It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 4

Episode Date: October 9, 2021

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You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio 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, so 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 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. All right, welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is about 50% of the time introduced well and about 50% of the time us talking about how we're bad at introductions. you well and about 50% of the time us talking about how we're bad at introductions. And today it is just me, Christopher. But with me is Hadley and Mike from Lobelia Commons who are here to talk about many things, one of which is the first edition of their Earthbound

Farmers Almanac. Hey! Hey! How are you two doing today? I heard there's maybe a thunderstorm rolling in. Yeah, we're doing pretty good. Gonna be glad for the rain, I guess. Yeah, it'll be good. We'll need to have it. We're gonna talk a little bit first about Lobelia Commons.

So, how did that project start? I know it was something from the beginning of the pandemic, but had y'all been working on this kind of stuff before? And, yeah, just let us know a but had y'all been working on this kind of stuff before? And yeah, just want to roast you a little bit of that. Yeah. So it kind of started last year during the pandemic, basically. Basically at the beginning of the pandemic, we had a surge of interest in these kind of mutual aid groups. And the largest of which that formed in new orleans

specifically which some of us helped form was called new orleans mutual aid group which was doing like food distribution it kind of stemmed out of a project that was already um running like a food share basically getting uh excess produce that was coming into the port and Distributing it for free in front of like one of the gentrifying grocery stores But within like I want to say like a couple of weeks There was such an inch a surge of interest in Doing that type of like volunteer or whatever work that there was like a ton of labor to make it happen and That basically meant buying tons of produce eventually

because the ports eventually shut down i mean there wasn't any produce coming from anywhere at the beginning of the pandemic and so i mean basically buying tons of produce from like costco and that labor meant like waiting in lines for you know wrapping around entire like massive, like multi-city block warehouse stores. Um, and so that was basically doing like food distribution. So we took the opportunity to, since there was so much labor happening that we could go and start to address the question of like, um, food production specifically and try and do that in interesting ways. So we felt like it was pretty important to start like experimenting in different forms of food production and like ways of relating to food production. So I mean this first started with like a,

we were basically just starting tons of seeds and delivering them all over the city, just driving around. We had one centralized nursery that was run out of a warehouse. And that was a ton of labor. It was really time-consuming. It was super centralized. And so we moved from that into a number of other projects. moved from that into a number of other projects um short shortly thereafter we put together like a like a collaborative mushroom production group where we were um getting people who had been growing mushrooms and teaching folks and like doing skill shares to produce oyster mushrooms

out of buckets and we started doing some like woodlot production of shiitakes which has like since expanded pretty dramatically. And yeah just like kind of like things that draw people's interest like that and think about like how you can grow food in an urban or peri-urban scenario fairly interestingly and with joy. Also, after this, we were reached out to by folks that were like, well, I wanna grow herbs. And rather than specifically getting a lot and covering it in different herbal medicines we

reached out had already had folks reaching out to us and so someone came up with the idea of well let's just all grow in like our backyards tons of herbs and let's find herbs that already grow abundantly around us to kind of collectively share the experience of harvesting and and turning those into medicines And so now there's like this herb Commons group that the labor is distributed. It's distributed geographically But there's these like meetups where their bulk herbs are given up. Yeah out, just like in a communal space. And yeah, there's skill shares happening there.

And so there's kind of some community being built around that, that happens in a very decentralized manner. Yeah, it's definitely very decentralized. There are working groups that are part of Lobelia commons that I'm like not entirely sure what they're doing any given day or you know what what's going on I'm involved in like a couple particular projects within it and I think that it's really flexible for folks who are trying to get involved they can kind of be involved at whatever level they want like if somebody doesn't want to go to a bunch of garden work days or a bunch of meetings or

something, which, you know, have been a great way for us to like see each other and see our friends during the pandemic and stuff is to get together for these work days outdoors or whatnot. But if somebody wants to just like do nothing but sprout plants at their own house and then somebody will come pick up those seedlings and, you know, bring them to one of our decentralized nursery spots, that's great. them to one of our decentralized nursery spots. That's great. That's one of the other kind of projects we have. We call it the decentralized nursery. And that's kind of like just something that people already do at a certain time of year. You know, gardeners will regularly start more plants than they need and then just kind of give them away to friends and neighbors and stuff.

And we tried to just make it a little bit more of an intentional thing um and this was also kind of growing out of like at the very beginning of the pandemic when we were actually doing seedling deliveries to people which made sense at that time but it was like very labor intensive um so we kind of moved to this model of having just like free stands in front of houses on street corners in different places um you know there's already like a bunch of free fridges around new orleans and things like that and so this is kind of like a free plant version of that and it's really easy for somebody to just set one up um and then that kind of also allows us to like work on this other aspect of of decentralizing food production like work on this other aspect of,

of decentralizing food production. Cause like, that's definitely one of our goals, right. Is to like not have a tiny percentage of the population be the only ones who know how to grow food and doing it under the control of a tiny number of corporations that own all the land. And, you know, obviously we're trying to get away from that food system. And so one of the ways we can think about doing that is finding ways to really decentralize some of the skills that are that are necessary. So, for example, like if somebody is growing avocados for our nurseries, the thing about growing an avocado from a pit actually is that that tree probably won't produce fruit.

It actually needs to be grafted. So we can have people starting pits, and then we're also sharing the knowledge of how to graft these things because we kind of see a future in which a lot more people will need to be involved in food production but also like mike was saying like we want this to be not like a job that it feels like people have but this joyous kind of thing that's just a part of everyday life yeah one of the other things that i was i was interested in is you know so so part part of what i think

the the beginning of the the earthbound farmers almanac is about is talking about how i guess people people have this tendency to sort of focus on climate change it's just like the only sort of climate thing that's happening and you know i mean there's obviously that yeah there's there's a bunch of sort of stuff that is climate change but isn't the weather that are sort of you know things like the phosphorus cycle things like the nitrogen cycle that are breaking but simultaneously i think it's it's also true that you know that that that kind of stuff and this is also something that's talked about in there is is going to have a large impact both on sort of like even just what what kind of biomes exist in a very short term and you know another product this is also something that's talked about in there, is going to have a large impact both on sort of,

like even just what kind of biomes exist in a very short term. And, you know, another product of that is, you know, is the sort of increasing rate of storms. And I was wondering if y'all could talk a bit about what happened after Ida and how both, just sort of in the short term and long term, the increase of just hurricanes and i hesitate to call them natural disasters because you know that there's a whole

thing about how these disasters are sort of manufactured in a lot of ways but how that's been affecting how y'all i think are sort of thinking about and working with these kind of mutual aid projects and food production yeah so i with Ida, it's kind of complicated because you could almost look at it as like two different storms. Because what happened in New Orleans versus what happened in say like Houma or the River Parishes, these areas that are, you know generally south and west of new orleans um are are kind of like two different uh animals in some ways like what happened in new orleans specifically relates to infrastructure so like what you're saying like the kind of quote-unquote natural disasters thing that's um you know that's a pretty commonplace way of looking. I mean, it's not a very radical conception that, like,

these aren't natural disasters or whatever. The disaster is created as soon as there was the attempt to create a colonial New Orleans in the first place. So this became, honestly, part of, like, national discourse as a result of Katrina, most famously, because of the Army Corps of Engineers failure in 2005. So what happened this year was with with Hurricane Ida was the one of the main transmission towers for the energy corporation in New Orleans is called Entergy, for those that are outside of the Gulf South and aren't familiar with it.

So the Entergy Tower fell into the Mississippi River. You had that happening at the same time that thousands of power lines fell down. The power lines are on poles and very prone to getting knocked down, even just during any day of the week. And so there wasn't actually really much flooding that was happening. It was primarily wind damage. So the tower falls into the river, power lines down. You had something like, I believe, 55 barges in the port of south Louisiana falling off their moorings and floating around.

Just crashing into things. Just crashing. And there's several ferries that connect the east and west banks of the city um those fell off their moorings so so like the physical infrastructure of the place and and how that relates to beyond new orleans is new orleans is located at the very um southern reach of the mississippi rivers port of south southern louis, which is like a 55-mile port, I believe a 52-mile port, that processes like 60% of all U.S. grain going to export. So it's like a massive, really, really important piece of American capitalist infrastructure. So when those

boats fall off their moorings it's not like oh there's like whatever uh quaint like uh value problem it's a very serious uh imperial problem um but so for the average person living in new orleans um this looked like uh i think i think it ended up being for most people around a week and a half without power, which if anyone's lived even with air conditioning in New Orleans for a summer, it's extremely difficult to live here during the summer. It's obviously not impossible when you have modern amenities, but when you're without those, when you're without the refrigerator, when you're without your freezer, air conditioning, it's really's really really

really hot um you know uh so that's what was happening in new orleans there was some some damage to people's roofs there was um some you know fairly fairly substantial damage to the structures but what happened to the west in cities like La Paz, which is about 25-30 miles west of New Orleans. That's where you started to see very severe flooding, very severe damage to structures, places like Houma, Lafitte, Port-au-Chien, all these places that are closer to the coast, that's where you saw the real heavy destruction. So a lot of people have been framing what's happened down the bayou and in the river parishes as we would say as like those places Katrina because the destruction was so total in that way.

So the way that you relate to that type of, again, quote-unquote disaster is much different, whereas what happened in New Orleans is more of a continuation of what could be called a series of apocalypses that have been happening since colonization. I think that's an interesting point also that I want to talk about a little bit about U.S. grain exports because I think that's another part of this whole food system question

that is important on a scale that I don't think people understand. It's just for a bit of background for our listeners. So when all of the sort of giant uh like free trade agreements went into effect um you know so the free trade agreements are like okay you're not supposed to be able to like have government subsidies of agricultural products and there's there's a couple of carve-outs that were put into this now almost all of them but there are exceptions for there's a couple of like weird manufacturing stuff in like Italy and Germany that have carve-outs.

And the other big one is that the US government's allowed to just do enormous levels of agricultural subsidies that no one else like really in the world is allowed to like match or do. I mean, do it like, you know, if you try to have grain subsidies rise, like, you know, the IMF will come after you.

Like, you know, you're not allowed to do it. But then simultaneously you have the US producing all of this... I mean, it's not really cheap, but it's this enormously subsidized grain that nobody can actually really compete with.

And I think that's an interesting... I was wondering how do you guys think about that in terms of, you know, trying to do decentralized, I guess, agriculture in a place that's, to a large extent, this sort of like, conduit of grain to the rest of the world, but in a way that like also inhibits those places from actually, you know, having their own kind of like decentralized agriculture? uh those places from actually you know having their own kind of like decentralized agriculture um i mean i can speak a little bit about like what that kind of does to our context of like making it like especially when i see people in the kind of organic gardening farming world trying to go on this model of like oh we're gonna make you know regenerative agriculture profitable and we're gonna make it somehow compete with conventional agriculture um and i guess i just don't really

think that that is is feasible in that in that terrain like you know if we're trying to compete on that same terrain and we're competing with these absurd subsidies it definitely just the same problem that you see around the world where people aren't able to afford to grow their own thing because there's no way they can they can sell it as cheaply as as u.s grain um so i think it's more important to sort of like look at like there's a piece in the almanac actually that sort of gets into this this issue of like well are we really growing enough food in in this regenerative way like you know we don't even hardly grow that many grains or that many high calorie things a lot of things are just focused on vegetables and things like that and like i think that's a really

important critique and also i think that the way out of it isn't just going to be us trying harder or something or um like the the future i envision for us like really changing the food system kind of involves like really large-scale expropriation of that land where the grain is being produced and of those huge machineries those huge like satellite powered or satellite directed you know plows and and tractors and whatnot that are that are doing this stuff um and so like when i'm trying to think about like the impact that a food project is having or like a food justice project, I don't try to think like we're trying to replace agro business on its own terms. I think like we're trying to be an ally or an aid to any kind of antagonistic sort of

social movement that actually is going to create the conditions where like we can all get together and start to actually address these problems without being hindered by things like private property. So I guess that's a good point to jump into the almanac from, I think. Yeah, do you want to just introduce the project a little bit, and then we can talk about some of the stuff in it that I thought was really interesting? Yeah, so the almanac kind of came out of like a little bit of a, like partially as like a joke, you know, where like everyone gets the, um, uh, almanac and kind of, you know, it

doesn't really relate too much to, um, to like most of us, what we would be growing. Um, so we had, we had posited something like different you know something that that does kind of grapple with some of the questions of you know growing food and kind of the the conditions we live in maybe you can speak on it more yeah i can even just i'll actually just read the back of it because i think it speaks to it pretty well this is a farmer's almanac for the end of the world growing food used to be a lot more straightforward when you'd plant your okra the same time every year like your grandpa did. Now we've got to be ready for anything. Late spring freezes, freak heat waves that bring plants out of dormancy too early, fire season longer every year, the polar vortex. And if that wasn't enough, we've also got to

contend with the fallout from breakages in the global supply chain when millions of gallons of milk get poured down the drain and mountains of potatoes are left to rot. It's a world that calls for a new kind of Farmer's Almanac. Today's crisis has roots in the earliest moments of land theft against Native peoples, a process that has continued alongside hundreds of years of slavery and colonization. The way forward out of this mess will mean grappling with the crimes of the past, as well as charting a new course guided by Black and Indigenous knowledge, creative experimentation in food production, and paying attention across generational and species divides.

