Speaker 1: All media. Hi everyone, It's me James, and I'm coming
Speaker 1: at you today with one of these little requests that
Speaker 1: I make sometimes when there's something that we would likely
Speaker 1: to do when it's very important to do so today
Speaker 1: I want to talk to you about Syria, and specifically
Speaker 1: Northeast Syria. So with the world's eyes fixed on Syria,
Speaker 1: many are rightly celebrating as a brutal dictatorship of Bashara
Speaker 1: Lasad comes to an end. But for Kurdish and other
Speaker 1: minority communities, recent days have bought violent attacks, ethnic cleansing,
Speaker 1: and occupation by Turkish back Jahaddis groups in an attempt
Speaker 1: to take advantage of the chaos by crushing the Rajava Revolution.
Speaker 1: Turkey and its mercenaries are openly committing war crimes against
Speaker 1: the region's autonomous communities. Many thousands have already been forced
Speaker 1: to be displaced, and thousands of borrowing danger to make
Speaker 1: matters worth this remains largely absent from the mainstream media
Speaker 1: reporting on Syria. If you'd like to share your solidarity
Speaker 1: with the people of northern and Eastern Syria, please call
Speaker 1: on Congress to take urgent action by passing the Emergency
Speaker 1: legislation to stop the violentce, hold Turkey accountable, and commit
Speaker 1: US support to the Syrian democratic forces and the diverse
Speaker 1: communities under their protection. If you want to take action today,
Speaker 1: you can go to Defendrojaba dot org. That's d E
Speaker 1: F E N d R o ja va dot org.
Speaker 1: If you are able to the most effective action we
Speaker 1: can take right now is to call a couple of representatives.
Speaker 1: One representative and one senator. Representative would be Gregory Meeks.
Speaker 1: He's from New York. He's a Democrat. He is a
Speaker 1: ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. His phone
Speaker 1: number is two zero two two two five three four
Speaker 1: six one. Leathon will be Senator James Rish He's an
Speaker 1: Idaho Republican. He is a ranking member's Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Speaker 1: His phone number would be two zero two two two
Speaker 1: four two seven five two. If you'd like to have
Speaker 1: some talking points, you can find those on Defendrojaba dot org.
Speaker 1: If you'd like to donate financially instead, especially to this
Speaker 1: humanitarian aid effort for the tens of thousands of people
Speaker 1: who have been displaced by the SNA's advances, you can
Speaker 1: donate to two organizations that I would suggest to. First,
Speaker 1: we be heavier store, the Curtis Red Crescent. That's h
Speaker 1: E Yva s O R dot com and you want
Speaker 1: to go slash e n if you want to see
Speaker 1: their website in English, you can donate there. The other
Speaker 1: one will be the free Burmer Rangers who are currently
Speaker 1: working in Raka. I was talking to my friend Habat
Speaker 1: who works with them. You can donate to them at
Speaker 1: www dot free fr e E Burma b U r
Speaker 1: m A rangers dot com. We will put all of
Speaker 1: this in the show notes or the URL, so if
Speaker 1: you're driving, you do have to write them down. Those
Speaker 1: are the concrete ways that we can help right now
Speaker 1: and what is unfolding as a very terrible situation in
Speaker 1: nor Syria. Thanks. I hope you do the episode.
Speaker 2: It's it could happen here the podcast that's hafftic right now.
Speaker 2: This is maybe the foremost of the Putting Things Back
Speaker 2: Together episodes of I'm Your Host Mia Wong with me.
Speaker 1: As James Stout, a guy who likes it to put
Speaker 1: things together.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know, on the subject of putting things
Speaker 2: together over the last I don't even know three four weeks,
Speaker 2: the question I have been asked the most by everyone
Speaker 2: is how do I start organizing? And you know, the
Speaker 2: problem with how does we're organizing is that it's not
Speaker 2: a question that has cleaner simple answers. Now, the most
Speaker 2: common answer you get is just join an org. And
Speaker 2: the problem is that most of the people who you
Speaker 2: were hearing this from are already in an org and
Speaker 2: want you to join their org.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Also, the problem is a lot of the orgs
Speaker 1: that are currently dominating left to spaces in the in
Speaker 1: the United States are trash, yeah, and bad for people.
Speaker 1: Bad people in them, bad people who are not in them. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Here's a little test you can you can do, is
Speaker 1: your org currently sad that Basha a Lasad is no
Speaker 1: longer governing Syria? Because if that's the case, leave yep.
Speaker 2: And that's that's a lot of orgs that that's a lot, Yeah,
Speaker 2: take the most of them right now. We'll come back
Speaker 2: to orgs in a bit. But what I'll say about
Speaker 2: orgs is that, Okay, if you know an organization in
Speaker 2: your area that you like and you think does good
Speaker 2: work and most importantly spends their time actually doing work
Speaker 2: instead of either in fighting or talking about doing work,
Speaker 2: you join them.
Speaker 1: It'll be good.
Speaker 2: But the important thing about organizations is something we'll come
Speaker 2: back to you later. The important thing about organizations is
Speaker 2: they have a lot of people. And the thing that
Speaker 2: makes organizing work is people. It's not organizations. It's not
Speaker 2: even necessarily ideological labels. It's there being a bunch of
Speaker 2: people who you can use and who want to do things. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but something I realized that the more I had these conversations, right,
Speaker 2: you know, I'm having them with friends, I'm having them
Speaker 2: with strangers, I'm having them with other organizers. And the
Speaker 2: more I had these conversations, the more I realize something
Speaker 2: sort of startling you. The person listening to this almost
Speaker 2: certainly already knows how to organize, but you don't know
Speaker 2: that that's called organizing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a very good point.
Speaker 2: I have encountered some of the most stunning or I
Speaker 2: mean organizing that like I can't discuss the specifics of,
Speaker 2: but like, some of the best organizing I've ever encountered.
Speaker 2: I have ran into in the last three weeks from
Speaker 2: people who don't think that they're organizers and started talking
Speaker 2: to me about their stuff. I was like, what, like,
Speaker 2: people are winning victories that like the like hardcore committed
Speaker 2: organizers haven't been able to do in like thirty years. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and it's just by random people who don't think they
Speaker 2: know how to do anything.
Speaker 1: Yeah, can I tell a little organizing story? We do
Speaker 1: have time, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, go for it. So
Speaker 1: I remember, in like twenty eighteen, I am on a
Speaker 1: trip with a friend with coming back and we see
Speaker 1: the arrival of the migrant caravan. One of the migrant
Speaker 1: caravan is the one that everyone decided to have a
Speaker 1: fucking cow about right before the twenty eighteen mid terms.
Speaker 1: And at that time, they were corraling the people of
Speaker 1: the migrant caravan in a baseball stadium in Tijuana, and
Speaker 1: like it was raining every day. So the baseball stadium
Speaker 1: ends up looking like the Battle of the Psalm after
Speaker 1: like a couple of days, right, you know, kids in needy,
Speaker 1: mud and shit, and I particularly know what to do,
Speaker 1: but evidently there were people there who were hungry and thirsty,
Speaker 1: and so I get three of my friends. At this time,
Speaker 1: I was still making about half my money riding bicycles
Speaker 1: and the other half riding so my friends and I
Speaker 1: was supposed to do a long bike ride. All of
Speaker 1: us are people who make a living riding bikes. Right,
Speaker 1: We're not like expert organizers. And I was like, hey, guys,
Speaker 1: this is fucked. Which we do. We called a friend
Speaker 1: who has a company who makes waffles, where we obtained
Speaker 1: like as many waffles as we could physically carry across
Speaker 1: the border. At that time, we weren't able to get in.
