Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 2

Episode Date: September 25, 2021

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now, with the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. When's the last time you took a time out? I'm Eve Rodzky, author of the New York Times bestseller, Fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space, activist on the Gender Division of Labor, attorney, and family mediator. And I'm Dr. Edidina Rukar, a Harvard physician and medical correspondent with an expertise in the science of stress, resilience, mental health, and burnout.

We're so excited to share our podcast, Time Out, a production of iHeart podcasts and Hello, Sunshine. Repealing back the layers around why society makes it so easy to guard men's time like it's diamonds and treat women's time like it's infinite, like sand. And so whether you're partnered with or without children or in a career where you want more boundaries, this is the place for you, for people of all family structures. So take this time out with us to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, reclaim your time. Listen to Time Out, a fair play podcast on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Colleen Witt. Join me, the host of Eating While Broke podcast, while I eat a meal created by self-made entrepreneurs, influencers,

and celebrities over a meal they once ate when they were broke. Today, I have the lovely AJ Crimson, the official princess of Compton, Asia, Kid Ink, and Asya. This is the professor. We're here on Eating While Broke, and today I'm going to break down my meal that got me through a time when I was broke. Listen to Eating While Broke on the iHeart radio app, on Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Executive producer Paris Hilton brings back the hit podcast, How Men Think, and that's good news for anyone that is confused by men, which is basically everyone. It's real talk, straight from the source. The How Men Think podcast is exactly what we need to figure them out. It's going to be fun, informative, and probably a bit scary at times, because we're

literally going inside the minds of men. Listen to How Men Think on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. Every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the show where I had to change the introduction because Sophie said it would confuse people. So now we're just doing the boring thing and saying the actual name of the show, which is It Could Happen Here.

It's a show about the fact that the society's kind of falling apart or changing depending on your perspective of things, and people need to prepare for what's coming, which is a world of greater instability and economic collapse and rising authoritarianism and increasing fights in order to reverse and stymie all of those terrible things. And one of the things I've seen in some early feedback from other stuff I've done on other shows and also from earlier episodes of This Is People Who Will Go, like, hey, everything you're saying about mutual aid is rad, but I live in X-Town in whatever state, and there's nothing here. There's not an organized left. I don't know of any mutual aid groups. How can I get involved? Or how could I start my own organization and try

to get people involved? And then another thing we get asked a lot is, like, hey, what you're saying about building resiliency and preparing for difficult times, gardening and whatnot sounds great, but I'm poor as shit, and I live in a tiny apartment or whatever. I have no resources or no room, even if you're not enough money, like I'm in the middle of some horribly dense city. So this week, we're going to be talking around those subjects in a number of different ways. And to kind of kick us off, I've got, of course, Garrison with me. We'll come up at 9 in the morning. How are you doing, Garrison? Ungodly early. Yeah, it's hideous. It's hideous. And then Margaret Killjoy, who's up at a much more reasonable hour because time zones are a wild ass thing. Margaret,

how do we introduce you? You're an author. You're a writer of fiction. You host a podcast called Live Like the World is Dying, right? And you've had me on, and you talk about a lot of the same things we talk about, and it could happen here. We're actually shamelessly stealing your podcast in order to make it corporate and sold out. How are you doing, Margaret? I'm excited to be part of the corporate sold out version of my own podcast. And actually, very glad that you all do a wider audience thing. But I think that is a decent way to introduce me. I do a lot of different things, and I've been doing also organizing and trying to seek radical political change for about 20 years to various degrees of success. Actually, mostly not to any success because we actually

still live in maybe a worse society than we were in 2002. 20 years ago. Yeah. I tell people that I dropped out of college to ride freight trains and overthrow the government, and I wasn't good at either of those things. I mean, you have all your limbs. That's true. I do have all of my limbs. Yeah. And I'm not in prison. And you're not in prison, which is really all anyone can ask of the universe. So you have started a number of organizations in your career as an activist and kind of that hat. And I guess let's start with like, yeah, somebody who lives in a place, there's no kind of really, really organized left. There's probably not in a lot of these places much of even like a democratic party. There's certainly not mutual aid efforts. And I do think that there's a,

well, mutual aid as a concept is pretty firmly rooted in anarchism. There's mutual aid kind of organizations that are not particularly leftist or at least people doing stuff like that. Like, I think a good recent example would be the Cajun Navy who did a lot of rescues after the most recent set of hurricanes, where certainly not a left or an anarchist organization, but a lot of what they're doing is a community aiding itself. So I don't know, where do we, where do you want to start here? Well, I guess to, I mean, specifically in disaster times, you don't necessarily work with the people that you would assume that you're expecting to work with. And, you know, one of the, one of the stories that really sticks with me is like a friend of mine who's this, you know,

you know, train riding anarchists with covered in tattoos and, and all of that. And during flood relief in eastern North Carolina was like flying into storms and small planes with libertarians, because the people who are willing to fly small planes into storms and own planes tend to be the more libertarian side of things. And so here's anarchists and libertarians working together to get people what they need. And one of the things that I try, because this is one of the biggest questions I think that the left faces, and you know, people trying to make the world better faces is how do we get people involved? And also how do people get involved if no one's helping them get involved? And I don't have all the answers about it, but it's something that I

think about obsessively some a lot. And one of the things that I really try and focus on with people is as people say, well, I want to be prepared. And you talk about community being a very important part of preparedness, but I don't feel like I have a community because we live in a very isolated society. And one of the main things I try and remind people, though, is that in the same way that property relations break down, like someone's like, oh, I don't have any stuff. And if the apocalypse comes, what will I do? And like, well, kind of the answer is that like once property relations break down, there's a lot of stuff, and it's very helpful. There will be much stuff around. Yeah, like warehouses exist, full of stuff.

Yeah, Amazon warehouses are going to become like fun boxes. Yeah, exactly slash fortified outposts allegedly. Yeah. Yeah. And community is the same way, not that you would go raid community, but instead that some people. Yeah, it's true. But you can you can create community in times of crisis in a way that's actually harder to do when the existing social order exists. And the the the thing I always say uses my my dumb example of this about how people come together during times of crisis is, you know, when I'm waiting for the bus and, you know, some city or something, no one talks to each other if you don't know each other until the bus is like five minutes late. And then everyone is comparing

notes about where they think they saw the bus last and everyone's friends and sharing snacks and things, you know. So on some ways, I'm like, be optimistic if you don't already know a community. Yeah. And I think there's also things you can do that don't necessarily cost a lot of money to both kind of build resiliency and kind of community connections. Now, one of those things, I've had a lot of friends in different cities work for there will be different farming co-ops, right? And generally, the arrangement is you volunteer some sort of time helping them with, you know, there's a lot of shit work on farms. And in return, you generally get some amount of produce or whatever. But really, what you're getting is practical experience, growing food,

and you're meeting the kind of people who are interested in growing their own food. And, you know, those kind of connections can be really helpful when things get worse. And so I think it doesn't necessarily, it doesn't have to cost much to try building community now or to at least try putting yourself in some of the spaces where the kind of people you might want to be in the kind of people you might want to know when things get worse might be. Yeah. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of opportunities. The world kind of wants you to volunteer. You know, there's all of these things that if you reach out to people and you're like, hey, I don't have any connections, but I'm interested in volunteering. There are types

of organizations that do interesting things that are open to that. You know, I kind of, maybe it's terrible, but whenever my friends, especially my friends who are in their 20s or something who don't really feel kind of lost and without direction for a while, I'm like, yeah, go sit in a tree, like go join direct action environmentalist groups that are desperate for people to come live their lives in this like self sustaining community that is incredibly traumatic and hard to do. And I don't necessarily recommend this to everybody, but you know, it's a thing that you can do is that you can go participate in different movements, some of which do want strangers, you know, some of which don't, right? You can't show up to everything and be

like, why aren't you including me? You're a bunch of assholes. Yeah. And I don't know. So when it comes to actually like trying to start something like like going out and accepting, okay, there's not maybe I can't I can't leave my family behind and go do a tree sit, but I would like to, you know, start a community engaging in something direct. Maybe that's not illegal direct action. Maybe it is. That's none of my business. How do you recommend people just kind of start organizations, find people, avoid pitfalls? Like, you know, if you've got to make your own mutual aid group, because there's not one in your town, and you you want to, I mean, people have expressed a desire to to understand how to do that. So I'm, you know, I've never I'm not an organizer. I'm

barely a journalist. I am curious for your thoughts on that. Well, okay, so as my own caveat is I'm no longer an organizer. I spent much of my 20s being part of organizations. And then I finally realized that I can just kind of do whatever I want and then figure out how to plug that into other people's things. But I will say the the main way I've heard this expressed and I believe in is that we should do if you want to start getting involved is you think about what you're good at and or you think about what you want to be good at. And then you think about the problems that you're facing. And then you think about how to apply what you're good at to the the problems that you're facing. So if you're sitting there and you're like, Well, I'm a I'm a really good illustrator.

Right. I'm not I'm a terrible illustrator. But let's say you're a good illustrator. And then you you could basically reach out to organizations that maybe aren't even close and be like, Hey, I'm an illustrator. Is there anything I can do for you? Well, but if what you want to do is start an organization locally, it's okay to start small and build up. It's okay to, you know, it's kind of a if you build it, they will come kind of thing in general. Like if you start, if you figure out what you need to do, you know, we want to distribute supplies, right? Then you just do it. Like you just, even if you start by yourself, or ideally, you kind of start with yourself and a couple friends that you drag into it. And then you see what gets inertia, like rather than like

forcing rather than starting off, don't start off by writing your bylaws. You know, maybe start with an idea of like, if you have a cool name that you want to use, like, sometimes that's great to like start with like a hook and like starting a band or something, you know, you start with like the thing that brings everyone together, which is sometimes a clever name, but but mostly you just start by doing it. And, you know, one of the one of the ways that's longest standing that people can get involved with locally or start locally, and there's a lot of resources about how to do it is, is Food Not Bombs Food Not Bombs is a mutual aid project that's existed. And I wish I knew off the top of my head since when I want to say the late 70s, but I really couldn't

tell you. And it's just food, it's just organizing food to give to people in public. And it's actually wild how illegal it is in some places, like, people get arrested for Food Not Bombs all the time in Florida and a couple other places. But yeah, we talked about them in the first part of the season, because there've been a couple of, I don't think nationally the FBI has talked about them as a terror threat, but like in the Austin field office and I think one or two other places they've been like discussed as a terrorist threat for handing out food. I've had like helicopters flying overhead and like riots around the corner and stuff for handing out food with Food Not Bombs. Yeah, it's a, they missed the second half of the name, I guess. I don't know. I don't know. I think

maybe if we were to create bombs not food, we might not get as much police attention, but that's just a theory. Yeah. Well, what everyone says is that we need food and no one says this, no one would ever say this, no one would ever believe this, but we need food and bombs. You know what? Food and bombs. Yeah. Bombs for some food for others, we don't judge, we provide explosives and we provide food. Yeah. Okay, so if you can, I think if you can, you start by working, you figure out what you're good at, you find a group of people that are interested in accomplishing the same thing who maybe have similar skill sets or different skill sets and you figure out what you can do and you start doing it and you organize calling people

and being like, Hey, will you donate to us or getting all your friends together to give you stuff to redistribute or whatever, right? Putting out calls on social media for things to redistribute, you know, most structures start grassroots and most of the time they kind of tend to do best when they're grassroots instead of becoming a little more codified. So if possible, do that. But if you're just you, sometimes tying into existing organizations is a thing worth doing. And if there's nothing locally, you can look at things a little further away, or you can look at things that are on maybe on a national level. But there's a lot of dangers in joining existing organizations and structures. And I guess, I guess I would say there's like three types of

danger. And one is that you talk about all the time. And thanks for bringing into the leftist vocabulary, the word grifter, I never heard anyone use the word grifter until your podcasts. It's the most important word in American English, for sure. We live in a fucking grifter republic. It's incredible. And we always have this isn't new. Yeah. But we need more words because we also need the word for people who are looking for useful idiots. Yeah. And there's a lot of social movements. And not to be like, I support the left. I think that what we're attempting to do is very worthwhile. And I like us more than the other side by a fair amount. But there's a lot of things that there's a lot of problems with the left. And one of them

is that people are looking either to just have you as a body with no decision making power and no autonomy, which doesn't actually build a better world because you're just stop being a cog in their machine and become a cog in our machine, right? And then there's also people who are kind of looking for useful idiots, can and fodder, like people to hang around while they while they do stuff or, you know, and I don't want to go too hard bodies to stand out in front of cop shops sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. And even like, you know, even like movements that I really care about that might do a lot of like non violence, civil disobedience, although I don't have I'm not particularly I'm not a pacifist personally, but you know, it's a very useful strategy,

non violence, civil disobedience. But sometimes they're like, Oh, you're young and new, lock yourself to this thing, get arrested. And I would definitely say to people, don't get arrested on purpose at your first actions. Like, yeah, be anyone else's can and fodder until you feel like you are part of the decision making and part of like, like you really matter and like, then then don't do dangerous things for other people's projects. Yeah. Like the the shit that states do that's so messed up is is turn human bodies into resources that then get sacrificed for unclear ends. Yeah. And unless you feel like you have some sort of, like, there are times where being arrested is necessary and helpful, but unless unless you feel you fully understand

not just why you're doing it, but also that like, you you you're not being told to do it, you have autonomy and like, I'm going to do this thing that I know will end in my arrest because I like, I don't know, that's probably like, I think most people in that position know this, but I definitely have encountered some uncomfortable situations in the past, I'm sure similar to once you have where it did seem like people were kind of being pushed to take that risk for reasons they didn't fully understand or in a situation they didn't fully grok, you know. Yeah. Which which gets at one of the things that when I talk about how I think this is the biggest problem we've not not the cannon fodder issue, but the getting people involved is the biggest

issue I think we currently face because there's so many people who want to be involved right now because the world is even worse than usual. And yeah. And it's hitting groups of people who haven't been hit by both before. And people are often also looking for a sense of community. And there's a thing that people we don't talk about enough when people are getting involved. There's two different reasons people get involved and both are entirely valid. And one is to fix things. And another is to find to break out of the isolation that they live in in their daily lives. And we need to be aware of that when we talk about how to onboard people. And we need to be aware about that. If you are getting involved, you should think about your own desires. Are you

looking for community? And if so, you can find it within radical action, right? But if you are doing that, then you especially need to be on guard against peer pressure, because it's a really easy way to feel like you're involved with things is to go hang out with people who are all doing a really scary thing. And and that's beautiful. And I absolutely did that when I when I first got involved in anarchism, I and politics in general, I joined in headfirst and, you know, spent a night in jail within the first couple months. And I don't have any particular regrets about that. And I found community in a way that I had never had in my life because of how isolated our society is. But that's not the only reason to to go do these

things. Yeah. And that is I mean, I think a lot of people experienced that last year during the George Floyd protests is the kind of I mean, it's a thing we've talked about on in the first season, if it could happen here, that times like that, the war does this too, can actually provide meaning that that people have lacked. And a lot of it is that community that like community of sufferers, the trauma bonding, that feels like the most important thing, because maybe it is the most important thing you've ever done, I think in a lot of cases it is. But that's also mind altering. And it can lead to situations that are not entirely dissimilar to Colts. I'm not saying that they are Colts, because Colts are number one with Colt, there's generally going to be like a