So I mean, one like very concrete example of like how this farmer's almanac is different than what you might see just from the standard almanac is um you know we we don't have like oh it's it's may it's time to plant corn or whatever because i mean first of all that that was never that useful as for a publication that's meant to be used across this vast continent you know it's going to be different everywhere um where you're going to plant things at which time um but also like those standard resources that we would go to like for here for the southeast for example or wherever like if you're looking at something that was made a few decades ago it's not

going to actually be accurate or it's going to give you undue certainty about where the seasons line up and things like that. So, you know, instead of telling people exactly when to plant their seeds, we have a chart that has the actual germination temperatures of like all the major annual vegetables that people would want to grow. and then we also have like the uh monthly notes from this local farm in new orleans so you know located in this area you can you can also get a really precise view of like oh they were planting this then they were harvesting this then yeah i think that we hope to make something that was you know our original focus was something that was specific to new orleans and the region um you know in the gulf south and the southeast generally um because we are so aware of the the you know the differences or what have you between growing food here and

growing food in ohio or something or whatever and we all get these same seeds you know out of walmart or lowes or whatever and try and grow the exact same plants all over the place. So trying to hone in on some of that local perspective with me in terms of like, getting some like folk tradition, getting some, you know, anecdotal evidence about, you know, things that worked or things that people are trying. And I think that that was fairly successful. I think a side that we weren't really expecting as much was just the amount of national and even international kind of grasp that it had. grasp that it had um i think a lot of people like could could use something like this in in their area um and it's fostered some really interesting connections for people that are experimenting in new york for people that are growing things or thinking about maybe um food systems and how they relate to prisons in california or um, you know, as far away as Brazil, it's kind of began to foster a connection between Lobelia Commons and a group called Teatro dos Povos,

which translates roughly to like the Web of Peoples in Brazil, so-called Brazil, in Brazil, so-called Brazil, where it's kind of like experimental agroecology project that's very specific, specifically focused on, you know, sovereignty, land stewardship, kind of following a little bit in the tradition of the landless workers movement, if anyone's familiar with MST. It's kind of following in that tradition a bit, but it's heavily stewarded by Black and Indigenous knowledges. Yeah, so that was something I think of a kind of pleasant surprise out of it. Yeah, I thought that was a really interesting way of looking at it because I feel like there's this tendency in the U.S. to, you know,

when, when, when we talk about sort of our relationship to the land, which is something that comes up a lot in, in the sort of essays that are in the almanac is about, you know, like there, there,

there's a piece that I related to a lot, which is about someone from Guam trying to sort of deal with like, I mean, particularly like legacies of sort of japanese imperialism and being driven from their home and it was like oh hey look like this this yeah you know this is this is someone who experienced when japan went west and it's like oh yeah my family had this basically very similar thing when they went east and you know but but there's there's i think yeah and i i think it's very smartly you get you get to a point very quickly where you're trying to grapple with, you know, how do you build connections to land, but then also how does that work in a context that's basically defined by settler colonialism and defined by this occupation. And I think looking at the MST, looking at a lot of stuff that happened in Latin America,

I mean, there's very similar to what you guys were talking about in Brazil. There was a huge movement like this that was indigenous land reclamation, sort of agroecology in Colombia, for example, too, in the 90s. They run into this problem of, you know, there's a civil war going on in columbia and they a lot of them get murdered by sort of state paramilitaries in the army but i i think it's a it's a really interesting way of of of looking at what what is what does land back actually look like and how do you deal with interacting with land and also yeah the land workers in particular they use a lot of methods but you know they actually do just take a like

an enormous amount of land like back from the state and sort of back from corporate things so I'm interested in how y'all started talking to a lot of these a lot of the Brazilian groups and how that sort of like that that perspective has shaped the way that like this

whole sort of project turned out so we were specifically to their dispose um some previous connections that some of us had um in brazil um had when talking about what we were doing and just kind of keeping up a an exchange of um you know just like kind of updates from from the g and they would send updates from things going on down there. They kind of drew the connection for us and put us towards them. And I reached out to Teodos Povos and was like, hey, you know, we're doing this thing, and I, you know, am inspired by what you're doing personally.

And, you know, I'd be curious to see what kind of relationship, whatever we can foster. And they took it, you know, also with some inspiration, seeing that there's very clear connection in terms of relationship with land historically, dispossession historically between the two continents across the Caribbean, the implementation on a wide scale of plantation monoculture that was fueled entirely by slavery and genocide. And I think having that kind of like shared common history I think gives us a good bedrock to like exchange notes about where we are now, kind of multiplied by the fact that the way that so-called emancipation happened here

versus in brazil radically different um the the um like the for instance the existence of pt or the workers party in brazil being such a force after the dictatorship and having that like strong populist movement um that was you know rooted in a very traditional left um that that fueled mst well you don't have anything like that here you know that happens at the same time that here actually the workers movement in the u.s was kind of getting defeated, I mean, up in the 70s. So with respect to, like, Land Back specifically, you know, I don't know if you will see it in the same forms. I doubt, at least.

I obviously would totally be there cheering it on and happy to see it. But I think it looks a lot more like during the uprising last year, you saw in Chicago, for instance, when the trains were being expropriated as they were moving, taking goods out of these boxcars and just expropriating tons of goods, taking goods that would normally be going, just commodities, normally going to court, just cut off in the middle of the line. Or these kind of more, I don't want to say small scale, but focus more on infrastructural choke points rather than necessarily having thousands of people swarming uh you know a massive uh industrial agriculture um set up in in kansas or something

yeah yeah i think it's great to imagine that i think i i really love sharing the history of mst with people in america who've never heard it, because I think it's a great way to kind of expand the imaginary of like what is possible, like what kind of actions are actually at our disposal. Like it truly is not gonna look exactly like that, and I think it's also really important for us to like not forget a lot of the similar histories here like um part of uh the inspiration for the almanac or what kind of drove us to to make it was some of us were doing a reading group of this book called freedom farmers that's about kind of like various uh um black projects in the south for food autonomy after slavery and a lot of it is about fannie

lou hamer and um freedom farms and you know we were definitely inspired for some of the lobelia things by um fannie lou hamer's pig bank which was a really cool thing where they just like started with a bunch of pigs and if you're in the, like you get you get your pigs from you get a couple piglets from the pig bank. And then the interest on that is a couple of years later, you got to give them a couple of pigs because you're producing your own pigs. And so the pig bank is like self-sustaining. And another thing from that book that was inspiring to us was reading about George Washington Carver's public education projects out of Tuskegee University that were just really inspiring in terms of like he was doing all of his own kind of independent research about soils and pests and all these different crops and everything and creating these farm bulletins that were then being distributed to black farmers

throughout the region to kind of share better practices. And a lot of the stuff was like agroecology before people had that word. Like he was very far ahead of his time in terms of understanding soil dynamics and pests and things like that. So yeah, we definitely try to lift up all that history as much as possible. Yeah, I guess the other thing I thought was very interesting that you alluded to briefly in this was,

yeah, because there's a section of this that's talking about food in prisons. And I wonder if you could talk about that part a little bit more, because that's a connection that I really don't think gets drawn very often. Oh, here, let me flip to the piece right here. I mean, one of the things that it's kind of hard to describe, I do love the visual that we have for this piece. But yeah, I mean,

it's just like, it's a striking image, you know, it's got like, in the center there's a picture of a really high density chicken operation and there's somebody wearing sort of like a full tyvek suit suit and just walking through this like massive herd of chickens and then that's superimposed over this just like really nasty looking close-up photo of a prison food tray and just like the canned veggies and the everything and like i mean i don't i've been to jail a number of times and the food is always terrible it's

always one of the things you talk about or you can bond over or whatever it's just how bad the food is but i think people who have an experience that don't really think about just how much systematic like starvation is going on and malnutrition is going on where it's like the only way you can possibly survive in these places is spending a bunch of extra money on commissary to get stuff that also isn't healthy but at least you can get more calories and stuff and like i think that that there's's a lot of parallels between the structure of prisons and the structure of our food system. I mean, one example that I use to talk about this is the banana plantation, where we have an entire variety of banana that's basically extinct. an entire variety of banana that's like basically extinct or it's it can't be grown commercially anymore because the banana industry you know functions by putting by warehousing these

bananas together and these like super tight plantation formations you know which really only makes sense if you're just trying to maximize your profits and get as much out of a small space as possible but what it does is is the exact same thing that happens in prisons during covid or with any kind of uh you know pathogen like tuberculosis or whatever um you know it it's like the the trees are so close together that uh the fungus spreads so rapidly and then they're also like pumping all these things in to to fight that and they're actually breeding super funguses all the time and at some point the banana that we

eat now is going to also stop existing because of this um and i guess i i don't know if i can draw anything deeper out of those similarities other than the fact that there's this like overriding logic of capitalism that is just like has no respect for these beings like whether it is a person or a banana tree like it's all just commodities and things to be warehoused um yeah i i uh i think um to add on that i mean this this the piece in there, which is called the struggle for good food across walls. I think it does a nice job of talking about how, like, you know, if we're talking about, quote unquote, food, food justice or what have you, like, like, how can we talk about that on the outside while forgetting about just the most deplorable food conditions on the entire continent? And I think that it's really good at that. the imaginaries of inmates kind of go and, like, attack that, like, the logic of prison food being completely deplorable. Like, you know, you have all of these forms of creativity of, like, making tortillas and stuff

and, like, doing wild things with, like, stuff that's in the commissary and, you know, wild things with like stuff that's in the commissary and you know contraband kind of ways of of making kind of life a little bit more livable in there and if anyone has spent time in jail or prison uh or or kept up a relationship with someone on the inside or what have you um everyone has a story about a way of um food more interesting and joyful and there becomes whole cultures around them. is through pre-existing relationships with inmates in Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana, which, for those that don't know, was a plantation. Civil War happens. Two years after the Civil War, it becomes a Louisiana State Penitentiary.

It's still a plantation. It's, you know, many times descendants of the same enslaved folks who were on that plantation prior. And you know, it's a guard on a horseback riding around while there's folks pulling cotton. And so through some of these relationships with some of these inmates who are like kind of clandestine organizers, we're starting to come up with ways to like grow food collaboratively with folks that are behind walls and find ways to get food to either their family or maybe sell and get that into their commissary. And I'm just like trying to spitball ideas about like different ways of producing food despite people's incarceration. Yeah, that seems like a really, I guess the only word you can really say is necessary way for this sort of food politics to go if it's going to actually deal with sort of both the the land conditions and the conditions of just

you know the fact that we have an enormous that there's still just an enormous slave population in the u.s and i think that kind of resistance and creativity i think is how yeah y'all are on the right track with with pushing it that way yeah that this is this is sort of a bleak note to end on i think but i don't know i I think, yeah, it's a hopeful one, too. And where can people find, but basically all of Yale's work, and then also you talked a little bit about trying to get submissions for everything.

So can you talk a little bit about how that's going to work? Yeah. So it's kind of been on hold a little bit because we've been very very active after IDA. Yeah. And, you know, trying to make sure our people are all good and supporting in various places. Kind of doing like different workshops and stuff. And our focus isn't just on food production.

It's also like neighborhood survival or whatever so we've been um working with an old um neighbor of one of ours who um you know she's already been kind of doing this mutual aid stuff you know by any other name for decades you know letting people stay in her house um feeding people um she's like kind of like a block mama and she's really one of the last um black homeowners in her neighborhood so we're really trying to like um help her achieve some autonomy one way that we've been putting it is um when all the airbnbs like lose their power because they're still reliant on the colonial um world well miss lp it could still have her lights on because she's going to be totally autonomous from the system. So I think that that link is on our Instagram page. If you click on the link or whatever, there's a GoFundMe that is where we've been putting

a lot of our effort and really working with her on. And then also growing a garden adjacent to her so that there people in that community are food as, as food autonomous as, as we can get. We can, we can put that in the show notes too. Yeah.

And the, the handle for both Twitter and Instagram is at Lobelia Commons. And the almanac, you can find links to the Almanac PDF through either of those if you want to just read it for free. And then there's also copies for sale on EmergentGoods.com. And for submissions, I mean, yeah, like I said, we've been really behind on this just because of all this stuff. But for submissions, we're really looking for folks to contribute, throw us a pitch. I think if you've seen the first one or listened to this, you probably get something of an idea of what we're looking for. And we're happy to like talk to people about like, you know, different ideas.

And we're happy to talk to people about different ideas. Bear with us if we're a little slow to respond because we're still way steep right now. But the submission for Deadlines is the end of October. And you can email ideas or pitches or whatever to lobeliacommons at protonmail.com. And lastly, the project that I'm most focused on is the front yard orchard initiative, where basically we just propagate as many fruit trees as cheaply as possible, things that are really easy for us to grow from cuttings like figs, mulberries, things that are easy to grow from seed like papaya, moringa, pecan. And we basically just have some nice flyers that we put up and we advertise a bit on social media and also just kind of go door to door in neighborhoods where we already have gardens

or connections and offer to give free fruit trees out to people. And we're also happy to plant them for people and then kind of offer a consultation on how to take care of it or whatever. And also, if folks want to hear some of the pieces from the 2021 Earthbound Farmers Almanac, read by some of the authors, and then some interviews with those authors, you can check out this podcast called partisan gardens that did a really good episode that's kind of like an audio exploration of the almanac cool yeah people people definitely definitely go read the almanac it is it's it's a it's a really good it's a really good piece of work um yeah thank thank you too so much for joining us. Yeah. Thank you for having us.

Welcome. I'm Danny Threl. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted latin america since the beginning of time listen to nocturnal tales from the shadows as part of my cultura podcast network available on the iheart radio app apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. You suddenly wake up to the loud growling of a tactical vehicle. Must have left your window open. A few streets away, you can hear the troopers doing their morning patrols. This is closing in on week four of the all-day curfew. Cops and state troopers have put checkpoints at every bridge and on all major streets for about

every 10 blocks. Your friends and the city's local liberal majority are now calling this what it is. Your city is functioning as a full-on police state. National establishment media has been more hesitant to use that term, but your fox-watching conservative family from out of state has been texting you about how good it is that someone is finally establishing law and order and taking back the town after months of senseless looting and destructive riots. You've been mostly stuck in your downtown apartment. You quit your job when the recent bout of protests started up, which now means you don't qualify for the working hours

exemption of the curfew. You've got enough money saved up for another month, but you're looking to get a grocery delivery job, which would have the added benefit of allowing you to go outside during the day. Luckily, you've been able to sneak out at night to do roof-topping and surveil the police's, checkpoints, and patrol routes in your neighborhood. You've noticed that the cops rarely look up. You've been feeding your intel into a surveillance database shared on a telegram channel ran by some various activists. After lying in bed gathering your thoughts for a few minutes, you finally roll out and pick out your clothes. Dark loose pants, a plain shirt, beanie, and a high-vis jacket.