Speaker 1: We found a way to get in. We began distributing
Speaker 1: the waffles. After that, we put something online, people sent
Speaker 1: us money, and we continued feeding people for months. None
Speaker 1: of us, I think, had a particular plan or a scheduled. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was a bit chaotic at times, but we were
Speaker 1: able to do that and with a lot of other people.
Speaker 1: Clearly it wasn't just us, right, but we were able
Speaker 1: to process tenth of thousands of dollars and feed thousands
Speaker 1: of people. Be everyone there. And I've seen this countless times,
Speaker 1: especially working and organizing with well with refugees. For the
Speaker 1: most part, people are so good at organizing each other
Speaker 1: in themselves. Like when we got there with bottles of
Speaker 1: water and food. There are a thousand people there who
Speaker 1: have not had sometimes a drink for days, let alone
Speaker 1: more than a thousand, I think, let alone something hot
Speaker 1: to eat, right, everybody made sure that the children and
Speaker 1: the sick people got what they needed first. Organizing is
Speaker 1: something that is very inherent in us as people. It
Speaker 1: just we don't call it that. Yeah, And that's part
Speaker 1: of what I want to try to the myth.
Speaker 2: I want to try to puncture with this because I
Speaker 2: think particularly in the US, but this is true in
Speaker 2: a lot of places. There's this way in which the
Speaker 2: organizers sort of TM capital T capital O. The organizer
Speaker 2: gets held up as this sort of I guess even
Speaker 2: a particularly masculinist thing, which is it's this guy with
Speaker 2: specialized knowledge.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's just not true.
Speaker 2: This brings us something that I think is actually really important,
Speaker 2: which is what what even is organizing?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: And the answer is that most organizing is you get
Speaker 2: you get a group of people together, you get them
Speaker 2: to show up to something, and then you do something right.
Speaker 2: And the thing about this, right, that's something all of
Speaker 2: you know how to do. If if you can organize
Speaker 2: a dinner party, right, if you can get eight people
Speaker 2: to show up to a place to eat dinner, you
Speaker 2: can do this. It is it is largely the same
Speaker 2: skill sets, and all of the skill sets that make
Speaker 2: people good organizers are skill sets that you have to
Speaker 2: develop to you know, work a job, right. You know,
Speaker 2: like one of the things that comes up a lot
Speaker 2: in this which is less discussed and also kind of annoying,
Speaker 2: but you know you have to manage it is that
Speaker 2: organizing is about people and sometimes you have to you know,
Speaker 2: you have to do things like you have to manage
Speaker 2: people's egos. But like, I don't know, almost all of
Speaker 2: you work jobs or have work jobs, right, you have
Speaker 2: had to like deal with your boss being on one right,
Speaker 2: you have the skills to do this. You know how
Speaker 2: to do the interpersonal relationship stuff. It's just that you
Speaker 2: don't think about that as organizing, even though that's that's
Speaker 2: just what it is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the core of it is getting people to
Speaker 1: do stuff like you do it every day.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And the way you do this is by building
Speaker 2: relationships with people, right. And this isn't necessarily friendships, although
Speaker 2: that works. And like one of the easiest ways to
Speaker 2: start organizing is by getting all of your friends together
Speaker 2: because you are already friends, you have pre existing relationships
Speaker 2: and being like, okay, motherfuckers, we gotta go do something.
Speaker 1: And actually I love that.
Speaker 2: The first thing that you brought up was an admittedly
Speaker 2: sort of medium ish scale lift version of this. But
Speaker 2: one of the very easiest things that you can do
Speaker 2: is you can just get food of some kind. You
Speaker 2: can either buy it or you can make it yourself,
Speaker 2: and you and a group of like eight people, not
Speaker 2: even eight people, you can do it with lower I
Speaker 2: know people who've done this just solo.
Speaker 1: Is that you can just go give food to people. Yeah. Literally,
Speaker 1: it was this morning yesterday morning. I have some man
Speaker 1: house neighbors right and it was cold, and so I
Speaker 1: went out and gave them some hot breakfast or hot coffee.
Speaker 1: It's super easy to do. If you are struggling socially
Speaker 1: wherever you are, maybe you're finding it hard to make friends.
Speaker 1: I know that's the thing that people often struggle, especially
Speaker 1: if you've moved to a new place or post pandemic,
Speaker 1: or you're still concerned with cloud gatherings or any of
Speaker 1: those things. Like, if you start doing that, you will
Speaker 1: find other people who want to do it too. Like
Speaker 1: so many of my friends I organize with are people
Speaker 1: like when we had the end of Title forty two
Speaker 1: and people were in between the fences that a lot
Speaker 1: of the people who I organize with now or who
Speaker 1: helped people with Now I didn't know. I just showed
Speaker 1: up with a giant siler generator that I happened to
Speaker 1: have and some stuff that we had a whip around
Speaker 1: a call zone for and like, people who care about
Speaker 1: the same things as you are generally cool and it's
Speaker 1: a good way to make friends. And then you can
Speaker 1: go on from there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there's a second compounding thing here too, which
Speaker 2: is that you know, feeding people it's a way to
Speaker 2: build relationships with people, and also it's a really good
Speaker 2: way for people to get to know you in general
Speaker 2: and know that you are someone who will help them
Speaker 2: with things. Yeah, and from there, and this is a
Speaker 2: very common exception. I mean this is I literally had
Speaker 2: this conversation with one of my friends who's like an
Speaker 2: old school food not Bombs organizer. Food nut Bombs is
Speaker 2: a very very it's a cool organization. You can just
Speaker 2: like found a food nut Bobs chapter. They have like
Speaker 2: a couple of principles, or you can just do your
Speaker 2: own thing. And I'm pretty sure it's still like the
Speaker 2: largest anarchist project in the world because all it takes
Speaker 2: is you and like three other people and you just
Speaker 2: go feed people. But the thing is from doing that, right.
Speaker 2: If there's other things that you're concerned about, people will
Speaker 2: bring you their problems and you can help them doing it.
Speaker 2: And this is a very good way to get into
Speaker 2: other kinds of organizing because suddenly, once you start building
Speaker 2: these relationships, everything sort of cycles and cycles, and you know,
Speaker 2: you get involved in more and more things. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: that's kind of a that's kind of a late stage
Speaker 2: thing that we're sort of jumping to a bit. But
Speaker 2: I want to go back to the beginnings of how so,
Speaker 2: how do you get a group of people together to
Speaker 2: do a thing? And the answer is you kind of
Speaker 2: already know how to because you you presumably at some
Speaker 2: point in your life, have like organized a group of
Speaker 2: friends to go do something right, Like you've gotten a
Speaker 2: group of people together to go accomplish a task.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it could literally be anything, right, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: if you've got some people to go to a bar,
Speaker 1: you have the skills.
Speaker 2: One way I've been thinking about it recently and in
Speaker 2: my project is putting is thinking about it as like
Speaker 2: putting together a heist crew. And so, okay, I could
Speaker 2: vouch for this, right, the feeling of walking up to
Speaker 2: eight people and telling them individually, I'm putting together a team, and.
Speaker 1: I want you it is.
Speaker 2: It feels you could just do it. There is nothing
Speaker 2: stopping you. Nothing in the world can stop you from
Speaker 2: just walking up to your friend and going, I'm putting
Speaker 2: together a team. And it feels exactly as good as
Speaker 2: you think it put from the Ice movie.
