1: people could relate to that ecology. The reason why Nordic
Speaker 1: countries have high amounts of meat in their diet is
Speaker 1: because of what grows there and what how they can
Speaker 1: utilize book grows there to feed themselves through animals and
Speaker 1: things like that. M hmm, yeah, I mean that is
Speaker 1: that is generally what we hear is you know, look
Speaker 1: at the various indigenous methods of growing um and how
Speaker 1: they how they fed people in their media the area,
Speaker 1: and thinking like how can we take those similar ideas
Speaker 1: and scale it up? Because I mean, they weren't growing
Speaker 1: food for seven billion people. But I know, like we
Speaker 1: grow way too much food for what for many people,
Speaker 1: maybe not too much food, just we distribute it in
Speaker 1: a very unefficient way because we don't do it for
Speaker 1: what we need. We do it for profits, and like
Speaker 1: we we we throw away so much food that we
Speaker 1: grow as you know, globally UM. But I you know,
Speaker 1: when I think of these more like older methods of
Speaker 1: growing food. It's it's harder for me to picture that,
Speaker 1: you know, feeding an entire city, right, And I don't
Speaker 1: know what the solution is here. This isn't really the
Speaker 1: thing I focus on a lot. But is there a
Speaker 1: way to kind of scale up these like smaller scale
Speaker 1: things that you know, people can do in their own
Speaker 1: yards on any kind of mass level or is that
Speaker 1: just kind of rely back on the same thing. We've
Speaker 1: need to like re reevaluate how much we consume and
Speaker 1: how we consume it. So I think there's a little
Speaker 1: bit of both. I think we do need to reevaluate
Speaker 1: what we're consuming in the volume that we're consuming as well,
Speaker 1: is um, you know, the the waste specifically in terms
Speaker 1: of those two things that we tend to lose a
Speaker 1: lot of food that otherwise is useful um. But also
Speaker 1: there is a lot of opportunity and wild places like
Speaker 1: maybe New York City because of the development around the
Speaker 1: city might not there might not be any way possible
Speaker 1: to grow food like within the metropolitan or even the region.
Speaker 1: We know that like, and this is something I probably
Speaker 1: should have checked before the staff, but it's something like
Speaker 1: there's four acres of arable land for every person on Earth,
Speaker 1: and four acres is like that's plenty, that's plenty, That's
Speaker 1: absolutely plenty. Um. But like one of the things that's
Speaker 1: really important is to start thinking about how we can
Speaker 1: decentralize these systems in order to have those clusters of
Speaker 1: places where those things are more um capable of growing
Speaker 1: and handling the production that's necessary. And so maybe rethink
Speaker 1: about what urbanization really should be and what it should
Speaker 1: look like. And you know, in the future, while things
Speaker 1: may seem like, well, you can't ask people to leave
Speaker 1: New York City as climate change worsens in our food
Speaker 1: systems start to fall apart, that might be a much
Speaker 1: easier conversation to have, while today that seems kind of radical. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and at the very least, maybe we should maybe we
Speaker 1: shouldn't make any more New York cities absolutely, Um. Is
Speaker 1: there any like resources online that you can point to
Speaker 1: that talks more about these types of topics, or like
Speaker 1: books or like anything in this general was growing on
Speaker 1: the growing side of things and then like the more
Speaker 1: like ecology side of things. So Tom Wessels has this
Speaker 1: really great book called The Myth of Progress, which talks
Speaker 1: about complex system science and essentially what that is is
Speaker 1: decentralization and um, the benefits of having diversity within a
Speaker 1: community and the fact that any any power that's you know,
Speaker 1: centered in one specific place ends up having imbalances and
Speaker 1: has less resiliency, and that plays until it's focused around ecology.
Speaker 1: But I think it's really helpful, especially if you're an anarchist.
Speaker 1: I think you can through the lens. Yeah. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: that that's definitely one place to look in terms of
Speaker 1: like growing food. I don't know if there's really any
Speaker 1: books that really address it from this perspective of climate
Speaker 1: change and decentralization, but there's plenty of work online about
Speaker 1: silver pasture and you know, food force, any of these
Speaker 1: types of things. YouTube has like a vast array of resources,
Speaker 1: and of course if you're interested in this kind of stuff,
Speaker 1: you can come check us out on our podcast or
Speaker 1: proslamanac we Uh, the entire show is pretty much around
Speaker 1: this subject matter, So you want to learn more about
Speaker 1: it and check it out, Yeah, absolutely definitely. UM if
Speaker 1: this specific topic, you have a wonderful catalog of stuff
Speaker 1: discussing this UM And I just want to thank you
Speaker 1: they and thank you so much for coming on this
Speaker 1: show to kind of talk about these topics. You know,
Speaker 1: me and Robert and you know Chris Weed more like
Speaker 1: a background and like history and that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: We are. We are not super avid plant people. Like
Speaker 1: we're trying to start growing more stuff to our ourselves personally,
Speaker 1: but I'm definitely not educated to talk on this, and
Speaker 1: I'm very very happy that you were able to when
Speaker 1: you're generous with your time and knowledge. So thank you,
Speaker 1: Thank you so much. Yeah, definitely check out their show
Speaker 1: on you know, wherever you get your podcasts, and you
Speaker 1: can follow the show Twitter, on Instagram at cool Zone
Speaker 1: Media and happen here pod um any any any final
Speaker 1: final notes? Grow some food? Yeah, grow some food. Grow
Speaker 1: some food. That is what if I've I've asked that
Speaker 1: question a lot and that answer has come up many times.
Speaker 1: Just growth, grow food. Okay, grow food. Hi. I'm Robert
Speaker 1: sex Reese, host of The Doctor sex re Show. And
Speaker 1: every episode I listened to people talk about their sex
Speaker 1: and intimacy issues, and yes, I despise every minute of it.
Speaker 1: And she she made mistakes too, she kill everyone at
Speaker 1: her wedding. But hell is real. We're all trapped here
Speaker 1: and there's nothing any of us can do about it.
Speaker 1: So join me, won't you? Listen to the Doctor Sex
Speaker 1: re Show every Tuesday on the I Heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Hey Leeth
Speaker 1: the listeners take here. Last season on Lethal Lit, you
Speaker 1: might remember I came to Hollow Falls on a mission
Speaker 1: clearing my aunt best name and making sure justice was
Speaker 1: finally served. But I hadn't counted on a rash of
Speaker 1: new murders tearing apart the town. My mission put myself
Speaker 1: and my friends in danger. Though it wasn't all bad,
Speaker 1: I'm going to be reality take I like you, but
Speaker 1: now all signs point to a new serial killer in
Speaker 1: Hollow Falls. If this game is just starting, you better
Speaker 1: believe I'm gonna win. I'm tig Torres and this is
Speaker 1: Lethal Lit. Catch up on season one of the hit
Speaker 1: murder mystery podcast Lethal Lit, a tag Taara's Mystery out now,
Speaker 1: and then tune in for all new thrills in season two,
Speaker 1: dropping weekly starting February nine. Subscribe now to never miss
Speaker 1: an episode. Listen to Leave the Lit on the I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: The Black Effect Presents features Honest conversations and exclusive interviews,
Speaker 1: a space for artists, everyday people and listeners to amplify, elevate,
Speaker 1: and empower black voices with great conversations. Make sure to
Speaker 1: listen to The Black Effect Presents podcast on I Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. What's Spicy
Speaker 1: the Pumpkins? No, it was clipping where it's not clipping.
Speaker 1: You just don't like me saying what's spicy my pumpkins?
Speaker 1: But I said it and it can't be unsaid. It
Speaker 1: was because this is it could happen here, a daily
Speaker 1: podcast about the end of some things and the beginning
Speaker 1: of other things. And right now it's an episode about
Speaker 1: the beginning of fall. Because it's officially fall and I'm
Speaker 1: drinking a pumpkin spice black coffee. It's also not officially
Speaker 1: fall yet. It may it may be officially fall by
Speaker 1: the time that podcast comes in legally fall when I
Speaker 1: have my first pumpkin spice black coffee of the year
Speaker 1: and it's cool outside, that's because you're a monster. It's
Speaker 1: because I'm a happy man who is enjoying a fault beverage.
Speaker 1: On this episode, today, we have, of course Garrison. Garrison, Hello, Hi, Garrison.
Speaker 1: Are you doing I'm doing fine great. We also have
Speaker 1: my friends be in a lane b E lane. You
Speaker 1: you you were on the show recently to talk about
Speaker 1: terrorism a year ago recently everything before yesterday is a
Speaker 1: year ago. And uh and now you're on to talk
Speaker 1: about surviving. Yeah, yeah, like crafty surviving punc. We on
Speaker 1: because you were like two of the most useful skill
Speaker 1: filled people that I know. You're both wilderness survival instructors,
Speaker 1: primitive skill instructors for a while, and you have a
Speaker 1: small farm in a town that I won't name, and
Speaker 1: you do all sorts of cool ship like storing food
Speaker 1: and making arrows and other things that are alleged. And
Speaker 1: what I like about that is that, you know we
Speaker 1: talk about like collapse and and things falling apart, there's
Speaker 1: this kind of like I don't know, almost like mimetic
Speaker 1: obsession with like I want to get out into the
Speaker 1: woods and away from the city, and that's the only
Speaker 1: way to survive, and like the reality of the situations,
Speaker 1: that's a terrible way to survive. It's awful. There's nobody
Speaker 1: in there's nobody in the woods and people and it's
Speaker 1: you know, there's there are there are a small chunk
Speaker 1: of the human race that is capable with with just themselves,
Speaker 1: of like surviving in the middle of nowhere with nobody.
Speaker 1: But there's even among that population, there's a small fraction
Speaker 1: who are capable of doing that and not shooting themselves
Speaker 1: after a long enough period of time, and you wouldn't
Speaker 1: want to meet that person generally. Well, and I think
Speaker 1: the other the other thing about that is like the
Speaker 1: sort of fetishization of of you know, individualist survival skills
Speaker 1: is based on this idea that what people when people
Speaker 1: were like living off the land, that they were doing
Speaker 1: it by themselves alone. There's very few people that survived
Speaker 1: alone for a long time, and even of the people
Speaker 1: that had the skills, like even I, she wandered out
Speaker 1: of the woods after I think eight years of being
Speaker 1: by himself and was finally like fuck it. I was lonely.
Speaker 1: He was the last of a indigenous group in California,
Speaker 1: where everyone else in his tribe had been basically with
Speaker 1: been genocided and him and like the last like five
Speaker 1: people went off and hid for very good reason um
Speaker 1: and then after disease and stuff, then it was just
Speaker 1: him and he spent I forget how many years by himself,
Speaker 1: and after a while he finally was like, fuck it,
Speaker 1: being by myself is not worth it, and he came
Speaker 1: out and it was just after the turn of the century,
Speaker 1: and so he ended up being adopted by a bunch
Speaker 1: of anthropologists and spending the rest of his time in
Speaker 1: San Francisco. It's actually where we get most of a
Speaker 1: lot of like the anthropological knowledge of how to make arrows,
Speaker 1: because he was very much like, I'm the last of
Speaker 1: my group, so I will actually show people how to
Speaker 1: do flint napping and how I make arrows and how
Speaker 1: I hunt and yeah, and that's but I mean, and
Speaker 1: that's there's kind of the point there that like, with
Speaker 1: all of those skills, being one of that very small
Speaker 1: number of people, who could you drop that guy alone
Speaker 1: with nothing in the woods and he'll figure it out.