Ordinarily, you'd break into your Red Bull stash for morning caffeine, but you've already got plenty of energy today. It's your boyfriend's birthday, and for the past week, you've been planning to surprise him. You think there's birthday, and for the past week you've been planning to surprise him. You think there's finally enough information in the surveillance database to plan a trip across town with little to no law enforcement interaction. Between the in-person reconnaissance and hacking into the city's traffic cams, which was surprisingly easy, you've been able to figure out a route using city buses and on foot that should be able to avoid checkpoints and the regular patrol routes. From what you've seen online, bus drivers won't ask for a work authorization card, and you're hoping the high of his jacket will make it look like you belong.

Lastly, before you leave, you grab your small yellow messenger bag and jam in a water bottle plus a tin of a half a dozen cupcakes. Deep breaths. bottle, plus a tin of a half a dozen cupcakes. Deep breaths. Slowly twist the handle of your door and stare down your apartment hallway. You're on your way. You keep telling yourself, just act like you belong. After taking the stairs down to ground level, you make your way street side. This part you feel more confident about. You've been able to study the patrol patterns around your immediate area more carefully. The bus stop you're going to is just four blocks away. You can zigzag through two streets to avoid the main drags. As you walk through the sidewalks,

you keep your head down, but your eyes are darting side to side to get a lay of the land. Don't walk too fast or too slow. Match the people around you. Obviously, not many people are out right now, but there are enough to mirror their movement and pace. It feels like it took forever, but you get to the bus stop without incident, or seeing a single cop. Waiting at bus stops always feels like an eternity, but today it's worse. Within a few minutes, the blue metro bus does pull up. The bus driver gestures you on. The electronic ticketing system isn't turned on. You peek up to the driver. The look in her eyes is telling you just to head on back. At least you know she's probably on your side. You picked this bus, not because it's the most direct route to your

boyfriend's place. It's not. But because it gets you close enough while avoiding the checkpoints you and your internet buddies have mapped out. It's a slower, more jagged route, but at least you get to relax for a while and enjoy the ride. And hey, you can get an in-person look at the rest of the city under the curfew and police occupation. The ride's now closing in on a little over half an hour, about 10 more minutes until you get off. Your heart's racing. You might actually do this. In your flash of nervous excitement,

you look up ahead on the road. And your face drops. About half a mile up ahead, you spot a checkpoint. Fuck. No, this is wrong. This wasn't on the map. The checkpoint on this street was supposed to be further up the road, after you get off. Your mind flashes through different possibilities. Did the cops change the checkpoint this morning? Wait, did the police find the database map on Telegram and are feeding

it false info? You stop yourself from thinking because you realize you need to act now and think later. You jump out of your seat and sprint up the bus towards the driver. You blurt out, I need to get off this right now. Please. The driver looks ahead, looks at you, and tilts her head down and pulls over. Quick. That's all she says to you. You dart out of the bus and into the half-residential, half-retail labyrinth. And as you're running, you hear sirens. Fuck, they saw you. Your head swivels around to catch a glance. One car from the checkpoint is headed your way.

You hope the bus driver doesn't get in trouble, but right now, that's not your problem. You think, first thing you need to do is prevent the vehicle from pursuing you. So, off the big streets. You take a second to tighten the messenger bag around your body, and here we go. To your right, you see a walled courtyard for a small two-story apartment.

Estimate the wall is eight feet tall. Doable. You turn off the street and run towards the wall, slowly gaining speed. Jump up and plant your foot on the side, then your arms reach up and grab the top. It's a bit of a struggle to pull yourself up, you got some stuff weighing you down, and you're a bit out of practice, but you get up. You hop down onto the other side and keep going for now.

You barrel through some dense bushes and vault a few small railings as you traverse the side streets. Soon enough, you're far enough away from the car, with plenty of obstacles in between you and it, that you feel like you can catch a quick breather. Now you have a choice. Hide it out here for a bit, or figure out a way to your boyfriend's. You still got a decent sense of where you are. The destination should be only about 10 blocks away now, in a diagonal direction. You'll get plenty of time to rest at your boyfriend's place, so you figure you should continue on. As you're about to head on your way, two armored state troopers turn the corner on foot.

You remember, you're still pretty close to the checkpoint. One look at you, with your hands on your knees as you pant, the cops know you're out of place. Stop, yells the cop. You're being detained. Fuck. Time to book it. Gonna have to think as you run. Good news is, is that they're in armor. Bad news is, is that you're tired and your outfit is blown. You can change clothes once you get to your boyfriend's, so you decide the best course of action now is to make it hard for two people in armor to follow you. Time to put

some obstacles between you and them. You're already mostly out of the retail area, which means it's time to hop some backyard fences. Ferris Bueller's day off shit. You make a sharp left turn behind a car and into someone's yard and up and over their fence. One hand grabs on top, one hand goes to the far side, and you flip your body over. Next few fences are shorter. Regular speed vaults will do. The sound of the clunky tactile boots chasing you gets quieter as you traverse through the yards and zig-zigging around blocks. Before you know it, you're on the back street of your partner's place. Only a few more steps and you can see their backyard in the distance.

You quick turn your head and look around. From what you can see, you've lost the state troopers. You scurry through four more yards before you reach your target. You let out a sigh of relief. You jog past the side yard towards the front. You probably should use the front door. Before you knock, you take a look inside your messenger bag. You unclip the latch, and inside lies a smushed pile of cupcake crumbs

with pink frosting coating the insides of your bag. Huh. Well, at least I made it in one piece, you say out loud. After an exhausting trek, you finally knock on the door. Ooh! It could happen here. Podcast, Robert Evans. Sophie is not here today,

so I get to open the episode with atonal grunting because she was unable to stop me. Welcome to the podcast that this is, talking about things falling apart, how to, you know, make it not, maybe. My guest today, well, my co-host today first is Garrison Davis. Garrison, how are you doing today? I'm doing good. Good. We have a little bit of a fun update. This actually happened last week, but this will be the first episode we're recording since it happened. Last week, we put up some links to a GoFundMe and a couple of different episodes of Bastards and of It Could Happen Here to try to help a woman named Ruba who lives in Portland and is a community activist save her house when we started the fundraiser she'd raised about 28 grand to to you know get basically keep her home and it's up

to the 50 grand she needed y'all did that in about three days so you've you've you've kept a woman in her home and allowed her and her family to stay where they are. And I'm just extremely grateful to everybody who donated, who shared. It's just awesome. You know, this comes after earlier in this year, y'all funded the Portland Diaper Bank. I just continue to be very impressed with how much people who listen to these shows are willing to throw down to help people out so thank you all uh and now i'm going to hand it off to garrison garrison what are we what are we what are we what are we what are we what are we talking about today so today we're going to be talking

about and discussing two of kind of my favorite practical skill sets and i've been training for i don't know seven eight eight i think i almost eight years now um and it's what yeah one of my favorite interests it's useful very practically it's also useful for fun we're talking about uh parkour which people may have heard me discuss before but also just kind of like stealth in general um and how to be kind of mindful of your presence among other people um as a big clumsy guy who's worked extensively with you in aggressive situations i can confirm that your parkour is very uh very effective because you are a fast little son of a bitch very good at getting away from the cops and getting to where you need to be to film things it was always um uh kind of amazing as frustrating as it was sometimes when you would when you would

dart out ahead of everybody but yeah can't argue with the results um so and to help us kind of uh talk about parkour and stealth i have brought on a friend of mine who is the person who mostly uh taught me um parkour and stealth uh my friend rick who has been teaching parkour for a long time um say hi rick hi that that's right rick is very uh not super social so it's i think it's amazing that i was able to convince him to come on a podcast pretty funny um first off uh rick do you want to kind of just like give your definition of like parkour in general because i know whenever we say parkour everyone just thinks of the office um which i know you find frustrating but yeah for people who maybe aren't as into it as us do you want to give the kind of a brief overview of parkour as like a concept

parkour is a really annoying concept to actually pin down but basically speaking it's movement with purpose you are somewhere you want to get somewhere and you're trying to find the best way of doing that when we're training we kind of focus on efficiency safety speed and the the reason behind the movement yeah yeah i think that's thinking of it more as like a movement with purpose or like like intentional movement um is much better than thinking of it's like like parkour isn't like flips like flips and that kind of stuff is is more of what we call like um free running it's more of like a creative expression it's more of like a kind of kind of like a sport whereas like parkour is more usually i mean there's always going to people that are going to fight you on this in the parkour in the

parkour community but it's generally parkour is kind of more based on utility so like last last summer at the protests i i i used you know parkour in a lot of different ways both to like you know get somewhere specifically or parkour is great as like a recovery tool like if you get pushed over by cops um parkour can be very useful for like getting up very fast you know it's like all that kind of more practical side of things and i've used park you know, before I was doing filming at different kind of activism related type things. It's just it's a super useful skill to have. And today I wanted to talk a bit about like parkour is practical application in, you know, conflict ish scenarios, but also wanted to touch on stealth as, you know, sometimes you don't need

parkour and if you can avoid a scenario where you have to use it would be great. So I've asked Rick to prepare a few things on stealth which then we'll bounce off each other and have a general discussion of parkour and stealth in general and how it relates to conflict

scenarios. Rick, where would you like to start for, you know, stealth overview? Well, in conflict with other people, there's like three different levels of the conflict. And all of these get trained in different places usually there's the actual um like conflict the combat which is more of a martial arts or gun training or weapon training of any kind is what prepares you for that beneath that is the parkour level where you can avoid getting into the conflict in the first place if you can get away from the situation yeah if you're more of an arm's length away, then you can create more distance between you and someone that's trying to hurt you.

And in 99.9% of conflict situations, that's going to be a better self-defense option than literally any weapon you could carry. Just giving the hell away is always the preference. There's a really good comic. It's like

a comedy comic of someone's it's like a it's like a it's like a like a like a comedy comic of like someone someone trying to get into like a knife fight and you're just like nope i'm running away because there's no there's no winner in a knife fight the only way to win a knife fight is to be oh far away from someone with a knife yeah i mean literally again the only justified situation i can think of to physically getting into a knife fight is like what happened on the Portland Max train when someone else can't get away. Yeah, you're stuck in a space. And the two guys who did that died. They died.

Yeah. Not that they did the wrong thing. They did the only thing they could. But that's what a knife fight is. So, yeah, it's being able to get the fuck away is the best self-defense. So, yeah, being able to get the fuck away is the best self-defense. Yeah, I carry weapons with me wherever I go, but I don't want to ever use them. My first response is always going to be look for an escape path. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. A weapon is only for if you can't get away or if someone else can't get away. So pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. Or if someone else can't get away. So I don't know.

Like, yeah, I've always been interested because, again, I've watched, you know, Garrison hop away from cops over fences where I had to, like, you know, fall over the fence, essentially, because I'm not nearly as good. I'm someone who exercises. But, like, number one, is it even possible to, like, learn this stuff without fucking your 33-year-old body up a bunch in the process oh yeah that's the thing i'm scared of who is like over 60 and he's good very good he's actually like one of my high intermediate low advanced students honestly and he started when he was like 50 how do you, I mean, like it, it just seems like injury, I guess,

because my, my, my stereotypical view of it is like a bunch of jumping up on buildings and leaping over stuff. Like, yeah, it seems like injuries would be a pretty common fact. So I,

I guess that's kind of like always been my first concern there. Like, how do you, how do you, how, how do you, how do you train people to do this stuff with a minimum of risk? Well, that's kind of always the focus of my teaching. There certainly are other instructors out there,

but like the guy who taught me parkour was basically, this is a Kong vault. This is what it looks like. Do it. My training, like I sucked at parkour when I started. So my teaching method has been coming at this as a sort of, okay, I'm going to try to break this down into as many pieces as I can. And I'm going to try to keep you completely safe. Bumps and bruises do happen when you're

training parkour. That's just unavoidable. It's learning how to do walking but fancy so you get bruised when you're learning how to walk you get bruised when you're learning every technique in parkour but i've been doing it for 14 years now and i've never broken any of my bones so if you do it right you shouldn't be able to stay safe when training you definitely if you can get someone who's more experienced getting them to break down steps for you is very useful whether that be like a park or gym in your area or just like a friend that that's that's been that's been like messing around trying to like train with somebody is probably one of the most important things um is to have someone else there both if

you like one like get hurt you need help but two to kind of prevent to help prevent that from even happening in the first place because there's a lot of like very simple moves that can be introduced in very safe environments i've i've i've been wanting to get roberts down to the gym for like over a year now just to go over like a few basic kind of stuff that's just really really useful and pretty in and like pretty easy like we're not we're not jumping to like you know doing like roof topping right where we're like jumping from one roof. Like we're not, we're not jumping to like, you know, doing like roof topping, right. Where we're like jumping from one roof to another. We're starting by, we're starting by being like, here's like a concrete barricade. What's the safest way of getting over this if

you're under pressure. Right. It's that kind of stuff that's specifically useful in like conflict scenarios. Right. Cause like when we're, when we're facing in a riot line, I'm not going to be doing like flips and cartwheels to like get over fences. I'm trying to be like, what's the safest, fastest way I can get over this thing while get over fences i'm trying to be like what's the safest fastest way i can get over this thing while making sure i'm not going to get like shot with a rubber bullet right that's kind of it's it's very different from like what you see on like youtube right youtube is very like showy people are like trying to like basically when what you see on youtube is people are doing people are doing like a choreographed performance whereas parkour from a

utility standpoint is very different from what you see online. It's improvisation. Yeah. And that's one of the things that we try to train too when we're training parkour is we just give ourselves an environment and say, okay, I'm going now. Yeah. And like do it over and over again and try to figure out what's the best way of getting

over this specific path, right? If you can like make a designed path, be like, you know, even doing this at, like, a playground or, like, any place with, like, logs, you know, you can do parkour in the forest and stuff. Be like, I'm going to set this path and experiment with how many ways can I move through this kind of set of obstacles. And you can kind of figure out parkour on your own in that kind of way because your body knows what it's going to do.

