Podcasts about Trixter

LC has a road trip coming up. Taylor Swift has her masters back. Pete Loran... from Trixter, has some thoughts on Sebastian Bach. Kid Rock gets ICE. Tony Iommi joins a boy band. Josh Freese cements a drummer stereotype. KISS shifts into the under-promise phase of their career & more. ⁠⁠Pantheon Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Reach out to us! Rate, review, and subscribe at Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Cobras & Fire: Comedy / Rock Talk Show on Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join our fanpage on Facebook: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠(2) Cobras ON Fire: Private Group | Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Click like and follow on Facebook: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠(2) Cobras & Fire: Rock Podcast | Chicago IL | Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us on Threads: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@cobrasandfirepodcast • Threads, Say more⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Subscribe to our YouTube channel: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Cobras & Fire Rock Podcast - YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us on Bluesky: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Cobras & Fire Podcast (@cobrasfirepodcast.bsky.social) — Bluesky⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Email us: Buy a shirt!:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠"Cobras and Fire Podcast" T-shirt for Sale by CobrasandFire | Redbubble | cobras and fire t-shirts - cobras fire t-shirts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Stitcher: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Cobras & Fire: Comedy / Rock Talk Show on Stitcher⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Spreaker: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Cobras & Fire: Comedy / Rock Talk Show | Listen to Podcasts On Demand Free | TuneIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Find it all here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Cobras and Fire Podcast - Comedy Rock Talk Show⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Music: Love/Hate - You're Gonna Burn Lonely Ones - Make A Scene Them Dirty Roses - Candle In The Dark Faster Pussycat - Ain't No Way Around It Robbie Williams - Rocket Supersuckers - Pretty Fucked Up Durry - More Dumb Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

LC has a road trip coming up. Taylor Swift has her masters back. Pete Loran... from Trixter, has some thoughts on Sebastian Bach. Kid Rock gets ICE. Tony Iommi joins a boy band. Josh Freese cements a drummer stereotype. KISS shifts into the under-promise phase of their career & more. ⁠Pantheon Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠ Reach out to us! Rate, review, and subscribe at Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Cobras & Fire: Comedy / Rock Talk Show on Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join our fanpage on Facebook: ⁠⁠⁠⁠(2) Cobras ON Fire: Private Group | Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠ Click like and follow on Facebook: ⁠⁠⁠⁠(2) Cobras & Fire: Rock Podcast | Chicago IL | Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us on ⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us on Threads: ⁠⁠⁠⁠@cobrasandfirepodcast • Threads, Say more⁠⁠⁠⁠ Subscribe to our YouTube channel: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Cobras & Fire Rock Podcast - YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us on Bluesky: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Cobras & Fire Podcast (@cobrasfirepodcast.bsky.social) — Bluesky⁠⁠⁠⁠ Email us: Buy a shirt!:⁠⁠⁠⁠"Cobras and Fire Podcast" T-shirt for Sale by CobrasandFire | Redbubble | cobras and fire t-shirts - cobras fire t-shirts⁠⁠⁠⁠ Stitcher: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Cobras & Fire: Comedy / Rock Talk Show on Stitcher⁠⁠⁠⁠ Spreaker: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Cobras & Fire: Comedy / Rock Talk Show | Listen to Podcasts On Demand Free | TuneIn⁠⁠⁠⁠ Find it all here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Cobras and Fire Podcast - Comedy Rock Talk Show⁠⁠⁠⁠ Music: Love/Hate - You're Gonna Burn Lonely Ones - Make A Scene Them Dirty Roses - Candle In The Dark Faster Pussycat - Ain't No Way Around It Robbie Williams - Rocket Supersuckers - Pretty Fucked Up Durry - More Dumb Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This show has been flagged as Explicit by the host. New hosts There were no new hosts this month. Last Month's Shows Id Day Date Title Host 4369 Thu 2025-05-01 What LP records do I have? Fred Black 4370 Fri 2025-05-02 Playing Civilization IV, Part 8 Ahuka 4371 Mon 2025-05-05 HPR Community News for April 2025 HPR Volunteers 4372 Tue 2025-05-06 The power of GNU Readline - part 4 Some Guy On The Internet 4373 Wed 2025-05-07 Rsync with stdin as source oxo 4374 Thu 2025-05-08 24-25 New Years Eve show 7 Honkeymagoo 4375 Fri 2025-05-09 Long Chain Carbons,Eggs and Dorodango? operat0r 4376 Mon 2025-05-12 Re-research Lee 4377 Tue 2025-05-13 Password store and the pass command Klaatu 4378 Wed 2025-05-14 SQL to get the next_free_slot norrist 4379 Thu 2025-05-15 Mapping Municipalities' Digital Dependencies Trollercoaster 4380 Fri 2025-05-16 Isaac Asimov: The Rest of Asimov's Foundation Stories Ahuka 4381 Mon 2025-05-19 What Omni-Instantness Makes To My Brain and Your Brain? Antoine 4382 Tue 2025-05-20 Understanding Antenna Gain and the Decibel scale Paulj 4383 Wed 2025-05-21 Changing font in Arch Linux (Wayland) oxo 4384 Thu 2025-05-22 Browser and dedicated apps on the mobile phone Henrik Hemrin 4385 Fri 2025-05-23 Cable un-managment lol operat0r 4386 Mon 2025-05-26 Silly Tavern Spicy Roll Play operat0r 4387 Tue 2025-05-27 Did she say she flew light aircraft?! Elsbeth 4388 Wed 2025-05-28 BSD Overview norrist 4389 Thu 2025-05-29 Comments on hpr4373 Rho`n 4390 Fri 2025-05-30 Playing Civilization IV, Part 9 Ahuka Comments this month These are comments which have been made during the past month, either to shows released during the month or to past shows. There are 40 comments in total. Past shows There are 9 comments on 6 previous shows: hpr3511 (2022-01-17) "Podman like Vagrant" by Klaatu. Comment 1: Some Guy on the Internet on 2025-05-16: "It's show time" hpr4036 (2024-01-22) "The Tildeverse" by Claudio Miranda. Comment 2: leeand0 on 2025-05-25: "Another Public Access Unix" Comment 3: leeand0 on 2025-05-25: "Another Public Access Unix" hpr4072 (2024-03-12) "Piper text to speech engine" by Archer72. Comment 1: Archer72 on 2025-05-20: "Voice synthesis" hpr4281 (2024-12-30) "My ridiculously complicated DHCP setup at home" by Jon The Nice Guy. Comment 2: Windigo on 2025-05-23: "As advertised" hpr4367 (2025-04-29) "My first episode; 001 Introduction" by oxo. Comment 1: Torin Doyle on 2025-05-09: "Welcome!" Comment 2: archer72 on 2025-05-09: "Welcome. " Comment 3: oxo on 2025-05-30: "Thank you" hpr4368 (2025-04-30) "Lessons learned moderating technical discussion panels" by Trixter. Comment 1: Reto on 2025-05-06: "A link to one or more" This month's shows There are 31 comments on 15 of this month's shows: hpr4371 (2025-05-05) "HPR Community News for April 2025" by HPR Volunteers. Comment 1: Paul on 2025-05-05: "mp3 quality "Comment 2: Ken Fallon on 2025-05-05: "Good question !"Comment 3: Henrik Hemrin on 2025-05-08: "Community" hpr4372 (2025-05-06) "The power of GNU Readline - part 4" by Some Guy On The Internet. Comment 1: Torin Doyle on 2025-05-09: "SGOTI is so likeable."Comment 2: Dave Morriss on 2025-05-17: "VI Mode" hpr4373 (2025-05-07) "Rsync with stdin as source" by oxo. Comment 1: Paulj on 2025-05-09: "rsync capabilities"Comment 2: archer72 on 2025-05-09: "Rsync - paulj"Comment 3: Dave Morriss on 2025-05-17: "Enjoyable show!" hpr4374 (2025-05-08) "24-25 New Years Eve show 7" by Honkeymagoo. Comment 1: ClaudioM on 2025-05-08: "Ha! The signoff!" hpr4375 (2025-05-09) "Long Chain Carbons,Eggs and Dorodango?" by operat0r. Comment 1: Torin Doyle on 2025-05-09: "The cruelty of the egg industry."Comment 2: Bob on 2025-05-09: "Free range eggs"Comment 3: Some Guy on the Internet on 2025-05-16: "@Bob, Free range eggs." hpr4376 (2025-05-12) "Re-research" by Lee. Comment 1: paul on 2025-05-12: "sonos play back"Comment 2: Lee on 2025-05-13: "Sonos"Comment 3: Some Guy on the Internet on 2025-05-16: "LLMs in academic research" hpr4377 (2025-05-13) "Password store and the pass command" by Klaatu. Comment 1: Some Guy on the Internet on 2025-05-16: "Great show." hpr4379 (2025-05-15) "Mapping Municipalities' Digital Dependencies" by Trollercoaster. Comment 1: Some Guy on the Internet on 2025-05-25: " I agree with the intentions." hpr4380 (2025-05-16) "Isaac Asimov: The Rest of Asimov's Foundation Stories" by Ahuka. Comment 1: Some Guy on the Internet on 2025-05-27: "I'll have a go." hpr4381 (2025-05-19) "What Omni-Instantness Makes To My Brain and Your Brain?" by Antoine. Comment 1: Ken Fallon on 2025-03-19: "Interesting show."Comment 2: Antoine on 2025-03-20: "Nice study =)"Comment 3: Some Guy on the Internet on 2025-05-25: "My two cents."Comment 4: Antoine on 2025-05-29: "Education" hpr4384 (2025-05-22) "Browser and dedicated apps on the mobile phone" by Henrik Hemrin. Comment 1: lyunpaw@gmail.com on 2025-05-27: "I agree." hpr4385 (2025-05-23) "Cable un-managment lol" by operat0r. Comment 1: Some Guy on the Internet on 2025-05-27: "It's over 9000!" hpr4387 (2025-05-27) "Did she say she flew light aircraft?!" by Elsbeth. Comment 1: archer72 on 2025-05-18: "Thank you for sharing"Comment 2: KEVIN B OBRIEN on 2025-05-29: "I loved the show"Comment 3: Jim DeVore on 2025-05-31: "Thanks for the inspiration" hpr4388 (2025-05-28) "BSD Overview" by norrist. Comment 1: Dave Morriss on 2025-05-29: "Thanks for this"Comment 2: Jim DeVore on 2025-05-31: "Thank you!" hpr4389 (2025-05-29) "Comments on hpr4373" by Rho`n. Comment 1: oxo on 2025-05-29: "Hi Rho`n"Comment 2: Dave Morriss on 2025-05-29: "Good episode" Mailing List discussions Policy decisions surrounding HPR are taken by the community as a whole. This discussion takes place on the Mailing List which is open to all HPR listeners and contributors. The discussions are open and available on the HPR server under Mailman. The threaded discussions this month can be found here: https://lists.hackerpublicradio.com/pipermail/hpr/2025-May/thread.html Events Calendar With the kind permission of LWN.net we are linking to The LWN.net Community Calendar. Quoting the site: This is the LWN.net community event calendar, where we track events of interest to people using and developing Linux and free software. Clicking on individual events will take you to the appropriate web page. Provide feedback on this episode.

Kickass drummer/instructor Benjamin Hans joins me from Nashville! He's worked with such greats as Trixter, Eric Martin, and Kip Winger, and shares some stories. We talk about his jazz album, living and working in Nashville, vinyl, magazines, and more! We start the show with talking to our Gen Z friend Koda about her 90's knowledge.

This show has been flagged as Explicit by the host. table td.shrink { white-space:nowrap } hr.thin { border: 0; height: 0; border-top: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); border-bottom: 1px solid rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.3); } New hosts Welcome to our new hosts: Antoine, Shane - StrandedOutput. Last Month's Shows Id Day Date Title Host 4306 Mon 2025-02-03 HPR Community News for January 2025 HPR Volunteers 4307 Tue 2025-02-04 Chat with Sgoti Some Guy On The Internet 4308 Wed 2025-02-05 What tech Kevie would spend £2000 on Kevie 4309 Thu 2025-02-06 Talking with Yorik Trollercoaster 4310 Fri 2025-02-07 Playing Civilization IV, Part 6 Ahuka 4311 Mon 2025-02-10 LoRaWAN and the Things Stack Lee 4312 Tue 2025-02-11 What Is The Indie Archive? hairylarry 4313 Wed 2025-02-12 Why I made a 1-episode podcast about a war story Antoine 4314 Thu 2025-02-13 24-25 New Years Eve show Honkeymagoo 4315 Fri 2025-02-14 How I got into the wonderful world of hackery Shane - StrandedOutput 4316 Mon 2025-02-17 Is Scratch a real programming language? Trollercoaster 4317 Tue 2025-02-18 Recording an episode of HPR Kevie 4318 Wed 2025-02-19 What's up with the dates on the HPR future feed in AntennaPod? dnt 4319 Thu 2025-02-20 Am Rande - on the edge folky 4320 Fri 2025-02-21 Switching my Mastodon account Ahuka 4321 Mon 2025-02-24 Crux Linux Klaatu 4322 Tue 2025-02-25 Fighting smartphone addiction Celeste 4323 Wed 2025-02-26 Good Samaritan laws, Duty to rescue in the Netherlands Ken Fallon 4324 Thu 2025-02-27 24-25 New Years Eve show episode 2 Honkeymagoo 4325 Fri 2025-02-28 Two Software I use- Futo Keyboard and Inoreader Antoine Comments this month These are comments which have been made during the past month, either to shows released during the month or to past shows. There are 24 comments in total. Past shows There are 6 comments on 6 previous shows: hpr4106 (2024-04-29) "My tribute to feeds" by Henrik Hemrin. Comment 3: Sem luz em Saint Louis on 2025-02-06: "Valid!" hpr4129 (2024-05-30) "How I found Hacker Public Radio" by Henrik Hemrin. Comment 2: Sem luz em Saint Louis on 2025-02-06: "Thanks, Henrik!" hpr4168 (2024-07-24) "Beyond Economic Recovery" by Trixter. Comment 3: Sem Luz em Saint Louis on 2025-02-14: "Piracy may be not so straight-forward" hpr4204 (2024-09-12) "LibreOffice Importing External Data" by gemlog. Comment 1: Windigo on 2025-02-09: "Phenomenal tip" hpr4269 (2024-12-12) "What is on My Podcast Player 2024, Part 2" by Ahuka. Comment 2: elmussol on 2025-02-21: "Mike Duncan, Revolutions & Mars" hpr4302 (2025-01-28) "New Campaign Trail Playthrough" by Lochyboy. Comment 2: Sem luz em Saint Louis on 2025-02-06: "Played it!" This month's shows There are 18 comments on 10 of this month's shows: hpr4306 (2025-02-03) "HPR Community News for January 2025" by HPR Volunteers. Comment 1: Lee on 2025-02-05: "Whiplash" hpr4310 (2025-02-07) "Playing Civilization IV, Part 6" by Ahuka. Comment 1: Ken Fallon on 2025-01-15: "Not a gamer"Comment 2: Kevin O'Brien on 2025-01-15: "Well, it is math, really" hpr4311 (2025-02-10) "LoRaWAN and the Things Stack" by Lee. Comment 1: Ken Fallon on 2025-01-15: "Great insignt into LoRaWAN" hpr4312 (2025-02-11) "What Is The Indie Archive?" by hairylarry. Comment 1: Kevie on 2025-02-11: "Excellent show"Comment 2: hairylarry on 2025-02-13: "The Indie Archive" hpr4313 (2025-02-12) "Why I made a 1-episode podcast about a war story" by Antoine. Comment 1: dnt on 2025-02-28: "Welcome"Comment 2: Antoine on 2025-02-28: "Thank you!" hpr4314 (2025-02-13) "24-25 New Years Eve show" by Honkeymagoo. Comment 1: Dave Morriss on 2025-02-14: "My 'fix_tags' script and Ken's difficulties with it."Comment 2: freeplay on 2025-02-17: "Transcode script dependencies"Comment 3: Operat0r on 2025-02-26: "HPR" hpr4315 (2025-02-14) "How I got into the wonderful world of hackery" by Shane - StrandedOutput. Comment 1: Trey on 2025-02-14: "Welcome!"Comment 2: SolusSpider - Peter Paterson on 2025-02-14: "Feeling older & impressed"Comment 3: Steve Barnes on 2025-02-17: "Hi and merci!"Comment 4: Torin Doyle on 2025-02-21: "Bliss of discovering GNU/Linux for the first time." hpr4317 (2025-02-18) "Recording an episode of HPR" by Kevie. Comment 1: Reto on 2025-02-25: "Previous shows on tricks and apps for recording" hpr4320 (2025-02-21) "Switching my Mastodon account" by Ahuka. Comment 1: Ken Fallon on 2024-11-25: "Target Audience of 1" hpr4322 (2025-02-25) "Fighting smartphone addiction" by Celeste. Comment 1: Antoine on 2025-02-26: "Nice, and my experience is..." Mailing List discussions Policy decisions surrounding HPR are taken by the community as a whole. This discussion takes place on the Mailing List which is open to all HPR listeners and contributors. The discussions are open and available on the HPR server under Mailman. The threaded discussions this month can be found here: https://lists.hackerpublicradio.com/pipermail/hpr/2025-February/thread.html Events Calendar With the kind permission of LWN.net we are linking to The LWN.net Community Calendar. Quoting the site: This is the LWN.net community event calendar, where we track events of interest to people using and developing Linux and free software. Clicking on individual events will take you to the appropriate web page. Provide feedback on this episode.

In this episode of Denoised, Joey shares his first-hand experience at the Hollywood Professional Association (HPA) Tech Retreat, including his participation in a live AI-assisted editing challenge. Joey and Addy break down what makes HPA unique in the M&E space, the innovative AI editing tools Joey tested under pressure, and the cutting-edge tech on display in the Innovation Zone.Key topics covered:The unique networking environment at HPA Tech RetreatJoey's "Live without a Net" AI editing challengeAI tools tested: Claude, Perplexity, Strada, Eddie AI, ElevenLabsInnovation Zone highlights: Quickture, Strada's peer-to-peer technologyVirtual production updates from Lightcraft, B&H Studio, and PlatePros#############

Join us for an insightful conversation with Christina Caspers, General Manager of TRIXTER, one of Europe's leading VFX companies. Christina shares her unique perspective on industry changes, technological innovation, and the future of visual effects.In this episode, we explore:✅ The evolution of virtual production in Europe✅ How VFX companies are adapting to smaller budgets✅ The impact of AI and machine learning on VFX workflows✅ Cultural differences between European and American production✅ The challenges of being a female leader in tech#############