Speaker 1: He didn't want to do that. He in fact went
Speaker 1: into San Francisco and was like, well, people wiped out
Speaker 1: my entire gonna make friends with these anthropologists that live
Speaker 1: with them and teach them what I know. Yeah. Again,
Speaker 1: a lot of the folks who are kind of reaching
Speaker 1: out online being like, hey, I don't have a lot
Speaker 1: in the way of money, I'm never gonna be able
Speaker 1: to move to the woods and buy a farm or something. Well,
Speaker 1: you don't, you don't really need to. And like if
Speaker 1: shi it really does hit the fan. Where you live,
Speaker 1: there's probably parks, unless it's Detroit Um, in which case
Speaker 1: there's abandoned Walmart's. Like you can make it work, like
Speaker 1: there's it's so so this is an episode about kind
Speaker 1: of the skills that you can acquire and build for
Speaker 1: not a lot of money, more or less wherever you
Speaker 1: live that will help you build resiliency um but also
Speaker 1: build resiliency is part of a community, as opposed to
Speaker 1: living in the woods with a knife, sleeping under mud.
Speaker 1: There's a great short story that you'll turned me onto
Speaker 1: by Cory Doctor in a book of short stories called Radicalized.
Speaker 1: That was was it just called The Mask of the
Speaker 1: Red Death? I mean that's called The Master. Yeah. The
Speaker 1: original Mask of the Red Death is set obviously during
Speaker 1: I'm sure everybody read it in high school, like right,
Speaker 1: It's is set during the Bubonic plague with these rich
Speaker 1: people who like decided to just hold up in party
Speaker 1: to escape the plague and they all die of the plague.
Speaker 1: And doctors is a bunch of like libertarians survivalist crypto
Speaker 1: bros who build a fortress in the desert in order
Speaker 1: to survive the end of days. And it turns out
Speaker 1: that like a bunch of bad stuff happens, like there's
Speaker 1: disease in in in civil conflict, but like people figure
Speaker 1: it out, and all of the crypto bros die shooting
Speaker 1: themselves to death because the system. It's obvious from the
Speaker 1: start what's going and everybody who comes along to help them,
Speaker 1: they start shooting at you. We'll just wait until you're
Speaker 1: dead because you're shooting yourself because your water is bad.
Speaker 1: I think we all have, we all have elements of
Speaker 1: some libertarian tendencies in us, which you know, it's not
Speaker 1: bad to learn self reliance, and it's certainly not not
Speaker 1: even bad to want to like live outside of the city.
Speaker 1: But in a lot of ways, living in a living
Speaker 1: in an urban environment surrounded by a community, depending on
Speaker 1: the situation, can be even more resilient because like, yeah,
Speaker 1: an isolated farm instead there's benefits to but also it's
Speaker 1: really easy to surround and just shoot people who were
Speaker 1: living on their farm in the middle of nowhere. If
Speaker 1: ship really does hit the Fai, hap it happens all
Speaker 1: the time. It happened in like Al Salvador and ship
Speaker 1: when they had their economic crash. So I don't know
Speaker 1: where do you want to Where do you guys want
Speaker 1: to start? I know you had a couple of different
Speaker 1: things that you want that I want to talk about,
Speaker 1: Like preserving food is a big one, and then I
Speaker 1: mean making stuff and doing things is kind of they're
Speaker 1: sort of different. Where would you like to actually start
Speaker 1: with that? I think we can start with kind of
Speaker 1: the d I Y element, branching off of our original
Speaker 1: discussion on primitive skills, and then in like part two,
Speaker 1: we can go more into like food and like skin,
Speaker 1: like in like foraging, um and preservation and stuff. Cool.
Speaker 1: I mean, so d I why um? I guess now
Speaker 1: there's a lot of stuff about, Like there's I don't know,
Speaker 1: there's all this stuff about like survival skills and all
Speaker 1: this stuff, and both of us kind of came into
Speaker 1: the idea of making stuff and doing things by being
Speaker 1: punks um and it's kind of funny, yeah, having no money,
Speaker 1: but also just their d I Y like do it
Speaker 1: yourself was a very like kind of nineties punk thing
Speaker 1: that came into the mainstream like I actually was pulling
Speaker 1: out some of my old books, and I think it's
Speaker 1: funny to see the like progression because I have, you know,
Speaker 1: the really lovely like Food Not Lawns that goes into
Speaker 1: a whole pile of really fantastic things that came out
Speaker 1: that I don't know, the first Food Not Lawns house
Speaker 1: I saw at the town as in was in like
Speaker 1: two thousand five or six, but this book came out
Speaker 1: in two thousand and six. But it was this entire
Speaker 1: movement of like making community and doing and like how
Speaker 1: to do stuff yourself on your front lawn. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then I have from eleven the bus d i Y
Speaker 1: Guide to Life that includes everything from like how to
Speaker 1: do warm composting to how to make your own makeup
Speaker 1: and like finance the house. And that's that's like the magazine, right. Yes,
Speaker 1: So it's kind of interesting because it definitely like was
Speaker 1: the thing that I watched come into the mainstream. But
Speaker 1: you know, it started as a lot of punks trying
Speaker 1: to figure out how to do things because they had
Speaker 1: no money, and but also different from a lot of
Speaker 1: you know, like woodworking or craft books that really are
Speaker 1: you know, by these seven thousand dollars worth of tools
Speaker 1: and now you too can learn Yes. And there's also
Speaker 1: there's also an ethos behind it, right that, like before
Speaker 1: I was, I came at it first and foremost through
Speaker 1: being like a bike punk in the in the late
Speaker 1: nineties early two thousands, being a bike punk, and the
Speaker 1: idea of like the d I y ethos was less
Speaker 1: about the grid is going to collapse and like everything
Speaker 1: is going to fall apart and you're going to need
Speaker 1: to survive by the skin of your teeth, and it
Speaker 1: was a lot more you at the tail end of
Speaker 1: the nineties and like the sort of golden era of
Speaker 1: neoliberal capitalism and office space and that whole cultural moment,
Speaker 1: the idea that life was alienated and shitty and it
Speaker 1: felt better to know how to do things that you
Speaker 1: needed in your day to day life for yourself, using
Speaker 1: stuff you had made yourself or gotten from your community members. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: resiliency is less about knowing you have a pile of
Speaker 1: dried food in the house and know more about looking
Speaker 1: at fresh food and knowing, I know how to make
Speaker 1: that last the winter. Yeah, And it's been interesting to
Speaker 1: see the way that like as that has gotten kind
Speaker 1: of mainstreamed into like, you know, the the what is
Speaker 1: it primitive. There's a bunch of different like primitive x
Speaker 1: y Z YouTube channels that get lots of show trick
Speaker 1: and ship, and as that all gets mainstreamed, there's this
Speaker 1: idea of like expertise that creeps back into it. And
Speaker 1: d I I was like firmly committed to the idea
Speaker 1: that everybody could learn stuff and listening to somebody who
Speaker 1: said they were an expert was a trapped and a
Speaker 1: lot of that was coming out of like the seventies
Speaker 1: when there was all of the like you know, CULTI
Speaker 1: lifestyle ship that was like, hey, look we're going to
Speaker 1: teach you how to change your life, and yeah, we're
Speaker 1: gonna we're gonna buy up all this land and Antelope,
Speaker 1: Oregon and and so d I Y was emphatically not
Speaker 1: that it was like there's skills, and you can learn skills,
Speaker 1: and the Internet doesn't really exist yet or not really,
Speaker 1: so you can read books about it and you can
Speaker 1: have skills fare because there wasn't Twitter, we also all
Speaker 1: had a lot more time on our hands and like
Speaker 1: each other more. But there's also expertise was something that
Speaker 1: was handy to have you know, like if I needed
Speaker 1: to rebuild my wheel on my bike and respoke, it,
Speaker 1: wanted somebody who knew how to do it. And so
Speaker 1: it's good to have a couple of people who had
Speaker 1: really intense, deep knowledge of skills. But the idea that
Speaker 1: you would ask someone like I need to change my
Speaker 1: bike or two because I popped it with everyone would
Speaker 1: have been kind of like really really like everyone should
Speaker 1: know how to do basic stuff and it's and it's okay,
Speaker 1: Like the whole you know, Jack of All Trades was
Speaker 1: is as a desirable goal, like it's okay to dabble
Speaker 1: in a million little things and be kind of mediocre,
Speaker 1: but have a sort of baseline understanding of a bunch
Speaker 1: of stuff. Now, you know, there's places that I kind
Speaker 1: of think that we went too far, but also, you know,
Speaker 1: before the American Healthcare Act, we all definitely did a
Speaker 1: lot of at home medcare that we should not have.
Speaker 1: But there's also a lot of low stakes places that
Speaker 1: I think people have gotten away from just practicing and
Speaker 1: trying all sorts of crafty stuff as an ethos that
Speaker 1: is actually really good and there's no harm to learning things,
Speaker 1: like you're not going to quote anything and the only
Speaker 1: thing that's going to happen is you will have more
Speaker 1: skills and more to offer the people around you. There's
Speaker 1: this idea under capitalism that we should all specialized because
Speaker 1: that is like the most profit generating thing to do
Speaker 1: is just specialize anything that makes you the most money.
Speaker 1: But it's like, not only is it like not the
Speaker 1: best in a dangerous situation to only know how to
Speaker 1: do one thing that makes you money, but it's like
Speaker 1: it's not particularly good for your soul either. And there's
Speaker 1: also lots of different behavioral psychology, like group analysis of
Speaker 1: if you present people with a situation that they feel
Speaker 1: unprepared for and there's a person that they identify as
Speaker 1: an expert in a group who they can defer to
Speaker 1: pretty much every time, the group that's like, oh, we'll
Speaker 1: defer to this one expert because they know everything and
Speaker 1: we'll just do whatever they say ends up making worse decisions.
Speaker 1: Then if you have a group where everybody feels like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: I like I can at least get a handle on
Speaker 1: what's going on and we can all talk through it
Speaker 1: and like make make calls. Deferring to experts doesn't necessary
Speaker 1: severally help you know, that there's obviously cases we've mentioned
Speaker 1: medical care already, where like there's actually knowledge is very important.
Speaker 1: Skill sets are very important. But the idea that there's
Speaker 1: people who are just like, yeah, inherently more knowledgeable of
Speaker 1: things that you couldn't possibly understand. Is so where where
Speaker 1: do you recommend? Like people start with, like, like, you've
Speaker 1: got a bunch of books right now, and obviously, if
Speaker 1: you can afford books, that's a good call. A lot
Speaker 1: of these books on a preserving food and like growing
Speaker 1: stuff on your lawn, but even if you don't have
Speaker 1: a lawn, you can still Like there's certain like one
Speaker 1: thing that strikes me because we've been canning and pickling
Speaker 1: a bunch lately, is you know, different vegetables and fruits
Speaker 1: and whatnot are cheaper at different points in the year.