Like, you know, people have been moving like this for thousands and thousands of years it's only in the past few hundred years where we've like kind of lost this ability or it's like become it's become less necessary so like we we know how to interact with our environment in creative ways like we we know how to do this um it's just that you know we the past the the past few centuries, it's been less important. And I think parkour is really fun because you can kind of rediscover interacting with your environment in these kind of more wild

ways. It's something that we all do as children. Just like evolutionarily for some reason, as children we do this as play. We climb trees and we try to go over fences it's just that something in our society has made a shift so that when we become adults it's suddenly not acceptable for us to do this anymore yeah i mean i can remember when i was a little kid

growing up on the farm we had a bullpen because we kept the bull away from the cows and my my cousin and i would hop over the fence and we would throw stuff at because we kept the bull away from the cows and my my cousin and i would hop over the fence and we would throw stuff at the bowl and then when it started to charge we would hop back over the fence yeah i mean obviously i'd never do that today because it's mean to throw things at a bowl i was six but also i couldn't physically hop over the fence that way today but i'm guessing within like i don't know even just like a few hours of practice you could figure out a lot of ways to get over stuff. I could be back to fucking with bulls is what you're saying.

Exactly. You don't need to kiss the bull fucking goodbye. We can go back to this. We could go. I could return to tradition. Yes, exactly. What is the degree of this that can be done without, again, like, you know, we have a wide variety of income levels that listen to this show. What is the degree of this that can be done without paying for training? Is it even possible to start on this kind of thing if you're in reasonable shape on your own without paying someone? Because that seems like a recipe for breaking something to me. But again i don't know i don't know shit it is very much about knowing yourself and knowing what you're ready for uh this was something i mean

i say that i never broke a bone in my training but there were a couple times i started pushing myself further than i should have and it would have been really good to have someone there to say, Hey, you're probably not ready for this yet. Let's break this down into little pieces. But if you come at it methodically and you don't endanger yourself too much, what I started out with in parkour is I would just put a piece of tape on the ground and another piece of tape and jump from one piece of tape to the other and went out to parking lots and jumped from just an arbitrary pebble to the curb on the parking lot and found some just railings and learned how to go over those railings safely and gradually just started building up to higher and higher things you always want to start at ground level when you're training parkour don't go up to high places for your first

thing yeah i think there's a lot of like instructional videos on youtube too that that are not just like showing off it's actually people trying to like break down movement so you can like get find a specific video be like okay i, I want to bring this on my phone, go out into a playground, a parking lot, a wooded area, and be like, okay, this is this one vault. I'm going to watch the video, and I'm going to try to replicate it myself. That's really the easiest,

cheapest way to break that down without having to pay someone tons of money. Parkour classes aren't the most expensive thing um so that's if you do have a little bit of disposable income i i i i like parkour classes i did them for a long time but there was a certain point actually that like i couldn't afford classes anymore and luckily i've been doing parkour enough at that point

that i was able to become an assistant instructor which which means I got like a free, I got like a free membership in exchange for, you know, helping out in classes like a few hours a week. So that's what, that's what I did for years when I couldn't afford classes is, uh, is just help is help teach, which I mean, eventually I got leveled up to being like a full-time instructor. Um, so that is kind of the other way is, you know, once you get enough stuff, there are, you know, there's, there's ways you can make friends who know more parkour than you

you can do outdoor training with them which can be free but if you do really want a gym environment there's ways of making classes not the most expensive thing also there's online groups that schedule meetups every now and then

so if you can find an online group in your area, you can go to one of their meetups and ask for advice. Not everyone's going to give the best advice. There are some people in the parkour community who are always pushing their boundaries. They'll be in a cast half of the time. The more advanced people, yeah. They generally. So always take advice with a grain of

salt not everyone knows everything and no one knows your body as well as you do so you you got to keep yourself safe above everything else you can't get better at parkour if you break both of your legs yeah that's always um so a couple of questions here number one would be uh obviously i don't expect you know like somebody's in michigan or whatever i don't expect you to know the best parkour instructor there but if somebody is looking at going the gym route um are there kind of some hard and fast rules for determining whether or not these folks know what they're doing like is there any kind of advice you have in terms of picking a gym or is it just kind of like go into google maps and see uh see where the parkour be that's a little bit tough because

um especially since covid there's not many options for parkour gyms out there my best advice would be go and if they let you just watch a class and see what's going on, see how many people have casts. Yeah. Yeah. Back when I was learning parkour originally, we would have basically two people in a cast all the time just for the class. Yeah. I didn't know that. The guy that I was trying to keep up with the whole time spent three stints in a cast.

Yeah, just funny because I've never got a serious injury ever. I was always more careful in my training, but the most I've gotten is bruises and stuff. And I got to a relatively high level of parkour a few years ago. You only took classes from me. My focus was always on breaking things down and making them accessible and safe. True, true. Yeah. Yeah, but there's definitely people who are more carefree with their body and okay with hurting themselves to do something cool.

Yeah, and some people get away with that. do something cool yeah and some people get away with that so for folks who either don't have the financial means to go to a gym where there's just nothing in their area because as you've said there's a plague um if people are gonna you've given some advice on like how to start trying yourself are there any specific online resources you would recommend to folks who are you know looking to get on unless on their own dip their toes in um you know youtube channels or or people who you know do good like writing breakdowns, anything that you would you would push folks towards? I haven't been up to date on it recently.

A lot of the videos out there are garbage. What I recommend you look for is you look for, first of all, explanation. Second of all, if you can find videos of someone who's training something and they fail to do the move that they're trying to do correctly, and they fail to do the move that they're trying to do correctly, they fail and fail and fail and fail and then succeed, that's an honest video. That's one that I would listen to more because they understand the process.

The other videos out there are sort of greatest hits compilations, and you don't get to see the whole process that goes into that. So I don't have a lot of sense. I don't have any specific person or channel to recommend. to recommend but when you're going out there and looking for resources just make sure that the person is putting some understanding into the fact that this is a process of training and it's not just this is how it's done do it now you can do it there is there is a uh there is like a parkour wiki which was like you know parkour.fandom.com that you can you can find like just like lists of all of the moves and they give you very like simple explanations of them and they, and they link to some videos. Um, and generally like if you, if you just want to learn more about it, then that's,

then that can be a good resource just so you're familiar with all the different types of movement. But yeah, like make sure you take every video with a grain of salt and, you know, watch other, watch other people's explanations and be like, okay, I kind of like the way this person describes it versus this person because, you know, everyone teaches like, okay, I kind of like the way this person describes it versus this person. Because, you know, everyone teaches differently. Everyone teaches for kind of, you know, different body types, for different, like, you know,

body performance models. So, you know, because you can't just apply the same thing to everyone because everyone's different. But, you know, the Parkour Wiki is a decent resource. And then, you know, there's YouTube is, especially since the 2000s, there's been a plethora of content, most of it bad.

But, you know, there's lots to at least look for. All right. Anything else you wanted to get into? Yeah, I wanted to kind of branch off of like the parkour discussion into kind of like the more kind kind of stealth-based discussion of of kind of being aware of your presence in relation to other people and i know you were talking about like the different like levels of stealth yes so you've got the combat training which prevents you from getting killed or captured in uh the worst of scenarios and then you have parkour that you can use to prevent the combat in the first place. And stealth is what you use to prevent the chase from happening in the first place.

It's kind of a tree of, I really don't want to have to fight someone, so I'm going to run away instead. I really don't want to have to run away from someone, so I'm just going to try not to be noticed by them instead. And that's been a lot of what my training in parkour has been focused around, is just staying de-escalated as possible with everything. as possible with everything. Yeah. Because me and Rick have focused most of our parkour training on stealth as opposed to being super strong

or super powerful. And stealth's always a really hard concept to talk about because it's kind of nebulous in nature. Because stealth isn't being invisible. It's not being totally unnoticed. It's wanting to craft the way you're seen in a specific way yeah um it's always been very difficult for me to explain what stealth is the most recent

definition that i've given for it is that everything that you do, everything that you are gives off a certain amount of noise and a certain type of noise. So the way that you dress, you can dress in a very loud way with a high vis vest, day glow colors, something that makes you really easy to notice. But if you're in the right environment, that might be the right type of noise to be making to blend into a crowd. Like a three-piece suit is also a very loud outfit to wear. But if you're on the streets of New York, that's normal. If you come into a park orgy wearing a three-piece suit, it's very abnormal. So that's not the right type of noise

if you're trying to blend in there. Yeah, a lot of it's about kind of constructing the way people see you based on what environment you're in and who you're trying to remain undetected from, right? Because, I mean, they're, not even necessarily undetected, but just detected in a specific way. Because people's eyes can glaze over a lot of stuff. If just like the right puzzle pieces

are put into their brain, then it's like nothing to see here. Everything's normal, nothing to be alerted, right? Because what you're trying to do is prevent someone from being like alerted to your presence that is kind of the main thing so you can be within someone's sight lines but the way that you're dressed the way that you're moving the way that you hold yourself fails to get their attention their subconscious registers that you're there but it doesn't

register consciously to them that you're there it It's the, the gray man stuff that we were talking about with Chelsea, which again, there's a very frustrating chuddy dimension to it. But the, the original idea before it got taken over as an entire fashion aesthetic was if you're prepared, if you're, if you're going to make yourself prepared for bad situations, you don't want to wear a bunch of tactical gear. You don't want to be dressed in like five combat pants. You don't want to wear a bunch of tactical gear you don't want to be dressed in like five combat pants you don't want to be carrying like military backpacks and like the cargo pants with the you know clearly bulging with weaponry you don't want to be open carrying a gun you want to be dressed however is going to least to least set you apart from the crowd and that is as you said gonna vary no It's not a matter of like wearing all gray

or wearing all black. If you're in fucking downtown Salt Lake City, you know, a black hoodie and jeans might stand out more than it does if you're in like downtown San Francisco, in which case you're going to look like a million other people. I mean, and generally,

if you're trying to avoid being seen, I recommend against wearing black, basically at all times, especially if you're trying to remain like actually invisible at night, to avoid being seen, I recommend against wearing black, basically at all times. Especially if you're trying to remain actually invisible at night, you don't want to wear black, because black is usually too dark. You want to wear darker

blues or darker greens. Generally, black should be avoided. Of course, black block is a whole separate thing, because black block, you're trying to remain anonymous within a crowd context. But in a lot of of cases you don't want to be in black block at protests or you want to be able to switch from black block to what we call like normie block very quickly so like you know quick changes are another kind of form of stealth

um that you can like practice like you can you can just practice doing quick changes like in your apartment like how fast can i get from this outfit to this outfit in a small space? You can practice these even outside. But specifically for black block, changing both in and out of is a skill that needs to be practiced. But overall, I think there's a lot of

other ways of being anonymous at a protest besides actually black block. There's a lot of other methods. Black block's a very specific tactic, but it's not a tactic that needs to get applied all the time it's it's very it's you should be mindful that it has a lot of downsides um and based on what you're trying to do there's a lot of other ways to dress that would maybe be better um yeah yeah it's this um yeah it's a little bit like angles of it are kind of what we talked about even in like the last week when we were talking about like storing you you know, food and canning food and like the value of paying attention to the cycle of like what is in stock and what is not stock in stock during what seasons.

It's kind of the same thing at the value of paying attention to how people dress and how people move and like what is a normal way to move about in wherever you live as opposed to like what stands out like it there's a lot of value and a lot of self-defense value and just kind of paying attention to people wherever you live and getting an eye for what will stand out and what won't stand out if you're if you if you are someone for whom being able to blend in is something you see value in you know yeah um rick do you have anything that's kind of on that side of things or any like exercises people can like do to improve their own personal stealth yeah um it's very very situational you have to sort of study many different environments the biggest advice that i give people for stealth all the time is um pay. You have to pay attention to the smallest details.

When I'm even just moving around my house, like the bathroom door lock, when you twist the lock, the button pops out and makes a huge noise. I actually place my thumb over it and deaden the sound as I'm doing it. And I pay attention to the kind of noise that I make in every situation and try to minimize that as much as possible. I pay attention to which parts of my house make noise when you step on them and avoid those places. I basically just pay attention to every noise that my body makes, that my environment makes as I'm moving through it. Also, you have to pay attention and study other people in different environments. You can go to a grocery store and watch the body language of the moms who are shopping with their

kids, the people that normally you wouldn't pay attention to, pay attention to them because they're doing a good job of blending in if you're not normally paying attention to them. And then try to start mimicking their body language. What I'll do when I go out is I don't directly look at anyone, but I'm paying attention to if I'm being paid attention to and give myself that conscious feedback and say, hey, I wasn't all that stealthy this time. I kind of stuck out. Yeah, practicing your peripheral vision

is definitely useful for that. I mean, in terms of like exercises, yeah, just go into like parks or other places where there's a lot of people and like people watching and trying to figure out who does your eyes glaze over the most and what are they doing to cause that?

I think one thing that me and Rick have talked about before is like every part of your body points somewhere. Like whether that be your eyes, your nose, your chin, your arms, your hips, your chest, your hands, all of these things point in a direction. And if you can figure out which direction you can point them to make people pay less attention to you that's kind of one of the easier models of understanding how to like walk and move in a stealthy manner that i think like out of all the different ways of thinking about it i think that's the way that's helped me the most um it's being like you know if if my head is pointed up and my nose is pointed out and I'm moving my arms around a lot, that's people are going to like, like look at me more.