leader and such. But like there are things that happen that that draw people into Colts that are just human things. There are aspects in some cases, as I've said before, of like a good party. But there are like aspects to the kind of groups that form in these traumatic situations that can lead people to start making really poor decisions. And so you have to really, you always have to be kind of analyzing not just what you're doing, but what's going on in your own head and the heads of the people around you. That's just always important. But I think particularly when you're trying to do something new and different in a lot of ways bigger than anything you've done before. I don't know, do you have any specific advice for like kind of avoiding

the Colts of personality that sometimes form in new organizations? Yeah. So you have both informal and formal structures can both cause problems with Colt of personality. There are these brilliant essays that I haven't read in like 20 years that come from the feminist movement. And one of them is called the tyranny of structuralistness. And as best as I remember it, these are very short essays, as best as I remember it, the tyranny of structuralistness says if you don't have a formal structure in your organization, you're going to have this informal leader who basically tells everyone what to do. And that's a problem. And, and is a very important piece. And I believe it comes from a Marxist feminist

perspective, but I'm not 100% certain. And then there was an anarchist feminist response around the same time, maybe I'm not sure, called the tyranny of tyranny. That was like, yes, that's true. And also, when you have a formal structure and put someone in charge, they're in charge and that has other problems too. And I think that it just, we have to be aware of both of these things that, you know, the fact that most movements are very decentralized in grassroots has huge advantages, right? But it does have problems of causing informal and Colt of personality. Podcasting is a big part of this problem. And actually, I really appreciate that you're not an organizer, like, frankly, and it's part of why I'm not an organizer

on some level is because when people read the books that someone writes or listen to someone's voice all the time, it is very influential, right? And being aware of that and therefore not exerting that power is a very good thing. And, but there's okay, so the other thing, like when I worry about like people getting involved with like, don't get peer pressured into stuff when you first join, there's also this thing that is needs to be talked about. And maybe I've talked about this some previously, but entrapment, entrapment is a huge problem. And specifically, the feds tend to look for young idealist activists who can be peer pressured into actions that they may or may not have otherwise ideologically agreed with like,

hey, let's go blow up a bridge or let's go blow up a dam. And, and this doesn't just happen to the left, it happens. Oh, yeah, it's all around. Yeah, for sure. Like, there's that case of the guys who are trying to kidnap the governor of a, was it Michigan? A lot of that was informants who were, there's a lot of there's you can debate heavily whether or not it was entrapment. Obviously, we might consider entrapment morally often isn't entrapment legally, because the FBI does know where the lines are legally, but that doesn't mean it isn't morally entrapment. Yeah, right. And they do that a lot. And they usually succeed. Well, they may not usually succeed at the, they usually succeed at the case and entrapment defenses are hard to succeed with. And so,

really, just like and thinking about, I think developing your own moral compass and sticking to it is one of the single most important things that a new activist can can do. And not to be afraid of radical action necessarily like militant action, but, but be wary of it. But then again, I mean, in terms of like, being wary of what the other thing to avoid doing is like accusing each other like fed jacketing, like being like, Oh, well, that person's doing the same thing a fed might do like wink wink, you know, it's a really complicated and annoying game to play. And if you're just getting involved, you're going to have to learn how to get it play this game of not fed jacketing, and also not falling into stuff. And it's annoying because you probably

have to kind of learn some of the stuff, even if all you want to do is give away blankets, you know, if you want to tie what you're doing to a larger ideological structure, then it's going to come up that you need to be aware of how repression applies to that larger ideological structure. Yeah, like all this is very useful, specifically, if you're trying to find something kind of pre existing, or, you know, looking at or, you know, starting something in a bigger city where you have like connections can be made to other existing organizations. And I'm trying to think, you know, there's a lot of people who live in more like rural areas, it's not much of like a liberal or like, you know, especially leftist kind of subculture.

How would, how would you recommend people who live in those kinds of scenarios try to start building this community when say like they only have like a few friends? What, what steps do you think people can take if they have more, you know, a secluded setup? So it is harder, and I live in a red area close to a blue area, right, and I do most of my organizing and as much as I do organizing within the, the nearby small hippie city, even though theoretically, the thing that I care the most about is connections to my immediate neighbors, right? That is harder, and it is harder for a lot of different reasons, especially if you have cultural differences between you and the people that you're around, right, like,

I'm a trans woman, and I've lived around a lot of like farms and stuff, right? And, and previously, this wasn't a problem. Before Trump, this was kind of just wasn't a problem. After Trump, now all of a sudden, the fact that I'm trans is like an attack against people in a way that never used to be. And, and so now they, they all have an opinion about the fact that I'm wearing a dress. But still at the end of the day, I would say that most of the people that I'm around aren't actually totally chill. Like there's a vocal minority of really hard people, right? But even the people who might be, and might have even like voted for Trump or whatever, are not necessarily, at least along my own identity lines, I'm also white,

are not necessarily going to give me shit. And, you know, I can go talk to them in a dress, and they might be sort of confused and they might not be. But if you have more culturally in common with the people around you, then there is a lot of room that you can start working on from there. And this actually ties into something that I think applies to people across the board, which is we have this, especially new activists, but also including people who've been in it for a long time, have this like real arrogance about the fact that we're like, right. And when you want to change the world, you need a certain amount of arrogance, you need a certain amount of like, I mean, I literally believe we need to not have a government or capitalism. And these are very

major changes to our existing structure. There's a huge amount of arrogance to that. Although not having a government is slightly less of a major change now than it was a couple years ago. That's true. And also, like something like sometimes, actually, it's funny, I used that at more in common with these neighbors, but then all the libertarians went, God damn, authoritarian. Yeah, that bummed the fuck out of me. Yeah. There's some good ones still. There's like, again, there's the, there's the, there's the taking your private plane into a disaster area libertarians. And God bless them. Totally. And, you know, they're like, they just don't want to, you know, it's like my dad is sort of on the libertarian side of things and keeps $20 bills

in the visor of his truck to give to people flying signs. And he just doesn't want the government redistributing his money. He doesn't mind redistributing his money. Yeah. And I'm like, all right. I don't have any real objection to that. He's also no long anyway. If you come at people with this attitude of like, I'm right and you're wrong, the kind of people that you can get to join your side by saying, I'm right and you're wrong are not the people you want. You want people who challenge authority, including the authority of people who claim there shouldn't be authority. And, and so just actually listening to people and like hearing people out and when possible, avoiding drawing lines between people is one of the main ways to connect with people across

either cultural divides or especially political divides. And this, this can't always happen, right? Like I walked down the street in a dress and someone like called me a bad word. Like I'm not going to be like, I understand why you think to call me that. And I understand how like me dressed this way kind of challenges your sense of masculinity that you've been brought up into as the only way that you can hold yourself strong in a very hard world. No, I don't do that. I scream, fuck you and chase them. I would never chase anyone with a knife. I think that's not legal. So I wouldn't do that. But it, you know, that might work. And, you know, like fuck those people. I don't care what they have to say. No, of course not. And it when I think one of the

things that Twitter brain has done is that like, when you when you talk about reaching out and talking to people who, you know, don't agree with you aren't aren't on your side ideologically, there's folks who will kind of assume like, oh, so you're saying I should like try to be friendly with people who would have murdered me. Like, no, I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that like it's a trans person or a black person, you should go talk to a militant anti LGBT activist or a fucking Klansman or something. I'm saying that like, that's not within the broad, I'm saying what you need to recognize. But what I think is important to recognize, especially if you're, when we talk about like post, you know, collapse or whatever, is that within broad political

tendencies. So I'm not talking about like fascist or whatever, but I'm talking about like liberal, conservative, progressive, very broad political tendencies. You have roughly the same percentage of people who are shit. So in an anarchist group, the amount of people who are shitty is going to be similar to the amount of the general population that are shitty. It's the same with every political tendency. But the corollary to that is again, within broad tendencies, you'll find roughly the same amount of people who are basically rad. And maybe yeah, their brain got poisoned with disinfo and they believe some stupid shit. And they vote like an asshole, but you know, they'll stop their car if they see someone in an accident and they keep a fucking medical kit in

their bag. And you know, it's the shit that, you know, I talk a lot about the stabbing on the Portland Max train. Well, the two people who died confronting that asshole were a Republican retired veteran and a far left social justice activist. And they both, you know, put their bodies on the lines. I think that like when we talk about like being willing to kind of talk with people who are who are not on the same ideological boat as you, that's that's what I mean, not you should make nice with the people who want to exterminate you like fuck those people. Yeah, because the thing you're looking for, the thing I'm looking for is the Republican who's going to hopefully instead of dying a long side mean successfully defeat the, you know,

actual far right person. But yeah, yeah, totally. And, and I think that that actually is part of the it's not always the answer for every person who's isolated, right? Everyone who's socially isolated. But it is part of it if you're trying to organize with people where you say you're the only leftist or the only anarchist in your area, then maybe you don't start and this is actually funny, I'm very into being very public about my political ideology, so that people know what bias is I'm coming into things with. But, but maybe you don't start your rural mutual aid project calling it the rural mutual aid project, or maybe you do or maybe you, you just start doing it and you find people who are willing to have the same goals and means as you. And, and I think you can

do alongside of that, you can also just be really public about what you believe. I mean, you know, again, as an anarchist, I end up working with like, the church groups and things that I don't necessarily agree with on a lot of I, a lot of things. But they're not mad when I'm like, oh, I'm an anarchist, they're just like, huh, okay, I'm a church person or what, you know, and like, okay, I'm not, I don't expect different of them and they don't expect different of me and we, we know what we have in common and what we don't to a certain degree and then we work on what we work on what we have in common. And so airing. And so this is both true if you're within the movement and you're hoping to try and solve this problem for other people. But I also think it's

going to be true for people who are trying to build things in areas where they don't have, where they don't feel like they're part of something larger is airing on the side of inclusion versus exclusion and not and like you're talking about it's about airing on the side of not always include everyone, not always committing to a hard and fast rule. Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, be be open to the fact that people can surprise you in ways that aren't terrifying. Also, because you get terrified enough by enough like people who we think are on your side, that you're like, oh, yeah, I'm sad y'all don't do the ad pivots in this show. Because oh, yeah, no, you can do it. We can do it. We can do it. We can edit. We can edit.

We can cut it in during one of the long, awkward pauses. Go for it. Okay. And we'll keep all this up to it in, but we'll actually cut the actual ad with it. So you'll hear it. It's like Finnegan's Wake. You're going to hear it out of order. Okay. And I hopefully you all be able to figure out the second half of it. But the first the first half is anyone who claims to have all the answers is selling you something. Oh, uh huh. Yeah. Oh, oh, you know, who else is selling you something? Is it the ads? Geico services. Go listen to the Geico Geico or or Jesus, we've had some bad ones lately. There's that SOS Cuba show that sounds we're rough. There was that one that was just like God. It was just like they're selling the concept to Jesus. We are sponsored by God.

I think I've gotten like Walmart and McDonald's on your show before. Well, remember, that's the people's food. Oh, yeah. Organize actually try to organize around the Walmart. That could be very useful. So anyway, here's ads. If someone is trying to start something new inside one of these more secluded areas and like they have decided like, yeah, I'm willing to do something. I'm willing to actually just like start it. How how would you recommend they try to figure out what some of the like biggest needs of the community are that they can actually tackle? Like how does someone find out what to do with their mutual aid because they can like commit like, yeah, I can do something around supplies, something around this, you know, whatever, really

how does one try to actually gauge what is important to try to tackle? I guess it depends on whether you feel like you're totally like if in my head, if I'm totally inside a non aside community, but an area, right? I probably kind of know because I'm also experiencing whatever the thing is. But if I'm if I'm a little bit detached from it, then I do need to like do kind of, you know, the sort of traditional method is I think it's called listening projects. I've never actually personally done a listening project. I've been around many people who do where you basically like, sometimes you go door to door and you're like, Hey, what's up? Like what do you need? Like what's going on? You know, but like say for example, in the area

that I live, there is a rural organizing price, it's not the actual rural organizing project, which is a specific structure, but there is a rural mutual aid group in the largely red area that I live in that's run by by leftists. And they, I think that largely they did a lot of like firewood delivery, for example, because a lot of the areas around here are heated by wood stoves, and you have a lot of poverty in rural areas. And of course, poverty looks very different in rural areas versus urban areas. And, you know, one of the advantages of being rural poor, there's many disadvantages like lack of access to certain types of services, right? But one of the sometimes advantages of rural poverty, as I understand it, I'm not specifically an expert, is you have space,

right? You just don't have stuff or money. And so you can have stuff if people give you stuff. So you can like store your firewood. And so, and then also because it's this very specific, tangible thing, people can get really excited about like, Oh, I can chop firewood, or maybe even I can't chop firewood because my legs busted because I work in the paper mill or whatever. But I can, but I got a trailer on my truck, you know, and I can haul that and people get really excited when there's like things that they specifically are good at, especially things that kind of have alienated them from other people, that they're that they're good at, that they can then participate in. And so, which doesn't totally answer your question, but I would say if anyone specifically

is in a rural situation is looking to start a mutual aid group, look at the rural organizing project. Yes, I don't believe that they specifically do rural mutual aid organizing, but they talk a lot about what it means to be an organizer within areas that are largely controlled by the far right, but are not. It's not like the people are all far right, they're just controlled by the far right, you know, yeah, the people actually there. Once you talk to them might actually be a lot more reasonable than like the media influencers who are part of this, you know, same thing. Yeah. And it is one of those things. This is a topic we're drifting to, but it's when we drift to regularly on this show, we're like, when I talk with conservatives, it's not uncommon

that I can without, especially if I don't start by mentioning anarchy, I can get them to agree to a lot of the things I believe, which is like, yeah, maybe people don't need to be governed, maybe that like doesn't work out good, maybe politicians are corrupt and should have less power. And like, that doesn't mean that you're gonna get them on the barricades with you. Because any productive kind of relationship starts from like a base of shared interests. And it's not a useless endeavor to engage in, kind of trying to subtly, you know, if you feel out people around you who are ideologically not particularly similar to you, but also decent people, you can kind of try and work in some thing, not just some common ground, but you can

try and get them to see that they agree with you on more than they think. And that has an effect of changing the way people think about the world. It really does. Yeah. And you, but you also have to go into it open to- Yes. Maybe it's not going to change your opinion about the way the economy should be structured or the way that sure works, right? But, you know, you definitely have to go into it with a, I can now understand why you drive a big pickup truck that burns a lot of gas or whatever, whatever thing you might be coming into it thinking. Yeah. Or at least it might help you understand why they believe or do certain things outside of, you know, Dave Rubin broke their brain because they got on YouTube at the wrong time. I don't know.

Margaret, did you have anything else you wanted to really get into? I guess one of the other questions that you all brought up was about preparedness, like maybe kind of almost in the inverse situation. Yeah. Let's say that you live in a small apartment and you want to be prepared. And in which case, maybe you have better access to community. Maybe you don't, right? A lot of people who live in the city are just as isolated socially as people elsewhere. But at least you kind of have like, there's a little bit more easy access to ways to break out of certain types of isolation if you put work into it because there's more likely to be groups around that are public that you can go

interface with. But in terms of like actual preparedness, you have the inverse problem, right? If you live rural, you might have room to store beans and rice. And if you live in the city, you might not, right? But I will say it's the other thing that I find people, the two things that people talk to me about, and I think you all run into also, is that people are either, I don't have any community or I don't have any money in space. Yeah. And so if you don't have any money in space, I mean, in some ways, it's like, well, maybe your focus isn't like stock piling stuff. Stock piling stuff is like the single most overrated part of individual or community preparedness. I mean, I do it, but you know, that's because my brain works that way.