On the 61st Episode of the Album Review Crew of Shout It Out Loudcast, Tom, Zeus & special guest, the producer of Ace Frehley's "10,000 Volts" and founder, guitarist and songwriter of Trixter, and a former Def Leppard touring member, Steve Brown review the 1981 breakthrough album from Def Leppard, "High 'n' Dry." High 'n' Dry was Def Leppard's second studio album. This was the band's first collaboration with legendary producer, Robert John "Mutt" Lange. They would form a partnership like no other and dominate the hard rock scene. High 'n' Dry was Def Leppard at its hungriest. Led by the underrated lead singer, Joe Elliott, two guitar attack from Steve Clark and Pete Willis (this would be his last full time album), and rhythm section of Rick Savage on bass and Rick Allen on drums. The band broke through in American with their melodic rock songs and videos, which were all over early MTV. The album went to number 38 on US Billboard charts and eventually double platinum. Led by songs like Let It Go and High 'N' Dry (Saturday Night) and their breakthrough hit Bringin' On The Heartbreak, Def Leppard was heading for superstardom. As usual the boys breakdown and dissect the tracks and rank the songs. They then rank the album and the album cover against the previous albums reviewed on the Album Review Crew. This was the Tom's pick. So grab your white sailor's slacks and little Union Jack tight shorts and Let It Go! To Purchase Def Leppard's “High ‘n' Dry” On Amazon Click Below:   Def Leppard's "High 'n' Dry"   To Purchase Shout It Out Loudcast's KISS Book “Raise Your Glasses: A Celebration Of 50 Years of KISS Songs By Celebrities, Musicians & Fans Please Click Below:   Raise Your Glasses Book   For all things Shout It Out Loudcast check out our amazing website by clicking below:   www.ShoutItOutLoudcast.com   Interested in more Shout It Out Loudcast content? Care to help us out? Come join us on Patreon by clicking below:   SIOL Patreon   Get all your Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise by clicking below:   Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise at AMAZON   Shop At Our Amazon Store by clicking below: Shout It Out Loudcast Amazon Store   Please Email us comments or suggestions by clicking below: ShoutItOutLoudcast@Gmail.com   Please subscribe to us and give us a 5 Star (Child) review on the following places below: iTunes Podchaser Stitcher iHeart Radio Spotify   Please follow us and like our social media pages clicking below: Twitter Facebook Page Facebook Group Page Shout It Out Loudcasters Instagram YouTube   Proud Member of the Pantheon Podcast click below to see the website: Pantheon Podcast Network Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the 61st Episode of the Album Review Crew of Shout It Out Loudcast, Tom, Zeus & special guest, the producer of Ace Frehley's "10,000 Volts" and founder, guitarist and songwriter of Trixter, and a former Def Leppard touring member, Steve Brown review the 1981 breakthrough album from Def Leppard, "High 'n' Dry." High 'n' Dry was Def Leppard's second studio album. This was the band's first collaboration with legendary producer, Robert John "Mutt" Lange. They would form a partnership like no other and dominate the hard rock scene. High 'n' Dry was Def Leppard at its hungriest. Led by the underrated lead singer, Joe Elliott, two guitar attack from Steve Clark and Pete Willis (this would be his last full time album), and rhythm section of Rick Savage on bass and Rick Allen on drums. The band broke through in American with their melodic rock songs and videos, which were all over early MTV. The album went to number 38 on US Billboard charts and eventually double platinum. Led by songs like Let It Go and High 'N' Dry (Saturday Night) and their breakthrough hit Bringin' On The Heartbreak, Def Leppard was heading for superstardom. As usual the boys breakdown and dissect the tracks and rank the songs. They then rank the album and the album cover against the previous albums reviewed on the Album Review Crew. This was the Tom's pick. So grab your white sailor's slacks and little Union Jack tight shorts and Let It Go! To Purchase Def Leppard's “High ‘n' Dry” On Amazon Click Below:   Def Leppard's "High 'n' Dry"   To Purchase Shout It Out Loudcast's KISS Book “Raise Your Glasses: A Celebration Of 50 Years of KISS Songs By Celebrities, Musicians & Fans Please Click Below:   Raise Your Glasses Book   For all things Shout It Out Loudcast check out our amazing website by clicking below:   www.ShoutItOutLoudcast.com   Interested in more Shout It Out Loudcast content? Care to help us out? Come join us on Patreon by clicking below:   SIOL Patreon   Get all your Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise by clicking below:   Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise at AMAZON   Shop At Our Amazon Store by clicking below: Shout It Out Loudcast Amazon Store   Please Email us comments or suggestions by clicking below: ShoutItOutLoudcast@Gmail.com   Please subscribe to us and give us a 5 Star (Child) review on the following places below: iTunes Podchaser Stitcher iHeart Radio Spotify   Please follow us and like our social media pages clicking below: Twitter Facebook Page Facebook Group Page Shout It Out Loudcasters Instagram YouTube   Proud Member of the Pantheon Podcast click below to see the website: Pantheon Podcast Network Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This show has been flagged as Explicit by the host. table td.shrink { white-space:nowrap } hr.thin { border: 0; height: 0; border-top: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); border-bottom: 1px solid rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.3); } New hosts Welcome to our new hosts: Paulj, Jon The Nice Guy. Last Month's Shows Id Day Date Title Host 4261 Mon 2024-12-02 HPR Community News for November 2024 HPR Volunteers 4262 Tue 2024-12-03 DIY C02 operat0r 4263 Wed 2024-12-04 An interview with Adam Matthews about the Disco Pigeon Ken Fallon 4264 Thu 2024-12-05 Mintcast, high crimes and misdemeanors. Some Guy On The Internet 4265 Fri 2024-12-06 Drivecasting: arm sleeves, glasses and more. Some Guy On The Internet 4266 Mon 2024-12-09 What's the weather? Lee 4267 Tue 2024-12-10 Borderlands Movie Review Kevie 4268 Wed 2024-12-11 Book review and an Emacs rabbit-hole enistello 4269 Thu 2024-12-12 What is on My Podcast Player 2024, Part 2 Ahuka 4270 Fri 2024-12-13 Playing Civilization IV, Part 4 Ahuka 4271 Mon 2024-12-16 Beginners guide to Proxmox Al 4272 Tue 2024-12-17 Embed Mastodon Threads hairylarry 4273 Wed 2024-12-18 Improving videography with basic manual settings Trixter 4274 Thu 2024-12-19 The Wreck - I'm alright! Archer72 4275 Fri 2024-12-20 What is on My Podcast Player 2024, Part 3 Ahuka 4276 Mon 2024-12-23 PWNED operat0r 4277 Tue 2024-12-24 Introduction episode by Paul Paulj 4278 Wed 2024-12-25 Pi powered Christmas Tree Kevie 4279 Thu 2024-12-26 What is on My Podcast Player 2024, Part 4 Ahuka 4280 Fri 2024-12-27 Isaac Asimov: The Foundation Ahuka 4281 Mon 2024-12-30 My ridiculously complicated DHCP setup at home Jon The Nice Guy 4282 Tue 2024-12-31 Backup Power for my Gas Furnace Trey Comments this month These are comments which have been made during the past month, either to shows released during the month or to past shows. There are 26 comments in total. Past shows There are 7 comments on 4 previous shows: hpr3531 (2022-02-14) "Barrier: Software KVM" by Windigo. Comment 3: SolusSpider - Peter Paterson on 2024-12-01: "Fellow user of Barrier, and also InputLeap." hpr4070 (2024-03-08) "Civilization III" by Ahuka. Comment 1: Red Orm on 2025-01-01: "hpr4070 :: Civilization III" Comment 2: Kevin O'Brien on 2025-01-02: "Thank you" hpr4258 (2024-11-27) "Introduction and History of Using Computers" by SolusSpider. Comment 5: Spartan Minter on 2024-12-02: "Linux Mint " Comment 6: ClaudioM on 2024-12-03: "Hey Solusspider! Great First Episode!" hpr4260 (2024-11-29) "The Golden Age" by Ahuka. Comment 1: Moss Bliss on 2025-01-01: "Penguicon" Comment 2: Kevin O'Brien on 2025-01-01: "Sorry to hear it" This month's shows There are 19 comments on 10 of this month's shows: hpr4264 (2024-12-05) "Mintcast, high crimes and misdemeanors." by Some Guy On The Internet. Comment 1: Henrik Hemrin on 2024-12-06: "Thunderbird"Comment 2: Majid on 2024-12-07: "Mintcast and Thunderbird"Comment 3: Dave Morriss on 2024-12-14: "Thunderbird and email management" hpr4266 (2024-12-09) "What's the weather?" by Lee. Comment 1: Lee on 2024-10-21: "Errata" hpr4268 (2024-12-11) "Book review and an Emacs rabbit-hole" by enistello. Comment 1: Henrik Hemrin on 2024-12-15: "Thanks for the book tip" hpr4269 (2024-12-12) "What is on My Podcast Player 2024, Part 2" by Ahuka. Comment 1: Random listener on 2024-12-13: "Request for a bit more info in show notes" hpr4272 (2024-12-17) "Embed Mastodon Threads" by hairylarry. Comment 1: Ken Fallon on 2024-11-28: "Wayne Myers ?? Where did I hear that name before ?"Comment 2: Henrik Hemrin on 2024-12-18: "How is the post behaviour on Mastodon reflected on the web site?"Comment 3: Reto on 2024-12-25: "Plain text is not" hpr4274 (2024-12-19) "The Wreck - I'm alright!" by Archer72. Comment 1: SolusSpider - Peter Paterson on 2024-12-19: "I'm Mark's hospital room stalker!"Comment 2: Paulj on 2024-12-30: "Thanks for Sharing!" hpr4276 (2024-12-23) "PWNED" by operat0r. Comment 1: JonTheNiceGuy on 2024-12-28: "Exposed RDP, at least it wasn't VNC (which I did!), and VPN" hpr4277 (2024-12-24) "Introduction episode by Paul" by Paulj. Comment 1: SolusSpider - Peter Paterson on 2024-12-24: "Welcome Paul to HPR"Comment 2: Trey on 2024-12-24: "Welcome"Comment 3: Paul on 2024-12-25: "Thanks Peter"Comment 4: Paulj on 2024-12-26: "Thanks Trey!" hpr4280 (2024-12-27) "Isaac Asimov: The Foundation" by Ahuka. Comment 1: Red Orm on 2025-01-01: "hpr4280 :: Isaac Asimov: The Foundation"Comment 2: Kevin O'Brien on 2025-01-02: "Thank you" hpr4281 (2024-12-30) "My ridiculously complicated DHCP setup at home" by Jon The Nice Guy. Comment 1: Paulj on 2024-12-30: "Welcome, and thanks!" Mailing List discussions Policy decisions surrounding HPR are taken by the community as a whole. This discussion takes place on the Mailing List which is open to all HPR listeners and contributors. The discussions are open and available on the HPR server under Mailman. The threaded discussions this month can be found here: https://lists.hackerpublicradio.com/pipermail/hpr/2024-December/thread.html Events Calendar With the kind permission of LWN.net we are linking to The LWN.net Community Calendar. Quoting the site: This is the LWN.net community event calendar, where we track events of interest to people using and developing Linux and free software. Clicking on individual events will take you to the appropriate web page. Any other business Thanks to all 59 HPR contributors in 2024! Ahuka, Al, Andrew Conway, Archer72, Beeza, Beto, Bob, Brian in Ohio. Cedric De Vroey, Celeste, Claudio Miranda, Clinton Roy, Cov, crvs, Daniel Persson, Dave Hingley. Dave Morriss, Deltaray, dnt, dodddummy, enistello, Fred Black, gemlog, geospart. hairylarry, Henrik Hemrin, hobs, Honkeymagoo, HPR Volunteers, Jeroen Baten, Jon The Nice Guy, Ken Fallon. Kevie, Kinghezy, knightwise, Lee, Lochyboy, mnw, Moss Bliss, Mr. Young. MrX, Ne01sfree, Noodlez, norrist, operat0r, Paulj, Quvmoh, Rho`n. SolusSpider, Some Guy On The Internet, Stache_AF, Swift110, Thaj Sara, thelovebug, thompsgj, Trey. Trixter, Trollercoaster, Windigo. Provide feedback on this episode.

Happy Holidays! For our Christmas show this year Ralph Sutton and Dov Davidoff will review their favorite live performances of the year in between exchanging gifts and giving presents to Shannon and AJ. Some live performances include Vertical Horizon, Sawyer Hill, Trixter, Kula Shaker and more!(Air Date: December 25th, 2024)Support our sponsors!YoDelta.com - Use promo code: Gas to get 25% off!To advertise your product or service on GaS Digital podcasts please go to TheADSide.com and click on "Advertisers" for more information!The SDR Show merchandise is available at https://podcastmerch.com/collections/the-sdr-showYou can watch The SDR Show LIVE for FREE every Wednesday and Saturday at 9pm ET at GaSDigitalNetwork.com/LIVEOnce you're there you can sign up at GaSDigitalNetwork.com with promo code: SDR for discount on your subscription which will give you access to every SDR show ever recorded! On top of that you'll also have the same access to ALL the shows that GaS Digital Network has to offer!Follow the whole show on social media!Dov DavidoffTwitter: https://twitter.com/DovDavidoffInstagram: https://instagram.com/DovDavidoffRalph SuttonTwitter: https://twitter.com/iamralphsuttonInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamralphsutton/The SDR ShowTwitter: https://twitter.com/theSDRshowInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesdrshow/GaS Digital NetworkTwitter: https://twitter.com/gasdigitalInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/gasdigital/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Mark Gus Scott from "Trixter" Joins The Slimy Bastards Podcast Show - Episode 10

Trixter band members PJ Farley and Steve Brown join Ralph Sutton and James Mattern and they discuss whether PJ Farley or Steve Brown has ever had a regular job, Steve Brown's band as a teenager and how they met Ray Gillen from Badlands, choosing a singer because he's good looking, Trixter performing with Sebastian Bach, how Bon Jovi helped the band, what kept them grounded as hot, young rockstars, playing guitar left-handed, the second reunion of Trixter, the Blood, Sweat snd Tears tour, how PJ Farley and Steve Brown dealt with the industry changes, a live performance of One In A Million, Steve Brown's first concert, first drug and first sexual experience and so much more!(Air Date: September 21st, 2024)Support our sponsors!YoKratom.com - Check out YoKratom (the home of the $60 kilo) for all your kratom needs!To advertise your product or service on GaS Digital podcasts please go to TheADSide.com and click on "Advertisers" for more information!You can watch The SDR Show LIVE for FREE every Wednesday and Saturday at 9pm ET at GaSDigitalNetwork.com/LIVEOnce you're there you can sign up at GaSDigitalNetwork.com with promo code: SDR for discount on your subscription which will give you access to every SDR show ever recorded! On top of that you'll also have the same access to ALL the shows that GaS Digital Network has to offer!Follow the whole show on social media!TrixterBand Twitter: https://twitter.com/TrixterRocksBand Website: TrixterRocks.comPJ Farley Instagram: https://instagram.com/PJFarleySteve Brown Instagram: https://twitter.com/SteveBrownRocksJames L. MatternTwitter: https://twitter.com/jameslmatternInstagram: https://instagram.com/thejamesmatternRalph SuttonTwitter: https://twitter.com/iamralphsuttonInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamralphsutton/The SDR ShowTwitter: https://twitter.com/theSDRshowInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesdrshow/GaS Digital NetworkTwitter: https://twitter.com/gasdigitalInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/gasdigital/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Lots going on with this episode of Talkin' Rock.  Teemu Mäntysaari starts us out by talking about his year in Megadeth, how he became a member, how his life has changed, hockey, and more.  Chris Jericho's Rock N' Wrestling Rager At Sea Cruise will be in early 2025. Chris talks about the cruise's success and how it started. We also discussed the Jane's Addiction brawl, the new Vince MacMahon documentary, and a little hockey talk.  P.J. and Steve from Trixter are up next. They're out on tour and stops at the Token Lounge on September 22nd. We talk about early tours, their 40-year career, touring pranks, and much more.  The Rival Sons are out on tour with Clutch so Scott Holiday was cool enough to hop on with me. Mr. Fuzzlord told me about the tour, meeting Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, what he learned from Black Sabbath's Toni Iommi, and lots more.  We wrap up this episode with Detroit's own Vinnie Dombrowski from Sponge. Their album 1994 comes out on October 11th and features nothing but cover songs from that year, the year they started. He tells me why they did that, what songs are included, and what's in their future.  Thanks for listening!!

table td.shrink { white-space:nowrap } hr.thin { border: 0; height: 0; border-top: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); border-bottom: 1px solid rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.3); } New hosts Welcome to our new host: Bob. Last Month's Shows Id Day Date Title Host 4174 Thu 2024-08-01 Of the Mic and the Mop Ken Fallon 4175 Fri 2024-08-02 what's in my bag part 2 operat0r 4176 Mon 2024-08-05 HPR Community News for July 2024 HPR Volunteers 4177 Tue 2024-08-06 Blender 3D Tutorial #1 Deltaray 4178 Wed 2024-08-07 Today I learnt (2024-07-27) Dave Morriss 4179 Thu 2024-08-08 HPR New Years Eve Show 2023 - 24 ep 5 Honkeymagoo 4180 Fri 2024-08-09 Intro to Science Fiction Series Ahuka 4181 Mon 2024-08-12 Downloading out of copyright movies Bob 4182 Tue 2024-08-13 Replacing backup batteries in my Kenwood TS940S HF Radio Part 1 MrX 4183 Wed 2024-08-14 What's in Kevie's holiday bag: Kevie 4184 Thu 2024-08-15 Use GKRellM, wget and ImageMagick for a live slideshow gemlog 4185 Fri 2024-08-16 Archiving VCR or any other RCA media Ken Fallon 4186 Mon 2024-08-19 How to get started with Software Freedom Day? Trollercoaster 4187 Tue 2024-08-20 Go Fish Card Game Al 4188 Wed 2024-08-21 Re: HPR4172 Comment by Ken Fallon Archer72 4189 Thu 2024-08-22 HPR New Years Eve Show 2023 - 24 ep 6 Honkeymagoo 4190 Fri 2024-08-23 Civilization IV Ahuka 4191 Mon 2024-08-26 rkvm software KVM Windigo 4192 Tue 2024-08-27 Replacing backup batteries in my Kenwood HF Radio Part 2 MrX 4193 Wed 2024-08-28 Why I haven't recorded an episode for HPR thelovebug 4194 Thu 2024-08-29 Get more user space on your Linux filesystem with tune2fs Deltaray 4195 Fri 2024-08-30 Hacking HPR Hosts Ken Fallon Comments this month These are comments which have been made during the past month, either to shows released during the month or to past shows. There are 30 comments in total. Past shows There are 8 comments on 7 previous shows: hpr2023 (2016-05-04) "Setting up my Raspberry Pi 3" by Dave Morriss. Comment 7: Dave Morriss on 2024-08-23: "What failed first, the SD or the SSD?" hpr3661 (2022-08-15) "Ham Radio testing" by Archer72. Comment 2: Dave Lee (thelovebug) on 2024-08-22: "Only just got around to listening to this one" hpr4036 (2024-01-22) "The Tildeverse" by Claudio Miranda. Comment 1: Dave Lee (thelovebug) on 2024-08-22: "rawtext" hpr4096 (2024-04-15) "Powers of two" by Deltaray. Comment 4: mandigal on 2024-08-10: "RE:" hpr4135 (2024-06-07) "Mining the web" by Cedric De Vroey. Comment 4: Cedric on 2024-08-01: "Follow up" hpr4156 (2024-07-08) "Badger 2040" by Kevie. Comment 1: Ken Fallon on 2024-08-05: "I am weak" hpr4172 (2024-07-30) "Re: hpr4072 Piper voice synthesis" by Archer72. Comment 3: Ken Fallon on 2024-08-01: "More issues" Comment 4: Ken Fallon on 2024-08-02: "It works" This month's shows There are 22 comments on 9 of this month's shows: hpr4174 (2024-08-01) "Of the Mic and the Mop" by Ken Fallon. Comment 1: Knightwise on 2024-07-31: "Posting on behalf of Knightwise, and with his permission."Comment 2: dnt on 2024-08-03: "A good reflection on what this project is"Comment 3: Henrik Hemrin on 2024-08-04: "Leared more about what HPR is"Comment 4: Ken Fallon on 2024-08-05: "@dnt"Comment 5: Ken Fallon on 2024-08-05: "@Henrik"Comment 6: Archer72 on 2024-08-05: "Re: hpr4174::2024-08-01 Of the Mic and the Mop and Re: Henrik Hemrin" hpr4177 (2024-08-06) "Blender 3D Tutorial #1" by Deltaray. Comment 1: Deltaray on 2024-08-06: "Place to post your renders"Comment 2: Henrik Hemrin on 2024-08-13: "I like the audio tutorial concept" hpr4180 (2024-08-09) "Intro to Science Fiction Series" by Ahuka. Comment 1: Trey on 2024-08-09: "Downtown Buffalo Library"Comment 2: Kevin O'Brien on 2024-08-09: "Thank you Trey"Comment 3: Dave Lee (thelovebug) on 2024-08-14: "Great series!"Comment 4: Kevin O'Brien on 2024-08-15: "Just what I hoped for"Comment 5: Trollercoaster on 2024-08-20: "Small recommendation (and thanks)"Comment 6: Aaron B on 2024-08-24: "Interesting list, Sci fi" hpr4181 (2024-08-12) "Downloading out of copyright movies" by Bob. Comment 1: Windigo on 2024-08-12: "Alternative sites" hpr4182 (2024-08-13) "Replacing backup batteries in my Kenwood TS940S HF Radio Part 1" by MrX. Comment 1: Trey on 2024-08-13: "Thank you for the reminder" hpr4184 (2024-08-15) "Use GKRellM, wget and ImageMagick for a live slideshow" by gemlog. Comment 1: George on 2024-08-15: "png"Comment 2: gemlog on 2024-08-16: "re: png" hpr4185 (2024-08-16) "Archiving VCR or any other RCA media" by Ken Fallon. Comment 1: Trixter on 2024-08-21: "Some issues with your capture methodology"Comment 2: Ken Fallon on 2024-08-22: "Trixter" hpr4187 (2024-08-20) "Go Fish Card Game" by Al. Comment 1: Dave Lee (thelovebug) on 2024-08-22: "Not played this in years" hpr4188 (2024-08-21) "Re: HPR4172 Comment by Ken Fallon" by Archer72. Comment 1: Dave Lee (thelovebug) on 2024-08-22: "Bryce T. Shatner" Mailing List discussions Policy decisions surrounding HPR are taken by the community as a whole. This discussion takes place on the Mail List which is open to all HPR listeners and contributors. The discussions are open and available on the HPR server under Mailman. The threaded discussions this month can be found here: https://lists.hackerpublicradio.com/pipermail/hpr/2024-August/thread.html Events Calendar With the kind permission of LWN.net we are linking to The LWN.net Community Calendar. Quoting the site: This is the LWN.net community event calendar, where we track events of interest to people using and developing Linux and free software. Clicking on individual events will take you to the appropriate web page. Any other business Repairing shows where external files have been lost The further back in time we go with these repairs, the more challenging they become. The most that can be done per day is five, and there have been a few breaks along the way! This is the current repair state: +------------+------------+--------------+------------------+ | date | repairable | repair_count | unrepaired_count | +------------+------------+--------------+------------------+ | 2024-08-28 | 352 | 252 | 100 | +------------+------------+--------------+------------------+

table td.shrink { white-space:nowrap } hr.thin { border: 0; height: 0; border-top: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); border-bottom: 1px solid rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.3); } New hosts Welcome to our new hosts: Trollercoaster, Lochyboy. Last Month's Shows Id Day Date Title Host 4151 Mon 2024-07-01 HPR Community News for June 2024 HPR Volunteers 4152 Tue 2024-07-02 URandom Pirate Episode operat0r 4153 Wed 2024-07-03 Steading as she goes! Dave Morriss 4154 Thu 2024-07-04 About HPR Ken Fallon 4155 Fri 2024-07-05 GNU sleep tips Deltaray 4156 Mon 2024-07-08 Badger 2040 Kevie 4157 Tue 2024-07-09 Talking with Halla about the past and future of Krita for its 25th birthday Trollercoaster 4158 Wed 2024-07-10 Alexander's Introduction Lochyboy 4159 Thu 2024-07-11 HPR New Years Eve Show 2023 - 24 ep 3 Honkeymagoo 4160 Fri 2024-07-12 Passkeys Ahuka 4161 Mon 2024-07-15 Building a retro gaming console with a Raspberry Pi Kevie 4162 Tue 2024-07-16 HPR music project - Walking tune from Äppelbo Fred Black 4163 Wed 2024-07-17 Reintroducing myself while discussing Samba and tiny computers Al 4164 Thu 2024-07-18 Postgraduate Computing Lee 4165 Fri 2024-07-19 A circle of Moss Ken Fallon 4166 Mon 2024-07-22 Everybody organize Software Freedom Day! Trollercoaster 4167 Tue 2024-07-23 Removing another obstacle to recording an HPR show Beeza 4168 Wed 2024-07-24 Beyond Economic Recovery Trixter 4169 Thu 2024-07-25 HPR New Years Eve Show 2023 - 24 ep 4 Honkeymagoo 4170 Fri 2024-07-26 Playing Civilization III, Part 5 Ahuka 4171 Mon 2024-07-29 Al discusses the renovation of his bathroom Al 4172 Tue 2024-07-30 Re: hpr4072 Piper voice synthesis Archer72 4173 Wed 2024-07-31 Getting my 2015 Macbook Pro back up and running swift110 Comments this month These are comments which have been made during the past month, either to shows released during the month or to past shows. There are 23 comments in total. Past shows There are 3 comments on 2 previous shows: hpr4135 (2024-06-07) "Mining the web" by Cedric De Vroey. Comment 3: hobs on 2024-07-28: "Federated DB of domains?" Comment 4: Cedric on 2024-08-01: "Follow up" hpr4148 (2024-06-26) "Cheap Computers" by Moss Bliss. Comment 2: dnt on 2024-07-24: "Used corporate computers" This month's shows There are 20 comments on 9 of this month's shows: hpr4153 (2024-07-03) "Steading as she goes!" by Dave Morriss. Comment 1: Trey on 2024-07-03: "Wood finishing"Comment 2: Henrik Hemrin on 2024-07-08: "Teleprinter"Comment 3: MrX on 2024-07-08: "Re Wood Finishing"Comment 4: MrX on 2024-07-08: "Re Teleprinter"Comment 5: dnt on 2024-07-24: "Studio C"Comment 6: Dave Morriss on 2024-07-24: "Re: Studio C" hpr4157 (2024-07-09) "Talking with Halla about the past and future of Krita for its 25th birthday" by Trollercoaster. Comment 1: Kevin O'Brien on 2024-07-15: "I loved the show" hpr4158 (2024-07-10) "Alexander's Introduction" by Lochyboy. Comment 1: Henrik Hemrin on 2024-07-10: "Thanks for your first show!"Comment 2: Dave Lee (thelovebug) on 2024-07-11: "Congratulations on your first show"Comment 3: Peter Paterson (SolusSpider) on 2024-07-15: "Excellent Introduction" hpr4162 (2024-07-16) "HPR music project - Walking tune from Äppelbo" by Fred Black. Comment 1: Folky on 2024-07-16: "More information" hpr4165 (2024-07-19) "A circle of Moss" by Ken Fallon. Comment 1: Trey on 2024-07-19: "Wonderful discussion!" hpr4168 (2024-07-24) "Beyond Economic Recovery" by Trixter. Comment 1: Henrik Hemrin on 2024-07-24: "Where in the world and the interest to preserve"Comment 2: Trixter on 2024-07-30: "Reply to Henrik" hpr4169 (2024-07-25) " HPR New Years Eve Show 2023 - 24 ep 4" by Honkeymagoo. Comment 1: Rob on 2024-06-24: "One person talking" hpr4172 (2024-07-30) "Re: hpr4072 Piper voice synthesis" by Archer72. Comment 1: Ken Fallon on 2024-07-24: "Fails on Fedora 40"Comment 2: Archer72 on 2024-07-26: "Re:Fails on Fedora 40"Comment 3: Ken Fallon on 2024-08-01: "More issues"Comment 4: Ken Fallon on 2024-08-02: "It works" hpr4174 (2024-08-01) "Of the Mic and the Mop" by Ken Fallon. Comment 1: Knightwise on 2024-07-31: "Posting on behalf of Knightwise, and with his permission." Mailing List discussions Policy decisions surrounding HPR are taken by the community as a whole. This discussion takes place on the Mail List which is open to all HPR listeners and contributors. The discussions are open and available on the HPR server under Mailman. The threaded discussions this month can be found here: https://lists.hackerpublicradio.com/pipermail/hpr/2024-July/thread.html Events Calendar With the kind permission of LWN.net we are linking to The LWN.net Community Calendar. Quoting the site: This is the LWN.net community event calendar, where we track events of interest to people using and developing Linux and free software. Clicking on individual events will take you to the appropriate web page. Any other business Repairing shows where external files have been lost A number of HPR shows have "external" files. These are things like pictures, videos, example scripts and configuration files. During the move to the current static site these were not copied over, and the shows on the HPR server have been incomplete since then (the Internet Archive versions are complete however). A process to "repair" these shows has been started. It relies on the fact that there are copies of the lost files on the Internet Archive, and on a backup disk. These are being copied across to the HPR server and linked into shows again. We are restoring the missing parts of shows one at a time. The process is largely automated, but there is still a manual component. We are gradually fully automating it as time allows. We will document the progress here. This is the current repair state: +------------+------------+--------------+------------------+ | date | repairable | repair_count | unrepaired_count | +------------+------------+--------------+------------------+ | 2024-08-01 | 352 | 148 | 204 | +------------+------------+--------------+------------------+ Spectrum24 Conference spectrumconf@mastodon.radio - Remember, the call-for-booths for the #spectrum24 conference is still open: If you are interested in showing of your project to an audience that is just as passionate about radio as you, drop us a mail: info@spectrum-conference.org Check out the list of currently confirmed booths https://spectrum-conference.org/24/booths Spectrum24 is free but, to manage the practicle side of the conference, we do ask you to register: https://ticketplace.ch/?op=booking&id=45 #hamradio #callforbooths