Speaker 1: And even if you live in an apartment in the
Speaker 1: inner city and will never have more than a garden
Speaker 1: box at best, you can buy food when it's cheap
Speaker 1: and preserve it um and not only save yourself a
Speaker 1: little the money, but you can like also, uh, you'll
Speaker 1: you'll understand every time you encounter preserved food and like
Speaker 1: a grocery store, you'll be looking at a thing that
Speaker 1: you know where it comes from. It's not just like
Speaker 1: a mystery jar of preserved food that was made by
Speaker 1: some process of science. So I don't know. I'm interested in,
Speaker 1: like where you guys someone coming in having only uh
Speaker 1: specialized in whatever it is allowed them to pay the rent?
Speaker 1: Where where where's your where's your recommended start point for people? UM,
Speaker 1: I think it's picking something that is low stakes that
Speaker 1: you enjoy. Like honestly, one of my friends, um, her
Speaker 1: entry into doing d I Y stuff was, you know,
Speaker 1: she had lots of makeup and everything, and she was like,
Speaker 1: I'm going to make body scrubs? How do I do that?
Speaker 1: And you know, looked up how to make body scrubs,
Speaker 1: how to make you know, A lot of it is, oh,
Speaker 1: getting salt and grinding up rosemary that she found in
Speaker 1: someone's front yard and putting it together, you know. But
Speaker 1: just something simple that you enjoy, that you would love
Speaker 1: to be able to, you know, have a little bit
Speaker 1: more say over because it's most basic. A lot of
Speaker 1: the d I Y stuff is you can make something
Speaker 1: very specific to what you like. So for myself, actually,
Speaker 1: one of the first things I ever started doing was
Speaker 1: in high school just altering clothing. I had an old yeah,
Speaker 1: I had an old thirty dollar junk practice uh like
Speaker 1: kids sewing machine and just the cheapest one that Sears
Speaker 1: used to sell, And could definitely just take that and
Speaker 1: start putting scenes in an alter clothing and be like
Speaker 1: this shirt is now a T shirt. It was long
Speaker 1: sleep before. And that also ties in with you know,
Speaker 1: d I I just to sound like old punks for
Speaker 1: a minute. That d I I definitely also came out
Speaker 1: of things like the riot girl scene in a big way,
Speaker 1: and like the attention to like body awareness and like
Speaker 1: moving away from body negativity and the recognition that as
Speaker 1: a general rule, off the rack clothes are not and
Speaker 1: certainly twenty years ago were extra not actually designed to
Speaker 1: fit most people's bodies, and it was hard to find
Speaker 1: clothes that fit you right. And yeah, so like sewing
Speaker 1: was a big one. Um bikes because we were broken,
Speaker 1: didn't have cars, so figuring out how to fix bikes
Speaker 1: and you know, everything that mechanically happens on a bike
Speaker 1: is right there and you can see it happen, and
Speaker 1: it maybe requires a screwdriver and then eventually maybe some
Speaker 1: other tools. But there's lots of three resources a lot
Speaker 1: most cities I've spent any amount of time and you
Speaker 1: can find like you can find like a community bike
Speaker 1: shop where if you have to pay anything, it's very minimal.
Speaker 1: And a lot of cases are just sort of like
Speaker 1: show up and you know there's space to use. Yeah
Speaker 1: when um, Like I know in Santa Cruz there was
Speaker 1: the bike Church. In Portland there's the bike Farm and yeah,
Speaker 1: and Philly there was also a bike church because it
Speaker 1: turns out the basements of churches are are. There were
Speaker 1: a couple of spots like that in Dallas and it's
Speaker 1: uh yeah. And I think it is like this mix of,
Speaker 1: like with the body scrub stuff, like what is something
Speaker 1: that appeals to you that you you're interested in? And
Speaker 1: also what is with the bike stuff, what is something
Speaker 1: that's like just doggedly practical, Like you get a bike,
Speaker 1: you need a bike to get around, you should probably
Speaker 1: know how to fix it on it. I think the
Speaker 1: reason I say you should pick something that appeals to
Speaker 1: you especially is because a big thing with d I
Speaker 1: Y was that you're doing it yourself, and there are
Speaker 1: so many skills that are valuable to learn from other people.
Speaker 1: It is wonderful to craft in community. It is wonderful
Speaker 1: to work with other people in community. It's wonderful to
Speaker 1: teach skills and gain them. But also I've seen this
Speaker 1: growing idea with the as specialization for so many things,
Speaker 1: especially services comes in that people are always like, oh, wow, knitting,
Speaker 1: I've always wanted to learn. I need to take a
Speaker 1: class in that, or I need to And it's really important,
Speaker 1: I think, for people to realize that you can learn things.
Speaker 1: We are very good at learning things, and you don't
Speaker 1: necessarily need a teacher for more complex things you do.
Speaker 1: But starting with something that you really like and that
Speaker 1: you find really interesting, you've already thought about it. So
Speaker 1: when you start with you know, for my friends, starting
Speaker 1: with making bath salts and face masks and stuff, it
Speaker 1: was something she had already been thinking about quite a
Speaker 1: bit and thinking about stuff. So when she started looking
Speaker 1: at recipes to mix and looking on the internet and
Speaker 1: looking at ingredients, it was saying she already cared about.
Speaker 1: So it's easier to learn something that you are interested in,
Speaker 1: and it's easier to learn something that you want to do.
Speaker 1: But we are all capable of learning for ourselves, not
Speaker 1: every single thing, but especially just for craft projects and
Speaker 1: so starting with that so that you can pick up
Speaker 1: a book, or you can read an article, or you
Speaker 1: can watch a YouTube video and you don't need to
Speaker 1: take some like hundred and fifty dollar a weekend class
Speaker 1: before you can. It's, you know, a big part of
Speaker 1: the resiliency building. Like something you may scoff, like when
Speaker 1: you're thinking about survivalism and talking about like making bath scrubs,
Speaker 1: But a lot of the skills you would learn putting
Speaker 1: that together are useful in making like a salve or
Speaker 1: making like making soap, making soap things that you actually need.
Speaker 1: Like when I was traveling, I lived on the road,
Speaker 1: like out of a car and out of backpacks for
Speaker 1: off and on all over the world for years, and
Speaker 1: I would make my own medicated because we would get
Speaker 1: we would get cuts and scrapes and rashes, and we
Speaker 1: were poor as ship and often there weren't doctors where
Speaker 1: we were. So I learned how to use things like
Speaker 1: plantain and comfrey and yarrow and like bees wax and
Speaker 1: stuff in order to to make medicated saves. And it
Speaker 1: it was something that interested me. But like there's also
Speaker 1: a lot of like there's there's a number of roots
Speaker 1: into learning that sort of thing. And if you're learning
Speaker 1: how to make again something as simple as like a
Speaker 1: face scrub, learning where to find that information and for
Speaker 1: free learning some of the basic techniques in order to
Speaker 1: do that. That learning how to learn is is applicable
Speaker 1: in a wider variety of skill sets, and it I
Speaker 1: think it's so important to focus on what are you
Speaker 1: what are you interested in first, as as opposed to
Speaker 1: just being like, okay at first, Now I have to
Speaker 1: learn how to like splint a broken arm, because like
Speaker 1: ship is gonna hit the fans, like, well, maybe focus
Speaker 1: on something that's more exciting to you first, and and
Speaker 1: and and build time in your life to learn things.
Speaker 1: That's an enjoyable process. One of the first things I did,
Speaker 1: like years ago, was I learned to sew, specifically to
Speaker 1: make a cause play because you know so, so I
Speaker 1: would just I would make me and my whole family
Speaker 1: different outfits for comic Con. So every year I would,
Speaker 1: I would sew us whole whole new things. But then
Speaker 1: not only taught me sewing, it taught me how to
Speaker 1: do like like vacuum forming to molding, how to use
Speaker 1: like a heat gun, how to use like all these
Speaker 1: other types of tools, Um, how do you like molding
Speaker 1: and casting? Like all of these types of things I
Speaker 1: learned just wanting to make silly costumes. But now they're like,
Speaker 1: you know, useful in a lot a lot of other ways.
Speaker 1: And that can be that can be expensive at the
Speaker 1: high end when you're like vacuum forming and stuff your
Speaker 1: storm trooper armor. But the cheapest side of that thing again,
Speaker 1: you can get a basic hand sewing kit for like
Speaker 1: five dollars from a Walmart. And there's also and there's
Speaker 1: maker spaces and like YouTube will do the teaching. You
Speaker 1: don't have to pay for a teacher. The Taliban learned
Speaker 1: how to fly helicopters. On YouTube, you can learn how
Speaker 1: to fix your pants. And then I think also you
Speaker 1: mentioned specialization before. It's come up a couple of times, um,
Speaker 1: and there is you know, the idea of specialization. The
Speaker 1: rationale behind specialization is, oh, well, you'll be better at
Speaker 1: it because that's what you do all the time. But
Speaker 1: that cuts both ways, because if you only do one
Speaker 1: thing all the time, then as you know, whatever the
Speaker 1: maximum threshold of your abilities is that's required of you,
Speaker 1: that becomes your baseline like whatever in your day to
Speaker 1: day life, whatever it is that you're being asked to do.
Speaker 1: That's what you feel capable of. And on the flip side,
Speaker 1: there's with with the d I I approach with like
Speaker 1: teaching yourself ship, learning interesting ship. It's also practical and
Speaker 1: important and useful to be like this is a thing
Speaker 1: that I'm gonna do on a regular basis so I'll
Speaker 1: get better at it. But also it's not you know,
Speaker 1: there was you know, the whole idea of there's what
Speaker 1: you do and then there's your job, and that these
Speaker 1: need not be the same thing, because you want to
Speaker 1: be able to think think through things in a way
Speaker 1: that's not the way you're supposed to process things to
Speaker 1: make your boss happy. That it is not just what
Speaker 1: you do when you clock in. You are more than
Speaker 1: your career, more than your career, and and and your
Speaker 1: skill set need not be purely extracted as you know,
Speaker 1: not just like Okay, I have to go do the
Speaker 1: thing in order to make money, and then everything else
Speaker 1: is consumption. Like you can you can transition, like we're
Speaker 1: and this is not a societal level solution because we
Speaker 1: talk a lot about like, well, yeah, you're not gonna
Speaker 1: you're not gonna make small person changes to fix climate change,
Speaker 1: but changing your own particular attitude on how you approach
Speaker 1: the world from one that is I I produce and
Speaker 1: that I consume to to when we're you're thinking more
Speaker 1: about resiliency and what do I know how to do
Speaker 1: and what can I learn how to do? UM is
Speaker 1: helpful in a variety of ways on the note of
Speaker 1: you know, the transferability of skills and recognizing that you
Speaker 1: already do things on a day to day basis that
Speaker 1: requires specialized knowledge and require skill sets. UM. One of
Speaker 1: the things that I try and trot out at every
Speaker 1: possible opportunity. I worked with somebody in one of those
Speaker 1: volunteer bike shop spaces down New Orleans years ago, UM,
Speaker 1: and the whole purpose of that particular space was to
Speaker 1: make the skill set of bike repare more accessible to
Speaker 1: a population that relied on bikes to get places. And
Speaker 1: one of the folks I worked there with was like
Speaker 1: a very familiarity and was great because we would have
Speaker 1: young girls come into the shop and be like, my
Speaker 1: bike doesn't work. Somebody fixed my bike. My bike doesn't work.