I mean, people, if, if, if eye contact is made, that is like a failure. So, you know,

if your head's pointed down, your arms are more slouched, they kind of move with your body, but that's not super exaggerated and it's not super stiff. These are different kind of ways of pointing your body to make you seem more like, um, introspective,

um, and less external. Also walking around with, um, earplugs or like, uh, like, like, uh, earbuds, your body to make you seem more like um introspective um and less external also walking around with um earplugs or like uh like like uh earbuds earphones those are ways people will pay attention looking at your smart device looking at your smartphone yeah one of the back when we back when i took classes with you and taught classes we would have like a weekly a weekly games class um where we'd have different you know games and related to parkour and you know stealth would always kind of be something i would try to do and you could

survive so long in stealth games by just like looking like pretending that you're looking at your phone like not even actually doing it just like walking in like a circle around like walking in a circle around the arena as people are trying to like tag and stuff and if you can just like walk with your head down kind of slowly, you can survive a ridiculously long time. Because people are looking for people that are running around and being super energetic. And if you're not, people

aren't detecting you as much. Another thing to practice would be quiet walking, which we kind of mentioned before. It's like learning how to move your foot and interact with different surfaces that makes your walking basically silent. Which is very fun because you can use this to scare your friends. It's, it's, it's, it's very exciting to, to, to, to, to like try to figure out what's, what's ways I can hide in my friend's house to like jump scare them. Or like, I can like,

how close can I get behind someone with, with, without them noticing there'd be times I can just like walk up behind someone and wait, like, I kid you not, like, ten minutes before they noticed I was there. It's hilarious. I feel even better when I can do that to their pets, because generally the animals are paying more attention to everything, so if you can successfully sneak up on someone's cat, you're doing it

right. Yeah. Oh, man. I do really enjoy stealth, and I'll be happy to practice it more regularly once the plague is over, if it's over. Any other kind of stealth notes that you would want to kind of bring up for if someone's trying to like, get into stealth or start thinking about detection, you know, more often in their everyday life? very important that you engage in indirect observations. Yeah, I was looking this up. You were talking about how everything points. And one of the things that we subconsciously notice the most is people's eyes. We're kind of programmed to notice eyes. So if you're looking directly at someone, they're probably going to notice that you've noticed them. But if you're using your peripheral vision,

or if instead of watching them, you're watching a reflection of them, or if you're watching their shadow, or you're not even looking in their direction, instead you're tracking them by sound, it makes it so that you have a big one-up on everyone around you. Yeah. Indirect observation is one of the best tools that you can use. If you get really clever at it, now this, this, this, this is harder because it actually,

if, if you, if you, if you do this wrong, people will, people will pay more attention to you, but you can get good at it to start using like your phone camera or even just your phone screen, because like your black phone screen is pretty is pretty is pretty reflective in nature so you can use this as like a mirror um but yeah using like phone cameras and phone screens as a reflective surface or or just as like a camera uh can be used in indirect observation but you you do have to be careful because if if if it looks like you're filming somebody they're going to pay so much more attention to you. So you have to be very careful with this method, but it is possible. This is how I kind of, this is how

I, this is how I've like documented different like Nazis at rallies. If I don't want to be like super obvious that I'm taking a picture of them, there's ways of doing indirect observation with my phone that I can like get pictures of them from certain angles and be like, okay, so now I can put you,

I can add you to my, to my folder of Nazis that have showed up. That method, you have to be super careful if you're surrounded by potentially hostile people. Yes. Anyone who's behind you is going to see that your phone camera is on. So it's something that you only want to use if people are on one side of you.

Or, you know, you keep, you, you, you use your body as a shield for certain, for certain like angles. Yeah. You be tricky, the hoodie and, uh, increase your odds of success with that. But, but, but most often I would recommend against this method, especially if you're just starting out, cause it is, it is a is a lot more risky, but when it does work, it can come in very handy. But more often than not, using reflections like windows, mirrors,

car windows, puddles on the ground, shadows, sound, all of these different methods of observing someone without looking directly at them are generally much safer, and they can be very useful for trying to track someone or just be aware of what they're looking at

without looking directly at them. Kind of more similar to what I talked about in the fictional opening we did. Stealth is very dependent on what you know is trying to watch you. You need to be aware

of the ways people are trying to detect you. If? Like, you need to be aware of the ways people are trying to detect you. Of course, this place... Yeah, if you're being tracked by a canine unit, it's... It's very different than just being chased down on foot. Or, you know, security cameras, of course, online tracking, which we're not really getting

into today, but being aware of where security cameras are mapped out can be very useful. Learning to figure out where they are without looking directly at them can be useful. A lot of cities have websites that map out where all the cameras are.

I know there's one for Portland that can map out all of the cameras in downtown, and then you can plan a route through downtown that has no cameras watching right there's only there's only very few routes that actually have that but but they do exist um so learning to move in ways that make cameras less able to spot you um those that's definitely another kind of method of learning about stealth and learning about like how surveillance

works never looking directly at the camera but that's that's that's definitely useful which paying attention to where they are yeah which plays into which plays into indirect observation um but i mean this gets more tricky we know when police are using like thermal drones uh this is it's a whole whole other side of things that it's very hard to i mean in the infosec side of thing is hard to combat and it's a whole whole other side of things that it's very hard to i mean in the infosec side of thing is hard to combat and it's yeah yeah there will be a point in time in which it becomes effectively impossible to monitor for cameras yeah there's like there's there's like a hierarchy of worry because yeah if because if like the nsa wants to find you they will but most often they're not like

most often people are dealing with their local law enforcement unit. Most often people are not dealing with the FBI. Most people usually aren't dealing with the FBI, CIA, or NSA. If they want to find you, they will. But if you can learn to only interact with your surroundings in a way that would only concern your local police department,

that's much easier to combat against. Because it's way easier to hide from combat against um yeah because it's way easier to hide from you know your local department than it is from the nsa all right um anything else i think that pretty much covers everything yeah i think that's a good that's a sewed great that's a cast that we have potted um all right um we got any plugables here to plug at the end before we roll out? What, me? Yeah.

No, please don't find me. Leave me alone. Don't find him. This is the most visible you've ever been. Yeah. Is there any, I don't know, fundraiser charity for someone else that you want to highlight? Not currently. No.

else that you want to highlight not currently no you are you do try to be uh you do try to be a virtual ninja all right well i'll plug something uh one of our fans is putting together a graphic novel about the famed anarchist uh militant of the spanish civil war buena ventura de ruti so if you just go to type de ruti into Kickstarter, you'll find the graphic novel Kickstarter. Check it out. It's cool. Yeah, and I guess other things I'll close with is learn to walk quietly, learn to observe

your surroundings, keep these things in mind. Practice with other people if you can. Practice with other people. Don't do this alone. It's really useful to have stealth be a collaborative process because stealth by itself isn't just about you. It's about you and your whole environment. Collaborate with the CVS clerk when you rob the CVS stealthily. That is a different podcast I'm working on. How to shop the shoplifting cast?

I mean, yeah, that is something I will pitch very soon. We have had trouble getting sponsors for the shoplifting podcast. I will tell you that. It is difficult. If you could actually get CVS to sponsor that. Yeah, big shoplifting. I mean, we are giving them a lot of free advertising. If it does happen.

Yeah. Anyway, yeah. Most people who shoplift also spend. That's true. One of the best ways to shoplift is to buy other things in the store. I'm already giving out advice. Yeah, that is how I always shoplifted

back when I shoplifted. Yeah, back when I did that 20 years ago. That's how I did it as well. I feel like if Sophie were here, she'd be trying to backpedal right now and stop you guys no sophie supports shoplifting this is a very pro shoplifting podcast anyway that's the podcast Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network,

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You were out of town when the last cop left Seattle. It had been unseasonably cool that week. The 70 degrees of old and not the 97 you had come to dread every summer. But you'd already promised you'd visit your family in Montana. And so when the riots started and the National Guard opened fire into the crowd, you watched it on Twitter from your couch like everyone else.

The Second Battle of Seattle, they were calling it. You wondered briefly what the first one was. They'd been fighting in Portland, too. Some kind of massacre in Oakland, and no one was quite sure what was happening in the Napa Valley. Couldn't be anything good, you thought. But it was Seattle everyone was talking about. The mayor fled the city in a helicopter But it was Seattle everyone was talking about. The mayor fled the city in a helicopter when it became clear the police were losing.

After that, the cops had simply broken and retreated across the cascades. No one knew who was running the city now, and you sure as hell didn't want to be the one to find out. But after two weeks, you'd burned through every vacation day and every favor you'd ever accumulated at the hospital. And besides, the rent was due. No one was sure if the postal service was even still functioning. And with the eviction moratorium lifted, you weren't going to risk getting evicted because you weren't there to hand your landlord a check. So, with rary resignation, you pile into your battered car and head towards Snoqualmie Pass. What surprised you most when you hit Seattle was the art. You'd been expecting burnt-out buildings and streets filled with burning cars. And there were some. A few streets were still

blocked by what looked like improvised barricades. But every surface of every building, it seemed, had some kind of mural on it. Someone, and no one seemed to be quite sure who, had first come up with the idea, had blocked off an entire street up near Capitol Hill, and people were painstakingly painting portraits of every protester killed in the fighting in Seattle on it. As you walked past, they were discussing doing the same for the dead in Oakland. The second surprise came when you tried to pay your rent. A woman you'd never seen before was sitting at the office's reception desk. When you tried to hand her your check, she laughed and handed it back to you, explaining that after the cops fled, the local

tenants union had taken over most of the apartments in the city and placed them in something it called a community land trust. You didn't quite get the details, but no one was going to evict you, so you decided to just take the win. Besides, your friend had convinced you to do some child care for the tenants' union in college, and they always seemed like a decent sort, so there didn't seem to be any immediate cause for concern. The hospital was another matter entirely. From what you could gather, there had been some kind of labor dispute during the chaos. Management seemed to have fired a group of nurses for giving injured protesters shelter from the police. Your ward had already been understaffed due to COVID and budget cuts.

Now, the situation was intolerable. Worse still, many of the senior administrators had fled the city with the police. No one seemed to know who was in charge, supplies were starting to run low, and with so many administrators missing and the insurance situation completely up in the air, on account of nobody being entirely sure if Seattle was even still part of the United States, it wasn't clear if anyone was going to get paid. So when a co-worker pulled you aside and asked if you'd be interested in doing something about the management problem, you figured, what the hell, maybe it was time for a change. It wasn't like it could possibly make anything worse.

The fired nurses, it turned out, had started to set up a community health center with the help of the local neighborhood council. But some of the nurses still working at the hospital had another idea. Why not just turn the hospital into the community health center? After all, the hospital already had more equipment than any new center could possibly assemble. All they needed was some help from the community,

and the whole thing could be run by a council of the hospital workers. Insurance companies, be damned. Besides, if all the hospitals started pulling their resources together, they might be able to solve some of the shortages. At the mention of solving the supply shortages, even the more skeptical workers started to come around.

By the next morning, the Seattle Hospital Workers' Council was marching on the hospital. The remaining management found out somehow, and tried one final lockout to hold onto their property. But as you saw yet another column of protesters joining the crowd surrounding the hospital, you knew this wasn't their city any longer. On April 18th, 2001, military police in the Kabilia region of Algeria shot an 18-year-old high school student. Almost immediately, hundreds of thousands of people took to the street, chanting, you can't kill us, we are already dead,

at the lines of policemen assembled to attack them. The police would kill over 100 people and severely wound 5,000 more in the months-long battle for control of the streets that followed. But protesters burned police stations, government offices, courts, and the offices of Islamic fundamentalist parties until the government agreed to give ethnic minority groups language and cultural rights. The hated military police were driven from the region entirely, and so few regular police

stations survived the uprising that the regular police likewise ceased to function across broad swaths of Kabilia. They were replaced on a local village level by self-organized security committees, which would assemble on the rare occasion trouble emerged. Contrary to the expectations of the state, crime plummeted. But the Algerian government otherwise continued to function as usual for over a decade, until the local government in a small region called Rabacha attempted to rig their local elections. After banning the most popular political party in the region, they installed an unpopular coalition government. The people of Brabacha responded by storming the city

hall, seizing control of it, and setting up a democratic general assembly inside the newly dubbed House of the People to replace the existing government. This was dual power in its original sense, a council of the people facing off against an increasingly illegitimate parliamentary representative in a struggle for control over the fate of a new society. If you google dual power, you are likely to encounter a pamphlet written by Vladimir Lenin entitled The Dual Power, describing the conundrum of the situation following the first Russian revolution in February of 1917. After the overthrow of the Tsar, political power was split between two competing bodies. On the one side, a new, provisional government of liberal and social democratic politicians,

holdovers from the old Duma from the previous regime. On the other side, revolutionary social forces rallying around assemblies of popular power called Soviets, which were councils of delegates sent by directly democratic factory soldiers and sailors committees. Lenin saw this as a situation to be overcome by the seizure of state power by a socialist party. For Lenin and his Bolsheviks, dual power was a problem because after the Tsarist state ceased to exist in the middle of the World War, the new provisional government failed to fill the vacuum left in its wake by its collapse. To Lenin, the solution was obvious.