Speaker 1: It rules. It's so fun amazing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and and and but this gets into also what
Speaker 2: kinds of people you want to do right, because obviously
Speaker 2: you know there's two vectors of this. There's on the
Speaker 2: one hand, you have the aspect of okay, who do
Speaker 2: you know? Right, And a lot of organizing is just
Speaker 2: about here's a problem, and I know someone who has
Speaker 2: some sort of skill or resource that can that can
Speaker 2: help deal with it, and you put people in touch
Speaker 2: with each other. And that's organizing. That's so much organizing
Speaker 2: is literally just hey, like I have like a broken
Speaker 2: part of my car. I know someone who's like a
Speaker 2: car mechanic, right, and you put you put them in touch,
Speaker 2: and you have successfully organized people, and you have built relationships,
Speaker 2: and you have made all of the sort of social
Speaker 2: web that creates organizing, You've made it stronger. Yeah, it
Speaker 2: also just feels good because you know, and that that's
Speaker 2: an auxiliary benefit to all of this is that it's
Speaker 2: it's a great it's a great way to sort of
Speaker 2: break break the isolation we're all under.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the best solution for despair is I'm
Speaker 1: thinking of a quotation here something that the busy bee
Speaker 1: have no time for despair. But the thing that makes
Speaker 1: me feel better about the world is that I have
Speaker 1: seen that people can fix massive problems with very few
Speaker 1: resources by just showing up. And like, I think, organizing
Speaker 1: is what gives me, what allows me to enter this
Speaker 1: period of time that we're entering into with a great
Speaker 1: deal more hope than I otherwise would have done. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And do you know what else will help you enter
Speaker 1: your situation? Is it the products and services that support
Speaker 1: this podcast.
Speaker 2: I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but
Speaker 2: we are not in control of the length of the ads.
Speaker 1: They just do it. We're sorry, here's a really long
Speaker 1: period of ads.
Speaker 3: I'm so sorry we are back.
Speaker 2: So I want to I want to return to my
Speaker 2: my hight career. If I don't know if if you're
Speaker 2: a D and D person, the other way you can
Speaker 2: think about this is you're putting together like a Dungeons
Speaker 2: and Dragons party or like an RPG party. And the
Speaker 2: way you need to think about this is, Okay, so
Speaker 2: you've picked a thing that you want to do, right.
Speaker 2: You see, you've seen something in the world that is
Speaker 2: bad and you you figure it. You go, okay, I
Speaker 2: can do this thing to solve it. And maybe and
Speaker 2: maybe that's you know, it's literally something as simple as
Speaker 2: feeding people. Maybe that's you know, I want to start.
Speaker 2: I want to start doing tenants organizing. I want to
Speaker 2: start because my rent is too high, right, or people
Speaker 2: are getting evicted. I want to start doing like immigration defense.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And from there you make a list and that list
Speaker 2: is you know what you're interested in doing, and you
Speaker 2: try to match what things need to be done with
Speaker 2: people you know who have those skills. Yeah, and this
Speaker 2: is you know, this, this is is where you release
Speaker 2: get into the heist things, right, because everyone has their
Speaker 2: sort of like hight role. Now, obvious part of this
Speaker 2: that you want is you want to create sort of
Speaker 2: balanced teams.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: You want people who have overlapping strengths so you don't
Speaker 2: just have only one person who can do a thing.
Speaker 2: And part of the way the successful organization works over time,
Speaker 2: and I mean just how successful organizing works is that
Speaker 2: eventually you are trying to organize yourself out of a job,
Speaker 2: which is to say, you want your organization to function
Speaker 2: such that if you're not able to do it, you know,
Speaker 2: or just you're gone, or you cycle onto a next thing,
Speaker 2: or you know, any any number of things that can happen.
Speaker 2: You want the organization to still be able to keep
Speaker 2: working without you, and you want you want your you're
Speaker 2: trying to get people to be able to replace you
Speaker 2: as the person who's like organizing the thing, right. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And at this point we can start talking about the
Speaker 2: kinds of skills that people need for organizing, and a
Speaker 2: lot of people and this is unbelievably common when I
Speaker 2: talk to people, and like especially women and especially like
Speaker 2: a lot of binary people and trans people particularly have
Speaker 2: this is that people don't believe that they have any skills.
Speaker 2: And then you talk to them for five seconds and
Speaker 2: they're like, well, I'm good at carrying heavy objects, right,
Speaker 2: I'm good with kids, which is a huge one. We'll
Speaker 2: get you in a second, right, Or like I don't know,
Speaker 2: I have a car, that's a huge skill. There are
Speaker 2: so many different skills that are so useful for so
Speaker 2: many things, and I'm just gonna go over loss of
Speaker 2: things that are actually really useful to get to get
Speaker 2: people a sense of like the kinds of things that
Speaker 2: there are. There are massive roles for so one of
Speaker 2: the most important ones, and this is something you can
Speaker 2: you deliberately look for. You know, this is this is
Speaker 2: one of the things you do at the beginning of
Speaker 2: any union organizing campaign. Someone who's good at talking to
Speaker 2: other people and making friends. That is a staggeringly useful
Speaker 2: person because again, most most organizing is just talking to
Speaker 2: people and building relationships. And you know, one of the
Speaker 2: things you do when you're when you're doing you're sort
Speaker 2: of they call it power mapping. But when when you
Speaker 2: when you're figuring out how you're going to organize a workplace,
Speaker 2: is you find the person who everyone likes and talks
Speaker 2: to and respects, and you talk to that person. Yeah,
Speaker 2: because that person can you know, can sort of like
Speaker 2: organize people down the chain because they have they have
Speaker 2: their relationships already and also they're good they'll be good at,
Speaker 2: you know, talking to new people and spreading your organization
Speaker 2: that way. And so like you know if you're just
Speaker 2: someone who's social or and this is also very useful
Speaker 2: if you have a friend who is very social, because
Speaker 2: I know a lot of us on operary social but
Speaker 2: you probably have a friend that you're thinking of right
Speaker 2: now who is very good at conversations that is charming
Speaker 2: and is good at making friendships. That person unbelievably useful,
Speaker 2: incredibly useful and compelling skill.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: There are also things like research people who are good
Speaker 2: at and I think people are much better at research
Speaker 2: than they think to take like a Tenet's organizing example. Right,
Speaker 2: one of the common things you have to do is
Speaker 2: find out stuff about a landlord, right, Yeah, And there's
Speaker 2: the higher difficulty version of that, which isn't that hard.
Speaker 2: Also want to I want to mention this, but like
Speaker 2: going to a courthouse and finding records about who owns
Speaker 2: property companies that it's not that hard. It's like you
Speaker 2: could just do it, right, It's not as hard as
Speaker 2: you think it is from someone saying it. But there's
Speaker 2: also even just easy things in that, right that all
Speaker 2: of you probably already know how to do, which is
Speaker 2: just looking at someone's social media profiles and finding out
Speaker 2: information about them. Yeah, and this is very useful. Yeah,
Speaker 2: for like union campaigns, bosses.
Speaker 1: If you've ever been a person who uses dating apps,
Speaker 1: especially if you're a wo man, yeah, yeah, then you
Speaker 1: know how to ocin. Actually maybe you don't credit yourself
Speaker 1: with that skill, but one hundred percent that like you've
Speaker 1: developed that skill to keep yourself safe and you can
Speaker 1: use it for good.