Speaker 1: I don't know how to fix a bike. And she
Speaker 1: was the one who would just be like, your tires flat,
Speaker 1: and they're like, yeah, I don't know how to fix it?
Speaker 1: Can you fix it? And she'd be like, well, you're
Speaker 1: wearing press on nails, right, And I'd be like yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm like cool, how do you put on your press
Speaker 1: on nails? And they walked through the steps of like, well,
Speaker 1: you sand your nails and then you put the glue
Speaker 1: on your nails, and then you hold the press on
Speaker 1: nails on your fingernails for a little while and let
Speaker 1: them set and then you're good to go. And she's like, great,
Speaker 1: you've just described exactly how you patch a bike inner tube.
Speaker 1: So now we just need to get the bike inner
Speaker 1: tube out, and here's the part that corresponds to your nail,
Speaker 1: and here's the part that corresponds like here's the glue
Speaker 1: and here's the you know, it's the same process. We
Speaker 1: just have to get the bike inner two out and
Speaker 1: then back in again. But you already know how to
Speaker 1: do the part where you make the bike tube work again,
Speaker 1: and that does hit on another important like you know,
Speaker 1: apocalypse or whatever survival point where again all of our
Speaker 1: like fiction and movies, focuses on like knowing how to
Speaker 1: use a gun or like being a wood one of
Speaker 1: the most useful skills, maybe the most useful skill you
Speaker 1: can have in any disaster situation, is being able to
Speaker 1: teach people, like like knowing how to understand figure out
Speaker 1: what people know, and how to get them the additional
Speaker 1: information they need in order to be more resilient and competent,
Speaker 1: because you're always better in a community of people who
Speaker 1: know to handle their ship than alone. And it builds
Speaker 1: on itself too. You know, we both come from different backgrounds,
Speaker 1: but as we've been together and with the different trainings
Speaker 1: that we've had in just life, the projects that we
Speaker 1: take on have become more and more complex. So you know,
Speaker 1: where I like to practice gardening and stuff and doing
Speaker 1: a little bit of woodworking and things, and now you know,
Speaker 1: we're doing various construction projects that we're kind of self taught,
Speaker 1: and we have some various home depot books on how
Speaker 1: to do them. But it's it doesn't feel nearly as
Speaker 1: intimidating because we've done steps to go to it, and
Speaker 1: because it's not an all or nothing, you don't have
Speaker 1: to suddenly be like I'm going to d I why
Speaker 1: am I in entire life? Like I definitely get that
Speaker 1: way sometimes where I'm like, I want to one day
Speaker 1: have everything in my house be made by someone that
Speaker 1: I know or myself. And it's really lovely to know
Speaker 1: crafts people or to you know, make do sit down
Speaker 1: at a pottery wheel and make your own bowls or whatever.
Speaker 1: But a lot of it is about practicing stuff when
Speaker 1: it's not an emergency so that when you later on
Speaker 1: have need or you have the ability, you have the time,
Speaker 1: like you can do a bunch of different things. So
Speaker 1: you know, we refloored the room that we're in right
Speaker 1: now like a process, but we didn't get there from nothing.
Speaker 1: And we've both done lots of different construction and measuring
Speaker 1: and other things in little bits just for fun, for work,
Speaker 1: for other stuff beforehand. And a lot of these projects
Speaker 1: are things that are fun to do as a one
Speaker 1: off as a project. I've done, you know, embroidery with
Speaker 1: my kids just for fun, not because they need too
Speaker 1: suddenly embroider all of their clothing or they have two
Speaker 1: sew everything, but it's because it's a fun thing to
Speaker 1: do on a rainy day. Or you know, try fixing
Speaker 1: a book, not because there's no ability to go on
Speaker 1: Amazon and order another book. But hey, look I just
Speaker 1: we didn't add one thing to the landfill waste, and
Speaker 1: we don't have to fix all of the stuff we have.
Speaker 1: It's a one time craft. But then later on when
Speaker 1: stuff is falling apart, or when we have supply chain issues,
Speaker 1: or when stuff's not there, it's handy to know, like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know what, Like we're having water rationing right now,
Speaker 1: because during the one of the droughts that grew up
Speaker 1: in California, we had water rationing and it was my
Speaker 1: mom hauled out of the basement my grandmother's old ringer
Speaker 1: machine and we were doing the laundry and that because
Speaker 1: it could conserved a hell of a lot of water
Speaker 1: and you could use the same water for load after load.
Speaker 1: It's good to just have those things just kind of
Speaker 1: on hand that you've tried, because when an emergency hits,
Speaker 1: you don't want to be trying to search the internet
Speaker 1: are looking for something because you've never done it before
Speaker 1: and now it's necessary. And it's it's again to the
Speaker 1: point of like how the how collapse really looks versus
Speaker 1: how it's often pictured. You're not trying to replicate when
Speaker 1: you're when you're doing your own laundry. That way you're
Speaker 1: not trying to replace civilization. You're patching a hole, like
Speaker 1: and and that's a lot of building resiliency is knowing
Speaker 1: that you have. It's like it's being able to fix
Speaker 1: a bike tire, it's patching a hole. And I do
Speaker 1: want to acknowledge that, like this is a little bit
Speaker 1: more outside of the dead center of mainstream in you know,
Speaker 1: the United States and some other like wealthy industrialized countries.
Speaker 1: And it's not like it has never stopped being the
Speaker 1: way most people in the world kind of I have
Speaker 1: to tell from these people that was billeted with an Iraq.
Speaker 1: These these guys were like pulling people out of air
Speaker 1: strike craters every day, and we wanted to watch TV.
Speaker 1: One nine We were in like a bombed out mosque
Speaker 1: that Isis had been using and they had a refrigerator
Speaker 1: that worked in a TV that Isis had cut the
Speaker 1: chords with. And this guy just started pulling chords out
Speaker 1: of the fridge in about five minutes, had the TV working,
Speaker 1: had like hooked it, lashed everything together. It was like
Speaker 1: he wasn't a TV repairment or refrigerate. He just knew
Speaker 1: how electricity and ship worked and was able to figure
Speaker 1: out like, Okay, I can just put all this ship together,
Speaker 1: We're good to go. And and just also to loop
Speaker 1: back around to the whole like survival mentality a little bit.
Speaker 1: One of the things that like people that we've worked with,
Speaker 1: people who like have been in emergency situations that require,
Speaker 1: you know, complex skill sets and things that one of
Speaker 1: the big things is to have a role that you
Speaker 1: are competent in that you are ready to fulfill. So
Speaker 1: you don't have to figure out your first step. You
Speaker 1: can get moving. You can figure out your first step.
Speaker 1: So for example, in the you know, the supply chain
Speaker 1: issues that hit at the start of COVID and are
Speaker 1: hitting still and are recurring. Um the idea of like
Speaker 1: oh there's no way to like there's no laundry soap,
Speaker 1: Say okay, well we've got borax and these other making
Speaker 1: soda borax, right, we can we can make our own
Speaker 1: laundry detergent in a pinch and it'll work well enough. Cool.
Speaker 1: Don't have to have that be the thing that stresses
Speaker 1: us out and like adds to our like paralysis. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and again, a huge part of is even how you
Speaker 1: approach the problem. It's not freaking out, like oh my god,
Speaker 1: there's no laundry soap. Hell am I going to clean
Speaker 1: the clothes? It's being like, oh, there's no laundry soap,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go online because we still have that and
Speaker 1: try to figure out either other things that can make
Speaker 1: laundry soap that there are, and like it's it's accepting.
Speaker 1: Like you talk about like wanting to be competent in
Speaker 1: a role, you don't have to know what that is
Speaker 1: from the start, as long as like the starting point
Speaker 1: isn't I'm going to be the medic I'm gonna be this,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be the food or it's like no, I'm
Speaker 1: going to start learning how to do things I don't
Speaker 1: know how to do, and over a period of time,
Speaker 1: if I am dedicated that I will figure out the
Speaker 1: thing that I want to get most competent at. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I mean none of none of what we've been
Speaker 1: talking about in terms of the various crafts and projects
Speaker 1: that we've undertaken, are things that are like our primary
Speaker 1: function in the world. It's just like, well, at some
Speaker 1: point it seemed like it was worth doing, and so
Speaker 1: we did some of it, and then we kept doing
Speaker 1: it now and there's always pretty good at something literally
Speaker 1: everything we've talked about. There's the you're a I don't know,
Speaker 1: bougie hipster version of like doing it expensively. Even with
Speaker 1: like woodworking, there could be a dirt cheap. I built
Speaker 1: a table for almost nothing when I was younger, because
Speaker 1: it was like, well, I found this would that the
Speaker 1: city chopped down, and I bought sand paper and staying
Speaker 1: for fifteen dollars, and then I got like a fucking
Speaker 1: base from Ikea, and I had a functional table and
Speaker 1: I figured it out using YouTube. And it's you know,
Speaker 1: not as good a table as I could have made
Speaker 1: if I had ten or thousands of dollars and woodworking tools.
Speaker 1: But I had a table for years because of it
Speaker 1: um And it's it's accepting the because I think people
Speaker 1: do get freaked out. There's such an emphasis on like
Speaker 1: having the gear, getting the equipment, stockpiling things, and like
Speaker 1: really stockpiling competency is better because yeah, and I think
Speaker 1: the Amazon wish list ability to just be like, oh,
Speaker 1: I want this specific thing, I can in three seconds
Speaker 1: look it up online and find the exact thing that
Speaker 1: I want definitely pushes in the opposite direction and makes
Speaker 1: people a little less resilient. In that capacity because there's
Speaker 1: less of that idea that you can just have stuff.
Speaker 1: And I would just say, if people want to get
Speaker 1: started with it, it's really pick something low stakes, pick
Speaker 1: something simple, because you build the abilities, you build the
Speaker 1: ability to learn. And um, I had to explained to
Speaker 1: me once, it's like a hangar. Every skill you get
Speaker 1: X as a hangar, and having really basic simple things
Speaker 1: is actually super necessary arry because even even the like
Speaker 1: hardcore primitive skills. I have some amazing books that I
Speaker 1: bought when I was eighteen, and I remember I had
Speaker 1: them and I looked through and I read it and
Speaker 1: I was like, this is like reading magic. I understand
Speaker 1: absolutely none of it. And after a few years of
Speaker 1: doing things, not even necessarily traditional skills, but just things,
Speaker 1: practicing stuff, picking stuff, there was so much more framework
Speaker 1: that I had that I looked through and suddenly there
Speaker 1: was stuff concepts that I could hang all of these
Speaker 1: incredible skills on. And we're like, oh, that never made
Speaker 1: sense to me. I understand it now because I've done
Speaker 1: simpler things and starting with thing that doesn't seem like
Speaker 1: overwhelming to learn something simple and something something most steakes,
Speaker 1: something that if you utterly mess it up. If you
Speaker 1: have a what are the like like the regret see
Speaker 1: like craft epic craft fails that it's okay, it's not
Speaker 1: a big deal because failing is part of learning. And
Speaker 1: so pick things that it's okay to fail at as
Speaker 1: your as your projects, and and don't as many of
Speaker 1: us did in the late nineties and early two thousand's
Speaker 1: when we didn't have health insurance of any description, you know,
Speaker 1: experiment on ourselves and our friends with herbs because we
Speaker 1: didn't have healthcare, access to doctors. Avoid doing that is
Speaker 1: not low stakes. Yeah, I'm about to go do open
Speaker 1: surgery on my own infected wound now that you've told
Speaker 1: me this, and I'm really excited, really excited. I got
Speaker 1: I got an exact deal, I got some vodka. At
Speaker 1: least we're good to go. No, the key is really
Speaker 1: hot glue, same as I have similar because then it
Speaker 1: sterilizes the wound, hardly doesn't stick to anything. This is
Speaker 1: how I know you are not a crafter or is
Speaker 1: hot glue does not stick to anything. You just you
Speaker 1: squirt it in there, You get it in there real good,
Speaker 1: and then you cover it with with superglue. I do
Speaker 1: have a grand plug in the world. I would put
Speaker 1: superglue in first. I do have a grandpa that has
Speaker 1: used superglue so many times sticklue his body back together.