Send us a Text Message.Nightwind is an Original Rock/Hard Rock band based in the Northern Virginia/ Washington DC area.  Nightwind performs melodic, blistering guitar-driven rock with soaring vocals and a dramatic, energetic stage show. Led by the captivating presence and vision of Lead Vocalist Gina Alicya, Nightwind delivers an experience not to be missed. Nightwind is determined to bring the audience a completely original rock performance and experience, brought forth by top notch musicians with great ability and finesse onstage. They've shared the stage with legendary performers including Rick Wakeman (Yes), Joe Lynn Turner (Rainbow/ Deep Purple), Molly Hatchet, Trixter, upcoming national artist, Zeke Skyy, and musically supported TV Horror Host extraordinaire, Karlos Borloff, and is proud to have received Billboard recognition and Achievement in Songwriting for their songs “Rainbow” and “Hit & Run” (the latter of which Ann Wilson of Heart was a judge!).Information about Nightwind can be found at www.facebook.com/nightwindbandThe Fowl Players of Perryville are back in action and have upcoming shows on the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad, 5th Company Brewing in Perryville, MD, the VanDiver Inn in Havre de Grace, and others. If you are interested in seeing a show our website is www.fowlplayersofperryville.com and if your are interested in booking us- fowlplayersperryville@yahoo.com or 443-600-0446.Remember- every Tuesday from 4-6pm EST is the Back of the Rack- The Michael Spedden Show on 97underground.com- where we feature songs you forgot you liked, classics that never die, interviews with up and coming and classic beloved bands. Go to 97underground.com and download the free app today and listen to us wherever you go! We thank you for watching and listening to Fowl Players Radio- our main website is www.fowlplayersradio.comand our youtube channel is youtube.com/@fowlplayersradio.Remember- to support our guests in their endeavors. Links to their books, albums, tickets to their shows, and much more can be found in the show notes of each episode.#nightwind #fowlplayersradio #michaelspedden #fowlplayersofperryville #97underground #wmsr #5thcompanybrewing #marylandpartyboat #suskyriverbeverage #madiganswaterfront  www.fowlplayersradio.comwww.thefowlplayersofperryville.com#michaelspedden#fowlplayersradio#fowlplayersofperryville@fowl_radio@SpeddenMichaelwww.youtube.com/@fowlplayersradiowww.patreon.com/fowlplayersradiobuymeacoffee.com/fowlplayerw

On the 54th Episode of the Album Review Crew of Shout It Out Loudcast, Tom, Zeus & special guest, Trixter, Fozzy and Kuarantine's bassist, PJ Farley review the 1981 legendary album by Journey, "Escape." Escape was Journey's first album with songwriter and keyboardist Jonathan Cain. Journey now featured their classic lineup, with legendary singer Steve Perry on vocals, Neal Schon on guitar, Ross Valory on bass, Steve Smith on drums and the previously mentioned Cain on keyboard who replaced founding member Gregg Rolie. Escape propelled Journey into superstardom with legendary tracks like, "Don't Stop Believin'", "Who's Crying Now" and the dictionary definition of a power ballad, "Open Arms." With the help of shows like The Sopranos, Glee and more the songs have been intertwined with pop culture. The album has gone diamond, selling over 10 million copies and the album made it to Number 1 on US Billboard album charts. The album was produced by Mike Stone and Kevin Elson and is Journey's most successful selling studio album. As usual the boys breakdown and dissect the tracks and rank the songs. They then rank the album and the album cover against the previous 52 albums reviewed on the Album Review Crew. This was the Patreon pick. So tune in to find out do the guys slow dance to Open Arms or what would happen of David Lee Roth became Journey's singer. To Purchase Journey's “Escape” On Amazon Click Below:   Journey's "Escape"   For all things Shout It Out Loudcast check out our amazing website by clicking below:   www.ShoutItOutLoudcast.com   Interested in more Shout It Out Loudcast content? Care to help us out? Come join us on Patreon by clicking below:   SIOL Patreon   Get all your Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise by clicking below:   Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise at AMAZON   Shop At Our Amazon Store by clicking below: Shout It Out Loudcast Amazon Store   Please Email us comments or suggestions by clicking below: ShoutItOutLoudcast@Gmail.com   Please subscribe to us and give us a 5 Star (Child) review on the following places below: iTunes Podchaser Stitcher iHeart Radio Spotify   Please follow us and like our social media pages clicking below: Twitter Facebook Page Facebook Group Page Shout It Out Loudcasters Instagram YouTube   Proud Member of the Pantheon Podcast click below to see the website: Pantheon Podcast Network Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's our 4th of July special coming to you a day early and renowned rock bassist P.J. Farley is back on the show to talk about the upcoming July run of shows for his 80's Kiss cover band Kuarantine as well as all the goings on with Fozzy and Trixter.