Speaker 2: Do you want to explain what ocenters and yes? How
Speaker 2: that how that process works?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Sure? So open source intelligence is it's an acream
Speaker 1: that doesn't really need to exist. It's gathering information of
Speaker 1: open sources things sort of openly accessible, right, as opposed
Speaker 1: to like humint, which is like being a spy, or singint,
Speaker 1: which is capturing signals. Open source information is you're creeping
Speaker 1: someone's Instagram, creeping their Facebook, looking at the weird fucking
Speaker 1: shit that they put on good Reads. Right. All the
Speaker 1: data that is out there, largely on the Internet, about us.
Speaker 1: A lot of people put a lot of information on
Speaker 1: the and it's very easy. And I would imagine if
Speaker 1: you're under fifty and maybe if you're over fifty two,
Speaker 1: like you just know how to do this because it's
Speaker 1: what you do. Anyway you want to find out about
Speaker 1: someone and especially if you are a person who goes
Speaker 1: on dates with people who you haven't met before and
Speaker 1: haven't been introduced to by a mutual friend, but you
Speaker 1: meet on the internet, you probably already do this to
Speaker 1: keep yourself safe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is something that's very useful for I mean,
Speaker 2: there's so many use cases for this, right there's you know,
Speaker 2: there's the very obvious ones where you're dealing with the
Speaker 2: local Nazi and you're trying to organize around like running
Speaker 2: them out. People say from them and you can find
Speaker 2: information about them. But I mean it's useful for cops
Speaker 2: who are beating people. Is useful for like politicians particularly.
Speaker 2: It can be very useful for it's useful for landlords.
Speaker 2: This happens all the time. It can be very very
Speaker 2: useful for bosses in union campaigns. Unions have like teams
Speaker 2: of researchers usually to like do this kind of stuff.
Speaker 2: But the thing is also and this is something I
Speaker 2: don't think people understand. Those guys, like the people they're
Speaker 2: hiring the researchers are just you, but they got a
Speaker 2: job being a researcher for a union. Like they have
Speaker 2: the same skills as you. They know how to like
Speaker 2: Google stuff, and they know how to look through people's
Speaker 2: like dating profiles and like look through their their facebooks
Speaker 2: and their Instagrams and like a big one, a big
Speaker 2: one that that the rich people especially do not think about,
Speaker 2: is like cash app and venmo oh Venmo, because yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: because because people's people's people just leave public transactions out
Speaker 2: there like that. That's how they got what's his name,
Speaker 2: the congressional Gates. Can I legally call him.
Speaker 1: The congressional pedophile? I guess they call him the accused pedophile? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: the man credibly accused of sleeping with an underage woman
Speaker 1: lots of times, you know.
Speaker 2: And one of the ways they found that was that
Speaker 2: and also like paying paying for that, right, yes, which
Speaker 2: is which is rape. By the way, I want to
Speaker 2: be very clear about that, Like, yeah, having sex with
Speaker 2: someone who is underage is rape.
Speaker 1: It is always rape, you know.
Speaker 2: And the way people found that was that they just
Speaker 2: looked through like his cash app history and they found
Speaker 2: all of these money transfers to people. You know, This
Speaker 2: is all very very simple stuff. That's that's very very
Speaker 2: useful organizing wise that you already know how to do.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Pinterest is another absolute ban to people. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: may be pinning.
Speaker 2: You know if if if you're hearing some of these
Speaker 2: things and and you think that you can figure out
Speaker 2: how to do this. That's also a huge skill. Finding
Speaker 2: people who are willing to learn things and willing to
Speaker 2: learn new skills is a huge benefit to to organizers
Speaker 2: because you know this, this gives you, like, this gives
Speaker 2: you a flexible person, right, it gives it gives you
Speaker 2: someone you can like flex into into any of a
Speaker 2: bunch of roles that you need. And also can you know,
Speaker 2: pick up skills to learn things. Having a car, being
Speaker 2: able to drive, and I know a lot of you
Speaker 2: don't do this, but if you do do this, this
Speaker 2: is you immediately, even if you literally cannot contribute anything
Speaker 2: else to a project, being able to just drive a
Speaker 2: bunch of water to a place, Oh yeah, huge, staggeringly useful.
Speaker 1: The amount of things that people can't access because they
Speaker 1: can't get there, it's vast, Especially when I talk to
Speaker 1: migrants right have recently arrived in the US. They don't
Speaker 1: have a US cell phone, they can't uber Oftentimes, nowadays,
Speaker 1: you can't even pay for mass transit with cash. You
Speaker 1: have to have a special card and then you have
Speaker 1: to get to the place to get the card right.
Speaker 1: The problems you can solve by being able to drive
Speaker 1: someone five miles are enormous, especially in the US where
Speaker 1: everything is designed around everyone owning a motor car at
Speaker 1: all times. Yep.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And like transport based skills are also very useful.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you hike a lot, that's a very
Speaker 2: very useful skill. There's a lot of sort of mutual
Speaker 2: aid projects. There's a lot of you know, I mean
Speaker 2: even things like like setting up summer camps is the
Speaker 2: thing that like leftist groups do right, and being able
Speaker 2: to hike very good for that. It's good for things
Speaker 2: like wilden just rescue. There's a lot of you know
Speaker 2: the James like the work you do that has to
Speaker 2: do with like going in helping migrants. Like being able
Speaker 2: to hike is staggeringly useful skill.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's very Like, it's useful. It's important. It's
Speaker 1: okay if that's not something you can physically do or
Speaker 1: you know that that works for the way you like
Speaker 1: to in your life. Like another thing I was thinking
Speaker 1: of which can be massively important and people don't realize,
Speaker 1: is if you know how to take off a tail
Speaker 1: light and replace the bulb in it. Yes, like we're
Speaker 1: entering a time when people with darker, people with TPS,
Speaker 1: people who are undocumented, people are on temporary migration statuses,
Speaker 1: are going to be definitely afraid of any interaction with
Speaker 1: law enforcement. If you can change the bulb on someone's
Speaker 1: tail light or their turn signal indicators of US in
Speaker 1: the UK, then you can meaningfully protect that person in
Speaker 1: a really important way. And it can literally take ten minutes.
Speaker 2: And this is something that you know, can scale up
Speaker 2: depending on how much skill you have. Right, there's even
Speaker 2: just very basic auto maintenance stuff is very useful for
Speaker 2: stuff like this. But you know, like if you're a carpenter, right,
Speaker 2: if you're an electrician, you do some kind of trade work, right,
Speaker 2: you do plumbing, right, That is thing that is massively
Speaker 2: useful to a lot of people. There's a lot of
Speaker 2: other kind of just skills that you have from your
Speaker 2: job that can be very useful. I mean, having someone
Speaker 2: to manage a spreadsheet, oh yeah, yeah, is staggeringly useful.
Speaker 2: And another one that I think people don't understand that
Speaker 2: they really have, but like being able to set up
Speaker 2: a meeting and like having a thing that lets you
Speaker 2: be like, Okay, here's when everyone is free, Like you
Speaker 2: probably have to do this for your job or just
Speaker 2: for you know, trying to get your friends to go
Speaker 2: even just like be on a call together or like
Speaker 2: go have food or like just do anything. That is
Speaker 2: what literally, genuinely one of the most important skills you
Speaker 2: can possibly have as an organizer is the ability to
Speaker 2: just sort of like go talk to people and be like, hey,
Speaker 2: can you show up to this thing here?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: And that is that is so much of just what
Speaker 2: organizing is. Can you be here at this time? And
Speaker 2: then trying to figure out a time.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So we're going to close out the sort of skill
Speaker 2: section with some I think just sort of like domestic
Speaker 2: These skills that I don't think people realize are super useful.