Okay. But also the level of like stuff that you might be looking for might be a lot less than like, you know, it's like prepper media is filled with like, here's how to build a bunker under your pool. And I'm like, what? Yeah, there's, there's so many levels. I mean, somebody, somebody other things that you should be doing before you go to that stage. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, don't get me wrong, if I had a pool, I'd be stoked. And if I have absolutely under it, I'd be even more stoked. I'd be so happy. Yeah. But, but you know what? It's like, it's the first five gallon bucket of like dried food you store is far and away more important than the 10th, right? And like, so just having a five gallon Jerry can full of water, so that you're like,

you know what, if the water turns off or we have a boil advisory, which happens all the time, yeah, I'm good for a couple days, right? Because most of the time people think about preparedness as like, I'm preparing for the end times. And usually what it is is the end times are real slow and chunky and crumbly. That's the word. Yeah. And so you're just really looking to like smooth out interruptions. And a lot of that can be done very cheaply. And honestly, when, when you start storing your fifth five gallon Jerry can of water, you're not storing it for you anymore, you're storing it for your neighbor. Yep. Yeah. And that's good, but not exactly not the first step, you know? Yeah, it's better to prepare for if you have like a week's worth of power outages

or a week's worth of the water not working, right? And those are more incremental steps, because we're not just going to drop off and have no water forever starting in a month, right? Probably not. But we very likely have enough remaining systems that they want to fix it. You know, it's more likely that some, some disaster is going to happen that we're going to have, you know, a week worth of stuff gone, you know, and that's the thing that's actually more, more reasonable to to prep for. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, Margaret, where can, where can the good people and hopefully not the bad people, but statistically some of them will suck? Find you. The good people can find me on, I have a podcast called Live Like the

World is Dying, which they can listen to you on if they would like. And they can. It's about individual and community preparedness. I also am on Twitter way too much at magpiekilljoy, Instagram, at Margaret. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you get to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man

who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991, and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that

it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus, it's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Killjoy, my website is birds before the storm.net or margherkilljoy.com. And that has like a list of all the books that I have out and I have a new book, an old book being reissued that is coming out in November from AK Press. The book is called A Country of Ghosts and it's an anarchist utopian book because I was sick of people being like, but how would an anarchist society work? And I was like, you know what, I wrote a book. Damn straight.

It also has a plot, so it's not boring. Oh, wow. Fancy, getting kind of bougie with your redo plots. If you write a plot, you get the wall. No plots allowed. Only post structural literature. Well, okay, so this has actually happened to anarchist fiction writers before. Oh, I love anarchists so much. Dumbudzo Mercerra was this anarchist fiction writer. Oh, I can't remember where from.

I mean, this is terribly embarrassing. But he moved to England from a colonized African country. What did Rhodesia become? This is the most embarrassing. Oh, it became a Zimbabwe, right? Okay, yeah. So he was from there and then everyone, and he moved to London until he realized that they're all a bunch of racists and he would like break shit at award ceremonies and then go back home.

But then he was a squatter for a while in the 80s. But he wasn't writing in the proper post-colonial like Marxist realist tradition because instead he was writing post-modern fiction, which is decadent and terrible. So he just like was like, I don't care. And so he's great. That is that is lovely. So anyway, you love to see it. That's the episode.

That's the episode. Go out and write post-modern. I was going to say jump on a train. Oh, that too. Yeah. Probably also a bad idea. I talked to somebody who lost their legs doing that once. Anyway, episode's over.

I'm Eve Rodzky, author of the New York Times bestseller, Fair Play, and Find Your Unicorn Space. Activists on the Gender Division of Labor, Attorney, and Family Mediator. And I'm Dr. Adidina Rukar, a Harvard physician and medical correspondent with an expertise in the science of stress, resilience, mental health, and burnout. We're so excited to share our podcast, Time Out, a production of I Heart Podcasts and Hello Sunshine. We're uncovering why society makes it so hard for women to treat their time with the value it deserves.

So take this time out with us. Listen to Time Out, a Fair Play podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, guys? I'm Rashad Bilal. And I am Troy Millings, and we are the hosts of the Earn Your Leisure podcast, where we break down business models and examine the latest trends in finance. We hold court and have exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names in business,

sport, and entertainment. From DJ Khaled to Mark Cuban, Rick Ross, and Shaquille O'Neal. I mean, our alumni list is expansive. Listen to them as our guests reveal their business models, hardships, and triumphs in their respective fields. The knowledge is in depth, and the questions are always delivered from your standpoint. We want to know what you want to know. We talk to the legends of business, sports, and entertainment about how they got their start,

and most importantly, how they make their money. Earn Your Leisure is a college business class mixed with pop culture. Want to learn about the real estate game? Unclear as how to stock market works? We got you. Interested in starting a trucking company or a vending machine business? Not really sure about how taxes or credit work? We got it all covered.

The Earn Your Leisure podcast is available now. Listen to Earn Your Leisure on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Look to your children's eyes to see the true magic of a forest. It's a storybook world for them. You look and see a tree. They see the wrinkled face of a wizard with arms outstretched to the sky. They see treasure in pebbles.

They see a windy path that could lead to adventure. And they see you. Their fearless guide through this fascinating world. Find a forest near you and start exploring at discovertheforest.org. Brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the Ad Council. Welcome. This is It Could Happen Here Daily. This week, we are focusing on different ways to actually start doing things.

We've talked a lot about ideas and we made some broad recommendations. And had people on to give specific insights into different things. But we're trying to focus this week and then more in the future. It's like, if you're brand new to this sort of thing, how to actually start doing stuff. And one of the things we talk about a lot is almost everyone we've interviewed has mentioned this at some point, that trying to get more active in the things you're consuming and the things that you're eating. And one of the ways to do that is by just literally growing your own food.

When I was growing up, I mean, my grandparents operate. They used to operate like a large, large farm. Now they operate kind of like a farm that just feeds them. So whenever I'm at my grandparents in Canada, usually we just eat all the food. They grow, whether that be produce, they also do like their own hunting. They make their own sausage, they preserve meats. So I kind of grew up around this type of thing. Because just how self-reliant some of my family is.

But not everyone may have this kind of background. And so this idea of growing your own food can feel maybe a little bit daunting. And to help us talk about food and then eventually soil and other kind of things, I have invited a guest on from another kind of podcast that operates in the same rough framework, I would say, probably, of how to kind of slowly improve the world. Do you want to explain who you are and what your project is? Sure. So my name is Andy.

I'm the host of the Poor Pearls Almanac. We're a podcast that's focused on thinking about after-claps. How do things like climate change and collapse impact things like food systems? And what can we do today to prepare for what's coming in the future? Yeah, I feel like it's not a coincidence that all of these different kind of projects are getting more popular around the same time. Because we're all looking at the world and being like, huh, this doesn't seem very sustainable. So we better start figuring out what to do with

all these systems kind of slowly start losing parts. We're going to talk about kind of food today. I want to maybe branch off into like a few different directions. Branch, that's a plant pun. What a branch off into a few different directions. Both like, what do you do if you have like your own house and yard? Or maybe you're like more rural, you have lots of space. And then also like the inverse of like, let's say you lived in like,

I don't know, a cramped city apartment, different things that you can do. Let's probably start with like the rule just to like give a, you know, a more like base background on, you know, you have more of like a standard setup for what you're able to do. If someone's never grown anything before, they've never, like maybe they've had like one house plant, but like they never grown anything. What do you think is the best first like preparation steps before you actually,

you know, go out and start buying seeds and stuff? Sure. So when it comes to growing food, it's really not that complicated. Chances are, if you have a front yard, we're talking about someplace that's pretty rural, assuming the climate isn't someplace super dry, you're generally going to be thinking about growing food someplace where grass probably already grows. So if grass is already growing there, you know, things can grow there. And really that, that's as simple as it can be.

It can be more complicated. We can start talking about things like soil pH and nutrients and all of these other things. But really when it comes down to it, if you put a seed in the ground and the temperature is not too warm or cold and it gets rain, but not too much rain, the plant's going to grow. And if you've got some, say a couple acres and you want to cut out a little section of it to grow some food, that's as simple as it really can be. And you can go to whatever store and buy seeds.

So like that, that's a good place to start. And obviously, depending on where you live, you want to think about things like lead in the soil, if you live someplace near an old house, or maybe if you're near someplace where there was manufacturing. And one of the things to keep in mind is that a lot of older settlements, even if there isn't a factory there now, it's very possible there was a factory 50, 100 years ago, it's been demoed and you never even knew it was there. So it's really important if you do live in some place that has that

manufacturing background or an old house to really check for things like lead in the soil, because that can be really dangerous. And there's a very accessible like soil testing kits available at stores and online. Yeah, it's like, I think $15 you can have the soil sample taken and you can find out everything that's in it. And also find out like the pH and if it's too acidic and things like that. So yeah, you figure out, you want to start growing stuff. You have some space, whether it be like a front yard or maybe like even like an open field,

if you're lucky. What kind of stuff do you think, should I just jump in and buy any kind of seed that looks fun or should I like start with specific things? I don't know. It's like, if I really like potatoes or just go to potatoes, if I really like cauliflower, should I just do cauliflower, what's kind of the, if I'm brand new, what's the different things that would be worth first trying out? So generally speaking, you really want to think about what your climate is.

And I think that's one of the things that gets missed a lot of times is you want to grow things. So like I live in New England, growing say watermelon is really a challenge in a lot of ways because you have to think about the length of my season versus the length that takes for a watermelon to be a full sized fruit for you to eat. So depending on where you live, the one thing you need to keep in mind is what that length of your season is. Now, to get back to the main subject of the podcast talking about things like climate

change and collapse, that season is changing rapidly. Right now, we're adding days so the seasons are getting longer, but also we're having weird cold snaps later and later into spring. So what might have been a traditional season no longer really applies anymore. So if you're thinking about, this is your first year, you don't want to grow anything that might be right at the cusp of, you know, what's going to happen. Being in your season or you don't want to start a plant inside and then have to move it outside and you have to know whether or not it has a taproot and all these other

things to make sure that you don't damage the plant. Then you definitely want to grow something with a shorter season. Things like cold weather plants, lettuces, broccolis, cauliflower, things like that will generally do pretty good in short seasons. But they don't really do well in really warm climates. So if you're in, say, Florida, it's going to be really difficult. But that's kind of how you want to start thinking about those processes, learning what the cold season plants are, what the warm season plants are,

where you fit in in terms of the zone that you live within. And again, starting to think about, okay, the last couple of years, when did we get the last frost? Because it's not what it might say 10 years ago is your average last frost. Those days are pretty much gone. I know here in Portland, we're currently growing a lot of potatoes. And that's been kind of our big haul. Also, tomatoes did very good this year, particularly because of our big heat domes.

They got, the tomatoes did so much better than what they usually do. We've canned so many tomatoes just because we have so many more than what we're used to. But I do find that interesting being climate change, obviously, being generally a net bad. But in some cases for growing, it's going to make certain crops easier to grow, but other crops will be harder to grow. That's something I wanted to talk more about in the first five heavily scripted, that could happen here, season two episodes.

It's like particularly how different growing regions are going to shift up and how Canada, for instance, is going to have a lot more agriculture in the next 20, 30, 50 years, just because so many climates are slowly inching upwards. But even places like Georgia and other places where specific plants are growing, all that stuff is going to be changing. Obviously, this is affecting coffee and how we're getting less and less space and land that's actually able to grow coffee. Because basically, growers have to move their plants up a mountain every year

in order to make the coffee actually work. Which is why we're just going to run out of space. So yeah, that is obviously the more negative sides of things. And in California, lack of rainwater. And just lack of rain. Yeah, lack of rain, yeah. Absolutely. And that brings up a really important point that you're talking about moving the

coffee trees further and further up a mountain. As the areas that are considered prime agricultural areas moves north for us, you have to think about the infrastructural challenges that brings. So it's not just you're going to grow the crops in one place, but the infrastructure, the trains, all these different things don't exist in the places where you'll be able to grow those foods. So speaking of something around that rough kind of idea is like, if someone's never done this before and they're out to go get stuff,

where would someone like that find seeds? Let's say that they don't use the internet to tons. Whereabouts will you think they'll go and get cauliflower seeds or carrot seeds if they want to start doing this stuff? Yeah, so there's a bunch of different growers that offer seeds. And one of the things to keep in mind with annuals is that it does make sense if you can to buy them locally, because within a couple generations, plants will start evolving towards local conditions.

It's really beneficial, especially like I said with climate change, to start thinking about how can we integrate our food systems into the ecological conditions where we live. And that ecology includes the climate. So we have to continuously more thoughtfully start thinking about these things and how we grow food and where those foods come from in order to really be able to deal with and mitigate the effects of climate change. So a great resource is Johnny's Seed.

They do a lot of really good work and they have good quality stuff. And there's a bunch of seed companies out there that have done some really problematic stuff that I won't go into or talk about. But these guys, as far as I'm aware, are pretty good. So I would definitely recommend them. Awesome. Yeah, their website is just johnnyseeds.com just for everyone who's looking that up.

And it's Johnny with a Y. Good for Johnny. With a Y. With a Y, yes. With a Y. Great. All right, now let's say someone lives in a downtown apartment in a metropolitan area. They don't have immediate access to tons of dirt or grass.

But they want to start kind of growing some stuff. If you were in that position, what would you start doing? And to that, I want to two part that that would be somebody with a balcony where they have access to like even like a little patio area or those and then without. Yeah, sure. So there's a bunch of different things you can do starting with if you have a balcony, you can start thinking about getting pots, filling them up with soil, amending that soil as needed as you add plants.

And again, the general rule is to think about how big a plant gets and how big a plant gets is how big its root system is going to get. I mean, that's not 100% accurate by any means, but it's just a good rule of thumb to think about as you're doing something like this. And, you know, if you have a tiny pot, then something that gets big is not going to work. It might be better for a lettuce or whatever. And there's a bunch of different places you can look online for how to grow things on balconies and things like that.

You can also, and this is really dependent on money, is start thinking about things like grow lights, which really are not that complicated. Once you start learning a bit about them, hydroponics, which comes with their own challenges because at the end of the day, while it's nice to be able to grow food in your house, you're still relying on extractive processes. So, you know, your nutrients are coming from fossil fuel, essentially. So that's just something to be aware of. It's probably still better than the alternative of buying food on the shelf.

But it is something to be aware of in that process, that it's not really a sustainable, quote unquote, practice. Got it. And what are some of the go-tos for a balcony garden that you would recommend for people that are just starting out? Definitely those leafy greens are a good place to start. They grow small. They have smaller root systems.

Most times, things like lettuces don't need a ton of sun to grow super well. As long as they get a decent amount, they'll be fine. They're not like a tomato that's going to be desperately looking for that sun and that energy. So, those smaller greens are generally a better option. Great. Yeah, I was able to grow kale in like a pot of this winter, and it was great. Yeah, kale's a great one. Here in New England, it's really nice because you can grow it under glass during the winter.