On the 54th Episode of the Album Review Crew of Shout It Out Loudcast, Tom, Zeus & special guest, Trixter, Fozzy and Kuarantine's bassist, PJ Farley review the 1981 legendary album by Journey, "Escape." Escape was Journey's first album with songwriter and keyboardist Jonathan Cain. Journey now featured their classic lineup, with legendary singer Steve Perry on vocals, Neal Schon on guitar, Ross Valory on bass, Steve Smith on drums and the previously mentioned Cain on keyboard who replaced founding member Gregg Rolie. Escape propelled Journey into superstardom with legendary tracks like, "Don't Stop Believin'", "Who's Crying Now" and the dictionary definition of a power ballad, "Open Arms." With the help of shows like The Sopranos, Glee and more the songs have been intertwined with pop culture. The album has gone diamond, selling over 10 million copies and the album made it to Number 1 on US Billboard album charts. The album was produced by Mike Stone and Kevin Elson and is Journey's most successful selling studio album. As usual the boys breakdown and dissect the tracks and rank the songs. They then rank the album and the album cover against the previous 52 albums reviewed on the Album Review Crew. This was the Patreon pick. So tune in to find out do the guys slow dance to Open Arms or what would happen of David Lee Roth became Journey's singer. To Purchase Journey's “Escape” On Amazon Click Below:   Journey's "Escape"   For all things Shout It Out Loudcast check out our amazing website by clicking below:   www.ShoutItOutLoudcast.com   Interested in more Shout It Out Loudcast content? Care to help us out? Come join us on Patreon by clicking below:   SIOL Patreon   Get all your Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise by clicking below:   Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise at AMAZON   Shop At Our Amazon Store by clicking below: Shout It Out Loudcast Amazon Store   Please Email us comments or suggestions by clicking below: ShoutItOutLoudcast@Gmail.com   Please subscribe to us and give us a 5 Star (Child) review on the following places below: iTunes Podchaser Stitcher iHeart Radio Spotify   Please follow us and like our social media pages clicking below: Twitter Facebook Page Facebook Group Page Shout It Out Loudcasters Instagram YouTube   Proud Member of the Pantheon Podcast click below to see the website: Pantheon Podcast Network Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode Summary This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Maria comes on to talk to Inmn about the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, the state of aid going to Gaza, and the obstacles the powers that be have erected to prevent aid from arriving. Guest Info Maria Elle is a wing nut anarchist Jewish dyke extremist whore anti-Zionist psycho who writes poetry, conspires against the Empire, and organizes for collective liberation. You can find her on IG @Lchiam.Intifada or @bay2gaza Gaza Freedom Flotilla: freedomflotilla.org International Solidarity Movement: palsolidarity.org International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network: ijan.org Host Info Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript Live Like the World is Dying: Maria on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla **Inmn ** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host today Inmn Neruin. And today we're going to be talking about a kind of different lens of preparedness than we normally talk about...or no--well, I guess we always kind of talk about it. But we're...you know, we're not we're not going to be talking about a skill today as much as the importance for figuring out how to provide aid when the powers that be: governments and nations that we absolutely don't put our trust in but...are trapped by fail to do that or purposefully obstruct it. And today we're going to be talking about the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and organizing efforts around that and trying to bring critical aid to Gaza. But before that, we are a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts and here's a jingle from another show on that network. [singing] Doo doo doo doo doo. **The Ex-Worker Podcast ** 01:24 The Border is not just a wall. It's not just a line on a map. It's a power structure. A system of control. The Border does not divide one world from another. There is only one world and the Border is tearing it apart. The Ex-Worker podcast presents No Wall They Can Build: A Guide to Borders and Migration Across North America, a serialized audio book in 11 chapters released every Wednesday. Tune in at crimethinc.com/podcast. **Inmn ** 02:04 And we're back. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. I know we had you on the Stranger's podcast recently for your poetry collection, which everyone should pause right now and go and listen to another hour long podcast episode first and then come back and listen to this...or don't. Or listen to it afterwards. Anyways, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Could you introduce yourself with your name, pronouns, and a little bit about yourself and your involvement with the Freedom Flotilla? **Maria ** 02:44 Absolutely. Yes. Hi, thanks for having me. I'm Maria. She/her pronouns. I am a Jewish, anti-Zionist, anarchist, I don't know, organizer, agitator--whatever you want to call it--from the Ohlone of xučyun (Huichin), aka Oakland, California. And I am.... I've been involved doing Palestine Solidarity work since I was a teenager. Originally, I came to awareness around what was happening in Palestine during the assault on Gaza in 2008 and got involved in the student movement and the student occupations that were happening back then. And then actually got kicked out of university as a result of that, which ended up being perfect because I got the opportunity to join the International Solidarity Movement doing work on the ground in Palestine, which is an amazing group that folks should look up. They were defunct for a little bit during COVID but have come back and are working again basically bringing comrades and activists from around the world to stand in solidarity with Palestinian resistance on the ground in Palestine. So I had that opportunity and then I came home and got involved in organizing back here and was not.... So the flotilla, the Gaza Freedom Flotilla has.... So, freedom flotillas have been sailing, trying to break the siege on Gaza since 2008. Basically, a flotilla--for those who don't know--is a group of boats. So it's a group of boats from.... Our flotillas or group of boats from all over the world. There's over 30 countries that are involved sending comrades and activists to break the siege on Gaza. And so these boats are filled--our current boat--is filled with 5000 tons of food and medical aid that we are attempting to bring directly to Gaza in defiance of Israel's illegal naval blockade. These.... Like I said, these missions have been happening since 2008, trying both to bring aid to Gaza and to bring awareness, international awareness, of Israel's blockade and kind of getting a lot of international notoriety 2010 When the Mavi Marmara, a Turkicsh ship that was part of the flotilla, was attacked. And nine people were murdered in that process. And it made headlines at the time and brought a lot of awareness to the ongoing siege on Gaza. And then since then there have been many attempts to break the siege. This year, of course, is a different context. And it's a little bit hard to know what to expect. As you know, as many of us already know, there has been a genocide happening in Palestine since 1948. But the particular intensified moment of genocide that we're in creates a different context that we don't totally know what to expect. But we are determined to sail. We are determined to break Israel's illegal siege on Gaza. And especially now more than ever, while there's been a humanitarian crisis in Gaza for a very long time, and this blockade has been happening for 18 years, the famine that is now gripping Gaza is unprecedented. And we are seeing mass death, especially in the north of Gaza, and that is spreading throughout Gaza. Now with the most recent attacks on Rafah, the situation just gets more and more dire every day. One of the goals of the Freedom Flotilla is to emphasize that this is not a natural disaster. You know, there's.... A lot of the way that this gets covered in US media and global media is as if this was a humanitarian--people use the word, "humanitarian crisis," and they use the word "famine." And both of those things are true. And they're also a little bit misleading because this famine is being intentionally created by Israel as a tool of genocide. Israel controls the flow of all aid moving into Gaza and is intentionally and carefully counting how many calories it is allowing into the Gaza Strip in order to intentionally keep the population on the verge of starvation in order to cripple the resistance. This needs to be highlighted. This isn't.... It isn't like they don't know how to get the aid in. It is not logistical obstacles. They try to make it seem like this is, "Oh, how can we possibly get aid in?" Israel has closed every barrier. Like, the fact that we even need to go by sea is insane. They could open the land crossings, which would be the most effective way, but they absolutely refuse. And the United States, our so-called government that has the power to do that and has the power to force the--probably the only government in the world--with the power to force Israel to open the land crossings--is instead building this pier, spending millions of dollars of wasted money that could be being used on aid or, you know, on stopping Israel. And this long drawn out project that now isn't even functioning due to like "climate" or "weather." I can't even remember what they said. There's some kind of structural damage. I mean, they put all this money into it and like still can't deliver aid somehow. And we're supposed to believe that that's a coincidence. Meanwhile, we have a plan to,within three days, effectively deliver all of this aid to Gaza by simply having a basic little fold-out pier that we have packed on the ship that could unfold, deliver the aid, and then we can leave again. It's actually really simple. It's not complicated. None of this has to be complicated. It's being intentionally made complicated as a tool of genocide and as a tool of hiding what Israel is intentionally doing. So that's really a big part of what the Gaza Freedom Flotilla is about. I would say that it's rooted, ultimately, in the principles of DIY and direct action, which are fundamentally anarchist principles to me, and to many of us, the basic idea that no one is going to do this but us. If we want something done, we have to do it ourselves. We cannot rely on these so-called governments who, many of whom around the world claim to support Palestine and give lots of lip service to the need for aid to get in and even for Palestinian Liberation. Other governments, such as our so-called government, have done nothing but contribute to and fund and exacerbate this genocide, still give lip service to "Oh, we need to get aid into Israel," but they're not going to do anything. At best, they don't care. At worst, they actively want this to happen. We cannot wait for them. We've been trying.... Like, you know, not that.... You know, fight by every means necessary. I really do believe in a diversity of tactics. And at the same time, we need to be honest with ourselves that there is no amount of pressure that we can really put on the Biden administration that is going to change the US' has strategic Imperial interest in propping up Israel, you know? And there's no amount of electoral or domestic pressure within the existing system that we can put in that will change the fact that Israel is a beacon of US imperialism in the Middle East. It is a central part of US imperialism's operation globally. And not only our military imperialism but our economic imperialism. So as many of you may already know, and many of you may not, a big part of the impetus for this genocide has to do with global trade and global shipping. So, after the Suez Canal crisis, we saw.... It became clearer than ever to the international community, how delicate the infrastructure of global shipping is. We saw with the simple breakdown of one ship in the Suez Canal, the global economy was brought to a halt. And it is unacceptable-- [Interrupted] **Maria ** 10:18 It's so fragile. And we saw its fragility even more with COVID and with the plague. And it has become clear to the West that having such an important chokehold located in Egypt is not strategic for them. And so Israel has a plan to build what they're calling the Ben Gurion Canal, which is going to be directly north of Gaza, within missile range of of Gaza to be clear, that would be an alternative to the Suez Canal and that would allow for Israel's, and therefore the United States', control over global shipping in a way that we do not currently have. So the depth of the economic investment in committing this genocide is deeper than even natural gas off the coast of Gaza, which a lot of us have also seen headlines about. And a lot of us already know Chevron's interest and BP's interest in colonizing Gaza and eliminating Hamas in order to secure access to that natural gas, but even beyond that, in order to facilitate the construction of the Ben Gurion Canal. With that much at stake, with both fossil fuels and global shipping at stake, there's a no amount of pressure that we can put up on the Biden administration to get them to like, hear truth, you know? If we want change, we have to make it ourselves. And no one is going to do this but us. And I think that the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, the amount of aid that we can actually deliver it with one flotilla is a drop in the bucket. The principle that we are trying to communicate to the world, and that we've seen in many places, is that we can't wait. We have to...we have to show up. We have to be there for our Palestinian siblings. We have to be there for our siblings around the world. And we have to do it ourselves. You know, I think we saw a similar thing with the Great March of Return, and I'm extremely inspired by the Great March of Return of Palestinians coming from Lebanon and breaking through the border there. And we, you know, continue to be inspired by Palestinian resistance globally and to work in concert with that resistance in order to do whatever we can to stop this genocide, both in the immediate sense and in the ongoing sense of Israel's colonization of Palestine from the river to the sea. **Inmn ** 10:18 It's so fragile. **Inmn ** 12:35 Golly, thank you for that very--I will call it a little bit of a rant thing. That was incredible and very informative. And now I have like 100 questions. **Inmn ** 12:47 I have 100 more things to talk about but lay it on me. **Inmn ** 12:51 Um, I think like, or.... I don't even know where to start. Actually, there's this funny place that I want to start, which I'm maybe gonna feel funny about and is maybe like.... Whatever, I don't think it's me feeling nihilistic about it as much as like confused by imaging in..... So I, as a lot of us have been seeing a lot of news graphics, infographics. And I saw this one recently that was talking about "planned distraction." And it was like this thing that was like, "Israel's really counting on Americans being distracted by Memorial Day weekend to intensify the assault on Rafah." And I was just like, I don't think Israel's thinking about what random Americans are doing. Like, as you say, I don't think there's any amount of pressure that we can put on institutions like the Biden administration to change those things. **Maria ** 14:30 Yeah, it's an interesting question. I mean, I don't know. I mean, nobody really knows. I do think that it's worth noting that the last major assaults on Rafah began during the Superbowl also. So I mean, it's...who knows, maybe they are thinking about it. And Israel is very much concerned with its public image. [half interrupts self] Well, it's complicated, right? They are very much concerned with their public image and they're also on a genocidal, psychotic rampage, which is causing all sorts of domestic tensions. And Israeli domestic politics are a whole nother can of worms. You know, there isn't one--like anywhere--there isn't one unified Israeli interest. Israel, like every other country, is a contestation of political forces with central goals but also pulling at each other and pulling itself apart. And we actually are seeing Israeli domestic-- [Interrupts self] I think it's also very worth noting that last summer before the assaults on Gaza, before the most recent assault on Gaza began, we saw the first ever domestic Israeli social movement, really since the creation of the state. There was an actual--I mean, you know, fairly tame but for Israel significant--uprising of Israelis against their government. And several months later, this genocide happens, right? And this is not a coincidence. We've seen this kind of pattern time and time again, where a state in order to secure domestic unity will declare war or genocide on a foreign enemy. I think it's also worth noting that the plans for this--while October 7th may have been the the spark--the plans for this were very much already in place. And it is very clear from how quickly and strategically and efficiently they have acted that they have just been waiting for this opportunity. So I think that's worth emphasizing. I think, and then I just also want to clarify, as far as like "no amount of domestic pressure," I think that there's...I want to be clear that, like I said, I believe deeply in a diversity of tactics. And I do think that we need to do everything. And I think that there is very--like, I'm not saying that we should all just go to Palestine. I think there's very important roles for us to play here in the United States in organizing. But we need to be realistic about how we're gauging our targets. So we're never going to be able to appeal to the moral or even political interests of--as far as like electoral political interests--of these things. We...I think...I personally think that our best hope is to challenge their economic function, right, and to make this cost so much that they cannot continue. And that's a lot. It has to cost a lot because they have a lot to gain. But you know, what? We have a lot to lose. We have everything to lose and everything to gain. And we need to make this cost more than they can imagine. **Inmn ** 17:28 Yeah. And yeah, maybe to be clear, the infographic that I was seeing, it was like, its suggestion was like, you know, "Get on the phone and call your congress people." And I was just like, you know, yeah, "by any means necessary," and whatever people can do, but I was like, I don't think the one thing stopping.... It framed it in this way--I am gonna get off this topic very quickly and spent too much time on this--but it framed it in this way of like, "Oh, if Americans just weren't so distracted by barbecuing over the weekend then genocide and then Gaza would have been over," and I was just like...that. Okay, whatever. Anyway, a real question. So I think maybe something that I've been curious, I guess, about is some of the like geopolitical--or like, specifically like geographical--forces at work where.... Like for the.... Can you tell me about waterways, waterways in and around Israel and Gaza? Like I guess like what is the proposed route? Or like, what are some of the.... Like, how get Flotilla? **Maria ** 18:48 How get Flotilla. **Inmn ** 18:49 How blockaded? **Maria ** 18:52 Through the Mediterranean. So we had originally, we had originally planned to sail from Turkey, from Istanbul, and I was actually in Istanbul with hundreds of other people. We were, our bags were packed, the boat was full, we were ready to sail, and the mission was bureaucratically sabotaged by Israel. This was several weeks ago. **Inmn ** 19:13 Is this the flag thing? **Maria ** 19:14 Yeah, so Israel has tried many different avenues to sabotage the Flotilla, including physical sabotage of the ship. But one--and this has happened for many years--but one tactic they have not tried before, and that we were not prepared for, was that they pressured.... So I don't know how much people know about shipping. But every ship that leaves a port has to pass to sail under a flag, a national flag. As far as I understand, any ship that doesn't sail under a flag is technically considered a pirate ship. [says incredulously, laughing] So if we wanted to leave and be allowed to leave by the Coast Guard, we would have to have a national flag. And usually those flags have nothing to do with the mission. You basically buy a flag to sail under. It's interesting. It's actually kind of like a side hustle for a lot of poorer countries, they sell their flags at a cheaper rate and with less bureaucracy. So I think most international shipping actually happens under the flag of the Philippines. But we were gonna sail under the flag of Guinea Bissau, which was a flag of convenience. And Israel put immense--Israel in the United States--put immense pressure on Guinea Bissau to withdraw the flag. And so the flag was withdrawn literally the day we were supposed to depart, like bags packed and ready to go. And, you know, we could have...like the captain could have, I suppose, made the choice to sail anyway, but then that would have forced a confrontation with the Turkish Coast Guard, rather than with the Israeli naval blockade, which people felt wasn't...wasn't worth it. You know, for better or worse. Whatever. The people thought it wasn't worth it. And that it was a better plan to just try to get another flag. So the flotilla is delayed as we are searching for another flag. That process is well underway. And I am hoping.... We'll have more information within the next week about where that is at and when and where we're planning to sail from. It's not sure that we'll be sailing from Turkey anymore at this point. Turkey would have been about a three day sail to Gaza. And at this point we might have to be looking at somewhere further out. TBD. **Inmn ** 21:27 Like somewhere further out to escape the influence of Israel putting pressure on those local areas? **Maria ** 21:36 Yeah, so there was a lot of pressure, a lot of pressure put on the Turkish Government. And Turkey, while it gives incredible lip service to supporting a free Palestine, is actually deeply economically dependent on Israel. And the domestic politics there is a whole can of worms. Anyway, I don't know where that's at. That's not part of the...that's not the team that I'm on. You know? I'm doing a lot of more of a social media and grassroots organizing here in the US. So I'm not one of those people figuring that part out. But, I mean, we can all see, we all basically know the general geopolitics of that region and how complicated it is for any country in the world to allow us to sail because of the possibility of antagonizing Israel, and what that can mean as a nuclear power and as a proxy of the United States in the region. But we will. We'll find a place that we will do it. Inshallah, very soon. And that is underway. I think as far as what's happened in the past, so what's happened in the past, most of the Flotillas have not--actually all of the Flotillas--have not actually made it to Gaza. They are pretty consistently stopped, often in international waters--which is illegal--before arriving. There are no ports in Gaza that one could land at. So like we said, we had this plan with a pier that can unfold. In the past Israel has stopped the flotilla with its naval blockade. In 2010 the ships were famously--one of the ships in particular--was famously attacked, and nine people were were murdered in that process. Since then, there have been no fatalities. No one has been matyred. But everyone pretty much has been arrested and deported. **Maria ** 21:37 From like international waters? [Said confused like it sounds sketchy] **Maria ** 23:40 I think they get brought into Ashdod, usually, and deported from there, like on an Israeli vessel or whatever. I don't know. I haven't been on any of the flotillas before. This will be my first journey. One of my aunts was really involved in them for many years, so I learned a lot about the process, and I've been following the process, since 2010. She's been very involved in--or she was--very involved in it. Gail Miller, may her name be for blessing. So I've been following it but this is my first actual mission joining. **Inmn ** 24:14 Cool. Um, yeah, it's...I don't know, it's.... Thinking about waterways has been something that's been really interesting with a lot of the goings on in and around the genocide in Gaza, like specifically with like...it was fun to see countries like Yemen be like, "Oh, we're gonna blockade Israel or we're gonna blockade shipping routes for Israel shit." And interesting to hear you talk about the connections to global shipping, because then that turned into this big global shipping catastrophe. And like the US and Israel were like "We're protecting global shipping lanes for like the good of Capitalism..." **Maria ** 25:14 One of the first honest things they've said. Yeah, absolutely. I think even with that, it's worth remembering too, just kind of going back to what I said, that the governments of the world are not acting. It wasn't the Yemeni government who took that action. You know, it was it was the Houthis. And overwhelmingly, we see that is not governments anywhere, but rather people working with conviction and solidarity who can actually stop the infrastructure of global trade, can actually stop...can actually have some real impact on this genocide, right? Like, that's one of the only meaningful...you know, people know that acronym BDS, It's boycott, divestment, and sanctions, which is...was a movement in South Africa during the anti-apartheid struggle that the Palestinian anti-apartheid struggle has adopted, and that has been a global call for some time now. And one of the only real meaningful BDS actions we've seen has been by the Houthis, in that way, you know, actually interfering with Israeli shipping. **Inmn ** 26:15 Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay, that's, interesting to hear. I feel like this is a topic that I've tried really