Speaker 2: If you have a button maker, you are instantly the
Speaker 2: single most useful person in any organization that. Yeah, well
Speaker 2: you can obtain a button maker there. They're very easy
Speaker 2: to use. But if you have one or you know
Speaker 2: the person who has the button maker, and suddenly you
Speaker 2: can just crank out buttons for every single event they rule.
Speaker 2: Everyone loves them. It helps, it helps enormously. It's awesome.
Speaker 1: That's a badge. For those in the Commonwealth. Also, if
Speaker 1: you have a sewing machine. Yeah, I was about to
Speaker 1: mention that, yeah, yeah, you're a hero. Yeah. One of
Speaker 1: my friends recently made me a little patch and it's
Speaker 1: really cool and I like it put not all my stuff,
Speaker 1: but if you can sew, like, that's a skill that
Speaker 1: I do not have. And it's so great when people
Speaker 1: can fix stuff for someone or you know, make stuff
Speaker 1: fit someone. You know, if you're a person who finds
Speaker 1: it hard to get closed that you like to wear
Speaker 1: that make you feel good and someone one of my
Speaker 1: friends could do that. And one of my friends was
Speaker 1: making clothes for another friend for like a Renaissance fair,
Speaker 1: and like it was the nicest thing I've seen someone
Speaker 1: do for someone else in a very long time. And
Speaker 1: it really made her, like, yeah, feel like nice and
Speaker 1: cared for. And like you might think that like this
Speaker 1: is just a weird little thing that you like to
Speaker 1: do with your sewing machine, but you can meaningfully really
Speaker 1: make someone feel cared for using that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that's a huge part of what organizing is, right,
Speaker 2: and that that goes into one of the things that
Speaker 2: is also an appreciable skill that's very useful, is I
Speaker 2: mean just like being nice to people, being kind to people,
Speaker 2: and having people around who are good at like keeping
Speaker 2: groups together. Yeah, that's its own distinct kind of person
Speaker 2: is someone who can you know, keep all of the
Speaker 2: people who are involved in a thing enjoying being around
Speaker 2: each other. That's that's that's a kind of person who's
Speaker 2: very valuable. And it's something that you can look for,
Speaker 2: you know. And if that's not you, like you can
Speaker 2: there's something you can you know, find in your friends.
Speaker 2: You can find in this sort of the people around you. Yeah, definitely,
Speaker 2: there's also something that I think you can tell when
Speaker 2: an organization is collapsing because this is like the first
Speaker 2: thing with the quality drops drawing and graphic design are
Speaker 2: very very useful because a big part of what you
Speaker 2: do organizing is like you make a flyer and you
Speaker 2: put a flyer on a bunch of telephone poles to
Speaker 2: tell people that there's a thing happening. Yeah, and yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, and this is also something you know later
Speaker 2: on you might be making a social media presence, but
Speaker 2: just having good artists and having good graphic design people
Speaker 2: is enormously useful for this kind of stuff. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: along this line, these things like making music, and there's
Speaker 2: a bunch of different ways this can go. This can
Speaker 2: be an immediate thing where you know, like you have
Speaker 2: people on a picket line, right and everyone's singing songs
Speaker 2: and this is great.
Speaker 1: We love this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, also, and this is another thing that you can
Speaker 2: be thinking about in terms of what skills you have
Speaker 2: and what things you can create. Benefit shows, yes, has
Speaker 2: been a huge part of a lot of how some
Speaker 2: of the unions off up here has been getting funded
Speaker 2: is by just having like punk benefit shows. And if
Speaker 2: that's the thing that you can do, or you know,
Speaker 2: people in bands, you know people who make music, you
Speaker 2: know people who just make stuff who are willing to
Speaker 2: contribute it to the cause, that's great.
Speaker 1: I remember one of we had one night last September,
Speaker 1: so cold. We were in the desert and I'm like
Speaker 1: a thousand people, right, and we were well at that point,
Speaker 1: we were really struggling to feed everyone, even you know,
Speaker 1: because there was so few of us. But my friend
Speaker 1: bought out like their guitar and some bongo drums they had,
Speaker 1: and I think I had my harmonica in my truck,
Speaker 1: and like we were sitting around with these. We had
Speaker 1: some Sikh guys had some Wiga folks come from China
Speaker 1: and then some Kourdish people and they were all explaying
Speaker 1: their different music and it was so nice like that,
Speaker 1: taking people out of a shitty situation for a moment
Speaker 1: with music. Again, like, don't underestimate how important that it.
Speaker 1: Don't feel like if you have that skill, it's not
Speaker 1: a useful one.
Speaker 2: No, And this is something I've I've been starting to
Speaker 2: say more and more. If if you need a theory
Speaker 2: brained way to say this to someone who like is
Speaker 2: is like a curmudgety Marxist who hates fun. Morale is
Speaker 2: a terrain of struggle that this there's a reason why
Speaker 2: morale is one of the most important factors of military campaigns.
Speaker 2: You can't get people to do things if they're too
Speaker 2: depressed to do it. Yeah, and being able to raise
Speaker 2: people's morale, it's it's this massive if you want again,
Speaker 2: want to go into technical language, is a massive force multiplier, right.
Speaker 2: It makes everyone you have enormously more effective. The better
Speaker 2: they feel about themselves and the better they feel about
Speaker 2: the situation they're in, and things like music, things like art,
Speaker 2: I mean, things like pulling pranks. This is a yeah,
Speaker 2: if you were if you were in good practical jokester.
Speaker 2: This is a staggeringly useful skill both like in terms
Speaker 2: of you know, you need to be careful about whether
Speaker 2: you're you're playing your pranks on like other people in
Speaker 2: the org, but like you know, if you know how
Speaker 2: to just like pull pranks, this is a really really
Speaker 2: useful thing. In like union camp Tenant's organizing. There are
Speaker 2: a lot of people who you can pray and it's
Speaker 2: very funny and it lowers their morale and it raises
Speaker 2: your morale.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I going back to your music as all like,
Speaker 1: like morale is a terrain of struggle. Like the other
Speaker 1: memory I have last year of playing guitars is in Rajava,
Speaker 1: being inside at night because everyone was getting drone struck
Speaker 1: all the time and it was dangerous to be driving
Speaker 1: around sitting around with some ZD friends, and like we
Speaker 1: spent all night playing the ood, which is like a
Speaker 1: it's like a guitar with a gord on the bottom,
Speaker 1: and to describe it like it's a string instrument. It's
Speaker 1: a string instrument, is what it is. And like that
Speaker 1: made everyone so happy. We had such a nice evening.
Speaker 1: Everyone was able to like get through this relatively difficult thing, Like,
Speaker 1: you know, it sucks that people are being killed and
Speaker 1: just for driving around are existing and they're bombing all
Speaker 1: this cuitly and infrastructure and the power keeps going out
Speaker 1: and all these things, right, like, but there's a reason
Speaker 1: that those people have ooed around after fifteen thirteen years
Speaker 1: of war, and it's because it is important, and so
Speaker 1: don't overlook that.
Speaker 2: And you know, and resisting fear is another huge aspect
Speaker 2: of this, right. A lot of the ways that people
Speaker 2: like a lot of the ways that you demobilize people.
Speaker 2: This is why regimes like this spend a lot of
Speaker 2: effort trying to make people afraid, is that it makes
Speaker 2: it harder for you to act. And things that you know,
Speaker 2: the things that make you less afraid, even if they
Speaker 2: sort of seem silly, are very very important. And you know,
Speaker 2: on sort of this note, one of the things that
Speaker 2: you know, as you've assembled your group of people, right,
Speaker 2: one of the things that that's important to be able
Speaker 2: to sort of have a grasp on is that you
Speaker 2: can't just do organizing by having it only be the capital,
Speaker 2: the serious thing, the captialty organizing thing all the time.