Fill that vacuum with Lenin. For the peasants, soldiers, and workers who made up the majority of Russia's population, however, dual power was their first fleeting taste of freedom and autonomous control over their lives. Lenin used the Soviets to seize power, but almost immediately began to turn on these democratic assemblies of popular autonomy. Over the course of the Russian Civil War, Lenin and the Bolsheviks stripped power away from the workers, peasants, and soldiers, sometimes by bureaucratic fiat, often at the point of a bayonet, until the Soviet

had been stripped of all meaning in the very state named after their democratic form and became synonymous with dictatorship. Dual power today draws from the potential of that post-revolutionary crisis, from the bottom-up direct democracy that was so threatening to the social order that Bolshevik revolutionaries and Tsarist police spies alike conspired to wipe them from the historical record. Just as Russia was haunted by the memory of the French communes, so is America today haunted by a memory of dual power that against all odds refuses to die. We are, after all, still ruled by a greedy, bloodthirsty, and out-of-touch elite who have chosen to march us to our deaths by the hundreds of thousands by forcing us back to work

during a plague. But the Russian revolution is as far away from us today as Napoleon and his brass cannons were from the Russian revolutionaries and their machine guns. Times have changed. There is no Bolshevik party waiting in the wings to seize power as the state crumbles. The vacuum that the state leaves in its wake as its power deteriorates will be filled by any number of organizations, most even more hostile to the working class than the Bolsheviks had been. It could be warlords with the personal allegiance of the remains of the military. It could be organized crime. It could be religious fundamentalist militias.

Most likely, it will be an uneasy combination of all of the above. Or, it could be you. It could be your family, your friends, your neighbors, your co-workers, the person you wave to every morning at the bus stop when you're on your way to work. The path to that world, a world run not by capitalists and their cops, or by warlords and their armies, but by autonomous communities free to decide for themselves what to produce and how to best use their resources to care for each other, is dual power in the 21st century. At its core, dual power is about creating a counterpower against the state. During the Russian Revolution, this counterpower was formed essentially by historical accidents, as two governing bodies emerged from the course of the Russian Revolution, this counter-power was formed essentially by historical accidents, as two governing bodies emerged from the course of the February Revolution. But modern dual power does not arise from the whims of the course of revolution, or from an innate instinct of the working class.

It is something we build together by creating organizations that resist the power of the structures of violence—capitalism, racism,, homophobia in the state, name a few that control this world dual power organizations can take many forms from tenants unions to debtors councils child care cooperatives to land occupations workers councils to rank and file labor unions mutual aid networks to community self-defense organizations

these organizations seek to build autonomy from and against capitalism in the state. Alone, they are no match for the state's raw power to inflict violence and corporate control over our resources. But by joining together to form federations and pooling their resources and expertise to coordinate their efforts, they can become a powerful enough force to challenge the state both directly and indirectly. These dual-power organizations are designed to be the state's successor. As the industrial workers of the world famously put it, they form the structure of the new society in the shell of the old. In order to fulfill that task, they take the shape of the new society they seek to create. Academics call this prefigurative politics, organizing that employs the values and organizational structures that they seek to create

in the world. As we will discuss in the next episode, there are right-wing forms of both dual power and prefigurative politics. But for most of the people who employ it, prefigurative politics means creating direct democratic institutions without bosses, prefigurative politics means creating direct democratic institutions without bosses, managers, bureaucrats, or a party apparatus. The means of creating the new world are thus the same as the ends. Dual power organizations serve multiple purposes. Their long-term goal is to replace the state and the corporation with free and autonomous forms of organization. One's organized and powerful enough to protect themselves and manage the logistical challenges of a new

world where previous forms of organization and power no longer exist. But even reaching a point where this is remotely plausible requires not just the painstaking construction of counter-power and organization out of a fragmented American population. It requires a profound cultural transformation in how we make decisions. As the anthropologist David Graeber put it, It is assumed in many parts of the world that democracy is a group of people facing a certain problem, who come together to solve it in a way where everyone has an equal say. It's true that most Americans think of themselves as living in a democratic country, but when was the last time that any Americans actually sat down and came to a collective decision? Maybe if they were ordering pizza, but basically never.

Dual power organizations thus also serve as schools for democracy where people can learn, experiment with, create, and spread their own forms of democracy and collective decision making. When these spaces of democratic experimentation are functioning properly, their very organizational structure serves as a kind of recruitment tool. This was the original theory behind Occupy Wall Street, that democracy and the experience of autonomy were contagious and would spread rapidly as more and more curious people experienced it for themselves. That experience, in turn, would create a new generation of people trained in democratic practices who could go forth and transform the world. Obviously, this didn't quite happen.

Occupy's model of democracy was limited in many ways, not the least of which was that it required a public, physical meeting space that could be closed down by police violence. But the initial premise worked. Occupy itself, of course, had been inspired by the mass democratic assemblies in Spain and Greece in 2011, and the direct democratic co-ops and factory occupations that engulfed Argentina for the better part of the 2000s. At the most basic short-term level, however, dual power organizations are designed to meet people's needs. The cornerstone of this effort is mutual aid. Probably the most famous example of such a project was the Black Panther Party's survival programs. Former Black Panther Jonina Irvin describes them

in detail. The Black Panther Party's survival programs were, in fact, an example of an effort, a successful effort while it lasted, to create dual power in the United States. The Black Panther Party had a school. It had free food programs. One of its most respected survival programs was a breakfast for children, which was overall a response to hunger and poverty in the country, particularly among poor low-income black people. We had free medical clinics in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. We had free ambulances, free pest control, free shoes. We had free busing to prison programs, legal aid programs to help people get attorneys who needed them. And we had a program that was called the SAFE program, Seniors Against a Fearful Environment,

in which we provided free transportation and escort service to senior citizens who needed to get out and take care of their errands, their business. They were often being attacked, so this was a form of protection for them. The Panthers were able to grow their influence by keeping their communities safe, healthy, cared for, and increasingly autonomous from the state. But most importantly, they were able to keep people alive. As Black Panther's co-founder Huey P. Newton famously said, these survival programs satisfy the deep necessity of keeping people alive, especially people who the state would rather kill or leave to die, for building any kind of power. But these programs are also necessarily insufficient. No mutual aid program, no autonomous project, no liberated territory can provide for the entire

community while the corporations, capitalists, and state maintain their stranglehold over the resources and production capacity that the working class collectively created over centuries of grueling labor and struggle. Dual power, more than just survival, is about building the counterpower to take it back. Building power is what draws the line between what is and isn't dual power. Growing food for you and your friends might cut down on bills and make some killer pesto, but it's not necessarily challenging the capitalist system. Autonomy for its own sake is not necessarily dual power. If it doesn't actively aid in struggle or better organize the community, then from the perspective of building counterpower, that autonomy is

meaningless. Making food for striking workers to allow them to stay on strike longer is building dual power, where simply producing it for general consumption is not. While dual power organizations necessarily serve the needs of the community, they must also be able to pivot and attack the state and capital and provide solidarity and mutual aid to those in their community who are already in struggle. Or, they simply aren't dual power organizations at all. The simplest solution to this problem, of course, is to organize around a specific side of resistance. Organizations that build up the capacity to fight can emerge from almost anywhere. The Symbiosis Research Collective described how dual power organizations emerge from Palestinian prison organizing during the First Intifada, an uprising against the Israeli government in the late 1980s.

Most discussion of the First Intifada focuses on the role of mass protests in making Palestinian society ungovernable for the Israeli occupying forces. Less discussed is the role of community organizations of mutual aid and confederated participatory democracy in making such mass protests possible. Organizing from within the political system was a political incubator of the Palestinian resistance movement and offers a microcosmic example of the development of dual power in the much larger prison of the occupation. With hunger strikes, political prisoners eventually won concessions for their own self-administration within the occupation. With hunger strikes, political prisoners eventually won concessions for their own self-administration within the prisons. They assembled structures of political organization and representation, forced prison authorities to recognize their representatives, and developed a division of labor around hygiene, education, and other daily tasks. Palestinian prisoners described this arrangement as internal organization, similar

to the concept of dual power. Even in the least free of circumstances, these prisoners carved out space for self-governments and created the preconditions for revolutionary struggle. Prisoners taught and studied everything from Palestinian history to Marxist political economy, often from 8 to 14 hours per day. As freshly educated and trained political activists were released back into society, the resistance movement was galvanized. Illiterate teenage boys arrested for throwing stones re-entered the fray months later as committed, competent organizers who had studied movement-building, strategic resistance, and dialectical materialism. Meanwhile, the organizing context outside of the prison

transformed dramatically. Saleh Abu Laban, a Palestinian political prisoner from 1970 until 1985, stated, When I entered the prison, there wasn't a national movement. There were only underground cells that performed clandestinely. When I got out, I found a world full of organizers, committees, and community institutions. Central to this new world of community organizing was the Palestinian labor movement. Unions were formed out of workers' places of residence rather than workplaces because migrant labor was prevalent and Palestinian unionism within Israel had been criminalized. Unions then formed strong alliances with local organizations in the national movement. formed strong alliances with local organizations in the national movement. With rapid growth in the early 1980s, labor unions found it necessary to decentralize and democratize their structures

to become more resilient as Israeli repression intensified against union leaders and organizers. These local unions were networked together through the Palestinian Communist Party and the Workers' Unity Bloc, creating a web of labor organizers and community groups that linked their class struggle to the larger project of national liberation. This wave of resistance, carried out largely outside the purview of the major Palestinian political parties, showed that even communities in the most dire circumstances can assemble astounding levels of organization and resistance, as was also true in the United States, although today the memory of these prison radicals is largely forgotten. Palestinian organizing emerged from

the sites of deepest oppression in their society. But this kind and level of organization is not just the property of the left. And in part two, we'll see what happens when the right gets a hold of it. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows

presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's been three months since you and your co-workers took control of the hospital. Things aren't back to normal yet. You're not even really sure what normal is anymore. But the days have fallen into a kind of routine. It's Thursday, which means it's your turn to go report back to what a friend jokingly referred to as the Endless Meeting Assembly,

and was now forever known as the EMA. The EMA is technically the closest thing left to a central government in Seattle. It was formed as a sort of coordinating council between the various organizations and workers' councils that had emerged, or simply emerged from the woodworks in the wake of the collapse of the police. Two things had become clear very quickly. One, there was need for some kind of coordinating committee between the different bodies. Two, the only people who had any idea what was going on in their portion of the city or in their workplace were the members of the local council,

which meant there was no way in hell any kind of central apparatus could dictate to them what actually needed to be done. There just wasn't a way to move the information around. The solution had been decentralization. Let the councils do their work. Let them work out who they needed to talk to, but make sure there was some kind of daily council that people could show up to, where the various groups would do report backs on what they were doing and what they needed. The structure was messy, but it mostly worked. And at least someone had had the idea to make sure that the delegates to the EMA rotated, so one person wasn't stuck spending half their life showing up every day. The problem, really, was the same problem you'd been dealing with for months now.

Even with the pooling of resources, and people donating their last precious American dollars to paying people to import more supplies, The blockade was taking its toll. Nobody wanted to try to force their way through the blockades and the cascades. There had been some attempts to get in touch with groups in Portland, but the control map was so ugly there was no real chance of getting any assistance. Besides, the real problem was the port. When the cops had fled, the ships had simply stopped coming. They'd rerouted further south, many of them to Oakland, or so you'd heard. The logistics lines were collapsing faster than anyone could piece them back together. What the long-term consequences would be, no one knew. But something was going to have to change.

The calls to start engaging in piracy were only half-oaks now. A week later, an answer of sorts arrived. It wasn't precisely what anyone had been expecting. You'd heard about negotiations between workers' councils, shipping companies, and a couple of governments to try to prevent a bloodbath at the docks, with the Port of Seattle already out of commission. No one could afford another stoppage. You hadn't really been sure what to make of it, but the representatives were here now. What they proposed, in front of the largest assembly you'd ever seen, was a kind of under-the-table

deal. In essence, the port workers would go back to work in both Oakland and Seattle, in exchange for ceding part of Oakland itself to a newly formed federation. No one was sure how any of this was actually supposed to work, but it was the first chance he'd seen in months to start solving the supply problem. That didn't mean everyone else would agree to it. Democracy is still democracy after all. But maybe, just maybe, with a toehold in Oakland, the councils would start to spread, and that so-called government in California was looking shakier every day. Who knew? Maybe next time, you wouldn't be negotiating at all. In March of 2004, American occupation forces in Iraq attempted to shut down the newspaper

of a Shiite cleric named Maktadal Sadr. The Americans had expected Sadr to simply fold under the weight of the coalition's pressure. Instead, they triggered mass protests that quickly turned into an armed uprising. This was a new force in Iraq. The American occupation force, who'd been expecting to be fighting al-Qaeda and maybe the rump of the remaining Ba'athists were stunned to suddenly be facing a working class uprising among Iraq's Shiite population. This new Mahdi army, as it began to call itself, was extremely well organized and were initially able to rout coalition forces. So what was this Mahdi army that had so thoroughly rewritten the rules of Iraq?