So even if you get a cold spell, it'll stay just warm enough to make it pretty much throughout the winter. That's awesome. All right. Now, I have no balcony. I only have two small windows. I have like a counter and stuff. I can sit up stuff, but I do not have tons of outdoor access. But I would like to stop buying dill every time I go to the store because I use it in my homemade ranch dressing.

Can I just buy those pre-potted stuff and just water them? Or if I want to get more in-depth, what are some things that are beyond that but not making this giant setup? So, you could be creative and do something that's less than 100% legal, and there's just practice known as guerrilla gardening, guerrilla agriculture. I was going to mention guerrilla gardening soon, yeah. Sure. So this is like something that works really well, and there's a bunch of different ways you can do it. And it really depends on your local conditions and what can grow out in the wild and needs a lot of maintenance and what doesn't. And I don't know the Pacific Northwest that well, but it is warm enough that I think dill would probably do fine and it is wet enough that dill would probably do fine.

So you could just go anywhere where there's green space that nobody checks things and just drop some plants in. You could start seedlings in your house and bring them where you want to harvest it later, and if it's on your walk to work or where you get coffee or whatever, drop it in the ground. Make sure the roots are not bound up and make sure it's got a nice watered wrench right when you put it in the ground so it starts adjusting. And that's the first step in something as simple as guerrilla agriculture. One of the first things that we tried to do when I got kind of started in, you know, the, you know, Portland is kind of more lefty scene was, you know, ideas for, you know, building a community garden somewhere. And yeah, because there is just a lot of dirt, especially in Portland, specifically lucky just because we just have so much green space. There's a lot of places to start guerrilla gardening to start doing your own little community garden. Do you have any alleged experience in guerrilla gardening?

Yes. So if you're on Instagram, I post a bit about some of the guerrilla gardening stuff that I do. I generally focus on guerrilla gardening, not necessarily for my own consumption, but more for ecological mitigation for damage from clear cutting and things like that. So I go out and try to plant things that are native to regions and try to bring them back a little bit. So that's one of the challenges that we see here on the East Coast is not only are our cities not really designed with green space in mind. And for like community gardens, I almost never recommend them just because in places like Boston, they're hard to get into and a lot of major cities like you can be on waitlist for years. So that's not really a short term solution or a solution for a lot of people that are rather transient where you might move communities every four or five years. So guerrilla gardening works really great for those folks because you can do it when you want and how you want.

Nothing says community like a waitlist. Right. No, but like in terms of community gardens, I think there's been a lot of people asking about how they get involved in mutual aid and stuff, especially if they don't have like friends or like they don't have like many friends or connections to activism. I think one of the best ways to start anything like that is just all you need is like yourself and maybe one or two other people that you know to just start a community garden somewhere. And that's a very, very nice on ramp into like community organizing. Absolutely. Back in Portland, when I used to live in the Southwest, there was there's just whole like community plots that are like, you know, more like official, but still pretty like decentralized that you could just basically go up to one of the banquet plots and just start planting food in this community setting and like once a month all of the different gardeners would like get together and talk about what they're growing and stuff.

And they could, you know, could trade produce be like, I'm growing, I'm growing pumpkins, you're growing butternut squash, I want one of your squash, I want one of your pumpkins, right, you can like that kind of stuff. Or if you know if you end up having with him during the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Like a larger hall, you can just give it out to random people. Turns out people might like receiving fresh produce.

That could be another way of making friends and making connections if you're kind of isolated in a city and you only have one or two other people. Start a new community garden somewhere in the city, scope out a spot, start growing. And to speak to that, one of the things is that if you act like you're official and you're supposed to be there and you know you're supposed to be there, people generally don't really question you, especially when it comes to plants. If I go to a median and go plant some trees, as long as I act like I know what I'm doing and don't look like I'm trying to be sneaky, no one ever questions me. And that's the key thing is to really make it clear that you know you're supposed to be there. Whenever I eventually I'll put together an episode on like urban styles and stuff and there's nothing more powerful than like a high vis vest, just an incredibly powerful tool for making people glaze over you and think you're professional. It's amazing. Or in this case, like when I'm doing what I do, you know, I'll borrow someone's old beat up pickup truck and throw a couple of big trees in the back and like you see that pulled over on the side of the road with the hazard lights on.

Nobody's going to question that it's like a town or a city and if somebody from the town shows up as I'm from the DPW or whatever. Yeah, it's incredibly, incredibly useful. And yeah, like getting to know, you know, if you're like, I don't know where to find a local, you know, I don't know how to like where I would take a local community garden spot. Be like, you should like get to know your local area is another great way of figuring out how to start doing any mutual aid or anything is like you need to know where you live and like what's what's around you who others who you know, maybe on your search to find a community garden. You might find one that already exists. If you're unfamiliar with your, you know, if you're in a metropolitan area, or if you know more out in the middle of nowhere, you may not know what's around you. And I mean, looking out to see what's actually in a community is one of the first big steps. Yeah, any kind of. And that plays out also in ecology.

So, you know, if you're in a city, most cities have public forest parks, whatever it might be. And part of not knowing what's around you or knowing rather what's around you is starting to identify the plants that are already around you. And while there's been a lot of action in terms of thinking about things like foraging, there's there's a ton of opportunity for us to start looking at foods that we don't traditionally think of foods but produce a ton of calories. So something like Oaks, Oaks are across the United States. I don't think there's any state without oak trees. And acorns can be a huge part of anyone's diet if they're willing to take the time and learn about them. And that's not something that's radical or anything. It's something that's been done for thousands of years. It's just in our lifetime, in our parents' lifetime, that knowledge and that experience has been mostly lost.

But it's not something that's weird or inaccessible or any of those types of things. Absolutely. I think this is actually a decent cutting off point for this episode. And then in the next episode in the feed here, we will focus more on ecology, looks more on soil and maybe get into permaculture and some other kind of stuff. I would love to learn more about specific soil stuff and more insight to our current growing situation overall as a country and how stuff is changing. But would you like to plug anything related to you or any other resources on this topic before we head out? Absolutely. So we are a podcast. Go check us out for pearls.com or Spotify, wherever you're listening to this podcast. You can go check out some of our work. We're also on Instagram and Facebook, like everyone else. And you can go follow us over there.

Fantastic. If you want to keep up to date on stuff for this show, you can follow Coolzone Media and happen here pod on Twitter and Instagram. And you can catch more. It could happen here daily in this feed. See you tomorrow. Bye. You knew the painting was fake. Listen to Art Fraud starting February 1st on the iHeart Radio App Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I call the union hall, I say it's a matter of life and death. I think these people are planning to kill Dr. King. On April 4th, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis. A petty criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested. He pled guilty to the crime and spent the rest of his life in prison. Case closed. Right? James Earl Ray was a pawn for the official story.

The authorities would parade over. We found a gun that James Earl Ray bought in Birmingham that killed Dr. King, except it wasn't the gun that killed Dr. King. One of the problems that came out when I got the Ray case was that some of the evidence, as far as I was concerned, did not match the circumstances. This is the MLK tapes. The first episodes are available now. Listen on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Rafi is the voice of some of the happiest songs of our generation. Baby Beluga. So who is the man behind Baby Beluga? Every human being wants to feel respected. When we start with young children, all good things can grow from there. I'm Chris Garcia, comedian, new dad, and host of Finding Rafi, a new podcast from iHeartRadio and Fatherly.

Listen every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. It's soil time. Hello. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. We're talking about dirt today. Big dirt fans here. We love dirt. We love soil. To help us talk about soil dirt, ecology growing, forging, all of this kind of stuff, we have Andy from the Poor Pearls Almanac podcast about what to do after stuff crumbles away slowly, kind of like our podcast. Hopefully not like our soil. Hopefully well. I got some bad news for you there. Some of us are not great at cultivating soil, which is what we are talking about today is how to avoid getting a lot of void. Like how can we help help against our soil just blowing away? Yeah, that is that is that is our discussion. I wrapped up like a week of research on California's specific climate and drought and what all the farmers are doing.

And a lot of their soil is pulling away. And so far their solution to that is just spray more water on it, which the problem is, there's not tons of water. So let's talk about dirt. Let's talk about soil. I will hand it over to the resident soy boy, the soil expert here, because I don't know what I'm talking about with dirt. My puns are getting famous. I know I have that was that was just that I was just ripping ripping off of a title of one of his episodes. So that's not original blame him for the pun. Sorry, I do that a lot. So in terms of building soil, there's it's really a basic idea of how to do it. And it generally comes down to understanding what a soil needs and how to let the soil build through rest. And generally speaking, when we plant our annual crops, what happens is you put your tomato plants in the ground, whatever it might be, you get a great harvest, you let them die, clear them out.

And then the next year, maybe you throw some more compost on it, or maybe you're like, Yeah, I just don't have time. I won't do it. And you'll grow and you might have a pretty decent crop again. And then usually by like the third year, you start to notice that your plants just aren't doing as well, like all the nutrients and the minerals have started to get taken out of the soil. So you can either continuously add new material to it, which comes from somewhere doesn't seem very sustainable. Yeah, it's absolutely not sustainable. And the alternative is to think about how can I build up that soil without doing that. And there's a couple different ways we can do that. The soil can get built from things like cover crops. So we can add cover crops, generally things like nitrogen fixing plants, flovers, hairy vetch, and a number of others that we can use to help fix nitrogen into the soil, or we can add other things that add biomass. So certain grasses and things like that can be planted, and they'll mine deep into the soil to pull up nutrients. When they die off, or you can cut them down, they start breaking down, they return those nutrients back, but they're on the top soil now. So that's another way we can do it. Alternatively, if we're talking about a little bit more land, you can take advantage of using animals.

So chickens, rabbits, sheep, cows, whatever it might be, reintroduce nutrients back into the soil through things like rotational grazing. And that's a whole other subject of how different methods are better or worse for fixing nitrogen and all the other nutrients back into the soil. And we can talk about it. I don't know if you want to spend an hour talking about it. I assume that definitely depends on the scale of your operation, I would assume. Absolutely. And you can do that on a smaller scale. Not necessarily cows, but chickens can be run through chicken tractors, which can be as small as 3 feet by 6 feet. We were making some fertilizer a few months ago, and basically we raked up, well, I watched as people did this because I was lazy. I watched people just rake up tons of sheep shit because there's a little sheep set up, and they were just raking up all the shit and putting it into a pile of dirt. And now it's been like a month or two, and we should have some OK fertilizer by now, which we can use however we see fit.

But chickens, chickens do well. Not everyone probably has sheep or access to sheep, but chickens are surprisingly easy to get. Yeah, and depending on the city you're in, you can live in pretty dense places and still legally have chickens. You might have to get comfortable with the idea of slaughtering a rooster, but other than that, it's funny because what you'll see is in the early spring everyone gets chickens, and then by July on Craigslist or Facebook or Instagram, everyone's free rooster to good home because they can't slaughter themselves. Yeah, I've had to watch a few roosters get the old axe. There was this one rooster that would always wake up as we were all going to bed. We would have a movie night, and we're going to bed at 4 a.m. and that's when the rooster starts, and we're like, no, we're trying to sleep. And we're like, we need to kill that rooster.

It only takes one bad day to be like, I cannot listen to that sound again. At least it went to some good use. Anyway, back to dirt. Let's see, where were we? We're talking about reintroducing stuff via chemical means, or just using animals and stuff, or rotating plants. Yeah, so there's a bunch of different ways you can do it, and obviously it's all defined by what your site needs. The way we're talking at this point has been mostly about you already have a garden, and that soil needs to be amended to improve it. But if you're working with, say, a site that has almost no topsoil.

So, for example, a friend of mine out in California lives near a highway, and they'd scraped all the topsoil around the highway to build up the highway. So now there's no topsoil, it's just garbage. So how do you build that soil up? And there's a bunch of different ways we can do that, whether it's through taking advantage of free resources like mulch. If you see a tree getting cut down and they chip it all up, those guys have to pay to get rid of it most of the time, or they get paid just enough to cover their gas. So if you see it down the street and say, hey, you want to drop it off at my house, they'll happily do it. Yeah, we just found out there is this business in Portland that you can email them to do a chip drop where they take all of their mulch and wood chips and drop them off in your driveway. And it's completely free. You don't need to pay for it. You can just schedule them to drop it off anywhere. And a short aside, we also found out that they don't require address verification, so you can do this as a prank.

You can find out where the mayor lives or where, I don't know, particularly bad person lives. Let's say he wears armor and he brutalizes people and threatens them with guns while having a badge. You can find out if you know where he lives. You can just deliver tons of wood chips right on this driveway. And they have a rule on their website is once a delivery has been initiated, it's like once the truck leaves their office, it cannot be stopped. There's no way there's no way preventing it. And they don't contact the house beforehand. No way preventing it. Just a random random wood chip drop anywhere in any driveway. It's a magical system. But you can also just use this for, you know, getting wood chips to help grow things. Yeah, and mulch is such an underrated medium. It's like really good for like water retention and helping soil not dry out too fast.

It's not just like aesthetically nice looking and accessible. It's also like really good for the plants. So I'll add two caveats to that. And the first is that it's really important to know what species you're dealing with that are the wood chips, because certain species have chemicals on them that will reduce growth or stop it completely. So like black walnuts are really well known on the East Coast as having what's called jug loan. And there's a bunch of different species that again are probably unique to where you live that you should just be aware of. And the second one is that mulch and wood chips are fantastic for your garden. However, the one drawback is that for the wood chips to break down, they actually utilize a lot of the nitrogen in the soil. So that's just so you may have a bit of a nitrogen problem or some kind of nitrogen fixing.

So it'd be more important to think about cover crops and either adding fresh compost or whatever it might be to help offset some of that nitrogen absorption. So it's a great resource. It's just not perfect. You just have to be aware of the limitations of it. I would like to touch on why we're in a bit of a pickle. What have we done agriculturally to kind of make our soil so unfragile? What did we do wrong on a larger scale? And how might someone like me, who just has a small setup, not make the same mistakes in my own personal garden? Sure. So the beginning of the food system becoming what it is today really started with oil. Access to things like petrochemicals allowed us to start rethinking about how we group food and forgetting about traditional methods, primarily things like using manure.

I mean, you think about it. You eat all the nutrients go out the sewer and then they never go back into the soil. And we're constantly taking from the same soils year after year. And the only way we continue to produce is because we're dumping chemicals and forcing the soil, which is just a medium at this point, just dirt. It's not soil. And we're just making it grow food because we're adding the chemicals the plants need. But we've destroyed things like the bacterial community, the fungi community, all these different things that are so crucial for our food systems to be resilient. In terms of how can we move forward, building that soil is super important and understanding these cycles of where our food comes from. The biggest challenge really is that we're trying to create ethical food systems under an inethical economic model. So you'll see permaculture is a really big thing today.

And for a lot of good reasons because it challenges that methodology. However, because of things like capitalism, we can't really have an honest conversation about the fact that a lot of people will tell you you can make money doing permaculture. And you some people do, but it's not it's not really what people think. Like there's no way to ethically grow food and not have the problems of. Yeah, you're facing or competing with somebody that doesn't have any ethical guidelines or frameworks that you have to compete with. And I mean, there's plenty of things we can say that there are problems with permaculture. And if you want, we can talk about that further. But this is the primary reason why we can't really fundamentally rethink our food system until things either fall apart or capitalism no longer exists. Or there are major subsidies for these alternatives, whatever it might be. Yeah, let's see, like, is even something like, would you even say just like someone buying premade fertilizer should be avoided in that case? Like would you would you rather, you know, someone try to make it ourselves and like what's cheaper?