hard to learn about on the internet and every time I do it's deeply confusing. And I get more confused because there's a lot of propaganda from the US and from Israel about, like, you know, who's enacting these blockades and whatever reasons that they make up. I saw...I was reading a little bit about the 2010 flotilla where, either like before or after it, Israel was making these wild accusations that the flotilla was working with Al Qaeda or had all these connections to groups they labeled as terroristic. And then the claims were withdrawn later because everyone was like, "Literally what the fuck are you talking about?" **Maria ** 27:15 Yeah, absolutely. And, of course, they're always going to do that, you know, and they're always going to try any possible means to antagonize and paint any kind of resistance is terrorism, which is also what we're seeing in Gaza, right? They will paint five-year old children as terrorists, you know? They have no shame and and they've gotten so far...they've spiraled so deep into their own narrative that they have really lost the plot. It's kind of wild. **Inmn ** 27:46 Yeah. Yeah. I think there's...it's like this thing that's been happening for quite some time, which seems like less obvious to people who have been paying attention, but like, I feel like a decade ago, or a decade and a half ago--wow, time happens--there, like you said, Israel has had these moments of being deeply concerned with their public image and then these moments of just the veil coming off and being like, which is happening there, it's happening here in the United States, it's happening everywhere, just fascistic forces becoming less concerned with what their public images are and just owning being terrible and fucked up. Being like, "Who's gonna stop us?" **Maria ** 28:39 Yeah, I mean, you know, it's, like I said, Israeli domestic politics are a total mess, but there is definitely a stronger and stronger faction that feels that way. And just thinking about it also, to bring it back to sort of the actual mission of the Flotilla, which is to deliver aid, and.... Well, it's twofold, right? It's to deliver aid and it's to break the siege and highlight the injustice--and not just injustice but absolute insanity--of the fox guarding the hen house here, so that all aid flowing...coming into Gaza has to be searched and is being monitored by Israel, and the sort of intentional, as I spoke to in the beginning, of the intentional famine that is being constructed there. And, you know, we saw in the news in March, that we were on the...we're at a tipping point of mass starvation. And that tipping point has been tipped. We are seeing unprecedented famine happening in Gaza. And I wanted to bring it back to that because I also want to just think a little bit about contextualizing what famine means. You know, I mentioned before that people often treat--like the media often treats this as a natural disaster or something or tries to paint it as a natural disaster-- **Inmn ** 29:53 Yeah, it "just happened" **Maria ** 29:54 --as an intentional act of war and genocide. And I think that we have to frame it that way and we have to both make sure that aid is getting in immediately, and to recognize that this is political, that no matter how much money we send to the Red Cross, if aid isn't being allowed to cross isn't helpful, which is not to say don't donate. Donate. And donate, specifically, to Palestinian mutual aid funds, which are the most grassroots opportunities, the most direct way to get funding, and you can find that...I can direct you, at the end, towards different places to donate The Middle East Children's Alliance has been able to get a lot of aid directly in. There's also a lot of, there's a group called Bay to Gaza Mutual Aid, which has collected a bunch of on the ground places to help people in Gaza. So just to be clear, I'm not saying not to donate. You definitely should. And we have to recognize that without an end to this, to the siege and to the bombardment, and the occupation, aid can only go so far. And I think it's important to contextualize that, to remember that this isn't...this phenomena also isn't unique to Palestine, right, this ideathat the global media treats famine as somehow a "natural phenomenon," when in reality, it's politically constructed. It's not just for Palestine, It's true all over the world. And we're seeing that especially in..... I think you can't actually talk about Gaza right now without also talking about Darfur and Sudan and what's happening there. And I think even more than in Gaza, famine--the politically constructed famine--that affects Africa, and specifically, that affects Black people in Africa, is often treated as "inevitable," and "natural," when it is very much politically constructed. And what we're seeing in Sudan, and the genocide that is taking place in Sudan right now, and the famine that is gripping Sudan right now, is every bit as politically constructed, is every bit as entwined with resource wars with the UAE and Saudis, race for controlling natural gas and resources, and for having a monopoly over those things. And this is this genocide is being directly funded by the UAE, which the United States will not challenge because of our strategic alliances there. And the people being targeted by this genocide are overwhelmingly African agriculturalists who have continued to keep that land fertile and producing food when it is more within the interest of the imperialist powers, and particularly the UAE, to have the land become arid so that it can become extraction sites for minerals and fossil fuels. So all that to say, a big part of the goal of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla is to politicize famine itself, because it is political. **Inmn ** 32:53 Yeah. Yeah, I know, it's hard to actually think of a famine, like a historical famine, that is actually not a political tool, or like an act of genocide. It's like we...when we...when we think of it, even like the word that we have, it's like when we think of famine, we think of there being a lack of something, we think of there being some kind of disaster that is just like, "Oh, the conditions just made it so that food couldn't be produced." And it's...it's never that. And, at least in English, like we don't really have a word for enacted famine that I can think of that isn't just genocide or that isn't just like purposeful starvation. It's like this entire language lacks a word for this tool that is used. **Maria ** 33:51 Caloric warfare. **Inmn ** 33:54 Yeah, um, I guess like kind of change tack a little bit, I feel like I'm using you as my filter for trying to learn about things on the internet and like running into so many weird like blocks that I'm like, I have no idea what's going on because the global media apparatus is horrible. But what.... I guess like what's going on with world government efforts to like get like food and aid into Gaza? Like I know there's been like a lot of back and forth with what like the UN is doing to get in food and it seems like that's not happening anymore? **Inmn ** 34:40 Where was the pier being built? And, like, what, like there weren't other peirs? **Maria ** 34:40 Right. I mean, one of the most bizarre things that's been happening that has been a lot of the efforts right now is airdrops. So people are like, "There's no way to get aid into Gaza. We have to literally drop it from the air," which is not only unhelpful, but has actually been dangerous and had has caused injury and the destruction of the aid being delivered and has been, shockingly, both ineffective and unsafe. Meanwhile, you could just cross the border, right? We shouldn't even have to be going in through the sea. There's not even.... Like we're going through the flotilla because we feel like that is our best chance of getting in. But there are... like, Egypt shares a border with Gaza. The Rafah crossing a should be open, and people should be able to bring in aid by land. And there's some aid that is crossing there. But as we've seen, to the extent that Israel will let anything in there, which has been very limited, there are settler...civilian--so-called civilians--although, they're not civilian, because they're armed to the teeth with AK--well not AK-47s but M-16s--actively blocking and looting and destroying trucks that are delivering aid to Gaza. I'm just like, can you even imagine? Like, could you imagine? It's hard like.... Like, what goes through your mind? What lives in your heart to destroy food, going to starving children? You know, I.... Whatever. But like, that's actively happening, you know. And so yeah, the airdrops have been a lot of like, you know, this whole US pier that I think I spoke to earlier that they're trying to construct this peir, they constructed this peir. It was pseudo operational for a minute. Now, it's non-operational, again, spending millions of dollars for this basically theater, when the US could, in a heartbeat stop sending aid to Israel and end this whole thing. **Maria ** 36:45 Off the coast of Gaza. It's a floating pier. So yeah, it's whatever.... It's a floating pier off the coast of Gaza. No, it's...I mean, it's honestly, like it's a whole charade. To be honest. Like the United States could, tomorrow, stop this but they won't. **Inmn ** 37:08 Yeah. And it's like the excuses are always these like strange logistical, bureaucratic excuses. Of like, "Oh, I don't know, the pier, the pier didn't work out. Or like, if only we could secure the border crossings, then aid could flow freely through." [Said sarcastically] **Maria ** 37:29 Right, exactly. Which, you know, is a common thing that we see globally too. We see it in this country to some degree like the crisis at the US-Mexico border, which I believe you're at right now. Like, they treat it like..... They treat so much of the humanitarian crisis that's happening there as if it were an impossible problem to solve when it's a very similar situation. It's a intentionally constructed political crisis. **Inmn ** 37:55 Yeah. And it's like, you know, there's a kind of, I guess, famous zine--or maybe people haven't read that one in a while because it's been a long time. But there's a scene called Designed To Kill, which is exactly how the US-Mexico border works. It's like the way that you hear government talk about it, they talk about it as if like, "Oh, we just can't do literally a single thing about it. We have billions of dollars, but we just can't solve this problem." And it's like--this is gonna sound weird--but it's like when you hear Border Patrol talk about like, like, "If only we could figure out how to stop people from coming in," which is not anything that I would ever want, but is what the government talks about. And it's like, you're not trying to do that. If you were trying to do that, it would be quite easy to do that. Like you have designed a system to funnel people in, to exploit them through private prisons, to psychologically terrify, and kill people. **Maria ** 39:06 Absolutely. **Inmn ** 39:06 It is a sick and twisted thing. It is a disaster of your own creation that you then LARP as being the humanitarian actors for, for like public image. Like Border Patrol has a.... Border Patrol has a search and rescue unit. They have like a helicopter that they tote around. [Affirmative sounds from Maria] Fucking absurd. 39:32 I know. I know. Yeah. I mean, I think that you know, I believe you were involved with No More Deaths at the US-Mexico border for a long time, and I think that there's a very similar principle as with the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, that the people who created this crisis are not going to be the ones to stop it. And if anyone's going to do something, it has to be us. We have to do something. Because, yeah, the colonizer isn't going to stop colonizing unless we do something about it. **Inmn ** 40:03 No. And it's like we can't count on.... It's like, we.... Like a lot of people, I think have this, like this myth or hope or whatever that like, "Oh, well, if things ever get really weird, like the UN will step in," or something. And it's like the UN has proceeded to literally fucking nothing. Or it's like the...like, what is it? The I forget the acronym for that court, the UN court, the world.... **Inmn ** 40:31 Yeah. Yeah, the ICJ making rulings towards Israel about, "We want you to stop the genocide." And they're like, "Well, we're not going to do it." And it's like the ICJ does literally fucking nothing. **Maria ** 40:31 The ICJ 40:47 I mean, I believe that ICJ is interesting. The ICJ did issue an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, which, as far as I can tell, only means that there's like, certain countries he maybe can't go to or like, if he loses this war, which inshallah, he will, that there could be potentially be consequences for him. But that really, like, you know, it's all about real politics. That really just depends on how the war itself goes, you know? Like the international arrest warrants issued in Nazi Germany only were meaningful because Germany lost the war. I just wanted to, I mentioned No More Deaths early and I realized that probably not all the listeners know what that is. So I just thought I'd say No More Deaths is mutual aid project at the US-Mexico border. Grassroots, mostly anarchist lead from what I understand, project. Once upon a time, at least. **Inmn ** 41:45 Let's say anarchistic. **Maria ** 41:48 There we go, there we go. That [NMD] provides mutual aid that both has like emergency medical care and food and also like hikes the desert searching for people who are lost and helping evacuate people who are in need and giving direct aid at the Border despite the Border Patrol's attempt to criminalize those efforts. Which I know a lot of our listeners have probably been involved in. I believe you were. I went out there for...a long time ago. I went out there to do that. But I do think that there's powerful mutual aid projects like that happening here in Turtle Island, too. So it's worth shouting them out. **Inmn ** 42:29 Yeah, and it's like there's a lot of really interesting parallels between all of these mutual aid projects, and also the systems that create the need for them. Where, I don't know, there's so many Israeli defense contractors that got hired to build the virtual--like Elbit Systems got hired to build the virtual wall in the Border and it's like, the similar systems that get used in Palestine. And there's.... It's freaky. There's this, in Arizona, there's this company trying to build like a water pipeline from the Gulf of Mexico to Scottsdale or something. And it's the same Israeli company that builds pipelines through...or like distillation centers in Palestine. 43:28 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we see similar collaborations with Cop City in Atlanta. It's all, it's a global war machine. And we see it functioning exactly the way it's intended to function. But you know, we also have a power to be a cog in that machine. And I am weirdly optimistic a lot. I actually have a lot of faith that we can, you know, this machine can't operate without us, especially us here in the heart of Empire. Like this is in so many ways the veins of empire where so much of it is plotted and executed right here on Turtle Island. And we're uniquely positioned in a lot of ways to clog those arteries. We just have to find the courage and the confidence and the organization to make it happen. And I have so much faith in our ability to do that. Yeah, before, before we run out of time--I don't know if we're coming up on time or not. But I wanted to just also make sure that there's--and I mentioned this, but I just want to give it enough space that this crisis did not start in October. And it also didn't start with the siege of Gaza 18 years ago. This has been a crisis that has been exhibiting in its current form since 1948, since the creation of the State of Israel and the Nakba, which is the genocide of the Palestinian people in order to create the State of Israel and really for longer than that, since Zionist immigration began in the 1880s. And this crisis didn't start now and it's not going to stop when the bombs stop falling on Gaza. This crisis will not end until the settler, ethnic national...the settler, nationalist ethno state of Israel is dismantled. And really until the whole global system of settler colonialism--and all of the national states--are dismantled. But to look specifically at Palestine, like there is no...this is not over until Zionism is over. Zionism needs to be ended, and that the settler ethno state of Israel needs to be ended. And that until all Palestinians have a right to return to their homelands, until all Palestinians have a right to move freely in their homelands, until all Palestinians have a right to autonomy and self governance within their homelands. And by self-governments, I don't just mean to have a State, but to be able to have agency over their own lives and their own decisions. And until that, the struggle isn't over, and it can't be. And, you know, I think I'm actually very hopeful about this moment, I think that there is...that there is an incredible not, just an outpouring of support for the Palestinians, but incredible recognition of the state of global colonialism in the 21st century and its relationship to resource extraction and what we can do to stop it and I know that the Palestinian.... Like part of the reason that people around the world have responded to what's happening in Palestine the way they do is because this really resonates with so many indigenous people's struggles everywhere. Indigenous people all over the world see their struggle in the struggle with Palestinians and are rising up all over the world and it is very much a global struggle and very much that to free Palestine is in so many ways to free the world. **Maria ** 43:28 Yeah, yeah. Um, I know that you're...you've been part of some...part of this larger project...movement...coalition? I don't know words. But are there...are there ways that people can plug into this? Like if someone's like, "Yo, I got a boat. I want to join the flotilla." Can they do that? 47:25 I don't know about a boat. Well, I mean, if you've got a big boat. These are big boats we're talking Yeah, these are these are big boats. But um, I would say in general, yes. So the website is freedomflotilla.org. You can also find it on all the social medias, but especially you can find it on you know, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram. Also, specifically for those in the so-called San Francisco Bay area, we have our Bay to Gaza contingent that is...we are currently growing and expanding and getting ready to sail, so you can follow us on Instagram @Bay2Gaza. We're also on TikTok and Twitter, and you can reach out to us there if you're interested in supporting or getting involved. My Instagram is @lchaimIntifada. You can also message me there. I check that a little bit more. And, yeah, reach out. We're definitely still recruiting. We don't know exactly when we're going to sail yet. But we need all types of support. And especially, you know, in a lot of ways, this is a media project. This is about shedding light on a phenomenon. So especially folks who have skills in media are very much needed right now. Both legacy media but also social media. **Inmn ** 48:41 Yeah, yeah. Cool. Um, as we get...I guess, get to the end of time--our time, not the end of all time--are there any other things that you wanted to talk about? Any questions that I didn't ask you that you wanted to just touch on? I feel like I had 100 more questions that I will never remember until we stop the recording. And then I'll remember them. 49:11 Happy to keep talking after we stop the recording. But um, no. I mean, I think yeah, like I said, please, the best way to follow us is on social media. And please reach out if you are interested. And I would say other than that, taking the principle of the Flotilla, the principle that nobody is going to do this if we don't, and that we cannot depend on governments or higher powers to make change. We have to make it ourselves, and apply that to all of your organizing. Apply that to the ways, the strategic ways that you're thinking about challenging genocide and occupation and colonialism everywhere that you are, you know. I think that most of our organizing does need to be done at home where we live. And the message that I want people to take away, personally, from the Flotilla is that if we want change, we have to make it ourselves. And to use that framework, and I think...I think what that really is, is the framework of direct action, personally. I think that the word "direct action" has really lost its meaning. And a lot of activists spaces on Turtle Island in particular, people kind of think that direct action just means chaining yourself to something. And I am firmly of the belief that direct action means...it can mean three things. It can mean destroying something that needs to be destroyed, interfering with something that needs to be interfered with, and creating something that needs to be created. And you're doing it directly as opposed to protest, which is when you're asking power to do it for you. And I think there's a role for both. I think there's a role for protests and there's a role for direct action. But we should know what the difference is when we're framing our strategy, and encourage people to look to a framework of direct action and of destroying what needs to be destroyed, creating what needs to be created, and interfering with what needs to be interfered with. So I'd say that other than getting involved with the Flotilla, just holding those principles and all of our organizing, **Inmn ** 51:05 Yeah. And, can I add a little suggestion to that? **Maria ** 51:12 Please. **Inmn ** 51:13 Also in the realm of when thinking about taking direct action, when thinking about protesting, like whenever, it's like making sure that these things that we're doing are community driven and not relying on, I don't know, political parties, or even nonprofits to guide us through taking action. Like, the only ways that we're going to make it through this is if we do it and can't wait for people with more power to just hand it over. **Maria ** 51:55 Absolutely. And I think that's true on the micro sale scale of mutual aid, which is why we do mutual aid projects and it's also true on the macro scale of how this world will change. And, you know, to me, that's what anarchism is. So... **Inmn ** 52:07 Yeah, well, thank you so much for coming on again. And yeah, listeners, if you want to hear more from Maria, then you can find her on social media or you can go and listen to the Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness podcast and you can listen to us talk--honestly, a lot...mostly more about Gaza and the fuckery that is Zionism but through poetry and Maria's beautiful poetry collection, Escape Plan, which you can go check out on the Strangers in a Tangle Wilderness podcast. 52:47 And more about the West Bank, which I didn't get to talk about in this interview. And I'm realizing that was something I missed. But I do talk about that in the other one. 52:53 Do you wanna talk about it now? **Maria ** 52:54 I don't want to add that as like a little side note, but I do just want to say that speaking of like distractions, while this genocide in Gaza has been taking place, Israel has been annexing land in the West Bank at an unprecedented rate, and that the violence, but also the land loss happening right now, is a crisis that needs to be confronted directly. I do talk about that more in the other podcast. **Inmn ** 53:16 Yeah. Cool. Well, we'll see you next time. And I hope that.... **Maria ** 53:26 Free Palestine! **Inmn ** 53:27 Great. Yes. Happen. Free Palestine. I got all the words. At least 10 of them. **Inmn ** 53:40 Thank you so much for listening to Live Like the World is Dying. If you enjoy this podcast, then go do mutual aid. Break the siege of Gaza by any means necessary. But also, if you enjoyed this podcast and you want us to continue to put it on and do other cool stuff, then you can support the podcast and the best way to support the podcast is by talking about it. Tell people about it. If the people that you want to learn more about the weird myths, political myths, constructed to keep us not doing things, then tell them about Like Like the World is Dying. You can also support the show by supporting it financially. And you can do that by supporting our publisher Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. You can go to our website, tangledwilderness.org and find cool things like books and games and other stuff that we sell and make there. Or you can find us on Patreon and at patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. And yeah, you can get all sorts of fun things--we're gonna call them fun things--through the Patreon. You can get a zine mailed to you every month, like Maria's poetry collection--well, I guess you missed out on getting that one mailed to you, but you can get other future ones mailed to you-and also you can get us to thank or acknowledge things on your behalf. And we would like to thank these wonderful people and organizations. Thank you Reese, Jason, aiden, alium, Amber, Ephemeral, Appalachian Liberation Library, Portland's Hedron Hackerspace, Boldfield, E, Patoli, Eric, Buck, Julia, Catgut, Marm, Carson, Lord Harken, Trixter, Princess Miranda, Ben Ben, anonymous, Janice & O'dell, Aly, paparouna, Milica, Boise Mutual Aid, theo, Hunter, SJ, Paige, Nicole, David, Dana, Chelsea. Staro, Jenipher, Kirk, Chris, Micaiah. And a special shout out to one of our Patreon subscribers who told us that when they have more money, they're going to get the $20 a month tier so that they can get Hoss the dog another acknowledgement, we're just going to thank Hoss the dog like 20 times. Thank you, Hoss the dog. [Chanting] Hoss the Dog, Hoss the dog, Hoss the dog, Hoss the dog, Hoss the dog times 20. Times a million. Thanks all of y'all. Maria, is there anyone you would like to thank in particular today? **Inmn ** 56:34 Oh, I wasn't ready for that question. I'm sorry. That's fine. The people of Palestine, the Palestinian resistance. **Inmn ** 56:44 Hell yeah. Thanks for all and we'll see you next time. freedomflotilla.org, palsolidarity.org, and ijan.org Find out more at https://live-like-the-world-is-dying.pinecast.co