Speaker 2: Your organization will not hold together. There has to be
Speaker 2: actual like bonds formed between you and the people you're
Speaker 2: organizing with and the people you're trying to help.
Speaker 1: Hm hmmm. I don't want to call out any organization
Speaker 1: in particular, there is an organization that perceives organizing to
Speaker 1: exist solely in the realm of wearing a high vis
Speaker 1: vest and carrying a clipboard and getting people to write
Speaker 1: their email addresses down and then telling them to attend things.
Speaker 1: And like maybe there are several organizations like that. I
Speaker 1: don't know, I've just I've perceived one locally. If you
Speaker 1: don't have those bonds that, like, those interpersonal relationships, like
Speaker 1: these things won't hang together. Like yeah, So many of
Speaker 1: my happiest organizing memories, like again going down Jen's memory lane,
Speaker 1: I guess I have a memory of like Christmas Eve
Speaker 1: last year twenty twenty three, me and my friends have
Speaker 1: been out. I know some of them listen because some
Speaker 1: of them have come across from different states to help us,
Speaker 1: or at Christmas Holidays, which is nice, and it was
Speaker 1: cold and we had been feeding people all day and
Speaker 1: then we'd heard some people in another location that we'd
Speaker 1: gone to find, and then we got to the end
Speaker 1: of the day, and like, rather than just going home,
Speaker 1: I had a bunch of we had some MRIs left.
Speaker 1: Refugemri is sort of vegan. Lots of us are vegan, so
Speaker 1: we were like, we're not going to find any other
Speaker 1: vegan food in the middle of nowhere out here, so
Speaker 1: we'll set around eating the vegan MRIs and like just
Speaker 1: talking and like sharing some thoughts and things we experience
Speaker 1: over the last months of doing this, And like, it's
Speaker 1: those moments that make you're organizing groups so much stronger.
Speaker 1: No one's telling anyone to do anything. You know, there's
Speaker 1: genuine bonds and that the love and friendship we build
Speaker 1: up between each other doing things that are very important.
Speaker 1: Don't overlook the value of those because it's extremely valuable.
Speaker 2: And this is something that I think you can understand
Speaker 2: in your own life pretty easily, where Okay, if a
Speaker 2: random person on the street walks up to you and
Speaker 2: tells you to go do something, are you going to
Speaker 2: do it?
Speaker 1: It's like no, why? No? Probably not, Like I don't.
Speaker 2: Know, maybe it's something like really sort of hey, there's
Speaker 2: children in a burning building. We're going to run in
Speaker 2: and grab them. But like the odds are no you're
Speaker 2: going to ignore them. But if your friend goes and
Speaker 2: tells you to do the same thing, and you know
Speaker 2: you've been friends with them for a long time and
Speaker 2: you really care about them, the odds of you doing
Speaker 2: it are much much higher. And that's that's all organizing is.
Speaker 2: It's finding ways to You have a thing to do,
Speaker 2: and you go talk to people and you ask if
Speaker 2: they want to help you do it. And the stronger
Speaker 2: your relationships are, the more lucky that is to happen.
Speaker 2: And that's why it's very important to do things like
Speaker 2: you know, just like having potlucks, like bringing snacks to meetings.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, and like you know, even if you're doing
Speaker 2: a potluck, it's it's good to you know, you do
Speaker 2: like one capital capital T organizing thing, right, You get
Speaker 2: like a little bit of work done, but mostly everyone's
Speaker 2: just sort of relaxing and eating chili or whatever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you're a baker, you know you can base people.
Speaker 1: It's a wonderful thing to shut god. Yes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and just knowing how to cook. I realized I
Speaker 2: forgot to mention this one. Knowing how to cook is
Speaker 2: a staggeringly useful skill, and it's useful in literally every
Speaker 2: literally any kind of organizing you could possibly be, and
Speaker 2: it is a thing. It is a skill that is
Speaker 2: useful in like it's useful in war zones. It's useful
Speaker 2: like literally no matter what organization you are in, if
Speaker 2: you can cook for people, oh yeah, and you don't
Speaker 2: even and you don't have to be like a good cook.
Speaker 2: It's just like you can show up with food that
Speaker 2: you have made. You have instantly made this whole thing
Speaker 2: more successful.
Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely, Like I've had some wonderful meals in war zones,
Speaker 1: so I deeply appreciated those people. More broadly though, those
Speaker 1: ties like the way we organize without the state. The
Speaker 1: reason I believe that that is the way we should organize,
Speaker 1: the way we will continue to organize in a way
Speaker 1: that we can make the state irrelevant is because we
Speaker 1: understand each other as people and care about each other
Speaker 1: as people, and then we approach our organizing holistically, right
Speaker 1: with everyone in it, knowing this person is good at this,
Speaker 1: but they're struggling with this right now, and I care
Speaker 1: about them, so I'm not going to make them do
Speaker 1: that right now. That is how we can build sustainable
Speaker 1: communities in a way that state cannot and in a
Speaker 1: way that capitalism cannot right because fucking hurts rent a
Speaker 1: car doesn't care or know about its employees in a
Speaker 1: way that we who organize with people and care and
Speaker 1: love one another do, And like that's why our organizations
Speaker 1: will always be stronger than those created by capitalism on
Speaker 1: the state.
Speaker 2: Yeah, unfortunately, speaking of capitalism of the state, we're taking
Speaker 2: our last ad break.
Speaker 1: We're doing it. Yeah, hopefully it's hurts Rentica. We are back.
Speaker 2: So I want to wrap things up by doing a
Speaker 2: couple of doing a few things. I want to talk
Speaker 2: about some kind of basic organizing things that you're going
Speaker 2: to have to do that are not very difficult but
Speaker 2: are extremely important. And second, I want to talk a
Speaker 2: bit about how we did the first organizing project that
Speaker 2: I ever was involved in, which was tenants organizing, Because
Speaker 2: it's really not that hard, right, you just go do
Speaker 2: the thing, it will happen. Yeah, and suddenly it ceases
Speaker 2: to be this like, oh, this domain of expert knowledge,
Speaker 2: and there's like, oh, this is a really difficult thing.
Speaker 2: If you just I don't know, you go give food
Speaker 2: to someone and suddenly you've done that and it's happened.
Speaker 2: So there are things that are important to like basic
Speaker 2: organizing stuff. Knowing how to book rooms from like churches,
Speaker 2: from libraries, from whatever, meeting spaces, and also knowing how
Speaker 2: to book rooms in places that like accommodate disabilities is
Speaker 2: a huge thing because a lot of people book meetings
Speaker 2: and places are a wheelchair accessible and it's a fucking fiasco.
Speaker 2: And you can avoid that very easily, but you have
Speaker 2: to put a little tiny bit of work into it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Literally, I reached out to a friend to book
Speaker 1: a room last night because I knew the would get
Speaker 1: at that stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, there's arranging people's schedules, getting people show
Speaker 2: up for stuff, things you can do to prepare if
Speaker 2: what you're doing is basically all the things we've been describing,
Speaker 2: right getting to the other a bunch of people to
Speaker 2: do a thing that is technically forming an organization.
Speaker 1: Yea.
Speaker 2: Now, how formal informat you want it to be or
Speaker 2: just you know, maybe it's just your organizing project or whatever.
Speaker 2: There's things you usually want. You want some kind of
Speaker 2: email so people can contact you in tandem with the email.