Speaker 1: It is that's very funny, it's effective at that. Anyway,
Speaker 1: here's our medical advice. Don't do any of the things
Speaker 1: that we just said. But if you do want to
Speaker 1: learn how to do suitos, you can find guides where
Speaker 1: people do it on chicken, which is how if you're
Speaker 1: an E M T you learn how to do it.
Speaker 1: And it's that's a that is a skill you can
Speaker 1: build for very little money. That's useful and you don't
Speaker 1: have to start on your friends bodies. And I will
Speaker 1: put in a plug for like wilderness first aid courses
Speaker 1: are not cheap and there are some real good ones
Speaker 1: out there, and as a as like a baseline that
Speaker 1: is a real handy and helps you think about things
Speaker 1: creatively because wilderness first aid unlike an ambulance driver. An
Speaker 1: ambulance driver is driving in a box with all the
Speaker 1: tools they need, and wilderness first aid the assumption is
Speaker 1: don't have a box. You don't have to and so
Speaker 1: you have to work it out probably you know, uh,
Speaker 1: some plantain or something or some the right fucking kind
Speaker 1: of sap. There's like ship you can use which we
Speaker 1: will not proceed to attempt to lift off here and
Speaker 1: provide medical advice. Don't go to a doctor, No use
Speaker 1: pine needles, make your own needle t don't go to
Speaker 1: the craft books, cure your COVID, find a bee hive
Speaker 1: and start sucking. And the other sources are any other
Speaker 1: sources are you have a great book called Making stuff
Speaker 1: and Doing Things from way back in the day, definitely
Speaker 1: recommend that one. Um country know how, like there's some
Speaker 1: a lot of old craft books actually, um, the entire
Speaker 1: back collection of the Mother Earth magazine skills stuff like
Speaker 1: I have definitely made any steadying magazine, not Emma Goldman's
Speaker 1: anarchist newspaper, but I've definitely made solar powered dehydrators out
Speaker 1: of cardboard boxes and saran rap from the from Mother
Speaker 1: Earth magazine stuff. And it's absolutely fantastically just old school
Speaker 1: guide books, um. And but also anything that's listened as
Speaker 1: like d I Y guides that have stuff that you
Speaker 1: would like to make and like to do are great.
Speaker 1: The library is great. Use the library. Research librarians at
Speaker 1: the library are great. And if you're like I'm trying
Speaker 1: to learn how to do this thing? Can you help
Speaker 1: me find books on it? Research librarians at the library
Speaker 1: they have doctorates in how to help you do that,
Speaker 1: and that's they just sit at desks all day waiting
Speaker 1: for me. And what you'll learn from them about how
Speaker 1: to answer those questions for yourself is also useful in
Speaker 1: their long run. We'll go out and make a reflux.
Speaker 1: Still is that legal? Well, no, not in most places,
Speaker 1: but it's easy. You just need a box inside of
Speaker 1: a box and you pour old beer in the center box.
Speaker 1: That's the episode. After thirty years, it's time to return
Speaker 1: to the halls of West Beverly High and hang out
Speaker 1: at the peach pit. On the podcast nine O two one,
Speaker 1: OMG joined Jenny Garth and Tori Spelling for a rewatch
Speaker 1: of the hit series Beverly Hills nine O two one oh.
Speaker 1: From the very beginning, we get to tell the fans
Speaker 1: all of the behind the scenes stories to actually happen,
Speaker 1: so they know what happened on camera obviously, but we
Speaker 1: can tell them all the good stuff that happened off camera.
Speaker 1: Get all the juicy details of every episode that you've
Speaker 1: been wondering about for decades. As nine O two one oh.
Speaker 1: Super fan and radio host Sisson E sits in with
Speaker 1: Jenny and Tory two reminisce, reflect and relive each moment,
Speaker 1: from Brandon and Kelly's first kiss to shouting. Donna Martin graduates,
Speaker 1: you have an amazing memory. You remember everything about the
Speaker 1: entire ten years that we filmed that show, and you
Speaker 1: remember absolutely nothing of the ten years that we filmed
Speaker 1: that show. Listen to nine O two one O MG
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Speaker 1: you get your podcasts. Adoption of teens from foster care
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Speaker 1: new podcast Navigating Adoption, presented by adopt Us Kids. Each
Speaker 1: episode brings you compelling, real life adoption stories told by
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Speaker 1: adopt us Kids dot org, slash podcast, or subscribe to
Speaker 1: Navigating Adoption presented by adopt Us Kids, brought to you
Speaker 1: by the U. S Department of Health, that Human Services
Speaker 1: Administration for Children and Families, and the ACT Council. What's
Speaker 1: Avoiding Starvation? My autonomous neighborhood collectives. Uh, this is it
Speaker 1: could happen here a podcast about things not being as
Speaker 1: good as they are and trying to make them better.
Speaker 1: I'm Robert Evans, my co host today as many days,
Speaker 1: Garrison Davis Garrison say hello to the people, high people, Garrison.
Speaker 1: What are we? What are we? What do we? What
Speaker 1: do we? What do we? What do we? What do
Speaker 1: we do? What do we do? What are we doing today?
Speaker 1: Thank you? We are going to be having a discussion
Speaker 1: on um food and food preservation and finding you mean
Speaker 1: like putting in the freezer. Well, what if the freezer
Speaker 1: is not working? The freezer is always working. This is America.
Speaker 1: Thanks never breaking the power goes out for two weeks. Well,
Speaker 1: that's one of our guests for today. My friends be
Speaker 1: in a lane um who you've heard earlier this week,
Speaker 1: and we're going to talk about food storage and particularly
Speaker 1: again our focus this week is like we keep getting
Speaker 1: a lot of people being like I have no money
Speaker 1: or very little money or very little space. I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna be able to grow things. How can I possibly
Speaker 1: you know, gather food store food, like build resiliency. I
Speaker 1: don't have any any kind of farmland. And the good
Speaker 1: news is no matter where you live, things that are
Speaker 1: edible grow and you can get those things and you
Speaker 1: can find ways to make them last longer than they
Speaker 1: would if you just kept them in a sack. And
Speaker 1: that's a pretty cool thing to do. So I'm going
Speaker 1: to hand it over to be in a lane. I
Speaker 1: love that. Okay, I don't have much space, I don't
Speaker 1: have much money. Was kind of how I got into
Speaker 1: doing canning in the first place. For myself, I used
Speaker 1: to be very very poor. I was on food stamps,
Speaker 1: I had no money. I was a broke punk. And
Speaker 1: one of my friends was like, oh, man, there's this
Speaker 1: farmer at the farmer's market, and if you help them
Speaker 1: clean up, they'll let you take away whatever leftover produce
Speaker 1: they have of that they don't want. So you can
Speaker 1: just load up a bag with produce. All you gotta
Speaker 1: do is help them load the truck at the end
Speaker 1: of the day. So that's what I did every single
Speaker 1: Wednesday for the next five years, no matter what come,
Speaker 1: hell or high water. But with that that also came
Speaker 1: there's you started realizing that there's gluts and then lacks
Speaker 1: of things. Um much like you know, everything that's happening
Speaker 1: in society now, just in general, there was seasons when
Speaker 1: there was nothing but you were It was easy to
Speaker 1: at the end of a farmer's market day walk home
Speaker 1: with a fifty pound flat of tomatoes, and you know
Speaker 1: times of the year where it was nothing but cabbage
Speaker 1: and you might have wanted tomatoes a lot. And canning
Speaker 1: was great because it helped to equal out when I
Speaker 1: could get things without having to dive into the you know,
Speaker 1: sixty books a month I got in food stamps and
Speaker 1: spend it at the farmers market. On that instead, I
Speaker 1: could use it to have a variety of vegetables or
Speaker 1: canned goods or other things in order to flavor my raman. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I first came at this kind of from working on farms,
Speaker 1: where similarly there are gluts. There are times of year
Speaker 1: where you literally cannot eat melons fast enough, and everybody
Speaker 1: who works on farms talked about getting the melon ships
Speaker 1: because you're eating as many melons as you possibly can,
Speaker 1: and it turns out that doesn't always agree with you.
Speaker 1: Um and uh. And then you know there's the time
Speaker 1: of year where, well, if you want to eat some
Speaker 1: month old potatoes and some two month old squash and
Speaker 1: maybe some storage cabbage great, and otherwise there's no produce
Speaker 1: to be had. So preserving food is well, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of different ways to do it, and it seems
Speaker 1: really intense a lot of the time because people talk
Speaker 1: about like batchul is um, you're going to die of
Speaker 1: battulism if you have home canned food. And so first off,
Speaker 1: there's just to dispel a lot of myths about things.
Speaker 1: There's actually really really really low instances of botuli is
Speaker 1: um um. I'm not going to say it doesn't happen,
Speaker 1: but there's actually very few cases of bauchuli is um
Speaker 1: per year, and a lot of them are from industrial
Speaker 1: canned goods. Don't eat a can if it's bowing out
Speaker 1: in the sides of the top, throw the can, well
Speaker 1: bury the can, bury it in the woods far away.
Speaker 1: But then also beyond canning, there's a lot of different
Speaker 1: ways of food preservation. You know, you were joking about, like,
Speaker 1: but don't toss it in the freezer. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I toss a lot of things in the freezer. Shouldn't
Speaker 1: not a bad idea? Yeah, I mean, we got all
Speaker 1: sorts of animals from the farm in the freezer right now,
Speaker 1: We've got a lot of blueberries because a couple of squirrels.
Speaker 1: Yeah that was a random thing. Um, just just some
Speaker 1: squirrels on the side for squirrel for heat is, but yeah,
Speaker 1: they were the trumpet. Having a freezer is a bad idea.