Episode Summary This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Spencer and Inmn talk about bike packing and how cool bikes are. What is bike packing? Where can you ride? What do you need? Find the answers here. Guest Info Spencer can be found on IG @spencerjharding or at www.spencerjharding.com Host Info Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript Live Like the World is Dying: Spencer on Bike Packing Pt. I **Inmn ** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host today Inmn Neruin, and today we're going to be talking about something that I've been wanting to do an episode about for a really long time because I really love to do it. And I think what I'm going to learn in this interview is that I have been doing it really wrong. Or not wrong, but making it so much harder for myself. And it's just going to be...it's going to be a lot of fun. And today we're gonna be talking about different ways that you can travel long distances, or short distances over strange terrain, on a bicycle. And we're gonna be talking about bike packing. But before that, we are a proud member of the Channel Zero Net of anarchists podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show on that network. Doo doo doo doo doo. [singing] **Dissident Island Radio ** 01:27 You're listening to Dissident Island Radio, live every first and third Friday of the month at 9pm GMT, check out www.dissidentIsland.org for downloads and more. **Inmn ** 02:15 And we're back. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Could you introduce yourself with your name, pronouns, and just a little bit about what you do in the world? And what you're here to tell us about today? **Spencer ** 02:32 Hi, my name is Spencer Harding. My pronouns are he/him/his. I do a lot of things related to bikes and I have for the last...oh, at least 10 or so years. I'm currently a photographer, writer, and editor for a website called theradavist.com. We do all manner of cycling related articles and content reviews. I've worked as a bike mechanic at local community coops and full on bike shops a like, and I've been traveling by bike since 2009 pretty regularly. And that's been a huge focus of my interest in bikes and kind of my forte in bikes. **Inmn ** 03:18 Cool, cool. Um, it's funny because I know you real life and we, you know, we like play dnd together and I actually didn't know that's what you for work. And I just knew you knew a lot about bikes. So cool, great. **Spencer ** 03:40 I don't love that I'll know people for years and years and years and I think in a lot of the communities I've been in for years, no one really asks what anyone does. And it's not really important because we're all just doing these weird niche activities or hobbies together. And it's kind of fun. **Inmn ** 03:55 Yeah. I'm going to immediately go offer a little script. How did you get into bikes? **Spencer ** 04:07 I got into bikes right on the verge of the huge fixed gear craze that happened in like the early aughts. **Inmn ** 04:18 Oh yeah, I remember. **Spencer ** 04:21 So I was in school at Long Beach State in Southern California. I saw some people riding around bikes. It was the begining of my second year of college. I was moving off campus and I realized that I could buy a bicycle for the same price as a parking pass. And it took me as long to ride from my apartment to my classes as it did to walk from the parking lot to my class. So I took the, what, $130 that that parking pass would have been and I bought an old Schwinn off Craigslist. And it's been all downhill from there. **Inmn ** 04:59 [Laughing] I'm sure it has not been all downhill, but I appreciate the pun. We'll get into this later, but I did a big--introduction to me and biking--is that I have always just really loved bikes. Like similarly I had this thing in high school where a car became suddenly unavailable to me. And I lived in like a suburb of a suburb of a suburb. And I was like, can I take my dad's old Schwinn that's in the in the crawl space and ride it to the city? And the answer was, yes, I could. But like, fast forward many years to going on my first bike tour, and we like went over the continental divide and I was like, "So it's all downhill from here, right?" 06:00 [Laughing] That's one of the things. You never trust the elevation profile. There's always more up somehow. You could be on top of a mountain and somehow there will be some more uphill. **Inmn ** 06:11 Yeah. Always uphill. Always. Um, cool. Well. So yeah, let's just kind of happen to it. Um, what is like...what are the different kinds of scopes of bike travel? I feel like there's like a lot of words that were new to me as of a couple of years ago where I was just always "bike touring." But now there's all these kind of other words that people use that maybe seem like little subsets of bike touring, like gravel bikes or bike packin or r maybe there's other words that I don't know about. 06:50 There's so many buzzwords, and most of it is marketing, and like an ever smaller niche-ification of bikes. When we talk about bike travel, I think the word that comes to mind is bike touring, like, everything is bike touring. You're touring on a bike, you're riding, you're exploring, you're traveling by bike. The buzzword of the last decade has been "bike packing." And there's a lot of arguments about what that means, what that constitutes, what's bike packing, what's not bike packing. I won't go down a huge rabbit hole. I feel like the word bike packing ushered in a more modern sense of ways to pack a bicycle as opposed to what was classically bicycle touring. But if you're traveling by bike and you're strapping shit to your bike, you're going bike touring, Call it bikepacking. Call it gravel biking. You can call it...there's a multitude of other things like that. But when it boils down to it, it's all bike touring in my mind. **Inmn ** 08:09 Yeah. Okay. Um, golly, I'm going to immediately go on another tangent because I... [Spencer encourages it] It's reminding me of like.... I suddenly found myself thinking about like, wait, I wonder if Spencer knows the history...like what the history of the development of the bicycle was? This is a question I should have sent to you yesterday. And I mean, maybe you do, maybe you don't-- 08:39 I'm not super familiar. It popped in my head like I should probably do some sort of research. I mean I know the vagaries of it. But nothing specifically. I couldn't sit tell you names or dates or anything like that. **Inmn ** 08:53 Totally. But it's like, it is something that people have...like people have been riding long distances on bikes since bikes were invented, which is something that I find really interesting. Like there's.... Which I know you could take like a rewritten fairy tale and call it like absolute historical fact, you know but have you ever had any Angela Carter books. **Spencer ** 09:22 I haven't. **Inmn ** 09:24 She got famous for like rewriting the for rewriting a lot of fairy tales. And people were like, "Oh, you rewrote them with like a feminist lens." And she was like, "I absolutely didn't. My goal was to bring out the innate horror in all of these stories, and these stories just happen to be really like femicide-idle. And so that reads is feminism because the main conflicts in them are misogyny." But there's this story called Lady of the House of Love. About this vampiress who like lives in a collapsing, ruinous castle in Transylvania and is the offspring of like Dracula or something, who's just like quite bored in the world at this point. And there's this like whole diatribe in the story about this guy who she lures into the castle who has been traveling around France in Europe on a bicycle. And this is my funny tie in, and this is like in... this is like, in the early days of World War Two when this... Yeah, that's what.... And it's like, it's like these little nods where I'm like, okay, it's it's a fictional story, but I'm like, that sounds like a real thing people did, just travel around Europe on a fucking bicycle. **Spencer ** 10:56 I am 100% sure that there is some real world influence. Yeah, there's all those memes, you'll see. Like, there's some Scandinavian guy who just lived by his bike forever and ever. And, you know, big beard and all that jazz. I can't think of his name. But I can only imagine that there's some truth or they met some weird guy in a cafe one day and decided to just write them into the story after that. **Inmn ** 11:23 Yeah. Okay, wait, but back to the things. So if you had to kind of put a definition on what bike packing is, what is bike packing? **Spencer ** 11:37 So I would even back up to just bike travel. So bike travel is riding your bike multi day--so that could include a single night--somewhere, taking whatever you need for that journey, whatever that may be. Totally self sufficient. Maybe just change the clothes and a credit card. But using your bike as a means to explore and travel to somewhere. **Inmn ** 12:08 Cool. Cool. That sounds right. And what.... I guess maybe this.... It's like maybe some of these specific classifications kind of seems like it maybe gets down to what kind of bike you're riding or what kind of gear you're using? Or like something? I don't know. **Spencer ** 12:35 Yeah, there's been some discussion last few years about intent. So by touring, they've gone to the more recreational side of the venn diagram. So people on vacation, people going for a weekend trip, or for enjoyment. And by packing has, since it came at a time when people were packing less stuff on their bikes in new and creative ways that lent itself to more off road or very light and fast travel. So some people had defined bike packing as like a racing intent or like a competitive intent. And there are bike packing races. Someone who's staying with me right now, Austin Trace, she's training to ride the Arizona Trail and possibly some others. And that's an incredibly long distance. That's 800 miles of off road. There's many like 3000 plus mile bike packing races that happen all over the world over. So some people say bike packing for that kind of competitive intent. Some people will say they're going bike packing, when they're going camping for a weekend. There isn't really a line in the sand that I can thoroughly really draw. Bike packing is definitely like a new buzzword that's popped up in the last few years. And it encompasses everything that bike travel or bike touring would, depending on who you talk to or how you want to delineate that. **Spencer ** 14:07 Yes. And this is another fun thing where we have like, you know, all bikepacking Is bike touring but maybe not all bike touring is bikepacking. So all road bikes are gravel bikes, but not all gravel bikes or road bikes. If you really want to get into it--and this is even...I just wrote a review talking about how the word gravel needs to be split into two things because we're getting a recreational version of what gravel means and a competitive version of what gravel means, and those things are very different. Roughly speaking a gravel bike is traditional-ish road bike. You know, curvy handlebars, road levers. You're just getting bigger tires and typically a more relaxed geometry. That's the easiest without going into a whole mess of other unnecessary details, but the just is road bikes with bigger tires optimized for riding on dirt roads, like farm roads, forest roads, things of that sort. **Inmn ** 14:07 Yeah. Okay, that makes...that makes sense. And then there's this other word that I've been hearing people use a lot lately, which is--and by lately, I mean, this is years ago and I'm just like, really behind the the ball on things--but like, gravel bikes? **Inmn ** 15:35 Okay. Where can you ride a bike? **Spencer ** 15:40 These days? Where are there **Inmn ** 15:41 Or rather where are places that you can not ride your bike to? **Spencer ** 15:46 Legally speaking or terrain-limiting speaking? **Inmn ** 15:50 Terrain. Let's go with terrain limiting for right now. **Spencer ** 15:54 Okay, we don't need to dive into like the Wilderness Act limitations on mechanized travel. There are, if you're looking into that, there are so many crazy bicycles out there these days. There are very few places that you could not ride a bicycle. You're looking at incredibly steep and loose terrain or very deep snow or sand. But even that...like there's so many cool things with...like fat bikes have opened up just an incredible amount of terrain and versatility that wasn't available even like, you know, 20 years ago to bikes. And that's even expanding now. I've heard about some cool stuff I can't talk about, but there is some cool new stuff coming down the line that I'm very excited about in the monster truck realm of bikes. So there's.... Off road in the last few years has just totally exploded with gravel, with the accessibility of fat bikes, and like what those can.... So, fat bike, if I'm talking about, you're talking about four to five inch tires. They're just massive. So you run those incredibly low pressures like 10psi You're riding on snow, you're riding on sand, like, you know, that just opens up so many things that you can experience by bike and can travel across. And you can type in "adventure fat bike," and you'll get some crazy shit in fucking Alaska. A bunch of my friends have done it and they're just like...they have little boats and they're putting a bike on boats and they're riding down beaches and like...just places you would never would ever expect you could ride or get a bike to. And they can get a bike there and they can ride it. So there's obviously limitations like verticality or steep terrain but as far as like surfaces, you're...the world's kind of your oyster these days with that. There's so many options. **Inmn ** 18:07 Okay. Wow. Some of those are new to me and I'm like, okay, cool. Cool. Cool. **Spencer ** 18:14 I have a fat bike I just built it. You can come over and ride it. Play monster truck. Come over here, Inmn. I'll show you next time you come over for dnd. **Inmn ** 18:22 Wow. Love it. I, you know, on.... So like a background for me is my first bike tour, I didn't know anything about bike touring. I just knew that I wanted to do it. And so me and my friend Marie, we like...I met her up in Portland and then we rode our bikes to--Portland, Oregon--and then we rode our bikes to Boston. **Spencer ** 18:56 Oh, wow. Okay. [Laughing with incredulity] My first bike tour was taking the train to Santa Barbara with my like messenger bag and then riding back to LA as an overnight. You went full hog. Okay. **Inmn ** 19:11 Yeah, first first time ever riding a bike more than I could ride it in a day. **Spencer ** 19:19 Impressive **Inmn ** 19:19 It...you know, we're gonna go with a blend of impressive and utterly reckless. **Spencer ** 19:30 I know and I want to talk to this in the end too. Like, you can be really reckless on a bike and if shit goes totally pear shaped just.... Yeah, and like the accessibility of things going wrong and the ability to fix those or to get out of those situations is just such a cool component of bicycle touring that you don't get with like cars or motorcycles or, I mean, I guess hiking even less so, like there's even less to pickup. But yeah, tell me the story. How did it all go, you know, on the way to Boston? **Spencer ** 20:05 Oh, those are the worst. **Inmn ** 20:05 Um, well actually, you know, we're going to talk about that a little bit later, probably. But just, as this one funny tie in, was that in Glacier National Park, we met a...we met someone who is about to finish his bike tour. And he had been...he'd ridden the entire continental divide on a bicycle with like a little, like one of those little swivel trailers. **Inmn ** 20:06 Or, actually I don't know what they're called. They're like two wheels, in line. **Spencer ** 20:20 Oh, the bob trailer. **Inmn ** 20:42 Yeah, the bob trailer. Yeah, yeah. And he had crossed the Continental Divide like 30 times or something over the course of it. And it was utterly incomprehensible to me at the time. I'm like, "Are you riding on trails?" And he was like, "Sort of?" **Spencer ** 21:03 If I may do a quick... So the Continental Divide Trail is a long distance hiking trail that is mostly not bikeable due to the Wilderness Act thing with the wilderness stuff. I think the route you're referring to is the Tour Divide. **Inmn ** 21:18 Yes. **Spencer ** 21:20 Yeah. So those things kind of get interchanged, but they're vastly different beasts. The Tour Divide is a very popular off road route that a lot of people do these days and is one of the first mapped long distance routes, and still remains one of the longer documented off road touring routes in the world, too, which is super cool. **Inmn ** 21:42 Cool. Okay, wait, I'm trying to try to follow a little bit of a thread here. [Pauses, thinking] And maybe this is where to start. How do you...how do you start traveling long distances by bike in, you know, whatever capacity, whether you're like, I want to ride to a neighboring city, I want to ride across the country. I want to ride into the wilderness. These are vastly different. How do you get started? How do you get started? **Spencer ** 22:19 So my start was literally, my friend in college gave a talk, and at the time I was a backpacker. I'd done some backpacking, like three, four days. Stuff like that. And my friend gave this talk about how she went to France and took a bunch of kids bike touring and they took all the camping gear and they put it on their bikes and they just rode their bikes for like two months. And that blew my fucking mind. I was like, wait, I could put all my camping gear on my bike and go ride my bike. And this is in the very like first few years of me riding bikes. I was like, "This is the shit. I love this. Wait, I can go camping and do this?" So that was my first introduction. And I literally, New Year's Day, 2009, I took my road bike and my like good o'le Chrome messenger bag and I zip tied my sleeping bag under my saddle rails on my road bike and I took the train to Santa Barbara and I rode from Santa Barbara down like Highway One, like out near point Magoo, and I camped for the night. And I rode back to Long Beach the next day. And that's part of the Pacific Coast bike touring route. So it's just another established route from Adventure Cycling, who also does the Tour Divide, which you mentioned earlier. And that was my first time properly traveling by bike, and I was like, "This is cool." And a few months later a good friend of mine, Julia, who had just ridden across the country, kind of as you did. I can't remeber if she started in San Francisco or Portland as well. But she did that same trans-america ride. And she was like, "Hey, I just got off school. Like, I don't want to drive back to Southern California. Do you want to just like take a bus up here, and we're gonna bike back to LA together?" So I went back a few months later that summer and tried...like I got a different bike that had racks and all that shit and some bags. And you know, as that ball rolls, you get more bags, you get more specific stuff, you get bikes that are designed for it. And then I rode back from Santa Cruz to LA and then I was like, "This is fucking sweet." So, two months later, I flew to Seattle and rode all the way back to Santa Cruz that same summer too. So that ball kind of rolled pretty quickly for me. So, I think it's literally taking...like at the time I had a messenger bag and a sleeping bag and a stuff sack and that was what I took and I had a little tiny pocket stove and a sleeping pad. I don't know if I even brought a sleeping pad. I might not have. I have to look back at the photos. It might have been strapped to my handlebars or something. But it's really what you have. If you have most any kind of like reasonably lightweight camping gear, from car camping to backpacking. Like, all of that gear translates. And if you have a bicycle, there's--especially these days--almost...there's so many ways that you can affix things to your bike. **Inmn ** 25:14 And yeah, it's kind of funny, because I feel like I've seen this funny arc of like "bike luggage" or something. I don't know what to call it. [Spencer laughs] Where, like, when I was trying to get into bike touring, it's like--I'm sure like gravel bike/bike packing/offroad stuff, I'm sure I'm sure all that stuff existed, but I was less aware of it. But in the realm of bike touring, it seemed to be all about like how to like really neatly contain a lot of stuff on a bicycle, you know? And, like, now I see people's gravel bike or bike packing setups, and it's literally just like shit strapped anywhere that it could be. **Spencer ** 26:02 Yeah, so if we're gonna get into like, if we're gonna delineate two words, we're gonna do bike touring on one side and we're gonna do bike packing on the other. If we look at bike touring luggage, or traditional touring luggage, was usually two to four panniers [rhymes with "your"], Panniers [Rhymes with "yay"]. There's a whole video you can watch about someone from Webster's talking to my buddy Russ about how to actually pronounce that fucking word. It's a bag strapped to a rack. You can argue about it all day long. Typically two to four panniers, maybe a little bag on your handlebars, some water bottles, that was kind of the traditional setup that's been around since the inception of bicycles. Bike packing is when we're moving to more off road focus. So you, obviously panniers are just little hooks on a rack and maybe a bungee. If you've ever written off road with those they don't...they tend to eject. I've got buddies who have got busted collarbones from catching someone's unwanted, flying paneer **Spencer ** 27:02 Oh, no. **Spencer ** 27:03 So in the other corner, we have more modern bike packing bags, which arose from a cottage industry of people developing bags for things that they wanted to do that didn't exist at the time. There's a ton of them, like Revelate Designs has been around since the beginning and were big pioneers in a lot of these venues. And typically what that looks like is you have a bag on your handlebars. It's typically a double sided stuff sack, say 10 to 15 liters. Smaller, bigger exist. That's rolled on there, secured with some straps. There's harnesses and all that jazz. A big thing in bike packing that has really bled out to a lot of the other aspects of cycling, it's really convenient, is using the main front triangle of your bike. So bags that fit the center of your bike and fill that space. **Inmn ** 27:56 That's like the spot kind of like underneath where you're sitting, right? It's like the space between the seat and the handle bars, right? **Spencer ** 28:01 Correct. So, if you're thinking about a bike frame, this kind of goes back to the--I wanted to actually mention this in the history too--so a double triangle, like a diamond. So you have two triangles. You have the front triangle and the rear triangle. That design has been around nearly since the inception of bikes and fundamentally hasn't changed, which is kind of miraculous. There's there's always going to be some kooky weird shit that people are cooking up to make bikes better. But 99% of bikes that have ever existed have been the same design, and it's still the best and most efficient. So, you're filling that front triangle with gear. So it's where you would typically have your water bottles and things like that, but being able to put four liters of water, as opposed to two bottles, and a bunch of camping gear is more efficient. So frame bag. And then there's a bag attached to your seat post called a rocket bag or a butt bag or...[laughs] And this is where stuff gets real bondage-y. There's like 17 straps holding those fucking things on. They sway if you don't pack them right. And there's a bunch of designs to make that better, and we're getting really close to really nailing it. So you have those kind of are your three main staples for bike packing bags. There's bags that strap your fork, there's bags that go onto your down tube, there's ones that attach to your stem to put snacks in. If there's a tiny spot in your bike, there's a bag for it, I guarantee it. And those are kind of your two corners of like bicycle luggage. **Inmn ** 29:32 I see. I see. You know, what I.... Something I weirdly really appreciate about some of these bike packing luggage, or whatever, is when I was...when I was first hearing about some of this and I was like, oh.... Like I remember like 10 years ago when people were starting to have frame bags and stuff, and I was like "Where do you get a frame bag, like where can I go and buy this?" And the answer was, you had to just know someone who fucked around and made one and wanted to make you one. And it was like...it's like watching an entire--like, you know, fuck an industry, but it does make it more accessible for people that there's like more people making these things--but an entire way of making things, or a culture of making things, like erupting from like watching some people just fuck around with fabric and like cordura and vinyl and shit and just like.... Yeah, I don't know. I feel like...yeah, it's like watching that and watching the same thing happen with messenger bags like 15-20--I know, it's been more--years ago. But I don't know, it's something I've weirdly always appreciated about like bikes is that there's been a lot of innovation not on an industrial level. It's like on the level of people just messing around with stuff in their garages and figuring out some really cool things. I don't know, does that...does that track? Is that real? Am I under the right perception? **Spencer ** 31:11 100% There are so many cottage bag makers and a lot of them have scaled up and some of them are still really small. And a lot of the innovation is still coming from those cottage industries. Big companies have caught up. So there are a multitude of companies offering frame bags produced overseas that you can get at REI or on Amazon. There's a there's a host of options. Industrial production has caught up to it. One thing that's cool that they will never be able to do is there's a bunch of frame bike bag sewers--builders? What's the word? And you can send them a photo and they've written their various different scripts and computer programs and you send them a photo of your bike with like a ruler in it. And they will make a custom tailored bag exactly to fit your bike where you can put bolts through it, like just over the internet. And that's somethingl.... Like I personally have one from Rogue Panda. Nick is a crazy mad scientist and incredibly innovative. Yeah, you can just send him a photo of your bike or if they have the dimensions already in their system, they just sew you an exactly perfect custom bag. So you can get a bunch of off the shelf things that will work for most bikes, but if you have a weird like I do, or many that I do, you can get a custom one, and that's something that's always going to be around as like a cottage level industry. **Inmn ** 32:38 Um, okay, how.... Or.... Okay, so say...let's say I want to...say I want I want to ride my bike from where I live to a neighboring city. It's like...maybe it's four days away, or something, by bike. What...or, this is a regular thing that I want to do. This is a thing that I want to kind of invest in doing. And I'm asking this from the perspective of, so like on my month long bike tour, I feel like there was a way to have a bike that I didn't fucking hate riding. And so I'm wondering...I'm wondering kind of like what kind of bike do I need to do that? What will make my life be less terrible? I was on an old Schwinn steel frame that I put a mountain bike drive train on, essentially. And some like other mountain bike parts. I like converted it to 700s [wheel size]. I didn't know anything about fat tires. I just had like-- **Spencer ** 34:03 It barely existed back then. So yeah. **Inmn ** 34:05 It was like, I don't know like one and a half inch ties. This is embarrassing to say at this point. **Spencer ** 34:14 That's fine. I can't tell you the breadth of dumb ideas around bicycle. **Inmn ** 34:22 Yeah, yeah. And it's like my life was so bad in comparison to my road partner who was riding a Surly Long Haul. [Specialty touring bike] **Spencer ** 34:34 Yeah. So to segue out of this, if you ask the internet, the internet's gonna tell you the Surly Long Haul Trucker's the best bike touring bike for blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm going to tell you right now, the Surly Long Haul Trucker rides like fucking dogshit without about 100 pounds of gear on it, and I don't think is the right bike for almost anyone in this current day and age ofbike touring. But let's get into your actual question. So the cool thing about touring is the bags will fit to most bikes without racks or rack mount. So if you have a bike that's comfortable, that fits you, it's probably...it can probably be made to be some kind of touring ready. So every bike is a bike touring bike if you have enough gumption. I've written tall bikes halfway across this country on multiple occasions. So I wanna say that you can always a specific bike tailored to the trip or the adventure you want to go on. But you can probably make whatever you have work. And I could recommend, if you give me more specifics, I could be like, yeah, you should get this size tire. This is a great bike for that. Like, height matters. All right, before I run away on this, let's start at the...let's start at the bike. So more important than any other consideration is whether you have a bike that's comfortable for you? Does it fit you? **Inmn ** 36:07 What does that mean? **Spencer ** 36:09 So bikes come in multiple sizes for different bodies, different heights. Like, I'm all torso. I've got relatively short legs for my height, but I'm like 6'1" so I ride an extra large bike. If you're 5' or shorter, you might write an extra small. That's going to be...those bikes are gonna fit differently. So there's a varying size run. So most importantly, you want a bike that fits you. And that's going to mean different things to different people, depending on if they have any back issues or what have you. So comfort is going to be kind of paramount to start. So your four day trip, is it off road? Is it mixed between the two? Is it single-track mountain biking? You're not going to take your Schwinn Varsity on a bunch of single track trails in Arizona, because you're not going to have any fillings or teeth left at the end of that ride. So, once you have a bike that's comfortable, once you have a bike that fits you, then you want to say, "Does this bike...is it adequate for the terrain?" And that's typically going to be tire size. So tires come in a bunch of different flavors, but you're pretty much looking at anywhere between a 26" rim, a 27.5" rim, or a 29" rim, which is also coloquially referred to as 700c. And those come in--oh my God I'm really in the rabbit hole here--so many sizes. But, so is your bike comfortable? Does your bike fit you? Do you now have the appropriate tire size for the terrain you hope to traverse? And we're going to assume that you have all of those things. And the next consideration will probably be luggage. So how much frame bag space do you have? Can you get a frame bag for it? Do you have mounts to put a rack on the front, or even the back, of the bike? You want to make panniers to go on there? You can strap anything, like anything with the stuff sack, you can strap. I mean the quintessential like bike co-op special is the old kitty litter boxes with hardware hooks and some bungee cords. Like, do you have a cat? Do you use cat litter? And these are all things that can become bike touring luggage. It's so up to you and how you can fit it. I've seen such a plethora. There's such a rich community of people DIYing these things. And there's ways to use like old cutting boards to make handlebar rolls to hold stuff sacks, you know? Like, I could go on and on. So the next thing you want to figure out is how are you going to pack all your shit on your bike? And okay, we've got that. There's a plethora. And next thing is food and water. Is there water available? Do I need a water filter along the way? Where can I get more food, snacks, etc... along the way? How many days of food I need to pack? Those water and food options are probably going to inform how you pack or what kind of luggage you're going to need, beecause those your essentials. Like if you want the bike to move, you have to pedal it and you have to be alive to do that. So you're gonna need to eat and drink. **Inmn ** 39:36 Yeah, can I have a little segue off that? It was funny on this cross-country bike tour, like our attitude about that changed throughout the trip, you know, where it was like--Marie definitely had more like bike touring experience than I did--but like when we started, we were in rural Oregon, we were in Montana, we were in all of these big western states. And we didn't have a water filter, which is probably something we should have brought. But like, you know, we weren't camping. We weren't--or sorry, we were camping every night, but we weren't trying to ride off to find nice places. We were like, whatever's along the road, you know? And so we were like, "Okay, well, we just have to bring all of this stuff with us." Like, I think we had like two weeks' worth of food each and three gallons of water on us at all times. And it was utterly absurd, like our bikes were so goddamn heavy. But we often went a week without going to a grocery store. **Spencer ** 40:57 That could be the reality of your trip. And there's some of these long distance routes, especially the off road ones.... Like road touring, if you're on established routes, like highways or secondary highways, you're gonna hit a gas station hopefully once a day, if not every other day. And like, you know, it's not gonna be great food. But that's...those are all considerations to how much you need to pack. And that's...that's typically the first thing I would be like where's my reasonable resupply? Especially ifwe live down to the desert, like water is the main concern and the limiting factor for a lot of my trips. Like how much do I have to carry? Where can I get it? How can I get it? **Inmn ** 41:39 Yeah, cuz it's like, you're not--unlike being in the Northwest or something, you're not just gonna happen on a stream that you can like.... **Spencer ** 41:47 Exactly. I mean, maybe you can if you know that's there. But that's a big if, and I've planned to get water from a stream and then I got there, and the stream was dry. And I was like, "Oh, this is going to be interesting." **Inmn ** 42:01 But yeah, sorry. You're talking about water, food, etc... I don't know what you were going to say next. **Spencer ** 42:09 Yeah. So once you figured out how much water and food you need to be able to carry between places that you can get water or food, then you're gonna go to gear. So clothing, is it going to be hot? Is it gonna be cold at night? And then you're thinking about sleeping. So tent, sleeping pad, sleeping bag, at the bare minimum. How warm is that sleeping bag need to be? What's the weather going to be like? Is it going to rain a lot? How nice of a tent do you need? How many people are going to fit in that tent? And once you've figured out those things, those are all going to inform all the decisions we made already about like luggage. Like oh, I need to make a three person tent because there's three of us. Are we going to split it? Yada yada yada. If you've been camping at all, you understand that these are like kind of the basic things you want to have with you. Or maybe you're going there's a hotel every night and you're like, I'm just gonna get a hotel in and take a shower, and people do that and it's great. It's a different way to tour. **Inmn ** 42:10 We met someone like that who was credit-card touring, as it's called, I think. And, you know, I have a friend who just writes crazy distances in like single times, but like meeting this person who was like...he had a very fancy performance road bike and a couple regular small water bottles and like some granola bars and in his fucking lycra pockets, or whatever, and a credit card that was it. That was every single thing this person had. **Inmn ** 43:07 Still bike touring. My 20 year old self would be would be shaking at me saying that but still bike touring. **Inmn ** 44:01 Yeah, I mean if you got a credit card and he just like fucking get a hotel every night. **Spencer ** 44:08 But, you know, these are considerations with things. Like, I've stayed at hotels on bike tours. Like I had a real shit day got rained on for like this last trip I did in the Midwest past summer. We got stuck in like damn near a tornado. And I was putting up our tent in the downpour rain and then it was drizzling the whole next day. And I was like, fuck it. I'm getting a hotel. Going off route. I'm going to a hotel. Sleep in this hotel and shower and dry all of our shit out. And these are things you want to consider and this is all part of what goes into considering to go on a bike trip. **Inmn ** 44:44 Yeah, um, so we're getting close to the end of our time for today. I didn't say this at the beginning, but this is a two part episode. And I'm wondering if we could kind of end today's episode with, could you just tell us a story about going on a bike tour. Could have gone well, could have gone horribly. Kind of whatever. Tell us about a trip that you went on and kind of like what... Yeah. Yeah. **Spencer ** 45:21 Alright, I'm gonna tell you about my favorite bike tour. And it will bring it back together because you met that lovely gentleman in Glacier on the Tour Divided some years ago. So my buddies Kurt and Sam--this was 2016--so fledgling days of kinda packing bags. This is when one of the bigger companies, Blackburn, was getting into making bags. They sponsored a bunch of folks to go ride big long off-road routes. My friends got this scholarship sponsorship thing. And I was like, okay, cool, like, I'm gonna go meet them. I just finished up work. I worked as a bicycle tour guide, but the van stuff, not so much the touring that we're talking about, but going to hotels, yadda yadda yadda. And I got off work, drove out there. I took my dad's hybrid from like 1994 and I strapped a bunch of bags to it. And we went riding down. They had like slick bikes, all the new bags. But the fun thing was they were big rock climbers at the time. So we were carrying all of our camping gear and a full 60 meter rope, a full trad rack of cams and nuts and like our climbing harnesses and shoes, and every week we were climbing at least once a week. So we're doing trad climbing up some mountains in Montana or Wyoming or wherever the hell we want that being that week. And we packed nothing. We had.... Like none of us had real tents. We have like one spare tube between us because we just didn't have room for anything with all the climbing gear. It was just so reckless and stupid. We hitchhiked a ton and climbed a bunch of shit that was really sketchy. And it still to this day is one of my favorite memories of traveling by bike, just getting to go climb and just riding those wide opens stretches of Montana, Wyoming, a little bit in Colorado. And it was just the dumbest fun. God I miss you, Sam and Kurt, if you're out there listening somewhere. That was my bike penultimate trip that had been on. It just...it was silly and dumbn. There's photos and videos of that from years ago that I can send you some links to or whatnot. But the joy I still take from those memories and that trip stick with me. **Inmn ** 47:35 Hell yeah. That's wonderful. Um, one of my like, weirdly favorite memories of going on bike tour was--and we'll talk about this a little more in part two--but is preparation, how to prepare for a trip, how tolike plan an actual trip, you know. And me and Marie didn't plan literally at all. We just hopped on our bikes and started riding. Every day we woke up and we were like, "Yeah, let's go on that road. That makes sense. Whatever. It'll be fine." Weirdly, we did end up on...we accidentally ended up on Adventure Cycling routes, you know? Which makes sense. They were the most logical roads to ride on. We just didn't know. But our lack of preparation and planning was actually the most fun part of the trip. **Spencer ** 48:39 So my buddy Kurt on that trip, and we did a bunch of subsequent trips, and I'm a big planner and Kurt hates planning. He made me fly to fucking Columbia with zero plan and like one half contact that we called when we got to Bogota and a bunch of paper maps and was like, "Nah, we're just gonna figure it out." Speaking of accidentally winding up on ACA routes, did you the pro move where you found someone riding in the opposite direction and you asked if they were done with their maps because you were going the opposite way? **Inmn ** 49:11 No, that would have been smart. But we didn't... We met a couple other people on bike tour. We were incredibly surprised. We met exactly three people on bike tour on a two month long trip and I was actually surprised about it. **Spencer ** 49:30 Wow. I wound up on that TransAm for a little bit. And I didn't have any maps because I was being a total of shit bird and would be like, "Hey, you done with that section?" cause I didn't want to buy maps. **Inmn ** 49:42 Yeah, they're expensive. **Spencer ** 49:45 I mean, Adventure Cycling is a really lovely organization that has done a lot of good and they're a nonprofit. Do you ever, did you guys go through Missoula and go to the headquarts? **Inmn ** 49:55 We did. We got the free ice cream. **Spencer ** 49:56 Popscicles and soda. Yeah. Okay, well, that's why those maps are so expensive is they gotta give free sodas and ice cream to all the dirt bag toursists that won't buy them. **Inmn ** 50:07 Yeah, yeah. Cool. Well, that about does it for the time that we have today. Before we go, are there any things that you want to plug, any projects, any places that people can find you on the internet where you would like to be found? Anything like that? **Spencer ** 50:29 Anything on social media, is just Spencer J. Harding. Like I said, I write for the theradavist.com. You can type my name in there and there's a bunch of reviews and trip reports and stuff like that. My website is just SpencerJharding.com. There's a bunch of photos organized there from a bunch of my bicycle travels, if you want to check that out. **Inmn ** 50:50 Yeah. Cool. Cool. And for folks who...just to let you know what we're gonna be talking about next time, next time being next week, we're gonna be talking about how to actually plan a bike trip, what are things you should be prepared for kind of like on the road, why traveling by bike is just a really cool idea--if you haven't been swayed already--what are its limitations, and how does this fit into preparedness models for any kind of collapse or disaster situation that we might be in. So tune in next time. **Inmn ** 51:33 If you enjoyed this podcast, then go hop on a bike and ride around and see what happens. And also, if you like this podcast, you can please just tell people about it. It's the best way that people hear about the show and one of the best ways to support us. But if you would like to support us in other, I think, sillier ways, you can support the show financially. And you can support us financially by supporting our publisher Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. And the best way to support us is to go to tangledwilderness.org and buy some books. There's some really cool books you can buy. You can buy a cool TTRPG that me, Margaret, Casandra, and Robin wrote called Penumbra City. You can get a lots lots of other really cool books too. And you can also support us by supporting our Patreon at patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. And there's a bunch of different levels of support that you can give us, anywhere from like $5 a month, which kind of gets you a lot of cool stuff. It gets you discounts, it gets you digital versions of all of the stuff that we publish and just like lots of really cool updates. You can also get a zine mailed to you every month, that we put out as part of our monthly feature, which if you also just want to hear those, you can read them on our website or you can check out another podcast that I do called Ttrangers in a Tangled Wilderness, where we take our monthly feature and turn it into an audio zine and interview the author. And then there's another fun part of it, which is that for $20 a month, you can get us to thank or acknowledge anything that you want us to thank to or acknowledge, whether that be you or a cool organization that you want to get shouted out, or whether it's just someone you love and care about. Or as I'm still plugging for, a fictional or theoretical concept. So check us out on Patreon and we just want to give some special shout outs to these folks right now. Thank you alium, Amber, Ephemoral, Appalachian Liberation Library, Portland's Hedron Hackerspace, Boldfield, E, Patoli, Eric, Buck, Julia, Catgut, Marm, Carson, Lord Harken, Trixter, Princess Miranda, Ben Ben, anonymous, Janice & O'dell, Aly, paparouna, Milica, Boise Mutual Aid, theo, Hunter, SJ, Paige, Nicole, David, Dana, Chelsea, Staro, Jenipher, Kirk, Chris, Michaiah, and Hoss the Dog. Thank you so much for everything and we hope that you're doing as well as you can with everything that's going on and we'll see you next time. Find out more at https://live-like-the-world-is-dying.pinecast.co