Speaker 2: Something that's very helpful that I think younger people tend
Speaker 2: not to think about is getting Google Voice yes, when
Speaker 2: Google Voice lets you set up a voicemail account so
Speaker 2: people can call you and leave phone messages. I mean,
Speaker 2: everyone should just do this because this is the way
Speaker 2: that a lot of older people communicate.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: They won't send you an email, but they will leave
Speaker 2: you a voice message. And it's very, very useful for this.
Speaker 2: Childcare is something that's important. I did, I mean a
Speaker 2: lot is probably too strong of a word, but like
Speaker 2: I did childcare what I was organizing, and it wound
Speaker 2: up being really helpful because there's a lot of people
Speaker 2: with kids, and so you know, there's a couple of
Speaker 2: ways that this could work.
Speaker 1: One is that you know, you have everyone bring their kids.
Speaker 2: You have like a little space, you bring them like
Speaker 2: coloring stuff, you bring them toys, you bring them games,
Speaker 2: and you just sort of watch everyone for a while.
Speaker 2: And as an organizing thing. Again, if you're good with
Speaker 2: kid that's very useful staggering or useful organizing skill.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Another way this stuff happens is you know, everyone pulls
Speaker 2: together ten bucks and you hire a babysitter, yeah, for
Speaker 2: a bunch of kids. And that's a very useful organizing
Speaker 2: a thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I organize with people who have kids I remember
Speaker 1: four years ago, fuck me twenty twenty a long time ago,
Speaker 1: and also yesterday, but like we were organizing to feed
Speaker 1: and house people and we were having a big Thanksgiving dinner,
Speaker 1: and like, some of my friends have very young children
Speaker 1: and they bought them, and I think it's actually really
Speaker 1: cool to do that, a like for those kids, it
Speaker 1: is normal that, like we look after people in our community.
Speaker 1: This is what we do, and ever since I've been little,
Speaker 1: this is what we did. And like it's also very
Speaker 1: nice for people. Like a lot of my friends also
Speaker 1: bought their children down to the border, especially last year
Speaker 1: when we had because there were children there anyway, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: some of my friends who bring their children down and
Speaker 1: their kids would play the other kids, and like it
Speaker 1: doesn't matter that some of the kids are Kurdition and
Speaker 1: some of the kids are from China and some of
Speaker 1: them are from Columbia or whatever. They'll get along just fine.
Speaker 1: When they're four or five years old. They don't care.
Speaker 1: They just want to kick a ball or see a
Speaker 1: Teddy Bear or something. And I think it's really good
Speaker 1: for your children to you know, you're bringing them into
Speaker 1: a world which is cruel and at times unequal and
Speaker 1: like your kids seeing that, like we can make a
Speaker 1: difference and we can do this. I think it's one
Speaker 1: of the best educations you can give your children.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's something that's good for everyone involved.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, And it's also very I think one of
Speaker 1: the things I see a lot and people are organized
Speaker 1: thing with refugees of the un housed is like they're
Speaker 1: just people, Like you don't need to be afraid of them,
Speaker 1: Like they don't want to hurt your children, And having
Speaker 1: your children around shows that, like you have grasped they're
Speaker 1: just people, and that you feel safe and your children
Speaker 1: are safe around them. And I think that that's valuable too.
Speaker 1: You're giving both parties some dignity in that moment. Yeah.
Speaker 2: There are some other fair basic things that I think
Speaker 2: are very important. If you've never done this before, I'm
Speaker 2: going to talk a little bit about how you run
Speaker 2: a meeting. Yeah, And you would think that this doesn't matter,
Speaker 2: and until you watch a group of one hundred people
Speaker 2: who don't know how to do this attempt to get
Speaker 2: anything done and they it just is a fiasco. And
Speaker 2: this is even true of sort of smaller groups.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So I'm going to give you how to run a
Speaker 2: meeting one oh one, Okay. A very common way to
Speaker 2: organize meetings that people use all over the world and
Speaker 2: it's very effective is you have two things. You have
Speaker 2: an agenda and you have a stack, and those are
Speaker 2: like the technical terms for them. The agenda, I mean,
Speaker 2: is an agenda, right? You know what an agenda is.
Speaker 2: You put the things that you need to do on it.
Speaker 2: And another thing that's very helpful with these is you
Speaker 2: know you're going to be operating at our time constraints
Speaker 2: because people don't have forty five hours to.
Speaker 1: Be in meetings, and my god, you don't want to
Speaker 1: be in a meeting.
Speaker 2: For that long. Yeah, you know. Knowing how long roughly
Speaker 2: you want to talk about these things is very very
Speaker 2: useful and making sure that you're moving the conversation through
Speaker 2: the stuff on the agenda because you have more stuff
Speaker 2: you need to talk about. All of this again, like
Speaker 2: this all sounds very obvious, and again, you know how
Speaker 2: to do it, but until you've been in a room
Speaker 2: where people have not realize they need to do this,
Speaker 2: you don't understand how I.
Speaker 1: Put on Yet it's the pain of it not happening. God,
Speaker 1: I have watched rooms full of like science. These are
Speaker 1: like professional scientists.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: This is an entire room of one hundred.
Speaker 2: Feet of people with physics PhDs who don't know how
Speaker 2: to run a meeting, and it's a shit show. And
Speaker 2: all of this stuff could have been avoided with with
Speaker 2: some very very simple things. Yes, the other thing, and
Speaker 2: this is genuinely a piece of social technology, right, it
Speaker 2: is the stack. It is very simple, right. You have
Speaker 2: one person who is the stack keeper, and whatsone wants
Speaker 2: to talk? You have one person talking at a time,
Speaker 2: and what someone wants to talk, they raise their hand,
Speaker 2: they make some kind of signal to the stack keeper,
Speaker 2: and that person writes their name down. And so you
Speaker 2: now have a list of who gets to talk in
Speaker 2: what order. And so you go down the list and
Speaker 2: people get the say things, and again you know how.
Speaker 1: To do this.
Speaker 2: This is not like a complicated thing. But again I
Speaker 2: have one watch people who collectively have like more PhDs
Speaker 2: than like I earn money in a week, Like who know,
Speaker 2: I could not.
Speaker 1: Be able to pick this out, and you do. I
Speaker 1: believe in you. I believe in you, dear listener, that
Speaker 1: you could do this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a very common Sometimes this is one person
Speaker 2: and sometimes.
Speaker 1: This is two people.
Speaker 2: A very common way to do it is to have
Speaker 2: a stack taker and then have someone who's the facilitator.
Speaker 2: And the facilitator's job is to like call on the
Speaker 2: people and to try to like move the conversation forwards
Speaker 2: and get and make sure make sure everyone's involved. And
Speaker 2: also another important part of this, and this is again
Speaker 2: something you'll you'll know from your stupid work meetings, is
Speaker 2: you have to get people like me to shut up.
Speaker 2: Your meetings can't just be one person giving a speech.
Speaker 2: You have to cut them the fuck off, and you
Speaker 2: have to get to the next person.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and doing that courteously is a skill. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And finally, on this note, there's a lot of if
Speaker 2: you want to go into the like more technical stuff.