Speaker 1: It's just that the freezer depends on, you know, having
Speaker 1: power or at least having a backup power source or
Speaker 1: a generator or or or um. And in the case
Speaker 1: that you don't have access to those things, or can't
Speaker 1: afford to get a whole extra freezer, and that fills
Speaker 1: up a substantial part of or can't afford the power
Speaker 1: the freezer. Um. You know, we we definitely saw this
Speaker 1: past winter with the power outages that were caused by um,
Speaker 1: you know, in clement weather, and it suddenly became very
Speaker 1: hard to acquire dry ice because dry ice will keep
Speaker 1: stuff cold for longer. But everybody who's gone camping and
Speaker 1: use dry ice and they're cooler knows that. So as
Speaker 1: soon as there's an interruption in people's ability to refrigerate
Speaker 1: their food, the entire regional stock of dry ice is
Speaker 1: going to disappear. So what we're looking at more in
Speaker 1: what we're talking about today is a little bit more
Speaker 1: like the things that you don't need to keep anywhere,
Speaker 1: but like a cabinet that maybe doesn't get boiling hot,
Speaker 1: and if it's sort of a room temperature cabinet, you
Speaker 1: can store a lot of stuff. I've personally found the
Speaker 1: backs of closets, like, think about all of the areas
Speaker 1: that you don't clean that you're like, I just shove
Speaker 1: things back here and hope that they disappear because I
Speaker 1: don't actually care about them, or like the backs of
Speaker 1: broom closets. Um that actually, for a long time was
Speaker 1: my place where I would store canned goods because you
Speaker 1: can just stack the palettes of jars, the flats of them.
Speaker 1: Because if you buy jars from this supermarket, um buy
Speaker 1: mar Canning stores anywhere, safe Way has them, Walmart has them,
Speaker 1: you can They're not expensive. You can just they come
Speaker 1: in a little square flat and so after I would
Speaker 1: fill them, I just put them all back in there
Speaker 1: and then I could just stack those as a little
Speaker 1: tower and then you know, hand them out as gifts
Speaker 1: for the rest of the year, which is also definitely
Speaker 1: saying that you do when you have absolutely no money
Speaker 1: and people are like, oh, we're having a New Year's
Speaker 1: Eve party. And you're like, I brought you jam, and
Speaker 1: they're like, oh, great, blueberry lovely, but it's nice, has
Speaker 1: something to be you can give people beyond canning because sometimes,
Speaker 1: like right now, it's incredibly hard to find the metal
Speaker 1: lids that go on canning jars or in some cases
Speaker 1: the jars. That's actually was recently looking for more jar
Speaker 1: lids and ended up buying flats of jars instead, because
Speaker 1: as four different stores told me, there's a supply chain
Speaker 1: disruption in getting jar lids. There's also a lot of
Speaker 1: ways that you can preserve stuff with drying. You can
Speaker 1: also do a lot with salt, vinegar and sugar preserving
Speaker 1: as well, so that you don't necessarily need the recealable
Speaker 1: jars or like new lids for that. So there's a
Speaker 1: bunch of different methods um lact of fermentation as well,
Speaker 1: like fermenting things. So what would you like to talk
Speaker 1: about first? Let's start with just like what is what
Speaker 1: is the actual process of canning beyond like just dumping
Speaker 1: stuff into a can and sealing it. Um. So there's
Speaker 1: canning by itself is ceiling jars with heat. So that
Speaker 1: was oh God really really came into its own around
Speaker 1: like World War two was like industrial canning. And the
Speaker 1: thing about it is even within canning, there's two different types.
Speaker 1: There's low heat and high heat canning. Low heat is
Speaker 1: actually just boiling water temperature, and high heat you actually
Speaker 1: need to go above the temperature of boiling water so
Speaker 1: you can pressure can. Um you need a pressure cooker.
Speaker 1: They terrify me. I don't pressure can because I haven't
Speaker 1: quite gotten over the images of when they explode and
Speaker 1: give people steam burns um. I know plenty of people
Speaker 1: who do pressure can and it's great for them. You
Speaker 1: can pressure can at high heat. Anything. You can toss
Speaker 1: raw fish or raw meat in oil and jars or
Speaker 1: in water in jars, and you can pressure can it
Speaker 1: and it will cook and seal the jars and it
Speaker 1: is very safe. Low temperature canning is still relying on
Speaker 1: one of the other methods like salt, sugar, acid for
Speaker 1: the to keep down bacteria. So all it does, though
Speaker 1: is it makes the same so you can do this
Speaker 1: with or without canning. It just makes the jars keep
Speaker 1: a lot longer because it preserves them. So it's the
Speaker 1: process of you take a jar and then you either
Speaker 1: use a clean ring if you're using those latching reusable
Speaker 1: jars with these nice rings on them that you can
Speaker 1: use over and over again. Really handy when there are
Speaker 1: supply chain disruptions to know that you can reuse your
Speaker 1: jar and ring. We're talking about like the Mason jars
Speaker 1: that you you you would get in uh bars that
Speaker 1: are too expensive five years ago. They would pour your
Speaker 1: terrible I P A in them. Yeah, but you can
Speaker 1: use them for other things too. These are the well
Speaker 1: there's two. There's the jars that have a lid that
Speaker 1: is attached and it latch, oh with the YEA and
Speaker 1: so those have a Those have a rubber gas that
Speaker 1: you can and as long as you keep those oiled
Speaker 1: and clean, you can reuse those for years. They do
Speaker 1: eventually wear out, but they use a long time. Others
Speaker 1: is Mason or Ball canning jars, and those actually have
Speaker 1: a two piece top. They have a middle ring that
Speaker 1: you just need to make sure it's not like horrifically
Speaker 1: dented or rusted throat. It's reusable for a very long time.
Speaker 1: And then you have a lid and the lid can
Speaker 1: only really they are recommended to only use once I've
Speaker 1: re used them like twice. May used to can once
Speaker 1: you can like once it's canned and you you can
Speaker 1: take stuff out put it back on. You don't have
Speaker 1: to like replace the lid every time you get some
Speaker 1: preserves out. Yeah, but the tiny piece of rubber that
Speaker 1: is what steals it is very thin and so it's
Speaker 1: not very reusable for multiple can't batches of food and
Speaker 1: and true to farm. You know, if you go looking
Speaker 1: around in you know, rummage sales, vintage stores, whatever, you
Speaker 1: will probably find either very cheap or very overpriced some
Speaker 1: of those old hinged jars and tons of Mason jars
Speaker 1: and tons of Mason jars. You will often need to
Speaker 1: replace either the lids or the rubber gaskets in order
Speaker 1: to make them safe to star food in. But in
Speaker 1: either case, whether you're using the little the mason or
Speaker 1: ball jars that you'll find in lots of stores or
Speaker 1: the big latching ones, um, the jars are the more
Speaker 1: expensive spots things. The lids and the rubber rings are
Speaker 1: more inexpensive to replace. So if you can find them
Speaker 1: at Goodwill, if you can find them at Goodwill bins
Speaker 1: or the places, it's great, you should always grab them.
Speaker 1: Jars are never a bad idea, so canning. There's a
Speaker 1: million different ways to can. I do a lot of jams, jellies, pickles,
Speaker 1: and tomatoes, which are all things that are camped that
Speaker 1: are preserved either with acid or sugar. In either case, Um,
Speaker 1: James and jella is being sugar and pickles and stuff
Speaker 1: being acid. Yes, those are my two favorites. They're very
Speaker 1: simple to learn, and then you can always expand recipes
Speaker 1: and everything else. Um. But with pickles and tomatoes and
Speaker 1: other things, having the PHB very acidic is what actually
Speaker 1: does the preservation of the food and keeps down fungus is, molds,
Speaker 1: bacterias and stuff. And with jams and jellies, the natural
Speaker 1: acidity of the fruit mixed with a lot of sugar
Speaker 1: is what keeps the fruits from going bad or anything.
Speaker 1: And the great thing about canning fruit is that, like
Speaker 1: when you when you're thinking about what is the greatest
Speaker 1: number of free calories available to most people in a
Speaker 1: city during the seasons where fruit grows, it's often going
Speaker 1: to be fruit, And like you, you'd be surprised. Like
Speaker 1: where you can do like Los Angeles where I used
Speaker 1: to live, there was much of the year, like seven
Speaker 1: eight months you could fill your arms with fruit if
Speaker 1: you knew where to go and there's an app falling
Speaker 1: fruit that you can use to find people mark like
Speaker 1: where different trees are a lot of like you'll be
Speaker 1: surprised even if you think, like, well, there's no fruit
Speaker 1: in my area, to try falling fruit, you you may
Speaker 1: find that out. Actually there's a shipload of fruit. And
Speaker 1: I just was not looking or as you often find,
Speaker 1: I didn't realize that was an edible plant. I assume
Speaker 1: those berries were. We're not food and they can be.
Speaker 1: And and that's a lot of like free you know
Speaker 1: when you especially when you're making preserves that's really calorically dense.
Speaker 1: And and that also ties in with in the sort
Speaker 1: of survival utility aspect of this, because like canning is fun,
Speaker 1: and harvesting fruit is fun, and having stuff you made
Speaker 1: to feel pomegranates from rich people's houses do it, sure, absolutely,
Speaker 1: I mean, but part of part of the other thing
Speaker 1: to think about here is that like providing yourself with
Speaker 1: a reserve of different kinds of nutrition and different like
Speaker 1: there's you get an assortment of stuff so you know
Speaker 1: you aren't having to constantly buy it because honestly, the
Speaker 1: most expensive in terms of carbon output. The most expensive
Speaker 1: in terms of cost per calorie in grocery stores tends
Speaker 1: to come from the stuff that's you know, been shipped
Speaker 1: up from Argentina because it's not in season up here.
Speaker 1: That's while you're getting grapes in January, right and blueberries,
Speaker 1: you can actually watch them move all the way down
Speaker 1: the northern hemisphere over the course of the growing season
Speaker 1: until they're like growing them down in Chile right before
Speaker 1: they start being able to grow them again. So yeah,
Speaker 1: So just thinking about like the things that are available
Speaker 1: when they are available, um. And you'll see this all
Speaker 1: the time, like the good forage spots. When they're available,
Speaker 1: there will be crowds of people all they're all collecting stuff, um.
Speaker 1: And getting to know some of the things that you
Speaker 1: like and that grow near you and what time of
Speaker 1: year they come into season, and maybe forming some relationships
Speaker 1: with people and being like, hey, I noticed you have
Speaker 1: a chestnut tree in your backyard. Can I come and
Speaker 1: harvest chestnuts? Hey, you have this kind of oak, Can
Speaker 1: I come and get acorns from you? Because I want
Speaker 1: to do a leeching project. Hey, I was grabbing apples
Speaker 1: and I noticed that you're harvesting all these acorns. I
Speaker 1: didn't know that you could do anything with acorns. What
Speaker 1: is what are you doing with all those acorns? And
Speaker 1: one of the greatest things, too, is that a good
Speaker 1: fruit tree makes a lot of fruit. So much so,
Speaker 1: you know, we have a little plum that's near our house.
Speaker 1: It's a little plum tree. And since this year we
Speaker 1: managed to get to it before the raccoon did that
Speaker 1: likes to clamber over the roof. We got about two
Speaker 1: and fifty pounds of plums off of the small fruit tree.
Speaker 1: And it is not very big. It has a footprint
Speaker 1: of maybe about ten ft in diameter of the widest
Speaker 1: part of the tree. But it drops quite a bit
Speaker 1: of fruit, especially if we get to it before it
Speaker 1: all drops on the ground and our cars and the
Speaker 1: driveway and the walkway and the cat and the cat.
Speaker 1: But if we get to it, it's a lot. So honestly,
Speaker 1: I set aside about a fifty pound tub that was like, okay,
Speaker 1: we're gonna make some jam. We're gonna dry some of these,
Speaker 1: we're going to do things with it, and the rest
Speaker 1: we were able to give to friends. We toss some
Speaker 1: of the free fridges, We toss some all you know,
Speaker 1: we handed out because one good fruit tree makes a lot.