You know, like is just buying fertilizer cheaper than having to actually make it yourself? There's another kind of problem with these types of things that it turns out, you know, the way to make things better might cost some people more money, you know, than people who don't really have as many resources, you know, just like a regular person who's trying to do this. You know, they don't have as much money and would would just buying premade chemicals be, you know, easier and cheaper than doing work to kind of build it up more like quote unquote, naturally. I mean, obviously, I think under capitalism, anything that's efficient in terms of time and taking advantage of things like scalability, which, you know, mining nutrients is always going to be more efficient when you're doing it on a massive global scale. Like you really can't compete dollar for dollar. And that's at least with what I do with the poor pros on my neck. We don't really focus on that and instead say this is how things should be and how do we do that? And when do we need to start doing that if we know that what exists today isn't sustainable and that ultimately this is going to fall apart in some capacity.

Yeah, you talked more about like trees specifically and I would love to hear more about that, you know, outside of just, you know, making your own like edible garden doing doing other kind of ecology related related work. Sure. So trees have, you know, so many benefits outside of the fact that they can produce food. We could look at things like how they can manage a landscape and reduce temperature extremes, the way they can maintain soil quality because of reducing things like runoff from major storms, which are happening more and more frequently. Yeah. Further, like I said, they do produce food and they sometimes they produce food for us. Sometimes they produce food for our livestock. Additionally, there's a process called civil pasture, which is essentially when you think of a farm you think of a cow walking around in a field.

Instead that cows walking around in a managed forest and the forest floor gets enough sunlight to grow grass. So you're getting the benefits of the grass as well as the trees. And you can either be using those trees for lumber or for food crops or whatever it might be, and you're getting the best of both worlds. And in a lot of ways, the civil pasture system more accurately represents the way the landscape had been managed, especially here in the northeast and generally the east coast by indigenous people. You know, they weren't using cows. They were doing prescribed burns and things like that. But those environments are actually better for things like deer, which like to like to exist on like the margins of forests where they're getting the best of both worlds. So that was how they managed a wild, essentially they're wild grazing the native species.

Yeah. And we just just trying to think there's like, we don't really have anything like that on a large scale anymore. We've just jumped right into like the field and pasture thing. Yeah. I mean, you think about it and make sense that we haven't because of the fact that to do that requires individuality in terms of how we manage a landscape. You can't run a machine through a civil pasture. You can't just make like a template and apply it to every situation. Everything is much more unique based on their individual environment and ecosystem.

Yeah. And then it becomes less efficient to manage in terms of how we manage things as a successional thing where we have you go through the field and you seed it with a giant machine because you can do it faster that way. You can add whatever amendments you need more quickly when it's just a flat piece of land with nothing in the way. And so on. It goes right in the face of how we think of efficiency. Yeah. Despite the fact through its diversity, it's more resilient to what's coming in terms of climate change. Especially in the long run.

Yeah. Yeah. In the last episode, we talked a bit about grilly gardening. Can this like intersect with this idea of like growing in the forest? I assume there's like a decent crossover there. Absolutely. So generally speaking, a lot of people that are into civil pasture are also thinking about things like tree crops. And one of the things that I really focus on is thinking about foods that we don't traditionally think of as foods or at least not as like staple crops.

So like while people might be familiar with kind of the odd fruits like persimmons, if you might know what a persimmon is, you might have one or two or maybe make persimmon bread. That's not usually a large part of anyone's diet. No. And that's the challenge that we really have is while people like to incorporate these types of things in permaculture into how they think about their relationship with the environment, like nobody's giving up their toast in the morning. And that's a third of your diet or whatever it might be. And that's where we need to fundamentally shift how we think about food. So you're saying that we need to change in order to address these large systemic issues that have caused many problems. We need to change the way we extract resources from the earth and maybe reevaluate how much we do so.

Yeah. I mean, you know, it's no small feat is what I'm saying. I know. I'm just saying like, you know, that's this specific thing around like food and diet is the same root problem we have with climate change on a larger scale of like just doing, you know, progress for progress's sake without realizing that this is not a sustainable way to do things. And infinite growing and like infinite expansion maybe is a bad idea. Yeah. And maybe has some consequence. Who has some consequences?

Yeah. Who would have thought that infinite growth on a finite planet wasn't sustainable? Oops. Yeah. The point that I'm really trying to drive home is that we really need to rethink what food looks like. And it has to be in a meaningful way that it can't just be those odds and ends. And the thing I think people forget is that food is a huge component of our culture and our identity. Absolutely.

When we think about food and identity, the reason why our... During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver.

At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark and not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Our identity is surrounded around food is because food is the byproduct of the environment that we live in. It's been a couple generations and we went from the reason why Italians eat XYZs because that's what grows there to I eat this because my family does, but I don't know why. The way those things relate to one another has been completely lost and we need to figure out how to do that again. Can you point to any examples of these things you're talking about, of systems existing now or in the past that have shown these methods of viewing food and viewing growing and soil cultivation? Any indigenous practice, and we say indigenous and we usually mean North America or South America or Australia, but even if you look across Europe, before capitalism got its claws into the rest of Europe or all of Europe, there were plenty of indigenous practices and in some places they continue and the way that people lived reflected the needs of their ecology and how people could relate to that ecology. The reason why Nordic countries have high amounts of meat in their diet is because of what grows there and how they can utilize what grows there to feed themselves through animals and things like that. That is generally what we hear is the various indigenous methods of growing and how they fed people in their meaty area.

I'm thinking how can we take those similar ideas and scale it up because they weren't growing food for 7 billion people. We grow way too much food for many people, maybe not too much food, we distribute it in a very inefficient way because we don't do it for what we need, we do it for profits. We throw away so much food that we grow globally. When I think of these older methods of growing food, it's harder for me to picture that feeding an entire city. I don't know what the solution is here, this isn't really the thing I focus on a lot, but is there a way to scale up these smaller scale things that people can do in their own yards on any kind of mass level or is that just kind of rely back on the same thing? We need to re-evaluate how much we consume and how we consume it. I think there's a little bit of both, I think we do need to re-evaluate what we're consuming and the volume that we're consuming as well as the waste specifically in terms of those two things that we tend to lose a lot of food that otherwise is useful. Also, there is a lot of opportunity and while places like maybe New York City, because of the development around the city, there might not be any way possible to grow food within the metropolitan or even the region.

We know that, and this is something I probably should have checked before the staff, but it's something like there's four acres of arable land for every person on earth and four acres is a lot. That's plenty, that's plenty, that's absolutely plenty. One of the things that's really important is to start thinking about how we can decentralize these systems in order to have those clusters of places where those things are more capable of growing and handling the production that's necessary. Maybe rethink about what urbanization really should be and what it should look like. In the future, while things may seem like, well, you can't ask people to leave New York City as climate change worsens and our food systems start to fall apart, that might be a much easier conversation to have while today that seems kind of radical. Yeah, the very least. Maybe we shouldn't make any more New York cities. Absolutely. Is there any resources online that you can point to that talks more about these types of topics or books or anything in this general growth on the growing side of things and then the more ecology side of things? So Tom Wessels has this really great book called The Myth of Progress which talks about complex system science and essentially what that is is decentralization and the benefits of having diversity within a community and the fact that any power that's centered in one specific place ends up having imbalances and has less resiliency.

And that plays until it's focused around ecology, but I think it's really helpful, especially if you're an anarchist. Yeah, you can do a lot of systems through the lens, yeah. Yeah, so that's definitely one place to look. In terms of growing food, I don't know if there's really any books that really address it from this perspective of climate change and decentralization, but there's plenty of work online about silvo pasture and food force, any of these types of things. YouTube has like a vast array of resources and of course, if you're interested in this kind of stuff, you can come check us out on our podcast, The Four Pearls Almanac. The entire show is pretty much around this subject matter, so if you want to learn more about it, come check it out. Yeah, absolutely. Definitely. This specific topic, you have a wonderful catalog of stuff discussing this, and I just want to thank you. Thank you so much for coming on this show to kind of talk about these topics.

You know, me and Robert and Chris, we have more of a background in history and that kind of thing. We are not super avid plant people. We're trying to start growing more stuff just ourselves personally, but I'm definitely not educated to talk on this, and I'm very, very happy that you were able to, and you're generous with your time and knowledge. So thank you so much. Yeah, definitely check out their show on, you know, wherever you get your podcasts, and you can follow this show, Twitter, on Instagram, at CoolZone Media and Happen Here Pod. Any final notes? Grow some food. Yeah, grow some food. Grow some food. I've asked that question a lot, and that answer has come up many times.

Just grow, grow food. Okay. There you go. Grow food. But hell is real. We're all trapped here, and there's nothing any of us can do about it. So join me, won't you? My mission put myself and my friends in danger, though it wasn't all bad. I'm gonna be real if you take. I like you. But now, all signs point to a new serial killer in Hollow Falls. If this game is just starting, you better believe I'm gonna win. I'm Tig Torres, and this is Lethal Lit. Catch up on Season 1 of the Hit Murder Mystery podcast, Lethal Lit, a Tig Torres mystery, out now.

And then tune in for all new thrills in Season 2, dropping weekly starting February 9th. Subscribe now to never miss an episode. Listen to Lethal Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's Spicy My Pumpkins? Let's try that again. That was too loud. It was clipping. It's not clipping. You just don't like me saying what's spicy my pumpkins. But I said it, and it can't be unsaid. It was clipping.

It could happen here, a daily podcast about the end of some things and the beginning of other things. And right now, it's an episode about the beginning of fall, because it's officially fall, and I'm drinking a pumpkin spice black coffee. Happy for you. It's also not officially fall yet. It may be officially fall by the time this podcast comes out. It is legally fall when I have my first pumpkin spice black coffee of the year and it's cool outside. That's because you're a monster. That's because I'm a happy man who is enjoying a fall beverage.

On this episode today, we have, of course, Garrison. Garrison. Hello. Hi, Garrison. How are you doing? I'm doing fine. Great. We also have my friends, Bea and Elaine.

Bea, Elaine, you were on the show recently to talk about terrorism a year ago. Recently. Recently. Yeah. Yeah. Everything before yesterday is a year ago. And now you're on to talk about surviving. Yeah.

Yeah. The crafty surviving punk shit. Yeah. I know. We brought you on. We made it this far. We were like two of the most useful skill filled people that I know. You're both wilderness survival instructors, primitive skill instructors for a while.

And you have a small farm in a town that I won't name. And you do all sorts of cool shit like storing food and making arrows and other things that are alleged. And what I like about that is that, you know, we talk about like collapse and things falling apart. There's this kind of like, I don't know, almost like mimetic obsession with like, I want to get out into the woods and away from the city. And that's the only way to survive. And like the reality of the situation is that's a terrible way to survive. Yeah. It's awful.

There's nobody in the woods. There's nobody in the woods. There's no shit in the woods. And it's, you know, there's, there are, there are a small chunk of the human race that is capable with, with just themselves of like surviving in the middle of nowhere with nobody. But there's even among that population, there's a small fraction who are capable of doing that and not shooting themselves after a long enough period of time. And you wouldn't want to meet that person generally. Well, and I think the other, the other thing about that is like the sort of fetishization of, of, you know, individualist survival skills is based on this idea that what people, when people were like living off the land, that they were doing it by themselves alone. No.

It was. Which is nonsense. There's very few people that survived alone for a long time and even of the people that had the skills, like even Ishii wandered out of the woods after, I think eight years of being by himself and was finally like, fuck it. He was lonely. He was the last of a indigenous group in California where everyone else in his tribe had been basically would have been genocided and him in like the last like five people went off and hid for very good reason. And then after disease and stuff, then it was just him and he spent, I forget how many years by himself. And after a while, he finally was like, fuck it. Being by myself is not worth it. And he came out and it was just after the turn of the century. And so he ended up being adopted by a bunch of anthropologists and spending the rest of his time in San Francisco.

It's actually where we get most of a lot of like the anthropological knowledge of how to make arrows because he was very much like, I'm the last of my group. So I will actually show people how to do flint napping and how I make arrows and how I hunt and. Yeah, and that's but I mean, and that's there's kind of the point there that like with all of those skills being one of that very small number of people who could you drop that guy alone with nothing in the woods and he'll figure it out. He didn't want to do that. He in fact went into San Francisco and was like, well, white people wiped out my entire civilization. I guess I'll make friends with these anthropologists and live with them and teach them what I know. Again, a lot of the folks who are kind of reaching out online being like, hey, I don't have a lot in the way of money. I'm never going to be able to move to the woods and buy a farm or something.

Well, you don't, you don't really need to. And like if shit really does hit the fan, wherever you live, there's probably parks unless it's Detroit, in which case, there's abandoned Walmart's like you can make it work. There's it's so so this is an episode about kind of the skills that you can acquire and build for not a lot of money, more or less wherever you live that will help you build resiliency. But also build resiliency as part of a community as opposed to living in the woods with a knife sleeping under mud. There's a great short story that y'all turned me on to by Corey Doctro in a book of short stories called radicalized that was was it just called the mask of the red death. And the original mask of the red death is set obviously during I'm sure everybody read it in high school like right it's set during the bubonic plague with these rich people who like decide to just hold up and party to escape the plague and they all die of the plague. And Dr. Rose is a bunch of like libertarian survivalist crypto bros who build a fortress in the desert in order to survive the end of days. And it turns out that like a bunch of bad stuff happens like there's disease and civil conflict.

But like people figure it out and all of the crypto bros die shitting themselves to death because their water system. It's obvious from the start what's going down everybody who comes along to help them. They start shooting at you. So they're like, well, fuck you. We'll just wait until you're dead because you're shitting yourself because your water is bad. I think we all have we all have elements of some libertarian tendencies in us, which, you know, it's not bad to learn self reliance and it's certainly not not even bad to want to like live outside of the city. But in a lot of ways, living in a living in an urban environment surrounded by a community, depending on the situation can be even more resilient because like, yeah, an isolated farm stead there's benefits to but also it's really easy to surround and just shoot people who are living on their farm in the middle of nowhere if shit really does hit the fan.

It happens all the time. It happened in like El Salvador and shit when they had their economic crash. So I don't know where do you want to where do you guys want to start? I know you had a couple of different things that you want that I want to talk about like preserving food is a big one. Yeah. And then I mean making stuff and doing things is kind of they're sort of different. Where would you like to actually start with that? I think we could start with kind of the DIY element branching off of our original discussion on primitive skills.

And then in like part two, we can go more into like food and like in like foraging and preservation and stuff. Cool. I mean, so DIY, I guess now there's a lot of stuff about like there's I don't know, there's all this stuff about like survival skills and all this stuff. And both of us kind of came into the idea of making stuff and doing things by being punks. And it's kind of funny. Having no money. Yeah, having no money, but also just their DIY like do it yourself was a very like kind of 90s punk thing that came into the mainstream. Like I actually was pulling out some of my old books.

And I think it's funny to see the like progression because I have, you know, the really lovely like food not lawns that goes into a whole pile of really fantastic things that came out that. I don't know the first food not lawns house I saw the town as in was in like 2005 or six. But this book came out in 2006. But it was this entire movement of like making community and doing and like how to do stuff yourself. The HOA grow corn on your front lawn. Yeah. And then I have from 2011 the bus DIY guide to life that includes everything from like how to do warm composting to how to make your own makeup and like finance a house. And that's just like the magazine, right?