Episode Summary This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Tav and Inmn talk about the utility of waterways and the ways that industrialization has changed our relationship to waterways. Inmn learns new terrifying things about river rafting and how river guides really come up with the scariest things to name potential dangers. Guest Info Host Info Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript Live Like the World is Dying: Tav on Waterways **Inmn ** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host today Inmn Neruin, and today we're going to be revisiting a subject that we've talked about before which is paddling on water. And we're going to talk a lot about rivers and we're gonna talk about—a little bit about planning trips and just generally the importance of getting to know your local waterways, with some specific contexts on places that are really cold. But first, we are a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchists podcasts, and here's a jingle from another show on that network. Doo doo doo doo doo! **Inmn ** 01:43 And welcome back. Thanks so much for coming on the show today. Could you introduce yourself and tell us just a little bit about what you—what you do in the world and what you're excited to talk about today? **Tav ** 01:59 Yeah, I'm Tav and I'm a, I guess broadly a wilderness guide from so-called Canada. Yeah, I've worked everywhere from the East Coast to Newfoundland, up to the Yukon. And yeah, I'm mostly a paddling guide, so everything from whitewater rafting, to sea kayaking, to canoeing, but I've also been known to guide hiking trips, and yeah, pretty much that's what I do. **Inmn ** 02:32 Cool, cool. That's—I feel like, you know, we've had people come on and talk about like, like arctic hiking, or hiking, or paddling, mostly in the desert, and I feel like—maybe this is just me having a very not understanding of all of these things for the most part. But what—I'm curious about, like, what kind of changes, like, in places where it gets super cold and you're having to be in the water? Which sounds cold. It sounds very cold to me.  **Tav ** 03:06 Um, yeah, I think the main thing is that it really depends on what—well, first of all, what time of year it is and, like, what exactly you're doing or planning on doing. So if you're going to be running rapids, you're certainly going to get wet. And so we have these things called dry suits, which are, well, it's kind of exactly what it sounds like. It's a suit that keeps you dry. They have these rubber gaskets on your wrists and your neck. So it, like, suctions completely to your neck and your wrists and the rest of its waterproof, including the feet. And you usually have, like I have these, call them river boots, and you just put them on over the suit. And then you're nice and protected. And you can wear warm stuff underneath if it's super cold out. But personally, I run hot. So generally, I find that like, just a base layer underneath is good enough for me. Because as soon as, like it really traps in all that air, so you stay pretty, you stay pretty warm. Even if you're in like really freezing water. But in other times of year, like to be honest, in the summer here, it gets pretty hot, like people—people don't really think of it. It's not like it's frozen year round. Obviously the waters running at a certain point and, especially these days, the summers can get up to, you know, like 30 degrees. And yeah. **Inmn ** 04:40 Cool. I'm gonna pretend I know what the conversion is on that. Wow, that's hot. **Tav ** 04:46 Yeah, I mean, it is pretty—it's probably not hot for you coming from the desert actually. But yeah, I think, I think broadly the biggest thing is always, at least for me, dressing as if you're gonna fall in the water. Unless it's really hot out. If it's really hot out and you fall in, it kind of feels great. But, but if it's chilly, you always dress like you're gonna go in the water, and not like you're just gonna have a nice day on the river. And yeah. **Inmn ** 05:25 Well, I guess like, I'm curious about, like, what the kind of preparedness like like, what—like, what do you what do you do if you fall in the water? What do you do if you fall in the water and you get wet? Like, what's—and your dry suit doesn't keep you dry? These scary questions that I have about being in the wilderness and being cold and wet.  **Tav ** 05:50 For sure. Definitely, I mean, so the first thing that's gonna happen it—and again, it all really depends on where you fall out. And like, because rivers are a very dynamic environment, actually, as one of my coworkers put it to me. He was more on the hiking side of things. And he told me that like paddling really scared him, because if something goes wrong on the river, you're still moving down the river as this thing is going wrong. So you have to like deal with the problem, but also maybe deal with a hazard that's like right in front of you. And then it's always about, like, figuring out what the best course of action is in regards to, like, dealing with the hazard, but also, you know, saving the person, and making sure everybody else who's still in the boat is safe. But I think broadly, what I tend to tell people if I'm taking them on a trip that's going to involve whitewater, is: the safest place on the river is in the boat. And if you're not in the boat, you should be on shore. So if I'm gonna, like, enter a bunch of rapids—and the other thing is actually, before I say that, you need to know, like, how to swim if you're gonna like be in whitewater. They call it a defensive swimming position. And you kind of sit back like you're in a lawn chair, and put your feet forward. And that way, if you like smashed into a rock, it's not your face that smashes into a rock, it's your feet. And you just kind of, like, you should have a lifejacket on. So that'll keep you floating. And, and then there's also, like, an offensive swimming position, which I wouldn't normally teach somebody, that's, yeah. Anyways, so yeah, so if I'm about to enter a bunch of rapids, I'll tend to tell people like, hey, if you do fall out, and for whatever reason you can't get back to the boat, you need to swim to the left shore or the right shore. Because sometimes it might not be safe to swim a certain direction and people don't know that and they're just gonna panic and swim whatever way seems the best. But if you let them know beforehand, like, hey, swim left, if something goes really wrong, I don't know, then they'll at least know the safer way to swim. Yeah. And then other than that, like, we have, I guess, a couple tools in our arsenal—and this should be the same with rivers everywhere. We'll have throw ropes, which are just some buoyant rope. And it's in a bag, and you throw it at people. And they should hopefully grab on to it and then you can pull them in to safety. And then there's obviously, again, like, as with all things, it can get more and more complicated depending on what the problem is. Actually, this one place I worked—I wasn't on this trip, but there was a person who got stuck on a piece of debris in the middle of a rapid which is, like, absolutely horrifying, especially because we've run that river—or that section of the river, like, a million times and that's never happened. So there was well, so—this is kind of insane, but there was a an old mill there, like a lumber mill. Or maybe it was a paper mill. I don't know, it was some industrial thing. And rather than, like, you know, when it went out of business, disposing of all the waste properly, they just decided, hey, there's this big river right there. Let's just throw the whole factory in the river. Why not? So there was all this big machinery and like metal under the water, and a lot of the rapids are actually created by that like big hunks of metal and stuff. But anyways, we had no idea that that, like, was there. And maybe it was just like the water level was perfectly right that day or perfectly wrong that day. But yeah, this person got like caught on their swim shorts, like, right on the piece of metal. And they were stuck in the middle of a rapid. So I cannot imagine what my friends went through trying to rescue that person. It must have been pretty terrifying. But yeah, so in situations like that, it would be like a much more complicated rescue than just like throwing a rope at them and hoping for the best. So yeah. **Inmn ** 10:23 Wow, that is—you unlocked a new fear for me. I thought that Blix had like gotten all of my fear out of me, you know, in horrible things that can happen in a river, and new fear unlocked. Thanks.  **Tav ** 10:39 Yeah.  **Inmn ** 10:43 What do you—I guess I'm curious—I guess my guess is, because boats, you just—I didn't know, boats are super interesting to me because, like you said, it's like the boat keeps moving down the river. And so it's like, I want to be like, okay, like, what, like, you know, what do you do if there's an emergency? What do you do if someone needs to be like, medivaced from an area like that? And I guess I'm expecting the answer is: put him in the boat and keep going. But—which is like a cool one interesting thing about boats, is they keep going?  **Tav ** 11:20 Yeah, for sure. I mean, again, it really depends. Like everything is situational, right?  **Inmn ** 11:26 Yeah yeah yeah.  **Tav ** 11:27 And you really have to assess the situation and figure out what the best course of action is. Like, the best thing to do might be to like pull over and call EMS and hope they can land like a bush plane or a helicopter near you, or get to a place where they can land it. I had this one evac where a lady actually had a stroke on the river.  **Inmn ** 11:53 Oh no. **Tav ** 11:53 Yeah, I was pretty terrible. I was the only person there with, like, you know, decent medical training. I'm not like a doctor or anything, but I have my wilderness first responder and all that fun stuff. And yeah, so it was just like me and these other guides, who had, like, some training, but not as much as me. And my coworker—love this guy, he's amazing—but he said that she had a concussion. And I was like, this is not a concussion. This is a stroke. Yeah. And so, so yeah, so what ended up happening is we had to take one of the boats and—honestly, mad respect to my to my coworker for this—he got her down like a 45 minute section of river and like 15 minutes. We were just lucky because we had a raft there with an oar frame on it. And those, like—an oar frame is just like, you know, like a rowboat— **Tav ** 12:51 —with like, the two oars and you're like rowing it. It's that, but you like, it's a big metal frame, and you like strap it down to the rafts. So instead of—like, if you have less than the ideal number of people, you can just have one person paddle the boat. So in that case, it was actually my group, where I only had like two people. So I just ended up strapping the warframe on because it's easier than having them paddle. So anyways, my coworker took that boat and just, like, ripped down the river faster than anybody ever has probably since then. So, so yeah, I mean, in that case, like, it was a serious medical problem, we couldn't deal with the problem, you know, you need to like, get that person to definitive care as fast as possible. And in that situation, we were close enough to the end, that the best thing to do was to just call EMS, get them to bring an ambulance to the takeout and get her there as fast as possible. But you might not be in a situation where that's, you know, plausible, you might have to call a bush plane or something like that. Or, even worse, like a bush plane can't come and you're stuck for like days with somebody with a serious medical problem. That can happen, unfortunately. Yeah. **Inmn ** 12:51 Oh okay.  **Inmn ** 14:18 Yeah. Yeah. I feel like—and I think this is a topic for another time—but I really want to—folks listening out there. This is my plug to our audience. I would really love to talk to someone at some point about like, like we have this idea in, like, wilderness first aid, response, etc. I have like an expired wilderness EMT. I haven't done that work in a very long time and my brain has totally fallen out of it. But like, interested in this conversation of like, long term care in, like, when definitive care is very far away, you know, like, how to troubleshoot situations where it's like, yeah, definitive care is days away. Definitive care is a week away. And I'm like really interested in talking to someone about that. So if that feels like you, Tav, or ambient listener, then send us a message. **Tav ** 15:31 Yeah, I can't say that's exactly my area of expertise. I can offer like, an anecdote from a friend of mine, who— **Inmn ** 15:41 Oh yeah. Love anecdotes. **Tav ** 15:43 —it's pretty, it's pretty grim. I'm not gonna lie. This guy is friend of mine, he's much older than me. He's been doing this river guide stuff for his whole life. And he's had lik three people die in his arms.  **Inmn ** 16:00 Oh my god.  **Tav ** 16:01 Yeah. But like that's, unfortunately, the reality of the situation where, if you're that far away, and someone's not getting there, and there's a serious problem, and you can't deal with it, that's what happens. Right? That's the unfortunate fact of existence. And it's pretty horrifying to realize. Also from a somewhat selfish perspective, like, if I continue along this career path that could very well be me telling another young person and a few years like, oh, yeah, this one horrible thing happened to me. And yeah, like, I've definitely seen my fair share of, like, pretty intense situations that could have gone pretty badly. Thankfully, I haven't had anybody die on any of the excursions I've been on. But be I've had some pretty close calls there. So yeah. It is it is something to always consider, like, when you're heading off on a trip that's going to be far away from a hospital or civilization, I guess. That, yeah, like you are far away, and you need to have a certain level of confidence in yourself to deal with the situations that you might need to deal with. But also, in that, like, for me, it comes with a certain level of, like, risk acceptance. And like, everybody has a different level of risk tolerance. You might not be the person who's going to go, like, on a month long trip through the wilderness. That might not be okay with you. And that's fine, it's not for everybody. You know, in my case, the way I tend to look at it is, like, if there's a problem I can't deal with—pretending I'm alone in this scenario—like, if there's a problem I can't deal with myself, and it's so serious that I'm gonna die, like, in a few minutes, then like, I just accept that, like, that's what's gonna happen. Like, if I can't deal with the problem, and I can't call for help with the problem and it's that bad anyways, then I'm alread—can I swear on this? Is this a no swearing show? **Inmn ** 18:31 Oh, yeah, you can, yeah. **Tav ** 18:32 I can swear? Okay, I was gonna say, I'm already in a lot of shit if that's—if that's happening. So for me, my risk tolerance, I mean, it might be higher than others. But I don't know—it's just like, something you have to accept when it comes to taking risks. I mean, you can be prepared and informed and know everything and still an accident can happen. And then you just have to accept that, yeah, accidents happen, and it might be a really big, bad accident. So, so yeah. **Inmn ** 19:06 Yeah. Yeah, that' very true. I feel like—I feel like there's a lot of aspects of our societies that have kind of—have had our, like, brains adapt to this idea that, like, that there is always a solution to something. And I feel like this was like a big thing with, like, with COVID, like, for a lot of people, was the expectation that there was a solution to something, and a lot of people, like, getting to the ER and being like, oh, there actually isn't a solution right now—or there isn't like a one 100%, like guarantee that this problem can be fixed. And yeah, I don't know. It's—I think that's the thing that I've been thinking a lot about, is how our societies have kind of expected there to always be a guaranteed solution to something that there might not be a solution to. And I think that's like—I think that's getting more extreme as things in the world change more. There's—when we are used to certainty, there is now more uncertainty. That is an articulate thought, I'm gonna stand by it. **Tav ** 20:42 Yeah. No, I mean, definitely. Like, I could see that in society at large, actually, now that you mentioned it. But like, yeah, I mean, with regards to wilderness travel, I think anybody who does this sort of thing, like you have an understanding of the risk involved, and like what—you know, there's things that you can deal with there and there's things you can't deal with. And, yeah, like, but I mean, okay, you know, I also don't want to scare people. It's not—like, yes, you have to kind of look within yourself and accept that something bad might happen. But at the same time, I've done, like, I don't even want to know how many 1000s of hours of paddling in my life. And I, yeah, I've had, like, some problems. But I think a lot of those kind of stem from the fact that it's my job. And I'm taking people out there who aren't necessarily prepared for what they're going to—like, they go online and they're like, oh, I want to go on a guided paddling trip. And they Google, whatever, paddling in the Yukon. And then they find this company and they book a trip and they go. And that's all the preparation and thought that they put into it. Where—and that's exactly what they're paying for, I guess, if you look at it from like a service perspective. They're paying for somebody else to do all of that thought. And what I'm, what I do, like, independently—like if somebody listening wanted to go out paddling, if you just, like, talk to somebody who knows what they're doing locally—like join your local paddling club, a lot of places have those, or like find a group online—and like, learn from people or learn from the Internet. We have a lovely resource of, like, all of the information anyone could ever want. So, yeah, it doesn't have to be dangerous. I think most of the danger, and most of the dangerous situations I've been in, happen simply because it's my job to take unprepared people out into the wilderness. And, like, that kind of sucks. I—that's why I'm not actually working as a guide this summer. One of the reasons is because I'm pretty tired of dealing with unprepared people in the wilderness because it's stressful. It's really stressful. And yeah, so I mean, I guess the the main point is, like, it doesn't have to be dangerous as long as you're prepared. And I think that's a pretty great theme, considering this show. **Inmn ** 23:43 Yeah, yeah. And it's—I don't know, like, I totally understand the outlook of someone who's like, yes, I want to pay someone else to be prepared for me. And it's like, you know, reality is very different from, like, adventure tourism. But like, it's funny because it's a thing that is like a little antithetical to preparedness in general. And I'm divorcing adventure tourism and preparedness, like, because they're different things.  **Tav ** 24:21 Yeah. **Inmn ** 24:21 But, yeah, it's like, that is the thing that we're always trying to talk about on this show is, like, if in our own lives, like, if we are all more prepared than it—then like your prepper friend has to, like, do less when stuff goes wrong because everyone's a little bit prepared.  **Tav ** 24:41 Yeah, for sure.  **Inmn ** 24:44 I kind of want to switch tacks a little bit though and talk about this other thing. So I'm curious—I guess in, like, in the Yukon specifically, like, there's places where I live that I'm, like, okay, yes, that is a less accessible place via like roads and things like that. But I'm curious kind of like what the Yukon and, like, that whole area is like in terms of, like, history of transportation and stuff like that. Because, like, waterways have played kind of like a pretty large part in that from what you've told me before this—and now I sound like it's something I already knew.  **Tav ** 25:27 Yeah, for sure. To be honest, it's not just the Yukon. Throughout this country we call Canada, if you actually look at all of Canadian history, like, Canada's like three companies in a trench coat. Always has been. And it was founded on fur trading. Right. And how that was done is basically, like, white people came over, and then they met the ndigenous people. And they were like, wow, these people move pretty far and they have some neat boats. And then they kind of co-opted those boats. And of course, Indigenous people and Metis people took part in the fur trade as well. A very large part, to be honest, in making sure a lot of white people didn't just die in the wilderness. Yeah, but like throughout this entire nation's history, every single place is really connected by water. Like that's just how people got around. Everywhere from, like, the far north, the Inuit had kayaks and—actually dogsleds. ou know, when the sea froze in the winter, they had greater mobility, because—I mean, and they're still moving over water, it's just frozen water, which is kind of like land. But it, yeah, so every single place in this entire so-called country is connected by water in some capacity. And I think that really forms the way that I look at places now. Because yes, we use roads to get around now. But very likely, there is another way to get anywhere you want to get. Because all of these settlements are built on rivers, on lakes, on the ocean, and the way people got there is probably on a boat, and not on a car because we didn't have cars 400 years ago. So yeah, I guess I just, I think it's really important to recognize that and recognize that it's still very very possible to go extremely long distances. And, you know, reach inaccessible, quote/unquote places with relative ease, to be honest. So actually, something that's pretty insane to me—it's mind boggling, to be quite honest: the longest river system in the country is the Mackenzie River. And it's technically, like, if you go by names, it's a bunch of different rivers that are connected. But it's really, like, from source to sea—I don't actually remember how many kilometers it is. But you can go from Alberta, like, around Jasper, if anybody knows where that is, all the way to the Arctic Ocean on a single river. And you can do that in like a single summer, too. And throughout that whole river, there's a bunch of towns. And a lot of them are not accessible by road, but they are very easily accessible by the river. So if you really think about it, like, in my mind, they're not inaccessible places. They seem inaccessible because of our modern transportation infrastructure, which, you know, makes anything that doesn't have a road seem like it's impossible to get to and you have to spend thousands of dollars and fly or whatever. But really, all it takes is, like, one person in a canoe and you can just go anywhere you want. Yeah. **Inmn ** 29:31 Yeah, that stuff is super interesting. It's like the—I don't know, it's like, I get on some level that, you know, cars are convenient. I love being able to drive somewhere. But it's like, I don't know, obviously cars are also terrible and we need different—we need something different before the planet dies. But It's like also this thing that, like, it's like car—I imagine that like switching over a transportation system to be, like, based on moving around on the river versus based on, like, driving around on some roads that demolish a bunch of shit. It also, like, divorces us from nature and like any connection that we have to, like, the natural landscape that we are using. And, like, used to be on the river and now it's put the remains of petrified trees in your thing and blast around on concrete or whatever. I don't know. It's just funny. **Tav ** 30:43 Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, I definitely—cars are—I wish I could just live out of a canoe. But that, I can't do that. I mean, I live in my car right now. So I get their convenience. But I do think that as, like, as things progress and the climate gets worse and worse, and I mean, even now, this is probably going to mean absolutely nothing to you—Oh, you know what, actually, I was in Alaska, like, the other day. And it's actually a bit cheaper than here. But the gasoline that I purchased was $5.50 American per gallon, which I think is $1.67, or .68 per liter. What I normally—like in the Yukon, it's like 1$.80 to $1.90 per liter right now, which, it's getting pretty unaffordable to go large, long distances in a in a car. And I think that like as this progresses, like—they're not getting—these prices are not getting cheaper, inflation is continuing, and it's quickly going to become really hard, I think, for your average person to go anywhere in a vehicle when it's costing them, like, over $100 to fill a single tank. And that's, I think, where we have to return to what we did historically, which is travel on rivers. And I mean, it's not even just returning to, like, historical transport, I guess. Like we can still use road infrastructure, a lot of people bike everywhere. And you can go pretty long distance—like actually, it's super common in the Yukon to see people biking the entire Klondike highway, or the entire Dempster highway, like all the way to the Arctic Ocean, which is pretty awesome. **Inmn ** 31:27 Whoa.  **Tav ** 32:03 Yeah, yeah, I see them all the time, actually. Yeah, so—but anyways, the point being like, as we're getting, like, priced out of these things that we once took for granted, we're gonna have to understand that, like, people think about collapse and preparedness from really local perspective. And I think that's great. Really, I think getting more local is awesome. But I think what people also forget about is the fact that, like, we still are really an interconnected species. And we always have been, even before modern globalization. Like people really were traveling very far to go trade or whatever, on rivers or on the sea. And I think it's important to recognize that we probably should still be doing that because it does strengthen everybody's community. Like, just, I don't know, checking in on the community next door, or, you know, a few kilometers down the river is important too and, you know, sharing, I guess. Like, I guess there's inter-community preparedness and then intra-community preparedness. And I like to think that, like, using the environment and more specifically the waterways to like stay connected, even when we can't drive everywhere, is is pretty important. **Inmn ** 34:15 Yeah, I don't know. We live in a—we live in a strange world now. Um, I, you know, I didn't know this for a while and finding it out kind of blew my mind in a funny little way. But um, as far as like the eastern half of the United States is, like, someone told me that it is technically an island because you can circumnavigate the, like, eastern half of the United States and a boat. And this has, like, always kind of blown my mind. Like I'm not going to remember what the actual waterways all are, but it's like you can go from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi—whichever one of those lakes connects to the Mississippi—and like take the Mississippi down and then, like, get out into the Gulf and like sail around Florida, and like sail up the Atlantic, and then, like, through—it might be through a series of rivers and it might require using a canal, but you can like, get right back into the Great Lakes system. Like the Hudson Bay, or something. And— **Tav ** 34:50 —probably the same. I mean, if I was gonna do that I'd do the St. Lawrence River. **Inmn ** 35:47 But cool. Yeah. I don't actually know what these waterways are. **Tav ** 35:52 Yeah, for sure. I spend, like, way too much time of my life, like, I'm looking at a map and being like, okay, where does this river lead, and I'm, like, follow the river, like, all the way to its source. And then I go, like, all the way to the sea. And I'm like, okay, that's how far I can get there. But what if I portaged to this lake, and then I take that lake to this river. And like, anyways, I have, like, a whole folder have these like map files of just, like, random paddling routes that I've planned out. And I probably won't get to do all of them. But, yeah, I just, I am kind of a nerd in that I just like to go figure out, like, how I can get around places. Yeah. It's really crazy. Like, once you start—once you realize, like, your mind is opened up to the fact that, like, you can travel, basically anywhere on a boat, all you have to do is look at the blue lines on a map and trace them and figure out how you get from point A to point B using them. And I think it's also actually important to note that, like—so in a context of—yeah, like, in a context of a world where we're not able to use our highways and stuff. Like that, following a river or a creek, even if you don't have a boat, is a great way to make sure you know where you're going. Because, yeah, like, I mean, it's like a really obvious landmark. And you can just follow it the whole way. Especially in places where rivers are super seasonal, like, part of the year, it might literally just be like a bit of gravel, and you can just walk on it all the way to where you're going. Yeah, so I think that's also important to mention, that they're not—it's not just boats, it's just that they're very convenient ways to traverse a landscape, especially one that's, like, heavily forested. There might not be like a lot of other clearings nearby, so yeah. **Inmn ** 38:01 Yeah. Um, have you—so this like folder of, like, wacky routes—I'm gonna call them wacky routes—have you gotten to—could you tell us about a creative, like, trip that you took via waterways. Or, like, what's like the longest that you've traveled in like—I don't have words for the things that I'm asking you... **Tav ** 38:28 Yeah. Honestly, like, the longest trip I've ever done is unfortunately with my job, and that would be about a 10 day trip on the Yukon River. But—and that's just, it's mostly like a time thing. Like I said, you know, I—it's—we live in this cold place, and the water's only running for, like, a certain amount of time. And unfortunately, I've made it my livelihood to, like, spend my entire summer taking other people on trips. So in terms of my, like, crazy, wacky trips, I haven't gotten to do, like, any of the big ones that I want to actually do. Because, you know, they take, like, a month or more. And I just don't have a month because I need to make money.  **Inmn ** 39:17 Yeah. **Tav ** 39:18 But I'm hoping that will change this summer. I'm planning on a very long trip at the end of August, and it should be awesome.  **Inmn ** 39:28 Cool. **Tav ** 39:29 But yeah, so. So yeah, I guess in that respect, I haven't done any of those like ones that I concoct that are kind of wild. But I do like to just go and explore, like, little waterways and figure out, I don't know—I just like find a river and I'll go upstream. Or, actually a few days ago I did—I went just downstream and I I literally walked back to my car at the end, it was just a day thing. And that kind of sucks, being alone, because you're like, oh, cool, I did this river. And now I'm gonna just like walk back to my car and drive and pick up my boat. But yeah, I wish I had more cool stories of me on my own doing things that I want to do, but capitalism exists and all my fun river stories are with tourists that I'm taking. So. **Inmn ** 40:31 Yeah, that makes sense. What is this trip that you're planning gonna be like? **Tav ** 40:40 Yeah, so actually I have a couple different options in that regard, and it is kind of gonna depend on, like, what's on fire and what's not on fire. So, but my main route that I want to take is, basically, it'll be I think 1000–1500 kilometers. And, yeah, and it'll be from this place called Eagle Plains, which is, like, in the Arctic—it's like right kind of on, slightly below the Arctic Circle, on the Dempster highway. And I'll start on the Eagle River, and then go through a series of other rivers. I'll reach Old Crow, which is the furthest north settlement in the Yukon. And then I'll take the Porcupine all the way across Alaska—I'll cross into Alaska. And that'll take me down to the Yukon River. I'll hit up a couple towns on the Yukon River in Alaska, and then I'll get off at the last point where there's road access. That the trip that I'd like to do if the fires allow me. **Inmn ** 41:58 Yeah, yeah. Um, what—are there—I guess like, when planning—when planning a trip that is not, like, a super pre established, I guess, route or something, are there any things that that are important to consider or important to, like, prepare for? **Tav ** 42:19 Yeah, for sure. The first thing is, I wouldn't recommend doing a non pre established route unless you kind of know what you're doing. But the second thing is that, like, basically, my strategy is: I figured out the route. I map it out. And then I scour the internet for information on any of these rivers. So in this case, all of the rivers—it's actually very likely somebody has done this route before. Like, I'm definitely not the only person to think of it. At the very least, some Indigenous people did it, 100%, before I did. **Tav ** 43:01 Yeah. **Tav ** 43:02 Yeah. But yeah, it's a pretty obvious one, as far as routes go. It's just a bunch of rivers, and they all kind of feed into each other. There's no, like, crazy portages I hope—there shouldn't be any crazy portages or anything like that. I have heard one of the rivers runs pretty low sometimes, so I might have to, like, drag my boat along. But um, yeah, so. So yeah, and that—like I met people who've done the route up to Old Crow before. So I know that—I've heard about that portion from a couple of people that I know. And, yeah, other than that, I look online. And, like, you just have to kind of incessantly Google until something comes up about the river you want. And like, it's probably going to be some like, weird, obscure blog from 2006 where someone's like, I paddled this river with my friends and it was cool. And like, it might not even have, like, all the information that you need. But, like, to me, a lot of the time I'm like, okay, cool, if someone did it, that means it's probably fine, right. And that's kind of my strategy. Like, you're not gonna get all of the information you want. But you can get a lot of information just by, like, scouring the internet. And actually, go to your local bookstore. If you're going to like plan a river trip near you, go to a bookstore—or not your local bookstore if it's not near you. Go to the bookstore there and look for maps, because they probably have maps of local places. And if they don't have maps, you should ask them where to get maps, because they probably know where to get maps. I know in Canada, though, you can go on natural resources, Natural Resources Canada, and they should have like topographic maps of the entire country if you need, like, that kind of math. But you can also just, like, go on Google. But, um, but yeah, I guess mostly it comes down to getting information from wherever you can get your information from, whether that's people who've done it, the internet, or your local bookstore. And the second thing is, if you're doing a route you're unfamiliar with, especially if you're alone, you have to be cautious, and you have to know what to look for. And you have to be able to react really quickly to situations. Actually, literally a couple of days ago I was paddling this river in Alaska and the water's really low because of the time of year. And I was coming around a bend and there was a sweeper right across the river. And what happened is the river really, really narrowed, like, in this section. And it just, like, it went right for the sweeper—a sweeper is a tree that's like right across the water. So if you think about it, like, a broom, it'll be like right over up the surface. And then there's all these like branches on the way. And I think there was like a log and there's like other stuff underneath the sweeper. It was not a fun thing to be like hurtling towards really quickly. And yeah, so I was alone. And I, like, swung my boat around and, like, jumped out—because like, it was really low water so that it was shallow, which made it much easier to just, like, jump out of my boat as fast as possible and, like, drag it on shore. But like, it's stuff like that, where you're not necessarily expecting it and then you're like, oh shit, like, I need to deal with this right now. Get out of the way. And I actually lost my paddle it went down—I got it. It's fine. That's why you always have a spare paddle. That's the moral of the story. Have two paddles.  **Inmn ** 47:09 I feel like the moral of the story is: river guides continue to come up with horrifying names for dangers in the river. I thought I had heard the worst but "sweeper" is—sorry this is uh, this is a call back to Blix telling me about, like, just the—I forget what they're—I feel like one of them was called a "blender," and I— **Tav ** 47:35 Blender? I dunno about a blender. Maybe American river guides have different names for stuff. I don't know. I don't know. To me, the most horrifying feature on a river is an undercut. And it's unfortunately something that comes up a lot in places where the rivers freeze. So what will happen is like the banks will be covered in ice. And if you're—and if you're paddling at that time of year, there'll be undercuts along the whole riverbank, like the whole way down the river. And an undercut is basically just where the current goes like underneath a ledge right? At the worst case, it can be, like, a recirculating current under there. So like you get sucked under in like basically an underwater cave. And then it just, like, like, circles you around underneath and like an underwater cave and you just, like, sit there and die.  **Inmn ** 48:30 [Quietly] God. **Tav ** 48:30 Yeah, so that's what an undercut is. And then like the ice undercuts and kind of terrifying, something to be aware of if you're going to be paddling a river during spring or fall. Yeah, those are—to me, that's the most terrifying thing. Because like a lot of other stuff, there's like a way to kind of get around it or, like, you know, figure it out. But if you get sucked into an undercut you're kind of boned. Like you're pretty—there's not a lot you can do. **Inmn ** 49:03 Yeah. **Tav ** 49:04 Especially if you're alone. There's other people—I've heard of someone who got sucked into an undercard on the Ottawa River actually. And, like, there's this—I don't remember the name of the rapid, but there's this one part that's like this crazy undercut. And someone got sucked in there. And they got a rope on them somehow. And they had a truck, like a pickup truck. And they were pulling them out of the current with a pickup truck and the rope snapped. And, like, the pickup truck couldn't even go against the current. Like they were just stuck under—that person didn't live. But yeah, like it can be pretty—those are—yeah, again, that's like the most extreme horrifying thing I think to me, but... **Inmn ** 49:50 Stay away from—I know we're just—we're talking about our rivers are cool, but everyone's stay away from rivers. Golly. That's not my actual advice. **Tav ** 50:02 I think it—no—they're definitely—like that's the thing, right? They're definitely a force of nature. I always like to tell people: you will never win a fight against a river. But that doesn't mean you should be afraid of going on the river always, like, yeah, I feel like I've been talking about a lot of negative bad things that can happen. And I don't want to freak people out. Rivers are really nice and cool, and they help you get places, and it can be really fun. It's not all whitewater. Like, the Yukon River is a giant—like it's a highway. It's like, huge, flat river. It goes like 10 kilometers an hour or something crazy. Like, you can paddle it super fast. And there's, like, basically no hazards. Like, there's like some log jams and like stuff like that, but they're very easily avoided. And it's, yeah, as far as, like, as far as rivers go, if you want to go a long distance and not have to worry about any of that scary, complicated stuff, the Yukon river is fantastic. Actually, every year there's a race called the Yukon River Quest, where people paddle from Whitehorse to Dawson City, it's like 730 kilometers, and yeah, people are doing that in like, three days. Well, less than three days actually. Like they're times because you have to like stop-there's a mandatory rest point where you have to sleep for a certain number of hours, and they don't count that towards the final time, but basically the the race lasts like three days. That's like paddling nonstop. But to be honest, if you think about the fact that you don't have a motor, and you're not in a car or anything like that, and you're traveling 730 kilometers in three days, that's crazy. And there's like no hazards. It's so crazy. **Inmn ** 50:18 That's really cool.  **Tav ** 50:32 Yeah, you can go really fast and get places on certain rivers. **Tav ** 51:21 Cool. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay, that sounds fun now. Now that sounds fun.  **Tav ** 52:09 Yeah.  **Inmn ** 52:12 Um, we're kind of coming up to the end of our time. Is there anything else you want to say about waterways, or paddling, or any questions that I didn't ask you that you're like, golly, why didn't Inman asked me about this.  **Tav ** 52:29 Yeah, um, I guess mainly just—I think I didn't get to talk about oceans as much as I would have liked to. But, like, I think the main thing I would hope people can take away from this is that it's really important to learn about the water near you, if that's the ocean, if that's a river, if that's a lake. You know, learn about whatever boa, the Indigenous people in your area use to travel on that water, because it's probably really well suited for it, to be honest. And yeah, just learn about your local waterway, learn about the ecosystem. I didn't get to talk about that as much too, but—because I'm really into traveling rivers—but they're also sources of food and just, like, life for everyone, you know. So learn about what animals live there, learn about how to help your river, and—or the ocean. And just learn about your local water and have some kind of relationship with it, whether that's, like, paddling or, like, picking blueberries on the riverbank. I think it's just important that everybody is aware of water and the life that it brings us and how it connects all of us. Yeah. I think that's that's it.  **Inmn ** 54:00 Cool. That seems like a great—that is a better place to end on than the blender—the sweeper—whatever that terrifying name was. Is there anything that you want to shout out, whether it's places people can find you on the internet where you would like to be found, or projects, or just anything you want to plug or shout out?  **Tav ** 54:25 Um, yeah, like, I guess I have a tiny YouTube channel that like doesn't have really much—it's mostly just my music, if anybody cares at all. It's, um, I'm birchbark online. You can find me there. That's whatever. But I think the main thing I want to plug is: go have a nice day by the water and be nice to yourself. **Inmn ** 55:00 Cool. That's a great thing. I'm going to go find water. I think there's water here right now.  **Tav ** 55:08 Awesome. **Inmn ** 55:08 I will try. Cool. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. **Tav ** 55:14  Yeah, for sure. Thanks. Thanks for having me. **Inmn ** 55:21 Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, then go learn more about your local waterways. And also come up with a new and terrifying name for a river obstacle so that I might live in fear of water forever. But also, if you liked the show, you can support it. And you can support it by telling people about the show, or doing stuff that involves an algorithm. I don't actually really know anything about any of that. But there is stuff that one can do. Also, if you would like to support the show, you can support it financially. And you can support it financially by supporting our publisher, Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. You can find us at patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. And you can sign up for different tiers. There's a super basic tier where you just get discounts. I mean, not just you, you get discounts and you get access to digital content. And there's another tier where you can get a zine that we send you every month, and it's a really cool zine. Sometimes it's a short story, sometimes it's poetry, sometimes it's an essay about something. And they're all really cool. And you can listen to those features in audio form on our other podcast, Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, and you can listen to interviews with the author, it's really cool. And in all of the ways that you support our publisher financially, it goes towards paying our audio engineer, and paying our transcriptionist, and maybe one day paying the hosts and the guests of the show. And, yeah, that's all that. We would like to give some special shout outs to some of our patrons who support us at the acknowledgement level. And just to plug how cool the acknowledgement level is: If you give us $20 a month, which goes towards us doing really cool things, then you can get us to shout out, acknowledge, or thank an organization, yourself, someone that you love, or a fictional and theoretical concept on all of our shows—except for things like, you know, if you ask us to think the Empire, we're not going to thank the Empire. So don't try. But we would like to give some special things to these folks: Thank you, Amber, Ephemeral, Appalachian Liberation Library, Portland's Hedron Hackerspace, Boldfield, E, Patolli Erik, Buck, Julia, CatGut, Marm Carson, Lord Harken, Trixter, Princess Miranda, Ben Ben, Anonymous funder, Janice & O'dell, Aly, paparouna, Milica, Boise Mutual Aid, theo, Hunter, SJ, Paige, Nicole, David, Dana, Chelsea, Staro, Jenipher, Kirk, Chris, Micaiah, and Hoss the Dog. Thank you so much for making this show and so many other projects possible. Thanks so much for listening, and we hope that everyone's doing as well as they can with everything that's happening in the world. And we'll see you next time. Find out more at https://live-like-the-world-is-dying.pinecast.co