Shortly after the U.S. deposed Saddam Hussein in 2003, Muqtada al-Sadr, the son of another famous Iraqi Shiite religious figure. Both Sadrs had been famous for their support and care for the poor. So when Sadr returned to Iraq, he began to build a political base among Iraq's working class, particularly in Sadr City, a working class suburb of Baghdad. He used his organization to redistribute wealth, providing a form of welfare state in an almost completely shattered country. Sadr and his allies also began to set up a network of free clinics for pregnant and nursing mothers. They used these clinics, which were enormously popular, to build a base

of support. It is, after all, extremely difficult, no matter what your ideological or political disagreements with the group, to attack them when they're running free clinics for pregnant mothers. They protected these clinics with militias, which allowed them to transform the community organizations and goodwill that they'd gained from the clinic into the military power necessary for self-governance and eventually for resistance against the American occupation. Strategy proved enormously successful. Muqtada al-Sadr is still today one of the most important political figures in Iraq. Despite sustained coalition and occupation force attempts to stamp him out, but for all their working-class support, the Sadrists were by no means leftists. In late 2019, massive anti-austerity, anti-imperialist,

and anti-sectarian protests erupted in Iraq as a reaction to the murderous incompetence of the Iraqi government, who, among other crimes, managed to poison 118,000 people in Basra through the mismanagement and subsequent contamination of the water supply. Al-Sadr initially backed the protest, but turned on them in early 2020, at which point Sadrist militias began to carry out a brutal campaign of repression against the protest camps that culminated in out-rent massacres of protesters. These massacres became semi-regular features of Sadr's mass mobilizations, and alongside state and paramilitary disappearances of activists, the attacks essentially crushed the uprising. The violent homophobia and

sexism of the Sauterists may seem at odds with their anti-imperialism and concern for the poor, but right-wing organizations have often adapted specific policies, positions, and organizational structures from the left, and in this case, the Sauterist mobilizations have been extremely effective. Indeed, right-wing organizations are often more effective at utilizing dual-power tactics in organizations and leftist movements. This is partly because of a fundamental asymmetry between the right and the left. Right-wing organizations can almost always depend on financial support from wealthy political

backers, who, when push comes to shove, can simply create a movement with pure money as the Kochs did to create the Tea Party. Leftists, the ravings of right-wing conspiracy theorists notwithstanding, have no such backers. This funding and support can go a long way towards explaining the success of groups like Hezbollah. It is certainly true that without Iranian support, Hezbollah would not be the movement that it is today. But a great deal of their success is simply attributable to the tactics themselves. This does not escape the notice of the U.S. Army. Joint Special Operations University's Major James Love wrote a monograph entitled Hezbollah, Social Services as a Source of Power. In it, he writes, The most important branch of the Hezbollah organization is the social service section,

which can be demonstrated by the allocation of an estimated 50% of Hezbollah's 2007 budget social service efforts. It is through the work of the social service section that all party activities are possible. Hezbollah's social service section was designed to influence all aspects of Lebanese Shia society. The original intent of providing needed services to an oppressed people appears to have been manipulated by Hezbollah as a vehicle to bolster its ranks, provide a humanitarian shield to the organization, increase influence

within the Lebanese government, and combated Shia rival Ambal. The social service section serves as an equal arm within the organization and is used as much as the military and political wing in terms of leverage. Hezbollah's deputy secretary general describes the purpose and intent of the social service section in the following passage. Hezbollah paid particular attention to social work. Not one aspect of aiding the poor was neglected as the party worked towards achieving joint social responsibility, answering the urgent needs, and introducing beneficial programs. Such work was simply considered party duty, and concentrated effort towards raising funds and making available social service resources served towards achieving these goals.

The party worked to the best of its capacities, cooperating with official institutions to respond to societal needs. Hezbollahs provided medical aid, reconstruction assistance, education programs, and particularly programs to take care of veterans and widows, which have served to solidify their base. These organizations were critical to Hezbollah's meteoric rise from a political non-entity to arguably the most powerful fact-shaded side of Lebanese politics. Hezbollah's state within a state, as it's become known, was capable of even resisting the Israeli army. Major Love's frustration with the inability of the American army to either deny Hezbollah's own aid efforts or replicate them in a way that could strengthen American power are testaments to the effectiveness of such a technique and the dangers they pose to the American imperial and state project. to respond as fast as community-led efforts, which means that those efforts will get off the ground faster, get to the scene faster, and thus reap the political benefits. When the state is unwilling or unable to provide services, especially in the wake of disasters, it leaves a power vacuum for

organizations to exploit. You may not have heard of the RSS before. It's a paramilitary group affiliated with India's ruling party, the BJP, and counts among its members India's Prime Minister Modi. It's also probably the world's largest fascist organization. The RSS was founded in 1925 as a group nominally dedicated to protecting and promoting Hindu interests. What this means in practice is that the RSS is dedicated to creating a Hindu state and maintains and promotes a violent hatred of practice is that the RSS is dedicated to creating a Hindu state and maintains and promotes a violent hatred of Muslims that results in RSS members being at the forefront of anti-Muslim pogroms. The RSS's pre-World War II leaders were open admirers of

Hitler and Mussolini, and while they eventually abandoned those positions at the start of World War II, the RSS's politics have remained thoroughly fascist. In the intense communal rioting that both preceded and followed the partition of India and Pakistan after independence, which saw mass population transfers of Hindus and Muslims, and the death of somewhere between 200,000 and 2 million people, the RSS established itself as a protector of Hindi refugees against Muslim violence, provided protection and aid to those trying to survive the chaos. The goodwill this generated, however, collapsed after a former RSS member did the single most famous thing anyone associated with the RSS has ever done,

assassinated Gandhi. The RSS was almost immediately banned. But in light of the terrible PR you get when you're associated with killing Gandhi, the RSS became increasingly involved with disaster relief. Over half a century of painstaking organizing, it created schools and youth programs

to spread its influence and use them to fuel further anti-Muslim violence. In 2001, the organization gained national acclaim for its response to a massive earthquake in Gujarat. The RSS heavily emphasized the non-discriminatory nature of their aid work and their propaganda. But in reality, many of the villages the RSS had rebuilt after the devastation had been transformed into miniature versions of the fabled Hindu state that the RSS seeks to impose on all of India.

Strategically, this should look familiar to us now. It's essentially a fascist form of prefigurative politics. The RSS used an earthquake to build the structure of the new Hindu society in the shell of the old. The BJP's dominance over Indian politics, while led by a member of the RSS, and the brutal crackdowns Modi carried out in Kashmir, are a bloody testament to the success of their strategy. Christian fundamentalist organizations have also been extremely effective in utilizing their own form of right-wing prefigurative politics, though in a somewhat different way than the RSS. Their new world is defined above all by theocratic, patriarchal authoritarianism. Like the radicals that occupy, the religious right was operating off of a form of contagion theory,

theory that exposure to their social organizations and forms would essentially be contagious and spread. But the Christian right's preferred form is the patriarchal family, which serves as a microcosm of the kind of hierarchy and patriarchal violence that dominate their long-dreamed-of theocratic society. The Christian right would instill these values into their children and send them off into the world to propagate their ideology. Edinger, an expert on the Christian right, wrote this about the second phase of the strategy. In 1975, several church leaders came up with a new approach, identifying seven spheres of culture to focus on, one after another, to try to bring about the lasting change and have a significant impact on the superstructure of American culture.

Lauren Cunningham, founder of Youth with a Mission, a Christian missionary group coordinating international and national mission trips for young Christians, describes these seven areas as such. These are the areas you can go on as missionaries. Here they are. First, it's the institution set up by God first, the family. After the family was the church, or the people of god the third was the area of school or education the fourth was media public communication in all forms printed and electronic the fifth was what i call celebration the arts entertainment sports where you celebrate within a culture the sixth would be the whole area of the economy, which starts with innovation in science and technology, productivity, sales, and service. The whole area. We often call it business. But we leave out something. We leave out the scientific part, which actually raises the

wealth of the world. Anything new, like making sand and chips for a microchip, that increases wealth in the world. And then, of course, prediction sales and service helps to spread the wealth. And so the last area was the area of government. This is a neat encapsulation of the rights for figurative politics. Start first with the family, and then with the church, then reshape school and education, and mass media in their image, and from there you can begin to take the entire economy. Churches have also long used aid programs to proselytize, and also expand their control over the population, which becomes dependent on their aid. In the

places where the left has failed to provide for their community, the far right has stepped in, and has been able to rapidly and effectively reshape the political landscape. This does not mean, however, that they can't be beaten. Cooperation Jackson has offered one of the most powerful visions of dual power in the modern U.S. A product of the New African People's Organization and the Malcolm X. Grassroots Movement's Jackson-Kush Plan, Cooperation Jackson has put forward a radical and democratic model of dual power with the aim of turning over control of the land and the means of production to Jackson's black working class and allowing it to achieve its own self-determination.

Cooperation Jackson has formed mutual aid networks, started an incubator program to help workers' cooperatives get off the ground, and formed a community land trust that purchases abandoned buildings in Jackson and turns them over to the community. They've also, somewhat unusually, wound up engaged in the electoral process after the untimely death of ally and Jackson mayor Chokwe Lemumba, which led to the election of his son, Chokwe Antar Lemumba. This placed the movement in a somewhat awkward position of having allies, even if constrained by the realities of state power in the state itself. But politics in the real world is never as clean as the models we create to describe it.

It is only in our ability to adapt to the changing conditions of struggle while maintaining our political principles that we can build the new world in the shell of the old. And we can build it. The question is simply, will we? Welcome, I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter?

Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters... to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows

as part of My Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Fuck! Well, that wasn't very good i'm robert evans host of the podcast you're listening to and ashamed of probably because i that was jesus christ garrison come in here no i refuse this fix this fix this fix this garrison um This is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about the fact that the world is falling apart, as embodied by me falling apart when I try to introduce the show. See, I tied it in.

Yeah, good job. Thank you. Thank you. It's poetry. It rhymes. It is. It is. It has to rhyme.

It's like the Star Wars movies. That's what I was doing. Yeah. Our guest today is Melissa Asadera, founder and director of Polo's Pantry, a mutual aid food distribution project in Los Angeles, California. Melissa, thank you for coming on and talking to us. Thank you so much for inviting me. A pleasure to be here. I apologize for the introduction, but I honestly, it's better than I usually do. Sophie can back that up. and a few years before the pandemic actually I started to organize with a lot of grassroots

organizations in LA working with a lot of houseless folks all over LA and kind of clocked pretty early that a lot you know a lot of a lot of groups were burning through their budgets spending it on food and so since i worked in kind of the the food industry i started to kind of poke around and figure out that we could get a lot of these things donated to us um and pretty much started building a roster like building kind of like a rolodex of um other organizations, nonprofits, food banks that we could rely on. So almost kind of created sort of like an alternate system for these groups who are working with houseless folks

to get food every week. I just wanted to figure out a way to make a steady and reliable system so that our unhoused neighbors would get food and that organizers across LA wouldn't have to worry about it. And so that's pretty much how Polo started. Officially it started in 2018. I was organizing with a group called Ketan For All and they do a lot of political advocacy and mostly rooted in like um kind of you know human rights for our house's neighbors if you don't know k-time for all look them up they're awesome follow them fantastic organization yeah and you know i actually was because i was already doing a lot of mutual aid work in Skid Row around that time and really kind of felt at some point that, you know, like, yes, it was great that I was going out there with teams, seeing all the conditions that they were living in.

And I just wanted to meet other activists and other folks who could really figure out how you connect people to services and just really, you know, anyone working in policy, that's really changing things for people out there. And so I wanted to take sort of my advocacy and like my work a step further and connect it with activists all over LA. So that's sort of like my org is really rooted in a lot of activism and organizing.

So I see a lot of, I'm not sort of your standard kind of org or nonprofit. I really see things in the lens of as a community organizer. And so that's why our um our work just pretty much exploded during covid so i'm kind of interested for for starters because you you're you know this is um a mutual aid project as opposed to kind of a charity project and what do you what do you see as being the dividing line there yeah well for you know for a lot of for us you know it's very easy for for folks to kind of see the work that we do as part of the kind of charitable food system because obviously we're you know um mutual aid it's the difference really is that obviously um you know there's a

there's a reciprocity between the two of you, between neighborhoods, between individuals, between organizations of sharing resources with each other. And charitable obviously is like there's only one way, right, there's only like one person giving, but for us, the way we picked our partners, I mean, we were already part of this nucleus of kind of a coalition of orgs doing this work. And so it was just really very easy for us to kind of share resources with each other.

So I was doing food and some folks were doing hygiene kits. Other folks were doing tents. Other folks were doing tarps or whatever. other folks were doing tents other folks were doing tarps or whatever and so there was so much you know kind of mutual aid and activity going on and so that that's why we're really kind of rooted in that um in that thinking as far as like as opposed to charitable orgs that basically just set up somewhere and give you know give give stuff out to people and so we have like in part in part of my advisory circle are a lot of houseless neighbors um houseless leaders um in our community um i also take a lot of advice from um indigenous organizers um black community leaders

in different neighborhoods that we work in. So our work is really informed by the community. And so we basically ask folks, hey, you know, like, what can we do? And plug into work that already exists in those areas. I hope that makes sense. But that's kind of how I feel about what we do. And as an organizer, because I think we get a lot of questions from people who are interested in starting mutual aid projects in their own areas. And one of the questions we often have is like, well, how do I do that? Right. And yeah, I'm interested in like if you could kind of walk us through the steps when Polo's Pantry got started, like what was the kind of order of operations that you had to go through to get this up and running?

I think the first thing to do is really to, for me, it was already kind of being part of grassroots org. So I was part of a few of them. And so it's really important to kind of identify the needs of a community first before setting up your org. So I feel like I already had an idea of what certain orgs needed, which areas, how many. And so kind of identifying the needs first kind of number one. And to do that, you really have to connect with grassroots organizations, local ones in your area. So, you know, I recommend really just kind of doing research. There's always folks doing that kind of stuff all over. If you're into political advocacy, there's folks that do that.

If there are folks who are more food justice oriented, like I would recommend going to a local food bank or soup kitchens too have also like i've been doing that for years and i've met a lot of people with kind of similar values mine um so just kind of pretty much identify one what you'd like to do what you're good at um and then essentially research um you know, kind of opportunities to tap into a local org doing that work and then essentially start organizing with them. Right. I don't I don't recommend to build like to build an org prior to not sort of kind of map out first what the community needs instead of you building mutual aid organization based on you know whatever because I feel like it's it's important to work through things from the ground up that way you feel like the work is

impactful that way the community is leading and informing your work and so that's that's kind of like how i i approach the line so look for a local org so kind of sit and organize it for a little bit and then from there once you once you guys identify what it is um and start to kind of have an idea of of the demand or the need in that area. Then start to reach out to, say, for me, for food, a lot of local chains will pretty much, if you tell them what you're doing, a lot of them will support you. So I actually have, I started with just going literally to my local ralphs and telling the manager they're like hey this is what i'm doing i'm starting this or you

know was it ralphs being a local grocery store in like los angeles area yes sorry a lot of i didn't know what ralphs was before i moved to la so i just wanted to be like she's not just like rolling over to her buddy ralph. You got some food. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. So that Ralph's out here in LA. Kroger most places. Yeah.