Yes. Yeah. So it's kind of interesting because it definitely like was a thing that I watched come into the mainstream. But, you know, it started as a lot of punks trying to figure out how to do things because they had no money and but also different from a lot of, you know, like woodworking or craft books that really are, you know, by these $7,000 worth of tools. And now you too can learn how to use a table. Yes. And there's also there's also an ethos behind it right that like before I was I came at it first and foremost through being like a bike punk in the in the late 90s early 2000s being a bike punk and the idea of like the DIY ethos was less about the grid is going to collapse and like everything is going to fall apart and you need to survive by the skin of your teeth. And it was a lot more, you know, at the tail end of the 90s and like the sort of golden era of neoliberal capitalism and office space and that whole cultural moment.

The idea that life was alienated and shitty and it felt better to know how to do things that you needed in your day to day life for yourself using stuff you had made yourself or gotten from your community members. The agency is less about knowing you have a pile of dried food in the house and know more about looking at fresh food and knowing I know how to make that last the winter. Yeah, and it's been interesting to see the way that like, as that has gotten kind of mainstreamed into like, you know, the, the, what is it primitive. There's a lot of different like primitive XYZ YouTube channels that get lots of shit. And as that all gets mainstreamed. There's this idea of like expertise that creeps back into it. And DIY was like firmly committed to the idea that everybody could learn stuff and listening to somebody who said they were it was a trap. And a lot of that was coming out of like the 70s when there was all of the like, you know, culty lifestyle shit that was like, Hey, look, we're going to teach you how to change your life. And yeah, we're going to we're going to buy up all this land and antelope Oregon. And so DIY was exactly not that it was like, there's skills, and you can learn skills and the internet doesn't really exist yet or not really so you can read books about it and you can have skillshare because there wasn't Twitter. We also all had a lot more time on our hands. We liked each other more.

But there's also like, expertise was something that was handy to have, you know, like if I needed to rebuild my wheel on my bike and re spoke it. You wanted someone who knew how to do it. So it's good to have a couple of people who had really intense deep knowledge of skills. But the idea that you would ask someone like, I need to change my bike tire tube because I popped it with everyone would have been kind of like, really, really like everyone should know how to do basic stuff and it's and it's okay like the whole, you know, jack of all trades was is as a desirable goal like it's okay to dabble in a million little things and be kind of mediocre but you have a sort of baseline understanding of a bunch of stuff. Now, you know, there's places that I kind of think that we went too far but also, you know, before the American Health Care Act. We all definitely did a lot of at home med care that we should not have, but there's also a lot of low stakes places that I think people have gotten away from just practicing and trying all sorts of crafty stuff as an ethos that is actually good and there's no harm to learning things like you're not going to put anything and the only thing that's going to happen is you will have more skills and more to offer the people around you. There's this idea under capitalism that we should all specialize because that is like the most profit generating thing to do is just specialize in the thing that makes you the most money but it's like, not only is it like not the best in a in a dangerous situation to only

one thing that makes you money but it's like it's not particularly good for your soul either. And there's also lots of different behavioral psychology like group analysis of if you present people with a situation that they feel unprepared for and there's a person that they identify as an expert in a group who they can defer to pretty much every time the group that's like oh we'll defer to this one expert because they know everything and we'll just do whatever they say ends up making worse decisions than if you have a group where everybody feels like oh well I like I can at least get a handle on what's going on and we can all talk through it and like make make calls deferring to experts doesn't necessarily help you know that there's obviously cases we've mentioned medical care already we're like there's actually knowledge is very important skill sets are very important but the idea that there's people who are just like yeah inherently more knowledgeable of things that you couldn't possibly understand is So where where do you recommend like people start with like like you've got a bunch of books right now and obviously if you can afford books that's a good call or libraries libraries have a lot of these books yeah on a preserving food and like growing stuff on your lawn but even if you don't have a lawn you can still like there's certain like one thing that strikes me because we've been canning and pickling a bunch lately is you know different vegetables and fruits and whatnot are cheaper at different points in the year and even if you live in an apartment in the inner city and will never have more than a garden box at best you can buy food when it's cheap and preserve it and not only save yourself a little bit of money but you can like also

you'll you'll understand every time you encounter preserved food in like a grocery store you'll be looking at a thing that you know where it comes from it's not just like a mystery jar of preserved food that was made by some process of science so I don't know I'm interested in like where you guys someone coming in having only specialized in whatever it is allowed them to pay the rent would where's your where's your recommended start point for people I think it's picking something that is low stakes that you enjoy like yeah honestly one of my friends her entry into doing DIY stuff was you know she had lots of makeup and everything and she was like I'm going to make body scrubs how do I do that and you know looked up how to make body scrubs how to make you know a lot of it is oh getting salt and grinding up rosemary that she found in someone's front yard and putting it together you know but just something simple that you enjoy that you would love to be able to you know have a little bit more say over because it's most basic a lot of the DIY stuff is you can make something very specific to what you like so for myself actually one of the first things I ever started doing was in high school just altering clothing. I had an old $30 junk practice like kids sewing machine and just the cheapest one that Sears used to sell and could definitely just take that and start putting seams in an altar clothing and be like this shirt is now a t shirt it was long sleeve before. And that also ties in with you know DIY just to sound like old punks for a minute that DIY definitely also came out of things like the riot girl scene in the big way and like the attention to like body awareness and like moving away from body negativity and the recognition that as a general rule off the rack clothes are not and certainly 20 years ago were extra not actually designed to fit most

people's bodies and it was like hard to find clothes that fit you right and yeah so like sewing was a big one. Bikes because we were broken didn't have cars so figuring how to fix bikes and you know everything that mechanically happens on a bike is right there and you can see it happen and it maybe requires a screwdriver and then eventually maybe some other tools but there's lots of resources. A lot most cities I've spent any amount of time and you can find like you can find like a community bike shop or if you have to pay anything it's very minimal and a lot of cases are just sort of like show up and you know there's space to use. Yeah when like I know in Santa Cruz there was the bike church in Portland there's the bike farm and then yeah and Philly there was also a bike church because it turns out the basements of churches are yeah there were a couple spots like that in Dallas and it's a yeah and I think it is like this mix of like with the body scrub stuff like what is something that appeals to you that you you're interested in and also what is with the bike stuff what is something that's like just doggedly practical like you get a bike you need a bike to get around you should probably know how to fix it on it. I think the reason I say you should pick something that appeals to you especially is because a big thing with DIY was that you're doing it yourself and there are so many skills that are valuable to learn from other people it is wonderful to craft and community it is wonderful to work with other people in community it's wonderful to teach skills and gain them

and also I've seen this growing idea with the as specialization for so many things especially services comes in that people are always like oh wow knitting I've always wanted to learn I need to take a class in that or I need to and it's really important I think for people to realize that you can learn things we are very good at learning things and you don't necessarily need a teacher for more complex things you do but starting with something that you really like and that you find really interesting you've already thought about it. So when you start with you know for my friends starting with making bath salts and face masks and stuff it was something she had already been thinking about quite a bit and thinking about stuff so when she started looking at recipes to mix and looking on the internet and looking at ingredients that anybody cared about so it's easier to learn something that you are interested in and it's easier to learn saying that you want to do but we are all capable of learning for ourselves not every single thing but especially just for craft projects and so starting with that so that you can pick up a book or you can read an article or you can watch a YouTube video and you don't need to take some like $150 a weekend class before you can you know a big part of the resiliency building something you may scoff like when you're thinking about survivalism and talking about like making bath scrubs but a lot of the skills you would learn putting that together are useful in making like a salve or making like a poultice. Making soap.

Making soap. Making soap things that you actually need like when I was travel I lived on the road like out of a car and out of backpacks for off and on all over the world for years and I would make my own medicated because we would get we would be cuts and scrapes and rashes and we were poor as shit and often there weren't doctors where we were so I learned how to use things like comfrey and yarrow and like beeswax and stuff in order to make medicated saps and it was something that interested me but like there's also a lot of like there's there's a number of roots into learning that sort of thing and if you're learning how to make again something as simple as like a face scrub learning where to find that information for free learning some of like the basic techniques in order to do that learning how to learn is is is applicable in a wider variety of skill sets and it I think it's so important to focus on what are you what are you interested in first as opposed to just being like okay first I now I have to learn how to like splint a broken arm because like the shit's gonna hit the fans like well maybe focus on something that's more exciting to you first and build time in your life to learn things that's an enjoyable process one of the first things I did like years ago was I I learned to so specifically to make a cosplay so I would just I would make me and my whole family different outfits for comic so every year I would I would so as whole whole new things but that not only taught me sewing it taught me how to do like like vacuum forming to molding how to use like a heat gun how to use like all these other types of tools how to like molding and castings like all of these types of things I learned just wanting to make silly costumes but now they're like you know useful in a lot a lot of other ways

yeah and that can be that can be expensive at the high and when you're like vacuum forming and so you're your stormtrooper armor but the the cheapest side of that thing again you can get a basic hand sewing kit for like five fucking dollars from a Walmart and there's also maker spaces your shit and there's maker spaces and like YouTube will do the teaching you don't have to pay for a teacher the Taliban learned how to fly helicopters on YouTube you can learn how to fix your pants and I think also you mentioned specialization before it's come up a couple of times and there is you know the idea with specialization the rationale behind specialization is oh well you'll be better at it because that's what you do all the time but that cuts both ways because if you only do one thing all the time then as you know whatever the maximum threshold of your abilities is that required of you that becomes your baseline like whatever in your day to day life whatever it is that you're being asked to do that's what you feel capable of and on the flip side there's with with the DIY approach with like teaching yourself shit learning interesting shit it's also practical and important and useful to be like this is a thing that I'm going to do on a regular basis so I'll get better at it but also it's not you know there was a you know the whole idea of there's what you do and then there's your job and that these need not be the same thing because you want to be able to think think through things in a way that's in a way that's not the way you're supposed to process things to make your boss happy that is not what you do when you clock in you are more than your career career and and and your skill set need not be purely extractive yes as a you know not just like okay I have to go do the thing in order to make money and then everything else is consumption like you can you can transition like we're and this is not a societal level solution because we talk a lot about like well yeah you're not going to you're not going to make small

personal changes to fix climate change but changing your own particular attitude on how you approach the world from one that is I produce and then I consume to to one where you're thinking more about resiliency and what do I know how to do and what can I learn how to do is is helpful in a variety of ways on the note of you know the transferability of skills and recognizing that you already do things on a day to day basis that require specialized knowledge and require skill sets. One of the things that I try and trot out at every possible opportunity I worked with somebody in one of those volunteer bike shop spaces down New Orleans years ago. I've been on bikes to get places and one of the folks I worked there with was like a very family lady and was great because we would have young girls come into the shop and be like my bike doesn't work somebody fix my bike my bike doesn't work I don't know how to fix a bike. And she was the one who just be like your tires flat and they're like yeah I don't know how to fix it can you fix it and she'd be like well you're wearing press on nails right. I'm like cool how'd you put on your press on nails and they walk through the steps of like well you sand your nails and then you put the glue on your nails and then you hold the press on nails on your fingernails for a little while and let them set. And then you're good to go and she's like great you've just described exactly how you patch a bike in or two. So now we just need to get the bike in or two out and here's the part that corresponds to your nail and here's the part that corresponds like here's the glue and here's the you know it's the same process we just have to get the bike in or two out and then back in again but you already know how to do the part where you make the bike to work again.

And that does hit on another important like you know apocalypse or whatever survival point where again all of our like fiction and movies focuses on like knowing how to use a gun or like being a woodsman. One of the most useful skills maybe the most useful skill you can have in any disaster situation is being able to teach people like like knowing how to understand figure out what people know and how to get them the additional information they need in order to be more resilient and competent because you're always better in a community of people who know how to handle their shit than alone and it builds on itself to you know we both come from different backgrounds but as we've been together and with the different trainings that we've had in just life the projects that we take on have become more and more complex so you know where I like to practice gardening and stuff and doing a little bit of woodworking and things and now you know we're doing various construction projects that we're kind of self taught and we have some various Home Depot books on how to do them but it's it doesn't feel nearly as intimidating because we've done steps to go to it and because it's not an all or nothing you don't have to suddenly be like I'm going to DIY my entire life like I definitely get that way sometimes I'm like I want to one day have everything in my house be made by someone that I know or myself and it's really lovely to know craftspeople or to you know make do sit down at a pottery wheel and make your own bowls or whatever but a lot of it is about practicing stuff when it's not an emergency so that when you later on have need or you have the ability you have the time like you can do a bunch of different things so you know we refloored the room that we're in right now. But we didn't get there from nothing and we'd both done lots of different construction and measuring and other things and little bits just for fun for work for other stuff beforehand and a lot of these projects are things that are fun to do as a one off as a project I've

done you know embroidery with my kids just for fun not because they need to suddenly embroider all of their clothing or they have to sew everything but it's because it's a fun thing to do on a rainy day or you know try fixing a book not because there's no ability to go on Amazon and order another book but hey look I just we didn't add one thing to the landfill waste and we don't have to fix all of the stuff we have it's a one time craft but then later on when stuff's falling apart or when we have supply chain issues or when stuff's not there it's handy to know like oh you know what like we're having water rationing right now because during the one of the droughts I grew up in California we had water rationing and it was my mom hauled out of the basement my grandmother's old ringer machine and we were doing the laundry and that because it could it conserved a hell of a lot of water and you could use the same water for load after load. It's good to just have those things just kind of on hand that you've tried because when an emergency hits you don't want to be trying to search the internet or looking for something because you've never done it before and now it's necessary. And it's it's again to the point of like how the how collapse really looks versus how it's often pictured you're not trying to replicate when you're when you're doing your own laundry that way you're not trying to replace civilization you're patching a hole. Like and that's a lot of building resiliency is knowing that you have it's like it's being able to fix a bike tire it's patching a hole. And I do want to acknowledge that like this is a little bit more outside of the dead center of mainstream in you know the United States and some other like wealthy industrialized countries and it's not like it has never stopped being the way most people in the world kind

of I have a story I should tell from these people I was billeted with an Iraq these these guys were like pulling people out of airstrike craters every day. And we wanted to watch TV one night we were in like a bombed out mosque that ISIS had been using and they had a refrigerator that worked in a TV that ISIS had cut the cords with and this guy just started pulling cords out of the fridge and in about five minutes had the TV working had like hooked it lashed everything together it was like he wasn't a TV repairman or a fridge he just knew how electricity and shit worked and was able to figure out like OK I can just put all this shit together. We're good to go and and just also to loop back around to the whole like survival mentality a little bit one of the things that like people that we've worked with people who like have been in. Emergency situations that require you know complex skill sets and things like one of the big things is to have a role that you are competent in that you are ready to fulfill so you don't have to figure out your first step. Yeah you can get moving you can figure during the summer of twenty twenty some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series Alphabet Boys as the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his house with like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was twenty three I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there as you can imagine I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth his beloved country the Soviet Union is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science.

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts about your first step. So for example in the you know the supply chain issues that hit at the start of covid and are hitting still and are recurring the idea of like oh there's no way to like there's no laundry soap.