Speaker 1: So when you see fruit trees around town, when you
Speaker 1: walk under someone's cherry tree, it's okay to ask for
Speaker 1: fruit too, because I don't know anyone that uses every
Speaker 1: single piece of fruit off of any other fruit trees.
Speaker 1: And you know, one of the things that you will
Speaker 1: see is that um a lot of cities try to
Speaker 1: discourage people from planting fruit trees along roads precisely because
Speaker 1: when they come into fruit, they produce so much fruit
Speaker 1: that it causes the problem. Also, it's a good way
Speaker 1: to form relationships in your neighborhood. You say like, hey,
Speaker 1: we have a whole bunch of plums, we have a
Speaker 1: ton of whatever is dropping all over your front yard.
Speaker 1: And then your neighbors may be like, oh, those weirdos
Speaker 1: who were collecting fruit that one time. This tree in
Speaker 1: my backyard that's about to drop all this stuff. I'll
Speaker 1: let them know and maybe they'll come so I don't
Speaker 1: have to clean it up afterwards. Yeah, which is again,
Speaker 1: like people, we talk a lot about the importance of
Speaker 1: building like community resiliency and community self defense, and folks
Speaker 1: act like, well, how do I actually do that? Well,
Speaker 1: that's maybe that's a start for you. Maybe the start
Speaker 1: is like you get to know what do they have?
Speaker 1: What do I have? And then you start talking about like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna can some stuff. Do you want to learn
Speaker 1: how to can? You're like, oh, well, I was going
Speaker 1: to dry at East. Do you want to learn it? Like?
Speaker 1: Or do you want to borrow a dehydrator? And then
Speaker 1: you're making connections that are very practical and also social
Speaker 1: in your area. Also one plug, we've talked a little
Speaker 1: bit about the process of canning. Dehydrators are great and
Speaker 1: are pretty affordable, and they're not expensive. Yeah, like I
Speaker 1: think you know, for sixty to eighty bucks, you can
Speaker 1: usually get a decent dehydrator. And if you don't have one,
Speaker 1: but you have an oven, if you put things on
Speaker 1: a baking rack very low heat, you can just put it.
Speaker 1: I would just turn my oven onto warm and you
Speaker 1: can lay out things in your oven. I have a
Speaker 1: nicer oven now that won't let me do this. But
Speaker 1: when I used to live in like my first junkie apartment,
Speaker 1: I would literally just stick a metal spoon, like a
Speaker 1: one of my big cooking spoons in the door of
Speaker 1: the ovens so that it would open and that would
Speaker 1: just vent all of the steam of whatever I was
Speaker 1: drying in the oven. So and meanwhile, if you live
Speaker 1: in say a really dry climate or a climate where
Speaker 1: you have a really dry stretch of time when fruit
Speaker 1: is in season, and you have windows, screens and an
Speaker 1: area where you can make sure there's a steady breeze
Speaker 1: flowing across your your fruit, cut it thin, lay it
Speaker 1: out in the sun. And that's why there's so much
Speaker 1: sun dried X, Y and Z. That's really expensive when
Speaker 1: you go to dram Joe's or whatever, and it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's not just a matter we shouldn't just say that
Speaker 1: like this is you have to forage for all this stuff,
Speaker 1: like it could be a matter of like, well, during
Speaker 1: these months, beef is is much cheaper, It's half as
Speaker 1: much as it will be later. I'm going to buy
Speaker 1: beef when it's cheap, and I'm going to make jerky now,
Speaker 1: and then I will have protein when I can't afford
Speaker 1: to purchase protein or as much protein later. In the
Speaker 1: air speaking of jerky, I mean like one of the
Speaker 1: just in the vein of you know, building your own
Speaker 1: dehydrat or something one other thing that uh that that
Speaker 1: I've done is you can just get a you know,
Speaker 1: a decent box fan and some furnace filters and strap
Speaker 1: them all together, and that can very successfully dry out
Speaker 1: jerky um so D dehydrators. There's a lot of different
Speaker 1: ways to Yeah, it is literally just kind of warm
Speaker 1: or less in some cases, and air that is moving,
Speaker 1: and it's it's like everything we've been talking about. There's
Speaker 1: the you can buy very expensive dehydrators if you want to.
Speaker 1: If you want to get a primo jerky making together,
Speaker 1: you can you can make that a real expensive thing,
Speaker 1: or you can do it for like trash, like with
Speaker 1: with discarded crap that you find around in people's like
Speaker 1: take aisles. And I think also the other thing to
Speaker 1: think about we're talking about it's not all foraging, is
Speaker 1: to think about we've been talking about supply chain disruptions,
Speaker 1: but also one of the things in our current circumstances
Speaker 1: is the weird gluts and excesses and surpluses that are
Speaker 1: produced by our supply chains. And again, one of the
Speaker 1: big ways that I learned about food preservation was food
Speaker 1: not bombs and food preservation and also just food preparation
Speaker 1: was food not bombs. Way back in the day, like
Speaker 1: you need a special sound every time on specifically it
Speaker 1: could happen here. Someone mentions food not bombs At this
Speaker 1: point that was my entry back when I was just
Speaker 1: kind of a liberally journalist guy to like anarchist practice.
Speaker 1: Was like every protest I go to, there's these like
Speaker 1: rusty punks handing out sandwiches, um, and then they have
Speaker 1: neat stickers. I wonder what's going on here and well,
Speaker 1: And one of the important things about food not bombs
Speaker 1: is that food not bombs has sort of two different
Speaker 1: ways that you obtain food for food not bombs. One
Speaker 1: is you form relationships with first farmers, Yeah, people who
Speaker 1: are going to have a lot of food, a lot
Speaker 1: of supply coming in and there's stuff they're not going
Speaker 1: to be able to use, either because it's ugly or
Speaker 1: you know, it's carrots that look like dicks and they
Speaker 1: don't feel comfortable putting the carrots that look like dicks
Speaker 1: on the shop. Or Yeah, so you have your relationships
Speaker 1: with like local businesses and local suppliers who aren't going
Speaker 1: to be able to sell or use some of their stuff.
Speaker 1: And right day Old Bread we are a bakery and
Speaker 1: we pride ourselves on fresh bread. So we're going to
Speaker 1: give our day olds and it makes us feel good
Speaker 1: as liberals to give it to food not bombs. And
Speaker 1: then on the flip side, there's the the fact that
Speaker 1: the supply chain is designed to produce these excesses. But
Speaker 1: then if it can't make money off of them, dispose
Speaker 1: of them. That's where you end up with, you know,
Speaker 1: cop starting, copscarding dumpsters for example, don't dumpster from the
Speaker 1: cops that the cop guarded dumpsters. Those are the other dumpsters.
Speaker 1: Go to other dumpsters because it's infuriating, it's very frustrating.
Speaker 1: I get the desire to yell at the cop, but
Speaker 1: there will you can find dumpsters that are not started.
Speaker 1: If you are a store or restaurant, you're legally protected
Speaker 1: to let people go through your dumpster. Yeah, not to you. Yeah.
Speaker 1: During the Clinton administration, there's legislation that was passed that
Speaker 1: straight up said, like at a federal level, if you
Speaker 1: present I think the wording is seemingly wholesome and healthful
Speaker 1: food two people for free, even if it has pastic
Speaker 1: expiration date, that you are legally protected because it's dumb
Speaker 1: to throw out food just because the thing that stamped
Speaker 1: on the package has expired. Now that does mean if
Speaker 1: you pick up some meat that's expired and the package
Speaker 1: is puffy, don't eat that. And it also there are
Speaker 1: also local ordinances and local laws that do restrict that
Speaker 1: more because there are places where people get arrested for
Speaker 1: handing out food to like you know, homeless people and whatnot.
Speaker 1: But you know, check your local laws before doing anything
Speaker 1: is radical and violent as giving out as giving out
Speaker 1: free food to poor people. Yeah, there are these gluts
Speaker 1: um and there are these points where the supply chain
Speaker 1: is going to dump huge amounts of stuff into the system.
Speaker 1: For example, right now, we just talked about how canning
Speaker 1: supplies are kind of in short supply right now, which
Speaker 1: is weird. I guarantee you that that means in a
Speaker 1: couple of months there's going to be tons of canning
Speaker 1: supplies everywhere. Or you know, when there were power outages
Speaker 1: in Portland then there was a bunch of stuff, even
Speaker 1: stuff that doesn't need to be refrigerated was getting thrown
Speaker 1: out if it was stored in the refrigerated section because
Speaker 1: stores have their specific protocols about like oh well if
Speaker 1: this is left, if this freezer is unplugged, we have
Speaker 1: to throw out everything in the freezer. Never mind that
Speaker 1: a bunch of stuff in the freezer straight up says
Speaker 1: right there on it does not require refrigeration, or only
Speaker 1: refrigerate after opening after opening, So think about, like, where
Speaker 1: are your local systems going to produce these huge bloods,
Speaker 1: or maybe it's super cheap at certain times of year,
Speaker 1: you know, you maybe corn goes down to like cents
Speaker 1: an ear or five cents an ear at the end
Speaker 1: of at the at the end of August, right, so
Speaker 1: maybe you can get a whole ton of corn and
Speaker 1: then you can dry it. Like you know, when I
Speaker 1: was a kid, we lived in California, and we were
Speaker 1: not doing a ton of canning. I did not grow
Speaker 1: up canning. I didn't grow up preserving food. I didn't
Speaker 1: in that type of way. But one thing that my
Speaker 1: mom would do is when our little mire lemon tree
Speaker 1: was covered in lemons, she would just juice a whole
Speaker 1: pile of them and then poured into ice cube trays
Speaker 1: and then empty the ice cube trays into gallon bags,
Speaker 1: and then we had lemon you know, we would make
Speaker 1: lemonade all year round. And her recipe literally called for
Speaker 1: three lemon cubes to how much sugar and stuff as
Speaker 1: she had it measured out, and so she would just
Speaker 1: pop those in and that would just live in the
Speaker 1: refrigerator all year round. Was just constant lemonade. One other
Speaker 1: plug in terms of preserving stuff that I want to
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about, but with the disclaimer that
Speaker 1: I am by no means an expert. Um. One of
Speaker 1: the other things that you know, the punks of Yesteryear
Speaker 1: with their food not bombs houses got really excited about
Speaker 1: was things like crowd and kombucha um and there are
Speaker 1: some really great resources out there, specifically um wild Fermentation
Speaker 1: and the Art of Fermentation, which are both by a
Speaker 1: guy named Sander Cats on how to ferment food without
Speaker 1: you you know, you're using naturally occurring bacteria, and fermentation
Speaker 1: as a means of preservation is possibly the oldest means
Speaker 1: of deliberate food storage that human beings have, and you
Speaker 1: can do it with a wide variety of things. And
Speaker 1: so again, if you're faced with one of those gluts
Speaker 1: where you have a ton of stuff and nowhere you
Speaker 1: can store it in your refrigerated storage areas, there's probably
Speaker 1: a way you can jam it, you can dry it,
Speaker 1: you can ferment it. You can you know, make vinegar
Speaker 1: out of it, and you can find guides for all
Speaker 1: of this for free online. Like all of this is
Speaker 1: accessible if you have a phone. There are people in
Speaker 1: people putting up videos on YouTube where you can watch
Speaker 1: them do it too to make it. You do not
Speaker 1: have to purchase books in order to learn. There's also
Speaker 1: a lot of ways you know, you can make cold
Speaker 1: storages in your backyard. You can definitely, like I have
Speaker 1: a lot of guides on how to make your own
Speaker 1: roots sellers than very small spaces and do things. Because
Speaker 1: as long as you're not having your food produce the
Speaker 1: thing that makes it that makes your food go bad,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of different ways that you can prevent
Speaker 1: food spoilage but that you can learn from. But honestly,
Speaker 1: crowd and canning are probably some of the quickest and
Speaker 1: easiest and as a general rule, um, you know, similarly,
Speaker 1: if you don't have access to building a garden, you
Speaker 1: probably also don't have access to like digging a root seller.