More or less. Yeah. Yeah. I will warn folks that not everyone is down for that kind of stuff, but somehow you'll, you'll really end up on one. That's really, you know,

that is really kind. I think most folks have to realize that this, this, this kind of work is not, it doesn't happen overnight. Like building, like building, you know, like a reliable network of people to donate to you is, is, takes time. So, but I think if you hit kind of larger chains, you will get, you know, you'll get a you'll start to get a steady supply from them do you have any kind of advice for um when you're actually approaching you know manager

at a ralph's or something somebody actually works for like what do you have like i don't know like a script but kind of a rough guide to like here's how i try to start these conversations here's some ways i try to phrase for things because that could be useful for folks you know i actually have like a form letter so i could share later maybe you can show yeah that would be great yes yeah um that you know that they can use to um you know if they're if they're going to um solicit folks with that stuff and i think a lot of mutual aid organizations do have that kind of um kind of literature that kind of forum so um i think just basically kind of letting them know who you are who you're serving um how often which demographic is going to that's usually really

important um what what helped me though was i i was um as i started to get more serious about about doing the food work i connected to to some community partners, and I actually turned Polo's into a fiscally sponsored org. So we moved from being just fully grassroots to being fiscally sponsored. That basically means we're operating under the 501c3 number of another organization, of a larger organization. So that opened so many opportunities for us. It really allowed us to be able to access larger amounts of food and really help out a lot of smaller orgs that needed to get their food programs off the ground. And so that is something I recommend if people are serious about it, to find a community partner who is an established 501c3 that they trust to see if they can sign on to be a fiscal sponsor.

that I think is one of the quickest ways to be able to really kind of establish yourself as far as getting larger amounts of food. And by that I mean getting pallets of food, not just cases, but literally pallets of food delivered to wherever you are. As soon as we did that, that completely changed the game. And I think I did that because I knew I had so many friends who were doing mutual aid that needed so, you know, just so much stuff from, you know, from groceries to, you know, fresh produce. And it wasn't, it wasn't, you know, it didn't stop in food. We were getting, you know, hand sanitizer, we were getting tents, we were getting all sorts of stuff, you know, and so, so yeah, that's what I recommend for folks who are serious about food, is to really, again, start to build a relationship with local businesses that they, that they like,

food businesses, and really telling people, this is what I'm doing, If you are willing to support us, you know, like this is, you know, these are the days that we need food or whatever, these are the times that we'll need food. And just let them know that, you know, you're happy to like pick it up or that you're happy to, because there's, I think at least for California, we're starting to change law,

like policy and law behind food waste. And so I think something's going to change in January of 2022, where a lot of food waste is basically going to decrease because it's going to be much more difficult. The city is going to make it much more difficult for um for businesses to just carry this stuff um they're really pushing them to uh um to separate them but anyway regardless you're helping the business really um move you know move food waste and and most of them and a lot of employees too that i've talked to um just you know just are heartbroken every time they have to clear out you know a full full tray or just trays and trays of of you know of perfectly fine food so yeah there's there's a video going viral on twitter right now of uh of like someone

working at dunking donuts and just like dumping just like hundreds and hundreds of donuts into the garbage yep and then that happens that happens every single day you know i have i have friends who used to work on whole foods and they would tell me just just how heartbreaking it was just the amount just the massive amount of food that's being wasted out yeah it's evil it's it's it's it's it's it's a thing that in the more difficult days ahead as you know things like well like wheat under in a lot of areas like hat the crop was half of what it normally is this year that's going to continue one day we will look at videos of dunkin donuts dropping an entire day's worth of donuts into the trash and use it as a pretext to bring executives to trial.

It's going to be like like like a war crime. It is. I mean, I mean, honestly, though, as someone in food, you know, like the food system is changing thing that happened in the pandemic is that lawmakers were able to identify that the, the way snap or, or CalFresh pretty much food stamps were not enough really to, you know, to feed families and feed people. It's not nearly enough though, but at least it kind of pushes the needle to where we need,

where we needed to go. And I think, it kind of pushes the needle to where we need where we needed to go um and i i think i think having having been so focused and so like in the center of mutual aid work in la i'm able to kind of broadly tell you know tell um really tell lawmakers too that hey you know there's so much um there's so much need out there but the community themselves have built alternate food systems to be able to you know to care for themselves i feel like my hope really is to be able to to kind of hyper localize our food systems that way neighborhoods and really like communities are are essentially dictating their own you know their own

needs they're basically bringing in the resources that they want they're bringing in the kind of food that they want you know and um and really just working towards a real kind of food sovereignty where people are able to you know to get the resources themselves and and for me I feel like mutual aid scares a lot of people because again it really is the sort of like um the reason why we were able to a lot of communities were able to to survive COVID you know we're still doing it and we still are yeah we still are so deep in it. And even, like, I try to tell students, too, like, you know, mutual aid isn't just food or whatever. It's also, like, say your dad has a pickup truck and your neighbor needs to move, I don't know, their dining room table across town. Like, that is a form of mutual aid.

Like that is a form of mutual aid. Or like there's so many things that, especially a lot of immigrant communities that I work with, this form of care, community care, you know, has existed forever. And it's just somehow elevated itself during the pandemic, because as we know,

the safety net just wasn't enough it it didn't it didn't it really didn't help but you know it didn't really help a lot of communities and so this system essentially kept people afloat and now we're trying to figure out how to really create better ways to sustain it and to really create better ways to get the resources directly to communities that need them. So that's kind of where I'm at. I'm working with other folks trying to figure out how to keep this sustainable and really have more agency over what kind of food and what kind of aid you want. How have people that have been needing to access the mutual aid and the food, how have they been learning about your organization? I think honestly, all this stuff really happened

by word of mouth. I think because I was already part of this huge coalition that's part of the Sophie Knows a Ketan for All. There's a group called Street Watch. There's a group called Brow Game. There's a group called like called like there's all these different folks that basically are in our wide coalition i haven't had to really advertise much like people just sort of like just kept telling others like hey you know like melissa polos and her team are doing this and um also as a covert response i created another um, um, um, uh, like COVID initiative called Homemade Meals. And, and that is in partnership with another organization called E-X.

And so as of today, I think we're close to 75,000 meals. Wow. Um, that's all community led. Yes. 75,000 meals. Wow. That's all community led. Yes. So we, so we, since March of 2020, we essentially created a system where we we work with people who are, who are cooking homemade meals in their homes and connecting them to drivers.

And so we have about six different org partners. So one of them is obviously it's the same people, K-Town, Streetwatch, Covenant House. They work a lot with homeless youth. LA Can, they're in Skid Row. And a bunch of other mutual aid groups in different areas of LA. So I recognize at the beginning of COVID, a lot of my houseless neighbors were telling us that they were scared, like, because a lot of businesses were closing, a lot of corner stores, restaurants. The food access completely shut off for them during the beginning. And I started to freak out. I was like, how are we going to get food to people and so um some friends who run um basically they're going to kind of like a youth uh kind

of youth focus org um wanted to activate their you know activate their community they're like how can we help what can we do so we, basically, that, you know, figured out, like, okay, well, a lot of people want to volunteer, but they can't leave home. So why don't they cook meals at home? And then we'll just pair them with drivers who can pick it up safely. And so we just started doing that. We created this system. And I think we honestly, I thought we we were just gonna do it for two months but now we're what like 19 months later 70 oh geez 75 000 meals over a thousand volunteers like it's

been wild actually jamie uh friend of loftus jamie loftus friend friend of the pod and a hot dog expert. She'd be angry if we didn't state that. So Jamie, Jamie actually is, is one of our OG like, like cooks. Like she started with home and made meals from the very beginning. She's kind of one of our, that's kind of how we know her.

It's because she found, she found that program. And it's been wild. It's been, it's been so amazing to really activate so many people across L.A. to cook for our houseless neighbors. And so I haven't even fully digested. Our team hasn't even fully digested the real impact of that. But it's been 75,000 meals made by the community for our houseless neighbors neighbors so so so that's yeah so i don't

know like i feel like and i truly believe there's just so much just so much power in the people and really trying to figure out ways to continue to you know to create um better systems where where we can redirect those resources you know um to us to us and um you know like really kind of break down these systems where you know because because even people were telling me like folks who are like you know these sort of big institutions food institutions have been around for decades or even folks um from like yeah from like running food orgs since the 80s were like you know how are you able to move so fast i'm like that's mutual aid that's like that's mutual aid then our ability to not have to run through so much bureaucratic crap and red tape is a reason why we were able to create such huge impact because people believed in what we did and helped support us, funded

us, and we essentially just hit the ground running. We're able to figure out what people needed on the ground and just got it to them. That's it. And we'll figure out if we don't have it, we'll ask around for folks who have it. There's a group called SELA. They're in Silver Lake.

And my friend Kat, who's one of the co-founders, she, they also work with houseless folks and they do incredible work, like, you know, providing showers, providing hot meals, providing reference services for folks. She was great at getting hygiene kits. And so that was our mutual will between each other. Like she needed hot meals.

I gave that to her on Saturdays and then I needed like hygiene kits. And so- And that's kind of like the basis of mutual aid. Yeah, exactly. Like I literally will give her 200 meals. She'll give me 200 hygiene kits. And that was like that throughout the pandemic.

Like we just would share resources and people thought we were this huge org but essentially it was just you know literally like our friends and i talking to each other like hey what do you have today what do you have coming in today and we just essentially kind of built this sort of cloud like sort of inventory right so it's like polo's has a thousand meals and like sila's got 500 hygiene kits and like you know street watch has like 50 tents and like 100 tarps so it's like we all we're like hey you know there's there's a houseless man on the corner of like sunset or whatever that needs like blah blah blah and so we essentially just you know just grab and go like polls has

meals and like street watch has tents like k-town's got like the tarps so y'all just again beautifully just sort of started to like build this sort of sort of cloud-like inventory of stuff and it just worked and it's still still working. And it's consistent. Like is what we're bringing up. At the beginning. Is talking about how consistent. You've been able to have done this work. Which is.

If you're an LA resident. You know that. The city's support is never consistent. So having that consistency. Is so vital. Yes. yeah i'm not thank you no it's it's a lot of hard work there's so much that people don't see obviously there's so many so many things that people don't see there's a lot of organizing behind it just literally a lot of community building a lot of meetings yeah i think the again like the bulk of mutual aid is relationships and trust you know

like that that's that's really it that's how you breathe life into your system and it's like you know you have to you have you have to continue to like nourish your relationships you know between yourself and other organizers between yourself if you're running an org between yourself and another org um and and really that's how we've been able to you know to to reach so many people is because organizers, between yourself, if you're running an org, between yourself and another org. And really, that's how we've been able to, you know, to reach so many people is because we focus on making sure that, you know, it's so easy to burn out in this work. But again, we also have to make sure that we take care of each other. And we focus on making sure that we're checking on each other too. And so I, you know, it's hard to fully explain how to even teach that, you know, how to properly build relationships.

But I feel like that's such a key part of creating a really robust mutual aid network. And that's at least the experience that we had you know yeah the work that you've done and what you've been able to accomplish is very impressive and is is something that a lot of people can aspire to um is there any like resources online that you can point to if someone's wanting to get into this type of work um or any any yeah like any kind of like uh advice to get started in your own city or to like look for stuff that's doing this similar that's like that's doing a similar thing um uh wow let's see who has um gosh that's a really, really, really good question.

Well, first, I hope that people have read Mutual Aid by Dean Spade. Sure. That's a really good book. And from there, I would read the Black Panther social programs. Yeah. I get a lot of i get a lot of my um my inspiration from there um and really that's that's really those those two things to kind of start as just sort of like your um your primers um and then if you want to kind of get deeper into food justice um

uh there's a really good book i read years ago it's almost i think it's literally called food justice 101 okay let me see it's literally called yeah it's literally called food justice 101 yeah there's there's quite a few but but one that's one and then there's another there's a one book um i read called more than just food um and then it's uh it's by yeah i'll give you guys my top five and that really kind of helps sort of um like shape my thinking on food justice so it's written by a guy named garrett broad and he essentially like kind of lays out sort of how the industrial food system kind of created this huge crisis that we're in and you know like how there's there's really kind of an abundance of food everywhere but you know obviously

it's just not getting distributed yes exactly and so and and it also kind of lays out how food justice you know activists um who are in mostly low-income communities of color help really build community based kind of solutions to these problems. And so that's really kind of where my thinking and my, my lens comes from is because I am a child of LA, I'm able to understand what different neighborhoods need based on because I either grew up there work there have family there you know went to school there or just have friends or other organizers who live there and so say if you know i i didn't grow up in ball heights but i have friends who did and so like if i'm trying to build out a food program or mutual aid program in goal heights i'm not gonna just walk in there

and be like all right we're gonna do it at you know yeah you're not gonna take over their their their thing exactly but i think that's one thing i think i really want to to for people to really especially for for um for young people who want to get to food justice is like you really have to really honestly do your research first and let community leaders lead um lead lead your program with you right and there's a difference between like making community connections and then trying to like take over right you know there's a very very two very different things exactly yeah you don't want to be extractive right you don't want to be extractive you don't want to be coming in and you know and and really like you know try to like show up with like you know solutions where they weren't informed at all by the community and i keep trying to stress that

yeah is is there anywhere that people can support or at least follow you online to keep up with the work? Yes. I'm very active on Twitter. It's we're at Polo's Pantry. So it's P-O-L-O-S-P-A-N-T-R-Y. And then I'm also tweeting as myself as an organizer. It's under M-E-L-L-E music.

So it's M-E-L-L-E music. And that actually, that handle for me everywhere, it's like my personal. So I tweet from there a lot. I tweet a lot about food justice work. I feel, and all our work in LA, I retweet a lot of our movement work and coalition work. Yeah, just thank you for coming on to the show

to talk about food justice and the work you've been doing. It's great to hear more examples of people from around the country and then hopefully, you know, around the world getting involved in this type of work. Anyway, I think that wraps up us today. You can follow this show on Twitter and Instagram at HappenHerePod and CoolZoneMedia

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