Say OK well we've got borax and these other baking soda borax. Right. We can we can make our own laundry detergent in a pinch and it'll work well enough. Cool. Don't have to have that be the thing that stresses us out and like adds to our our like paralysis. Yeah. And again a huge part of is even how you approach the problem. It's not freaking out like oh my god there's no laundry soap my how am I going to clean the clothes. It's being like oh there's no laundry soap. I'm going to go online because we still have that and try to figure out are there other things that can make laundry soap that there are. And like it's it's accepting. Like you talk about like wanting to be competent in a role. You don't have to know what that is from the start as long as like the starting point isn't I'm going to be the medic. I'm going to be the this I'm going to be the the food girl. It's like no I'm going to start learning how to do things I don't know how to do. And over a period of time if I am dedicated that I will figure out the thing that I want to get most competent at.

Yeah because I mean none of none of what we've been talking about in terms of the various crafts and projects that we've undertaken are things that are like our primary function in the world. It's just like well at some point it seemed like it was worth doing and so we did some of it and then we kept doing it now. And there's always pretty good for literally everything we've talked about. There's the you're a I don't know a bougie hipster version of like doing it expensively even with like woodworking. There could be a dirt cheap. I built the table for almost nothing when I was younger because it was like well I found this wood that the city chopped down and I bought sandpaper and stain for $15 and then I got like a fucking base for my IKEA and I had a functional table and I figured it out using YouTube and it's you know not as good a table as I could have made if I had 10 or thousands of dollars in woodworking tools but I had a table for years because of it. And it's it's accepting the because I think people do get freaked out. There's such an emphasis on like having the gear getting the equipment stockpiling things and like really stockpiling competency is better because yeah. I think the Amazon wishlist ability to just be like oh I want this specific thing I can in three seconds look it up online and find the exact thing that I want definitely pushes in the opposite direction and makes people a little less resilient in that capacity because there's less of that idea that you can just have stuff and I would just say if people want to get started with it it's really pick something low stakes pick something simple because you

build the abilities you build the ability to learn and I had it explained to me once that's like a hanger every skill you get acts as a hanger and having really basic simple things is actually super necessary because even even the like hardcore primitive skills I have some amazing books that I bought when I was 18 and I remember I had them and I looked through and I read it and I was like this is like reading magic I understand absolutely none of it and after a few years of doing things not even necessarily traditional skills but just things practicing stuff picking stuff there was so much more framework that I had that I looked through and suddenly there was stuff concepts that I could hang all of these incredible skills on and we're like oh that never made sense to me I understand it now because I've done simpler things and starting with saying that doesn't seem like overwhelming to learn something simple and something something low stakes something that if you utterly mess it up if you have a what are the like the regrets the like craft epic craft fails that it's okay it's not a big deal because failing is part of learning and so pick things that it's okay to fail at as your as your projects and and don't as many of us did in the late 90s and early 2000s when we didn't have health insurance of any description you know experiment on ourselves and our friends with herbs because we didn't have health care access to doctors avoid doing that whatever that is not low stakes yeah I'm about to go do open surgery on my own infected wound now that you've told me this and I'm really excited and I got I got an exact I got some vodka at least let us get the we're good to go no the key is really hot glue same as surgical stitches I have same as surgical stitches because then it sterilizes the wound I don't stick to anything this is how I know you are not a crafter is hot glue does not stick to anything

you just you squirted in there you get it in there real good and then you cover it with a with super glue I do have a grand I would put super glue in first I do have a grandpa that has used super glue so many times to glue his body back together it is actually what it was made for yeah that's very funny it's effective at that anyway here's our medical advice yeah don't do any of the things that were just said but if you do want to learn how to do sutures you can find guides where people do it on chicken which is how if you're an EMT you learn how to do it and it's that's a that is a skill you can build for very little money that's useful and you don't have to start on your friends bodies and I will put in a plug for like wilderness first aid courses are not cheap and there are some real good ones out there and as a as like a baseline that is a real handy and helps you think about things creatively because wilderness first aid unlike an ambulance driver an ambulance driver is driving in a box with all the tools they need and wilderness first aid the assumption is no ambulance is coming you don't have a box tools and so you have to work it out probably you know some plantain or something or some the right fucking kind of sap there's like shit you can use or and which we will not proceed to attempt to lift up here and provide medical advice and don't go to a doctor no no use pine needles make your own needle T go to the house it'll cure your coven find a beehive and start sucking any other sources are open your mouth real life any any other sources are like these you get in you the less great book called making stuff and doing things from way back in the day definitely recommend that one country know how like there's some a lot of old craft books actually the entire back collection of the Mother Earth magazine skills stuff like I have definitely made a home study magazine not Emma Goldman Sanarchist newspaper but I've definitely made solar powered

dehydrators out of cardboard boxes and saran wrap from the from Mother Earth magazine stuff and it's absolutely fantastic just old school guidebooks and but also anything that's listed as like DIY guides that have stuff that you would like to make and like to do are great the library is great use the library research librarians at the library are great and if you're like I'm trying to learn how to do this thing can you help me find books on it research librarians at the library they have doctorates in how to help you do that and that's they just sit at desks all day waiting for me and that's that and what you'll learn from them about how to answer those questions for yourself is also useful in the long run mm-hmm go out and make a reflux still is that legal well no not in most places but it's easy you just need a box inside of a box and you pour old beer in the center box and put like saran wrap on top that's the episode after 30 years it's time to return to the halls of West Beverly high and hang out at the peach pit on the podcast 902 1 OMG joined Jenny Garth and Tory spelling for a rewatch of the hit series Beverly Hills 902 1 0 from the very beginning we get to tell the fans all of the behind the scenes stories that actually happen so they know what happened on camera obviously but we can tell them all the good stuff that happened off camera get all the juicy details of every episode that you've been wondering about for decades as 902 1 0 superfan and radio host sissony sits in with Jenny and Tory to reminisce reflect and relive each moment from Brandon and Kelly's first kiss to shouting Donna Martin graduates you have an amazing memory you remember everything about the entire 10 years that we film that show and you remember absolutely nothing of the 10 years that we film that show listen to 902 1 OMG on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts

adoption of teens from foster care is a topic not enough people know about and we're here to change that I'm April didn't really host of the new podcast navigating adoption presented by adopt us kids each episode brings you compelling real life adoption stories told by the families that live them with commentary from experts visit adopt us kids dot org slash podcast or subscribe to navigating adoption presented by adopt us kids brought to you by the US Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families and the council what's avoiding starvation my autonomous neighborhood collectives this is it could happen here a podcast about things not being as good as they are and trying to make them better I'm Robert Evans my co-host today as many days Garrison Davis Garrison say hello to the people hi people Garrison what are we what are we what are we what are we what are we what are we what are we what are we what are we doing today nice yodelic thank you we are going to be having a discussion on food and food preservation and finding you mean like putting it in the freezer well what if the freezer is not working the freezer is always working this is America when the power goes out for two weeks well that's one of our guests for today my friends be in a lane who you've heard earlier this week and we're going to talk about food storage and particularly again our focus this week is like we keep getting a lot of people being like I have no money or very little money or very little space I'm not going to be able to grow things how can I possibly you know gather food store food like build resiliency I don't have any any kind of farmland and the good news is no matter where you live things that are edible grow and you can get those things and you can find ways to make them last longer than they would if you just kept them in a sack and that's a pretty cool thing to do so I'm going to hand it over to be in a lane

after that hey I don't have much space I don't have much money was kind of how I got into doing canning in the first place for myself I used to be very very poor I was on food stamps I had no money I was a broke punk and one of my friends was like oh man there's this farmer at the farmers market and if you help them clean up they'll let you take away whatever leftover produce they have that they don't want so you can just load up a bag with produce all you got to do is help them load the truck at the end of the day so that's what I did every single Wednesday for the next five years no matter what come hell or high water but with that that also came there's you start realizing that there's lots and then lacks of things much like you know everything that's happening in society now just in general there was seasons when there was nothing but you were it was easy to at the end of a farmers market day walk home with a 50 pound flat of tomatoes and you know times of the year where it was nothing but cabbage and you might have wanted tomatoes a lot and canning was great because it helped to equal out when I could get things without having to dive into the you know 60 bucks a month I got in food stamps and spend it at the farmers market on that instead I could use it to have a variety of vegetables or canned goods or other things in order to flavor my ramen yeah I first came at this kind of from working on farms where similarly there are gluts there are times of year where you literally cannot eat melons fast enough and everybody who works on farms talks about getting the melon shits because you're eating as many melons as you possibly can and it turns out that doesn't always agree with you

and and then you know there's the time of year where well if you want to eat some month old potatoes and some two month old squash and maybe some storage cabbage great and otherwise there's no produce to be had so preserving food is well there's a lot of different ways to do it and it seems really intense a lot of the time because people talk about like botulism you're going to die of botulism if you have home canned food and so first off there's just to dispel a lot of myths about things there's actually really really really low instances of botulism I'm not going to say it doesn't happen but there's actually very few cases of botulism per year and a lot of them are from industrial canned goods don't eat a can if it's bowing out in the sides of the top throw the can well bury the can bury it in the woods far away but then also beyond canning there's a lot of different ways of food preservation you know you were joking about like but don't toss it in the freezer I don't know I toss a lot of things in the freezer shouldn't be not a bad idea yeah I mean we got all sorts of animals from the farm in the freezer right now we got a lot of blueberries because a couple squirrels yeah that was a random thing just just some squirrels on the side yeah side squirrels for squirrel fajitas but yeah it's not that having a freezer is a bad idea it's just that the freezer depends on you know having power or at least having a backup that power source

or a generator or a generator or or and in the case that you don't have access to those things or can't afford to get a whole extra freezer that fills up a substantial part of your very small part or can't afford to power the freezer or can't afford to power the freezer you know we we definitely saw this past winter with the power outages that were caused by you know inclement weather that it suddenly became very hard to acquire dry ice because dry ice will keep stuff cold for longer but everybody who's gone camping and use dry ice in their cooler knows that so as soon as there's an interruption in people's ability to refrigerate their food the entire regional stock of dry ice is going to disappear so what we're looking at more in what we're talking about today is a little bit more like the things that you don't need to keep anywhere but like a cabinet that maybe doesn't get boiling hot and if it's sort of a room temperature cabinet you can store a lot of stuff I've personally found the backs of closets like think about all of the areas that you don't you're like I just shove things back here and hope that they disappear because I don't actually care about them or like the backs of broom closets that actually for a long time was my place where I would store canned goods because you can just stack the pallets of jars the flats of them because if you buy jars from this supermarket

buy Mart canning stores anywhere Safeway has them a Walmart has them yeah you can they're not expensive you can just they come in a little square flat and so after I would fill them I'd just put them all back in there and then I could just stack those as a little tower and then you know hand them out as gifts for the rest of the year which was also definitely saying that you do when you have absolutely no money and people are like oh we're having a New Year's Eve party and you're like I brought you jam and they're like oh great blueberry lovely but it's nice as something to be you can give people beyond canning because sometimes like right now it's incredibly hard to find the metal lids that go on canning jars or in some cases the jars that's actually a was recently looking for more jar lids and ended up buying flats of jars instead because as four different stores told me there's a supply chain disruption in getting jar lids there's also a lot of ways that you can preserve stuff with drying you can also do a lot with salt vinegar and sugar preserving as well so that you don't necessarily need the resealable jars or like new lids for that so there's a bunch of different methods back to fermentation as well like fermenting things so what would you like to talk about first what do we let's start with just like what is what is the actual process of canning beyond like just dumping stuff into a can and sealing it um so there's canning by itself is sealing jars with heat so that was really did really came into its own around like World War two was like industrial canning and the thing about it is there even within canning there's two different types there's low heat and high heat canning

so high heat is actually just boiling water temperature and high heat you actually need to go above the temperature of boiling water so you can pressure can you need a pressure cooker they terrify me I don't pressure can because I haven't quite gotten over the images of when they explode and give people I know plenty of people who do pressure can and it's great for them you can pressure can at high heat anything you can toss raw fish or raw meat in oil and jars or in water and jars and you can pressure can it and it will cook and seal the jars and it is very safe low temperature canning is still relying on one of the other methods like salt sugar acid for the to keep down bacteria so all it does though is it makes the same so you can do this with or without canning it just makes the jars keep a lot longer because it preserves them so it's the process of you take a jar and then you either use a clean ring if you're using those latching reusable jars with these nice rings on them that you can use over and over again really handy when there are supply chain disruptions to know that you can reuse your jar and ring we're talking about like the mason jars that you you you would get in the bars that are too expensive five years ago they would pour your terrible IPA in them yes yeah but you can use them for other things to these are the well there's two well they're the bigger jars that have a lid that is attached and it latch oh yeah with the yeah yeah yeah and so those have a those have a rubber gas gas that you can and as long as you keep those oil and clean you can reuse those for years they do eventually wear out but they use a long time yeah the others is mason or ball canning jars and those actually have a two piece top they have a metal ring that you just need to make sure it's not like horrifically dented or rusted through it's reusable for a very long time and then you have a lid and the lid can only really they are recommended to only use once I've reused them like twice only used to can once you can like once it's canned and you're you can take stuff out put it back on you don't have to like replace the lid every time you get some preserves out

yeah but the tiny piece of rubber that is what steals it is very thin and so it's not very reusable for multiple can't batches of food and and true to form you know if you go looking around in you know rummage sales vintage stores whatever you will probably find either very cheap or very overpriced some of those old hinged jars and tons of mason jars and tons of mason jars you will often need to replace either the lids or the rubber gaskets in order to make them safe to start food in but in either case whether you're using the little the mason or ball jars that you'll find in lots of stores or the big latching ones the jars are the more expensive spot things the lids and the rubber rings are more inexpensive to replace so if you can find them at Goodwill if you can find them at Goodwill bins or other places it's great you should always grab them jars are never a bad idea so canning there's a million different ways to can I do a lot of jams jellies pickles and tomatoes which are all things that are canned that are preserved either with acid or sugar in either case jams and jellies being sugar and pickles and stuff being acid yes those are my two favorites they're very simple to learn and then you can always expand recipes and everything else but with pickles and tomatoes and other things having the phb very acidic is what actually does the preservation of the food and keeps down funguses molds bacterias and stuff

and with jams and jellies the natural acidity of the fruit mixed with a lot of sugar is what keeps the fruits from going bad or anything and the great thing about canning fruit is that like when you when you're thinking about what is the greatest number of free calories available to most people in a city during the seasons where fruit grows it's often going to be fruit like you'd be surprised like where you do like Los Angeles where I used to live there was much of the year like seven eight months you would you could fill your arms with fruit if you knew where to go and there's an app called falling fruit that you can use to find people mark like where different trees are a lot of like you'll be surprised even if you think like well there's no fruit in my area good try falling fruit you may find that oh actually there's a shitload of fruit and I just was not looking for as you often find I didn't realize that was an edible plant I assume those berries were we're not food and and they can be and and that's a lot of like free you know when you especially when you're making preserves that's really calorically dense and and that also ties in with in the sort of survival utility aspect of this because like canning is fun and harvesting fruit is fun and having stuff you made to steal pomegranates from rich people's houses do it sure absolutely I mean but part of part of the other thing to think about here is that like providing yourself with a reserve of different kinds of nutrition and different like there's you get an assortment of stuff so you know you aren't having to constantly buy it because honestly the most expensive in terms of carbon output the most expensive in terms of of cost per calorie in grocery stores tends to come from the stuff that's you know been shipped up from Argentina because it's not in season