Speaker 1: That being said, if you have a room or a
Speaker 1: space in your house where you can reliably keep it
Speaker 1: cool and dark, like below, I don't know, seventy degrees dark. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like closets, there's probably a spot in your basement if
Speaker 1: you live in a house where you have a basement,
Speaker 1: or if you live in a basement, because if you
Speaker 1: live in a situation, yeah, um, it's pretty easy. And
Speaker 1: for that matter, when we talk about like roots sellers,
Speaker 1: there are totally some d i y schematics for literally
Speaker 1: digging a like three foot cube hole in your yard
Speaker 1: and sinking in something to line it, and then that's
Speaker 1: where you store stuff because if you dig down a
Speaker 1: few feet below ground, it stays fifty degrees year round.
Speaker 1: And I get like when you hear again, we keep
Speaker 1: coming back to this, Like, I think a lot of
Speaker 1: people get overwhelmed or get very anxious when they think
Speaker 1: about trying to build resiliency because they live in a
Speaker 1: tiny apartment, they don't have much in the way of money.
Speaker 1: The important one of the most important things to understand
Speaker 1: that like a lot of people, no matter how poor
Speaker 1: you are, poorer than you have been doing this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff for generations. Like it's why most of our
Speaker 1: grandparents survived the thirties. Yeah, And I think one thing
Speaker 1: that people have a misinterpretation of with canning and stuff
Speaker 1: is that they are going to put stuff up, and
Speaker 1: they're gonna like put up their cans and their jars
Speaker 1: and then they will eventually build this. You know, I
Speaker 1: have food for twelve years buried here. Nothing has that
Speaker 1: great of a shelf life. I mean, I've definitely pulled
Speaker 1: out some jerim that was from definitely didn't do that
Speaker 1: this year that I had forgotten in the back of
Speaker 1: a cupboard and eating it and it's fine. It's fine,
Speaker 1: but usually a couple three years couple. But the idea
Speaker 1: of canning and preserving was not that you are saving
Speaker 1: food in case the eye falls in and everyone is doomed.
Speaker 1: The reason that people preserve food was to extend the
Speaker 1: bounty of a harvest season for a few additional weeks
Speaker 1: or months. And if you think about it that way,
Speaker 1: you're extending what you have two times when it would
Speaker 1: be more enjoyable to eat it when it feels special. No,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's like jam. A big part of the
Speaker 1: reason for jam is there's really important nutrients in fruit
Speaker 1: that maybe you can't get in the dead of winter,
Speaker 1: but you can if you have jam. Just to be
Speaker 1: a farm nerd for a minute, because Robert, I know
Speaker 1: that you are a huge fan of pumpkin spice. Oh
Speaker 1: the reason that had my first cup of the season today,
Speaker 1: amazing monster. The reason that pumpkins and cinnamon and apples
Speaker 1: and baking goods, baked goods with reasons in them are
Speaker 1: all like a big deal and are all like apples
Speaker 1: are a fruit that if you put apples in, say
Speaker 1: a barrel, there's the saying about one bad apple. Because
Speaker 1: if you make sure that an apple isn't rotting and
Speaker 1: you put it in a cool, dark space with decent ventilation,
Speaker 1: apples will keep for a very long time. Squash are
Speaker 1: a big deal. Pumpkins are a big deal around this
Speaker 1: time of year because buttercup squash, for example, and but
Speaker 1: are not squash are both storage squash. They taste better
Speaker 1: if they have been sitting in a dark storage area
Speaker 1: for like two months. Then they have metabolized more of
Speaker 1: their starches into sugars and their tastier. A lot of
Speaker 1: a lot of like squash, root, vegetables, all of that
Speaker 1: sort of stuff that you associate with, you know, all
Speaker 1: harvest season is specifically storage crops. Because I'm originally from
Speaker 1: New England. That's the time of year where you stop
Speaker 1: being able to get food out of the ground, and
Speaker 1: everything freezes and dies, and then it doesn't start up
Speaker 1: again until April, and you need a way to keep
Speaker 1: eating in the meantime. And also, though, let's just remember
Speaker 1: that a lot of preserved foods are also neat, not
Speaker 1: just because they are a substitutor because they're staying the harvest,
Speaker 1: but because in order to preserve the food and keep
Speaker 1: the nutrients, you have to go through a process. You
Speaker 1: want to have the salt be too high, or the
Speaker 1: acidity be too high, or the sugar content be too high,
Speaker 1: or the water content be too low to enable bacterial growth,
Speaker 1: and so that the fruits and vegetables and meats or
Speaker 1: whatever don't rock. But that means that you get so
Speaker 1: many awesome and different flavors that you would never you know, grapes,
Speaker 1: grapes are great. Whatever grapes preserved in wine vinegar. That
Speaker 1: sounds really cool. You can do that, and then you
Speaker 1: have a completely different thing that you normally don't eat,
Speaker 1: you know, dried dried figs, apple chips, like. You also
Speaker 1: get a whole new variety of foods that are not
Speaker 1: just extending in harvest but are also other things to eat.
Speaker 1: You know, my kids are not going to toss a
Speaker 1: whole pile of fresh fruit in their backpacks sometimes because
Speaker 1: it squishes at the bottom of their backpacks and I
Speaker 1: find weeks later, and it's absolutely terrifying fortunate. On the
Speaker 1: other hand, a bunch of you know, dried dried prunes,
Speaker 1: plums and stuff from the garden that dried out. They'll
Speaker 1: take baggies of those, And if I find them a
Speaker 1: month later because they didn't eat them, it isn't the
Speaker 1: end of the world either. And and again like there's
Speaker 1: a lot of fun stuff, like you know, yeah, grapes
Speaker 1: by themselves are are fine. You can also turn grapes
Speaker 1: into stuff that will help you preserve other stuff. And
Speaker 1: raisins in baked goods. If you've ever had a loaf
Speaker 1: of raisin bread and a loaf of white bread in
Speaker 1: the same bread box, the white bread will mold first.
Speaker 1: Raisins are actually a preservative. It's why people started putting
Speaker 1: raisins in bread. Yeah, and I think we should we
Speaker 1: should close out, but I kind of wanted to do
Speaker 1: that by circling back to the overall topic of this week,
Speaker 1: which is like building resiliency when you don't have much
Speaker 1: in the way of money or resources. And one of
Speaker 1: the things that you may not think of his building
Speaker 1: resiliency is exactly what you were talking about. Being in
Speaker 1: you aline paying attention to what is available, what time
Speaker 1: of the year, what is cheap, what time of the year,
Speaker 1: what is like, when do the gluts happen, and when
Speaker 1: do the shortages happen, Because that doesn't actually cost any money.
Speaker 1: You don't even have to buy things like you're already
Speaker 1: you're all always going to be going out to the
Speaker 1: store to get food occasionally. It's it's it's keeping an
Speaker 1: eye on understanding what is available growing naturally and what
Speaker 1: is available in the economy, because that connects you more
Speaker 1: to the environment you live in, to the climate as
Speaker 1: it changes, um into your community, all of which make
Speaker 1: you more resilient, and none of which costs you a dime.
Speaker 1: It just costs you attention. Also just a plug for
Speaker 1: you know, people who have access to the ecosystems where
Speaker 1: this is relevant. Things like shellfish licenses are great. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to tell anyone that they should, you know,
Speaker 1: seek out sport fishing as a means of obtaining calories.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, in Oregon, at least for I
Speaker 1: think it's five five bucks, nine bucks. Oh, it's up
Speaker 1: to ten bucks now. But so for ten bucks, get
Speaker 1: a shellfish license. You go down to a cove and
Speaker 1: you rape cockles for an hour and then you have,
Speaker 1: you know, an enormous amount of food that you can
Speaker 1: do all of the preservation that we've talked about. You
Speaker 1: can also just make chowder and freeze it, you know whatever.
Speaker 1: But there's a lot of ways to to cheaply obtain
Speaker 1: calories from out in the world. Yeah, all right, well
Speaker 1: that's going to do it for us today. Um, until
Speaker 1: next time, remember experiment on your friends with different medical
Speaker 1: care treatments. Don't do that. Although on the other hand,
Speaker 1: look up the if you are in the Pacific Northwest,
Speaker 1: there is the Portland Fruit Tree Project up here, which
Speaker 1: goes around and connects gleaners with fruit trees that need
Speaker 1: to be gleaned. Um, so people who have over abundant
Speaker 1: trees that they don't want all the stuff. That's a
Speaker 1: really great resource. In other cities, I'm sure there's other things.
Speaker 1: And also the Falling Fruit Maps map, so you can
Speaker 1: go online and if there's not already one in your area.
Speaker 1: They also make it really easy to be able to
Speaker 1: chart and put in trees in your area. So if
Speaker 1: it's saying that you're excited about and you love identifying trees,
Speaker 1: you can go in and actually start charting your neighborhood.
Speaker 1: Also figure out how to identify, you know, five wild
Speaker 1: plants that grow in your area that you can eat,
Speaker 1: because it's always nice to have more variety and it's
Speaker 1: fun to be out on a walk and be like,
Speaker 1: oh cool, now I have a thing that I can
Speaker 1: toss in with dinner when I get back. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: we've talked about how there's like the poor version of
Speaker 1: the cheap version. There's also like the centrist version and
Speaker 1: the radical version of that. The centrist version is like
Speaker 1: I just want to know, like what kind of edible
Speaker 1: fruits grow naturally in my area. The more radical version
Speaker 1: is I'm going to start guerrilla grows of edible foods
Speaker 1: on like available in my area. I'm gonna seed ball
Speaker 1: some ship. I'm gonna like very get insurgent with my
Speaker 1: yeah to prepare food. Yeah. Things that grow rise only
Speaker 1: take root real easy in the ecosystems they like and
Speaker 1: are real hard to get rid of once they get
Speaker 1: crime gardens I'm not going to say people should tear
Speaker 1: out the random trees that cities plant and then replace.
Speaker 1: No one can say that, but it's possible to do
Speaker 1: trees didn't make food with trees that did make food
Speaker 1: in the same spot, probably nobody would notice except the
Speaker 1: people who got and there would be more free calories
Speaker 1: in your area. If you know the kind of things
Speaker 1: that have been happening the last several years, continue to happen.
Speaker 1: All right, that's the episode. That's the episode. Hey, We'll
Speaker 1: be back Monday, with more episodes every week from now
Speaker 1: until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen
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