Speaker 2: Part of the things that facilitators use in part of
Speaker 2: you know, the formal name for this is like the
Speaker 2: progressive stack, but it's just a thing that's very useful
Speaker 2: in organizing is you want to make sure everyone in
Speaker 2: a room is engaged and talking and that it's not
Speaker 2: just three people who talk all the time. And you know,
Speaker 2: and so the idea of the progressive stack, right is
Speaker 2: you're trying to find the most marginalized people in degrees,
Speaker 2: people who are least likely to speak, and you're trying
Speaker 2: to get them in first. And sometimes this is literally
Speaker 2: just like, hey, someone hasn't been talking in a meeting
Speaker 2: this whole time, and you can like ask them what
Speaker 2: they think about something, or asked if they have anything
Speaker 2: to say, and a lot of times they will, but
Speaker 2: they just don't feel confident enough to say it. And
Speaker 2: this is a very very important skill for a facilitator
Speaker 2: or just even you could just do this in a
Speaker 2: meeting too, right, Like you can be the person who
Speaker 2: goes like, hey, do you have this this person have
Speaker 2: anything to contribute? And that is an enormous thing. Sometimes
Speaker 2: it can be you know, sometimes it can be a
Speaker 2: little bit awkward, but it's a very important thing because
Speaker 2: you're just losing out on people who have really really
Speaker 2: valuable ideas and contributions and plans, and if you just
Speaker 2: let the same three people give speeches, you can't get
Speaker 2: to the stuff that's actually useful.
Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely, if you've been a teacher or in any
Speaker 1: way what you know, you probably have had you have
Speaker 1: this skill. You might not consider it as skill. But
Speaker 1: even if you've been a TA in grad school something
Speaker 1: like that. You probably know how to do this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I'm gonna put all of this together one briefly,
Speaker 2: and I'm going to run through basically how we started
Speaker 2: the first organizing project I ever day, which was a
Speaker 2: tenants union in Chicago. Okay, so this is based on
Speaker 2: my memory. It's been a long time since I did this,
Speaker 2: but my basic memory of what we did was. Okay,
Speaker 2: So one of my friends is an experienced organizer. I
Speaker 2: was like a tiny baby, right this this was my
Speaker 2: first offline organizing project ever.
Speaker 1: Right, I had no idea what was doing. I so
Speaker 1: thought I was a guy.
Speaker 2: Which like that, that's how much of a fiasco, Like
Speaker 2: little tiny baby bea who doesn't know anything?
Speaker 1: This was, you know.
Speaker 2: And so my friend talked to some people that he knew,
Speaker 2: and he knew that I, you know, I was interested
Speaker 2: in getting involved in tennis organizing, and we we like
Speaker 2: went to a cafe and we sat down and we
Speaker 2: ate and we just talked about what we wanted to do,
Speaker 2: what our plans were, what things we needed to do
Speaker 2: to get this organization set up. We talked about ideological
Speaker 2: stuff and that's actually is something that's important too, is
Speaker 2: part of organizing is getting people to think intentionally about
Speaker 2: their actions and think politically about their actions. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: that's something that's very useful. You also have to make
Speaker 2: sure that you're not forming a book club, Like book
Speaker 2: clubs are fine, but you need to make sure you're
Speaker 2: organizing group. If you're trying to do a thing, has
Speaker 2: it just become a book club. But that that's you
Speaker 2: know that that was something that was very useful to us.
Speaker 2: And you know, we started making a plan, and our
Speaker 2: plan was, okay, we made a bunch of flyers and
Speaker 2: then we went out and I did this and I
Speaker 2: walked around through a bunch of streets and put them
Speaker 2: a light post or whatever, and then we put them
Speaker 2: like we hung them up in the buildings of tenants,
Speaker 2: you know, because you can just like walk up the
Speaker 2: stairs right and you just put them on the walls.
Speaker 2: And you know, we had this flyer, this firehead information.
Speaker 2: This flyer said, Okay, we're starting a tenant's union. If
Speaker 2: you have tenant, if you have issues with your landlord,
Speaker 2: or you want to talk about tenants stuff like, come here.
Speaker 2: At this time, we had an email you can send
Speaker 2: us stuff. We had a phone number that you could call,
Speaker 2: you know, and so okay, and so parallel to this,
Speaker 2: we like, I forget if it was a church or
Speaker 2: if it was some building, some center or something. We
Speaker 2: booked a room. We were kind of lucky and that
Speaker 2: we had like local press people nice who we sort
Speaker 2: of knew. And this is another useful like if knowing
Speaker 2: a journalist can be a very useful skill, because one
Speaker 2: way to get a project off the ground, if you're
Speaker 2: trying to get to a bunch of people, is by
Speaker 2: finding a journalist who is willing to cover it. Because
Speaker 2: you know, we're we're finding founding like the first tenants
Speaker 2: union in this place, right yeah, and you know, so
Speaker 2: we had media coverage and we got kind of screwed
Speaker 2: when this event eventually came together because there was like
Speaker 2: three feet of snow that night, but people still came,
Speaker 2: like people still came in the blizzard, Like a lot
Speaker 2: of people showed up for this.
Speaker 1: What are things that we do?
Speaker 2: We also, like, you know, we just we just started
Speaker 2: talking to people, right, We started talking to tenants about
Speaker 2: their problems. We just you know, we talked to our friends,
Speaker 2: we talked to the people they knew. We ended up
Speaker 2: talking to someone, you know, and this is the thing
Speaker 2: that just happens as is spreads by word of mouth, right,
Speaker 2: people start contacting you. We ran into a really long
Speaker 2: time tenants organizer in the city who had a bunch
Speaker 2: of incredible stories about how our corrupt politicians got their
Speaker 2: jobs by portraying the old tenants' organizers, right, And like
Speaker 2: that's the thing is you know, another thing that happens
Speaker 2: in projects is you'll you'll sometimes you'll just you'll just
Speaker 2: pick up someone who's you know, has been doing this
Speaker 2: since like the sixties. Yeah, and it rules because they
Speaker 2: have a wealth of experience and they want to do stuff.
Speaker 2: We plotted out what we were going to do at
Speaker 2: our meeting, you know, we were going to do some
Speaker 2: political education. We were gonna have a bunch of time
Speaker 2: for people to talk about stuff, and we were gonna,
Speaker 2: you know, get get people to understand what we were
Speaker 2: doing how they can start organizing.
Speaker 1: And then we did it, and.
Speaker 2: I unfortunately don't remember much of what we talked about
Speaker 2: because I was often in another room taking care of
Speaker 2: a bunch of people's kids, which is very nice, but
Speaker 2: I don't I don't remember what we talked about. But
Speaker 2: like that, you know, but like all of those things, right,
Speaker 2: all of those steps from the start of you get
Speaker 2: five of your friends to go eat dinner and you
Speaker 2: talk about what you want to do through someone makes
Speaker 2: a flyer in like Microsoft or whatever. You make it
Speaker 2: in like PowerPoint p M, that's publisher, what's what's what's
Speaker 2: the one I'm blinking, I haven't used it in so long?
Speaker 2: The one you make greeting cards in I really program
Speaker 2: and I've forgotten what it is you see this to
Speaker 2: make Christmas cards? But like, you know, okay, so we
Speaker 2: made a flyer and then we walked around and put
Speaker 2: the flyers up and we made it. We made an email,
Speaker 2: you know, we got a space together, we figured out
Speaker 2: what we wanted to do, and then we did it,
Speaker 2: and you know, and there's a bunch of organizing from there, right,
Speaker 2: But like we had started a thing, and you can
Speaker 2: do every single one of those steps. And if you
Speaker 2: can't personally do one of those steps, you can think
Speaker 2: of a person who you know, who you can bring
Speaker 2: in to help you do these things. Because organizing you
Speaker 2: already fucking know how to do it. Yeah, you just
Speaker 2: have to go out there.
Speaker 1: And do it. Yep, you can have faith, Yeah, and
Speaker 1: this has been It can happen here?
Speaker 2: Go organize.
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