up here yeah that's why you're getting grapes in January right and blueberries you can actually watch them move all the way down the northern hemisphere over the course of the growing season until they're like growing them down in Chile right before they start being able to grow them again so yeah so just thinking about like the things that are available when they are available and you'll see this all the time like the good forage spots when they're available there will be crowds of people all they're all collecting stuff and getting to know some of the things that you like and that grow near you and what time of year they come into season and maybe forming some relationships with people and being like hey I noticed you have a chestnut tree in your backyard can I come and harvest chestnuts hey you have this kind of oak can I come and get acorns from you because I want to do a leaching project hey I was grabbing apples and I noticed that you're harvesting all these acorns I didn't know that you could do anything with acorns what is what are you doing with all those acorns and one of the greatest things too is that a good fruit tree makes a lot of fruit so much so you know we have a little plum that's near our house there's a little plum tree and since this year we managed to get to it before the raccoon did that likes to clamor over the roof we got about 250 pounds of plums off of the small fruit tree and it is not very big it has a footprint of maybe about 10 feet in diameter of the widest part of the tree but it drops quite a bit of fruit especially if we get to it before it all drops on the ground in our cars and the driveway and the walkway and the cat but if we get to it it's a lot so honestly I set aside about a 50 pound tub that was like okay we're going to make some jam we're going to dry some of these we're going to do things with it

and the rest we were able to give to friends we toss some in the free fridges we toss some all you know we handed out because one good fruit tree makes a lot so when you see fruit trees around town when you walk under someone's cherry tree it's okay to ask for fruit too because I don't know anyone that uses every single piece of fruit off of any other fruit trees and you know one of the things that you will see is that a lot of cities try to discourage people from planting fruit trees along roads precisely because when they come into fruit they produce so much fruit that it causes a problem also it's a good way to form relationships in your neighborhood you say like hey we have a whole bunch of plums we have a ton of whatever is dropping all over your front yard and then your neighbors may be like oh those weirdos who are collecting fruit that one time this tree in my backyard that's about to drop all this stuff I'll let them know and maybe they'll come so I don't have to clean it up afterwards yeah which is again like people we talk a lot about the importance of building like community resiliency and community self defense and folks ask like well how do I actually do that oh well that's maybe that's a start for you maybe the start is like you get to know what do they have what do I have and then you start talking about like well I'm going to can some stuff do you want to learn how to can you're like oh well I was going to dry these do you want to learn it like or do you want to borrow my dehydrator and then you're making connections that are very practical and also social in your area also one plug we've talked a little bit about the process of canning dehydrators are great and are pretty affordable as they're not expensive yeah like I think you know for 60 to 80 bucks you can usually get a decent dehydrator and if you don't have one but you have an oven if you put things on a baking rack very low heat you can just put it I would just turn my oven on to warm

you can lay out things in your oven I have a nicer oven now that won't let me do this but when I used to live in like my first junkie apartment I would literally just stick a metal spoon like a one of my big cooking spoons in the door of the oven so that it would open and that would just vent all of the steam of whatever I was drying in the oven so you and meanwhile if you live in say a really dry climate or a climate where you have a really dry stretch of time when fruit is in season and you have window screens and an area where you can make sure there's a steady breeze flowing across your your fruit cut it thin lay it out in the sun and that's why there's so much sun dried x y and z that's really expensive when you go to Joe's or whatever it's not just a matter we shouldn't just say that like this is you have to forage for all this stuff like it can be a matter of like well during these months beef is at is much cheaper it's half as much as it will be later I'm going to buy beef when it's cheap and I'm going to make jerky now and then I will have protein when I can't afford to purchase protein or as much protein later in the air speaking of jerky mean like one of the just in the vein of you know building your own dehydrate or something one other thing that that that I've done is you can just get a you know a decent box fan and some furnace filters and strap them all together and that can very successfully dry out jerky so the dehydrators there's a lot of different ways to yeah it is literally just kind of warm yeah like 130 dry or less in some cases and air that is moving and it's it's like everything we've been talking about there's the you can buy very expensive dehydrators if you want to if you want to get a primo jerky making together you can you can make that a real expensive thing or you can do it for like trash like with with discarded

crap that you find around in people's like take piles and I think also the other thing to think about we were talking about it's not all foraging is to think about we've been talking about supply chain disruptions but also one of the things in our current circumstances is the weird gluts and excesses and surpluses that are produced by our supply chains and again one of the big ways that I learned about food preservation was food not bombs and food preservation and also just food preparation was food not bombs way back in the day like you need a special sound every time on specifically it could happen here someone mentions food not bombs at this point because that was my entry back when I was just kind of a liberally journalist guy to like anarchist praxis was like every protest I go to there's these like crusty punks handing out sandwiches yeah yeah and and they have neat stickers yeah wonder what's going on here and well and one of the important things about food not bombs is that food not bombs has sort of two different ways that you obtain food for food not bombs one is you form relationships with grocery stores yeah people who are going to have a lot of food a lot of supply coming in and there's stuff they're not going to be able to use or so either because it's ugly or you know it's carrots that look like dicks and they don't feel comfortable putting the carrots look like dicks on the show because it's just too hot it's just too hot or yeah so you have your relationships with like local businesses and local suppliers who aren't going to be able to sell or use some of their stuff and they're like day old bread right day old bread we are a bakery and we pride ourselves on fresh bread so we're going to give our day olds and it makes us feel good as liberals to give it to food not bombs and then on the flip side there's the the fact that the supply chain is designed to produce these

excesses but then if it can't make money off of them dispose of them as we end up with you know cops guarding cops guarding dumpsters for example don't dumpster from the cops that the cop guarded dumpsters those are the wrong dumpsters other dumpsters go to other dumpsters because I know it's infuriating it's very frustrating I get the desire to yell at the cop but there will you can find dumpsters that are not guarded also if you are a store or restaurant you're legally protected to let people go through your dumpster yeah not to not on you yeah during the Clinton administration there is legislation that was passed that straight up said like at a federal level if you present I think the wording is a seemingly wholesome and helpful food to people for free even if it has past expiration date that you are legally protected because it's dumb to throw out food just because the thing that stamped on the package has expired now that does mean if you pick up some meat that's expired and the packages puffy don't eat that yeah and also there are also local ordinances and local laws that do restrict that more because there are places where people get arrested for handing out food to like you know homeless people and whatnot but you know check your local laws before doing anything is radical and violence is giving out as giving out free food to poor people yeah there are these gluts and there are these points where the supply chain is going to dump huge amounts of stuff into the system for example right now we just talked about how canning supplies are kind of in short supply right now which is weird I guarantee you that that means in a couple of months there's going to be tons of canning supplies everywhere or you know when there were power outages in Portland then there was a bunch of stuff even stuff that doesn't need to be refrigerated was getting thrown out if it was stored in the refrigerated section yeah because stores have their specific protocols about like oh well if this is left if this freezer is unplugged we have to throw out everything in the freezer never mind that a bunch of stuff in the freezer straight up says right there

on it does not require refrigeration or only refrigerate after opening or refrigerate after opening so think about like where are your local systems going to produce these huge gluts or maybe it's super cheap at certain times of year you know you maybe corn goes down to like 15 cents an year or 5 cents an year at the end of the end of August right so maybe you can get a whole ton of corn and then you can dry it like you know when I was a kid we lived in California and we were not doing a ton of canning I did not grow up canning I didn't grow up preserving food I didn't in that type of way but one thing that my mom would do is when our little Meyer lemon tree was covered in lemons she would just juice a whole pile of them and then pour it into ice cube trays and then empty the ice cube trays into gallon bags and then we had lemon you know we would make lemonade all year round and her recipe literally called for three lemon cubes to how much sugar and stuff as she had it measured out and so she would just pop those in and that would just live in the refrigerator all year round was just constant lemonade one other plug in terms of preserving stuff that I want to talk a little bit about but I'm with the disclaimer that I am by no means an expert one of the other things that you know the punks of yesteryear with their food not bombs houses got really excited about was things like kraut and kombucha and there are some really great resources out there specifically wild fermentation and the art of fermentation which are both by a guy named Sandra Katz on how to ferment food without you know it you're using naturally occurring bacteria and fermentation as a means of preservation is possibly the oldest means of deliberate food storage that human beings have and you can do it with a

wide variety of things and so again if you're faced with one of those gluts where you have a ton of stuff and know where you can store it in your refrigerated storage areas there's probably a way you can jam it you can dry it you can you know make vinegar out of it and you can find guides for all of this for free online like all of this is accessible if you have a phone there are people in people putting up videos on YouTube where you can watch them do it to to make it you do not have to purchase books in order to learn there's also a lot of ways you know you can make cold storages in your backyard you can definitely like I have a lot of guides on how to make your own route sellers then very small spaces and do things because as long as you're not having your food produce the thing that makes it that makes your food go bad there's a lot of different ways that you can prevent food spoilage but that you can learn from but honestly crowd and canning are probably some of the quickest and easiest and as a general rule you know it similarly if you don't have access to building a garden you probably also don't have access to like digging a route seller yeah that being said if you have a room or a space in your house where you can reliably keep it cool and dark like below I don't know 70 degrees closets dark yeah like closets is probably a spot in your basement if you live in a house where you have a basement or if you live in a basement or if you live in a meeting situation yeah it's pretty easy and for that matter when we talked about like route sellers there are totally some DIY schematics for literally digging a like three foot cube hole in your yard and sinking in something to line it and then that's where you store stuff because if you dig down a few feet below ground it stays 50 degrees yeah so and I get like when you hear again we keep coming back to this like I think a lot of people get overwhelmed or get very anxious when they think about trying to build resiliency because they live in a tiny apartment they don't have much in the way of money

the important one of the most important things to understand is like a lot of people no matter how poor you are poorer than you have been doing this kind of stuff for generations like it's why most of our grandparents survived the 30s yeah and I think one thing that people have a misinterpretation of with canning and stuff is that they are going to put stuff up and they're going to like put up their cans and their jars and then they will eventually build this you know I have food for 12 years buried here nothing has that great of a shelf life I mean I've definitely pulled out some jam that was from 2014 and definitely didn't do that this year that I had forgotten in the back of a cupboard and eating it and it's fine it's fine but usually a couple three years yeah couple but the idea of canning and preserving was not that you are saving food in case the sky falls in and everyone is doomed the reason that people preserve food was to extend the bounty of a harvest season for a few additional weeks or months and if you think about it that way you're extending what you have to times when it would be more enjoyable to eat it when it feels special no I mean it's like jam a big part of the reason for jam is there's really important nutrients and fruit that maybe you can't get in the dead of winter but you can if you have jam just to be a farm nerd for a minute because Robert I know that you are a huge fan of pumpkin spice oh the reason that just had my first cup of the season today amazing monster the reason that pumpkins and cinnamon and apples and baking goods baked goods with raisins in them are all like a big deal and are all like apples are a fruit that if you put

apples in say a barrel there's the saying about one bad apple because if you make sure that an apple isn't rotting and you put it in a cool dark space with decent ventilation apples will keep for a very long time and squash are a big deal pumpkins are a big deal around this time of year because buttercup squash for example and butternut squash are both storage squash they taste better if they have been sitting in a dark storage area for like two months then they have metabolized more of their starches into sugars and they're tastier a lot of a lot of like squash root vegetables all that sort of stuff that you associate with you know all harvest season is specifically storage crops because I'm originally from New England that's the time of year where you stop being able to get food out of the ground and everything freezes and dies and then it doesn't start up again until April and you need a way to like keep eating in the meantime also though let's just remember that a lot of preserved foods are also meat not just because they are a substitute or because they're saying the harvest but because in order to preserve the food and keep the nutrients you have to go through a process you want to have the salt be too high or the acidity be too high or the sugar content be too high or the water content be too low to enable bacterial growth and so that the fruits and vegetables and meats or whatever don't rot but that means that you get so many awesome and different flavors that you would never you know grapes grapes are great whatever grapes preserved in wine vinegar that sounds really cool you can do that and then you have a completely different thing that you normally don't eat you know dried dried figs apple chips like you also get a whole new variety of foods that are not just extending and harvest but are also other things to eat you know my kids are not going to toss a whole pile of fresh fruit in their backpack sometimes because it squishes at the bottom of their

backpack and I find it weeks later and it's absolutely terrifying unfortunate yeah on the other hand a bunch of you know dried dried prunes plums and stuff from the garden that dried out they'll take baggies of those and if I find them a month later because they have it isn't the end of the world either yeah and and again like there's a lot of fun stuff like you know yeah grapes by themselves are are fine you can also turn grapes into stuff that will help you preserve other stuff and raisins in baked goods if you've ever had a loaf of raisin bread and a loaf of white bread in the same bread box the white bread will mold first raisins are actually a preservative it's why people started putting raisins in bread. Yeah and I think we should we should close out but I kind of wanted to do that by circling back to the overall topic of this week which is like building resiliency when you don't have much in the way of money or resources. What is like when do the gluts happen and when do the shortages happen because that doesn't actually cost any money you don't even have to buy things like you're already you're always going to be going out to the store to get food occasionally. It's it's it's keeping an eye on understanding what is available growing naturally and what is available in the economy because that connects you more to the environment you live in the climate as it changes into your community all of which make you more resilient and then of which costs you a dime it just costs you attention. Also just a plug for you know people who have access to the ecosystems where this is relevant things like shellfish licenses are great.

I'm not going to tell anyone that they should you know seek out sport fishing as a means of obtaining calories on the other hand in Oregon at least for I think it's five five bucks nine bucks. Oh it's up to ten bucks now but so for ten bucks get a shellfish license you go down to a cove and you rate cockles for an hour and then you have you know. An enormous amount of food that you can do all of the preservation that we've talked about you can also just make chowder and freeze it you know whatever but there's a lot of ways to cheaply obtain calories from out in the world. Yeah all right well that's going to do it for us today until next time remember experiment on your friends with different medical care treatments don't do that. Although on the other hand look up the if you are in the Pacific Northwest there is the Portland fruit tree project up here which goes around and connects cleaners with fruit trees that need to be gleaned. So people who have over abundant trees that they don't want all the stuff that's a really great resource in other cities I'm sure there's other things and also the falling fruit maps. You can go online and if there's not already one in your area they also make it really easy to be able to chart and put in trees in your area. So if it's something that you're excited about and you love identifying trees you can go in and actually start charting your neighborhood.

Also figure out how to identify you know five wild plants that grow in your area that you can eat because it's always nice to have more variety and it's fun to be out on a walk and be like oh cool now I have a thing that I can toss in with dinner when I get back. Yeah, and we've talked about how there's like the poor version and the cheap version there's also like the centrist version and the radical version of that the centrist version is I just want to know like what kind of edible fruits grow naturally in my area. The more radical version is I'm going to start gorilla grows of edible foods on like available land in my area. Yeah, I'm going to seed balsam shit. I'm going to get insurgent with my yeah to prepare food yeah. Things that grow rhizomally take root real easy in the ecosystems they like and are real hard to get rid of once they get gone. Yeah, plant crime gardens. I'm not going to say people should tear out the random trees that cities plant and then replace them with apples.

No one would say that of course not. I was saying that if you were to replace trees that didn't make food with trees that did make food in the same spot probably nobody would notice except the people who got food from them. And there would be more free calories in your area if you know the kind of things that have been happening the last several years continue to happen. Alright, that's the episode. That's the episode. Bye. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

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