Episode Summary This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Brooke, Margaret, and Inmn talk about some news from Gaza, the climate, hurricanes, University occupations, Texas' latest attempt to become a mini fief, abortion laws that are older than states, an update on an Arizona gun law, Taylor Swift, and TikTok. Host Info Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery. Margaret can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. Brooke can be found on Twitter or Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke. Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript Live Like the World is Dying: This Month in the Apocalypse: April, 2024 **Margaret ** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. Oh, wait. Brooke, you had a better... You wrote us a new jingle to sing, right? Why don't you do that right now?  **Brooke ** 00:26 [Singing] I wrote us to do jingle to sing. Bling, bling, bling, bling, bling, bling, bling. **Margaret ** 00:36 And that's now our jingle forever. that doesn't even include our name in it. That's what happens when...  Right before we hit record, we were like who's going to record the intro. And I was like, I'm going to record the intro because I have an idea. And my idea was to make Brooke come up with something to sing off the top of her head, because I'm a good person. But who's not a good person.... Wait, I'm not introducing the bad stuff yet. More good stuff. Also a host today is Inmn. Hi, Inmn. **Inmn ** 01:06 Hello, hello. I hope everyone is doing as well as they can in our in our great times. **Margaret ** 01:15 Statistically, at least one of you is punched a cop in the last week. So that's pretty cool. And also, we're a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show on the network. [Singing] This is a new jingle for a show on the network. It goes like this. **Margaret ** 01:46 And we're back. So anything happened in the world this month, Inmn? **Inmn ** 02:22 Nope. Not at all.  **Brooke ** 02:24 Everything was good. Bye, yall!   **Inmn ** 02:26 Absolutely. Absolutely nothing has happened. Only sunshine.  **Margaret ** 02:29 What if we just did updates about like the things that we saw on TV? I guess that's a different kind of podcast. It's the wildest thing. Velma got the Scooby Doo gang together... Anyway.  **Inmn ** 02:43 We do This Month in the Apocalypse, but it's only it's only from the fictional worlds that we spend too much time inhabiting. [Everyone lauging] **Margaret ** 02:52 I conquered the entire world for my god. **Brooke ** 02:56 My child has been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer because she's been curious about this show that was like my formative high school experience **Margaret ** 03:05 Aw, to like connect with you, watching old people shows like Buffy. **Brooke ** 03:09 Right? So that's what's happening in the world right now in my world. Yeah. Wow. **Inmn ** 03:14 You know, every once in a while it lines up though. Because, you know, I was recently watching, as part of my delve back to things I watched in high school, which is the Gilmore Girls, the family that I grew up with on TV. And they actually talk about Palestine quite often in the show. Or like they mentioned that... They mention that that stuff is happening, which lines up politically with like when the show was on the air and there was also a lot of bad stuff happening in Palestine. And but I don't think the show's creators were... They were kind of like adopting a neutral but mostly support Israel thing, which is, you know, it's-- **Margaret ** 04:07 Not our line here. **Inmn ** 04:11 Which is not our line here, but is... How much can you expect from mainstream TV? Like I wasn't surprised to rewatch it and discover this. **Margaret ** 04:24 So what's our Gaza update? **Inmn ** 04:27 Yes, this is my very funny segue into Gaza stuff. **Margaret ** 04:31 No, it's good.  **Inmn ** 04:32 Yeah, so... Which, I mean, there's nothing absolutely nothing funny about this. But so there's like a big... There's like big kind of like ceasefire talks happening right now, which I feel like this is something... You know, obviously people have been wanting there to be ceasefire talks for a long time and they they sort of happen and then Israel's, like, "We're not doing ceasefire talks. Fuck everyone." But they're... In this more recent round, while people kind of like imminently await a ground invasion of Rafah, which like the last little southern piece of Gaza that pretty much everyone who lives in Gaza has been forced into. And Hamas has responded to a call for ceasefire negotiation talks, saying that in order to start negotiations, they need for there to be a ceasefire. And part of part of what they're asking for at this point is like, yeah, we're willing to talk about hostage stuff, because I think they are still like 130 hostages, or something--  **Margaret ** 06:03 Which is sort of--like from a pure detached point of view--like kind of impressive that they've still held on to these hostages, as the entire region falls? **Inmn ** 06:16 Yeah, yeah. And-- **Margaret ** 06:20 Like, tactically impressive. **Inmn ** 06:25 Yeah. And they. So, kind of what they're asking for is like, yeah, we're willing to play ball. We're willing to do... like, we're willing to release hostages. But what we what we need is for Palestinian people to have  basic human rights, and to not get bombed, and for there to be a ceasefire. And what do you think Israel's response to these like, pretty, pretty basic requests were? **Margaret ** 06:56 Did they build a time machine to kill all the peoples'.... No, they probably already did kill all those people's parents. Nevermind. Something really disproportionately, impressively evil. That's my guess. **Inmn ** 07:12 Yeah, well, it's kind of like.... So you know how this thing happens in politics, sometimes, where people kind of talk up a response as being much more internally conflictual than it actually is? The same things kind of happening in Israel were awaiting Netanyahu's response, like all of the like defense, prime ministers and stuff have been like, "If you don't continue with a ground invasion, we're abdicating and your government's going to fall apart." And Netanyahu was has vowed multiple times that regardless of whether negotiations happen, or there is a ceasefire, that a ground invasion of Rafah will happen. So it's kind of like fake strife, like fake internal strife. You know? Cool. And, yeah, that's kind of the state of the ceasefire talks. And something... This is just a piece that I've been trying to learn a little bit more about, which is a topic on a lot of people's mind, which is like, "Jey, Egypt, what's up? Why aren't you letting people into Egypt to escape genocide?" And there's kind of a few different factors at place. And one interesting development on that is that Egypt has started to build a buffered wall zone. Like a border between the border kind of thing. Which is just like a giant concrete pen that can fit about 150,000, people that they're building in anticipation of the border between Rafah and Egypt rupturing during  Israel's ground invasion of Rafah, which they've... which Israel's all but announced is imminently going to happen. And likepart of what Egypt has said about this is they have been saying like, "Oh, well, we don't want to let people cross over into Egypt because we don't want people to then not be allowed back into Palestine when the war is over." It's kind of like this farcical idea that Israel's gonna do a war, take care of Hamas, and then just like peacefully leave Palestinians to like go about their lives. **Margaret ** 09:47 Yeah, I mean, like, it is true that... It certainly seems likely to me that Israel will not let anyone back in after they leave because Israel seems pretty clear that their goal--and has been their goal since 1895. Can I tell you a thing I learned about this? Sorry. **Inmn ** 10:05 Yeah, absolutely, please. **Margaret ** 10:09 I'm not sure when this podcast comes out. I just recently recorded, and it'll be out around the same time, an episode of Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff about Palestinian resistance to the British Mandate of Palestine, basically the period between 1917 and 1948. Well, technically, the Mandate kicked in, in 1922. But after the British control started, right? And in that I learned a little bit more--like maybe a lot of the listeners already know this stuff--but everything that's happening now was in the diaries, and often public statements, of all of the founders of the State of Israel, down to very specifically like, "No, we are going to absolutely remove all of the--" they would never use the word Palestinians. They wouldn't even use the word Arabs. They specifically only said "non Jewish people" when they refer to the people who are already living in Palestine. And it's just really, blatantly clear that since the beginning, the project of Israel has been not just to create an Israeli State--or sorry, a Jewish state--but to remove non Jewish people. **Inmn ** 11:24 Yeah, yeah. And it's--yeah. Which it's like part of that, that makes it really confusing to see Egypt's response-- **Margaret ** 11:35 I mean, I'm sure they're still doing it because they're bastards. But that part about like, oh, well, no one would be allowed back. That's probably true.  **Inmn ** 11:45 But it's probably true regardless. And like Egypt not wanting people to go into Egypt, I think is probably more based on Egypt's fear of being drawn into a military conflict with Israel or, as they've also stated, Hamas kind of like migrating to Egypt and like taking up the fight in Egypt. And so it's... they're kind of adopting a "tread on no one's feet and just kind of not let anyone in" kind of situation, all while saying that it's for the... it's better for Palestinian people to be trapped in the city. You know?  **Margaret ** 12:30 Can I do one other random history interjection about all this because it's on my mind.  **Inmn ** 12:34 Totally.  **Margaret ** 12:36 Okay, so there's this huge revolt in 1936, where all of the--especially the Muslims and the Christians fought--against the Zionist takeover of their land, you know? And, and their main military enemy at this point wasn't the Israeli settler or the Jewish--the zionist settlers--it was the British, right? Because the British were in control. The British used human shields. The British invented the fucking Mad Max car.  **Inmn ** 13:11 Oh my god.  **Margaret ** 13:12 They actually invented it in Ireland where they strap a guy.... They invented it by, you take an Irishman and you strap him to the front of a car and now the other Irish are afraid to fucking shoot the car or blow up the car because they don't want to kill their own guy. And there's photos of this. There is a photo in Palestine of the British in an armored car with like kind of a... It's not like a guy crudely lashed to the front Mad Max style like totally, but it is instead almost worse. It's like they went and manufactured a little cart that sticks in front of the car with two guys tied up on it. Anyway, there's the whole like, every accusation is a confession thing, and I think no government in the world has ever been more guilty of that than Israel. **Inmn ** 14:05 Yeah, yeah. That's very, very true. But yeah, that's kind of the state of things in Gaza right now. And just because I was curious about this, I looked it up and like, for a lot of folks who are raising money for people to, for families, to get elsewhere from from Rafa, it's like those current... It's like that that is something that is possible to happen but it kind of involves...it involves a lot of bribing and involves a lot of waiting for a long time and a lot of just finagling political situations, and it costs anywhere from like 5000 to like $10,000 per person. So it's very expensive, but but it is something that's happening, but it's mostly available to rich people right now. **Margaret ** 15:02 And there's a lot of fundraising going on. And I wish I had a link more directly in front of me. There's people who have collected together spreadsheets where they keep track of all of the families that need to get out, and like what their specific fundraisers are and stuff like that. **Inmn ** 15:17 Yeah. But Margaret, what's kind of been happening with people's responses to stuff going on in Gaza here in the States? **Margaret ** 15:29 So one of the things about the way that we do the show is that there is a lag between when we record things and when we put things out, so don't... So we're not going to like do like the news about the occupation movement that's happening now in the US, we're going to kind of really briefly touch on it. But I'm guessing most of you all are more familiar already what's happening with that than this show, which will be a little bit out of date by the time you hear it. But there is a huge movement across the US, especially this week, as we record, of--maybe even more so in the future, you know, who knows, every social movement goes different directions--of students taking over their universities and demanding that their universities divest from Israel. And it's really shattered a lot of the.... The more pro-Zionist elements of the mainstream media are still touting the like, "And these are anti-semitic protests." But that line is failing more and more on.... Like, people aren't hearing it anymore. People are like, "That's so clearly not true. The people at the front of this are the Jewish Voices for Peace," like, you know? It's like more and more people aren't falling for it. And so there's a big culture war thing that's happening. I got really lucky in that I was scheduled to speak at the New School anyway last week, or something--I lose track of time, all the time--to some students who had read one of my books, and then the occupation had kicked off. So instead, I was sort of invited--like anyone from the occupation was invited to come--and we talked, instead of talking about my book, we talked about the directions that social movements go and how they succeed and fail. And I don't know, maybe we'll do a episode about that at some point. But those movements are fiery and interesting. Anyone who's listening who's part of them, don't let the fucking liberal sell you out, and don't let the fucking authoritarians take you over. And that's what's involved. And don't let the cops divide you into "good protestor, bad protester." Those are the ways that people try to sell you out. And you can not get sold out until you, at the very least, get the demands of divestment. And as we're recording, this is the stuff that might change. As we're recording, I think it's Brown University is starting to enter negotiations about divesting from Israel. Whereas Colombia, where a lot of this started, is promising suspensions. And everyone's like, "You don't understand. Stopping this genocide is more important to us than our stupid--" you know, like, I think people don't get.... And then in the right-wing, and even some of the Liberals, are all like, "I don't get it. This isn't even a war that's happening in the US?" and everyone is like, "Basic fucking empathy? Like what the fuck is wrong with you?" Another kind of protest that happened that I actually only found out recently is that around 50 Google employees were fired because of a non-violent protests that they took against a Google contract, a project called Project Nimbus, which is an AI that has been used by the Israeli government that was developed by Google. Google denies certain parts of their claims around project Nimbus. But the 50 employees are currently suing, I think through the Labor Board, to get their jobs back. And so there's other ways that people are standing up about this. And we've been, of course, seen some other ways all across the US for the past six months and all across the world. **Inmn ** 18:58 Yeah, and just to like shout out this thing real quick because I thought it was really cool. It's this trend of people kind of like...it's like fighting in any possible way they can to do something for people in Palestine. And like outside of university encampments and stuff, it's like finding ways to act in solidarity with those struggles or to just find other little gaps in the armor. But shout out to the bus drivers union in New York City for utterly refusing to transport a bunch of people who were mass arrested at at a demonstration. They're like, "No, no. We're not letting the NYPD commandeer our buses and make us their accomplices," and they just refused to transport people.  **Margaret ** 19:57 I think this is a really important part of why.... Like,  labor organizing fell out of style until--well, about five years ago picked back up again--but overall, there's this idea that like, "Oh, class, reductionism. And like, you know, it's boring. And that's the old way of doing organizing and shit." And there's like some problems with the way that labor organizing has been done, especially in the middle of the 20th century, when they created a bunch of corrupt organizations--that were still better jobs--but, you know, they lacked the fiery interestingness of early 20th century and late 19th century unions. But sorry, who knew I was just gonna talk about history this whole time. But this is the other thing about what unions are, is like in order to.... This is what is involved when we talk about building workers power, like building power among the people who actually have to work for a living versus the people who can make money off of the fact that we work for a living, like having the bus the union be like, "No, we're not transporting prisoners." and they can say that because they have power within their own workplace, even though they don't own their workplace, which is like the next step. That's what you want to build to after you build a union, you know? But anyway, unions. Fucking cool. Y'all ready to talk about climate? **Inmn ** 21:14 God, no.  **Brooke ** 21:16 Never. **Margaret ** 21:16 Well--I know this is the thing I keep coming back to--this is the thing that always slips through the cracks of even radical news because it is easier to wrap our mind around things that feel incredibly direct and present. And that is not to say that these direct and present things don't deserve our attention. They absolutely do. But keeping in mind the climate context that we all live in, I think is important. So I'm gonna tell you some stuff about it. Almost the entire continental US is forecast to have a hotter than usual summer, surprising nobody. The only exception to this is basically North Dakota and some of the like areas that like--nature doesn't really care about our borders-- that might be the same. Everywhere else is expected to be hotter. In particular, the swath cutting across Eastern Oregon and Montana and then cutting all the way down through all of Texas, kind of at an angle, that is the huge swath of the country that is like extra expected to be way hotter. And southern Alaska is the only place in the US on the map that I saw--Hawaii wasn't on this map--where it might be colder than usual. But most of Alaska will still be warmer than usual. The Rocky Mountains are expected to be dry. And the East Coast, especially the South, is expecting a wetter than normal summer. The actual wildfire prediction map for this coming summer is mostly normal--new normal, so bad--but mostly new normal. With the Sierra Nevadas in Southern California, like LA and kind of that surrounding area, are actually less fire likely than normal. And then the more likely fire than normal is Idaho, like southern Idaho into Nevada and Utah. **Brooke ** 23:10 Was gonna say that a lot of Idaho has had a lot of fires a lot of years. **Margaret ** 23:15 But it's like this map is like not totally the map of where you look and expect wildfires, which is not to say there's not gonna be wildfires everywhere. It's just that's the current anticipation. The National Weather Service has put together a heat risk website that does a daily forecast and a weekly forecast that also shows like where people are more at risk for heat problems. And it takes into consideration the wet bulb temperature and access to all kinds of stuff. There's actually a fair amount of adaptation that is happening by scientists and some of our infrastructure to try and figure out how to handle.... Because like some people are taking climate seriously and some of those people have access to weather data and shit, you know? April, as of this recording on the last day of April, was probably the 11th straight month of the hottest of that month on record across the world. Which means that if we pull it off next year, every single month for a year will have been the hottest ever. There is a 55% chance that this year will top 2023 as the hottest year on record. The reason that we might not beat last year--I know everyone's rooting for us but we might not pull it off because the other side will be like "Well they had us in the first half." We're expecting a slightly cooler than normal fall and stuff because of La Nina weather patterns hitting. However, La Nina weather patterns are gonna fuck up a whole bunch other stuff. And okay, I know you all are ready to root for America, number one. so you want to hear something else that we are number one about across the world?  **Brooke ** 24:57 No.  **Margaret ** 24:59 Economic impact of natural disasters. Doesn't that kind of surprise you? **Brooke ** 25:03 What? Say more. **Inmn ** 25:06 I've heard a little bit about this. **Margaret ** 25:09 We are number two in our spending related to per capita wealth, but we're number one in total spending on this kind of stuff. It costs us about point .4% of our gross domestic product every year to take care of natural disasters. This is twice China and four times Canada. And, I mean, it's just because we suck and Capitalism sucks, is the is the reason why this is happening. Home Insurance went up 21% between 2002 and 2023. A ton of people are just going uninsured because they can't afford it anymore. Also, insurers are jacking up prices and/or entirely pulling out of certain areas. And now a lot of countries just kind of say, "Well, we kind of just can't build where there's fires and mudslides all the time." But America is like, "No way. This is our country. You can build wherever you want." And so there's also like fewer building codes and stuff around how to make houses that makes sense in your area in terms of disaster and climate and things like that. So that's something we're really good at, is spending money that we shouldn't have had to spend. There's been a whole bunch in the past couple months. In April there's been a whole bunch of tornadoes that have moved through Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and north Texas. However, we are currently lower than normal by a little bit on tornadoes. However, they've been a little bit more deadly than normal, I believe. And overall, this is expected to be a fairly more active than usual tornado season coming up. So if you're in the Great Plains and the tornado lands, which is of course, as I think we've talked about before, the tornado belt is like slowly moving east because of climate change. Speaking of the American South, it is facing some of the most rapid sea rise in the world. We, once again America is number one--I don't know if we're number one. We're actually not number one. But we're doing... We're doing pretty good. We have twice the worldwide average in sea level rise. Isn't that? Anyway... **Inmn ** 27:15 Which means that there's going to be a lot new beachfront property. **Margaret ** 27:22 I mean, a lot of the old, a lot the old beachfront property has gone away. Or rather, people are like struggling to hold on to it. A lot of places across the American south have already gotten four, six, or eight inches of sea level rise since 2010. The highest is Galveston, Texas with 8.4 inches. And the results of this, of course, are wetlands are drowning, which leaves areas more vulnerable to storms. We'll talk about the hurricane season in a second. Septic systems are backing up and contaminating waterways. Insurance companies are just dipping out entirely. And roads are now below high tide in plenty of places. People are periodically cut off. Why don't we hear about this more? Well, because the people who are affected are Black. That's why. Environmental racism is a real thing. A lot of these areas have had specific redlining policies in place, or used to be in place, or whatever. The economic landscape is such that people of color, and especially Black people, are living in the flattest areas that are the lowest to sea level and in the most risk, and it is largely poor places that people have already not cared about because this is where a lot of like pollution happens, you know? Other fun news... The kind of thing that like.... I feel like every week there's something that should have been big enough news for us to entirely overthrow the world order, but a whole bunch of-- **Brooke ** 28:51 I'm concerned about what you call fun, Margaret. **Margaret ** 28:54 You take it where you can find it, ya know? Okay, so I'll explain my idea of fun. The very beginning of the movie Gladiator, right? I don't give a shit about the rest of the movie Gladiator. But there's this is one scene where the Roman army, who are somehow the good guys in this situation (they're not the good guys), they're attacking the Goths. And obviously, the Goths are good because they're goths.  **Inmn ** 29:20 Yeah, we love that.  **Margaret ** 29:20 And at one point, the barbarians come out of the woods and they're like holding the Roman messenger's head and then they all grab their axes and run screaming into the Roman army. and to their own death-- **Inmn ** 29:34 Which is how no army ever fought ever.  **Margaret ** 29:36 Yeah, I know. It's also not a very good way to fight, specifically, the Roman army. nd at least in the movie Gladiator, they all die horribly. There's a certain honesty to that. There's a certain honesty to just being like, "This isn't about winning or losing. This is about like, 'Can we fucking do this?"" But we can't because we don't have.... We're not in a revolution and individual actions don't.... This is the sketchiest thing I've ever said on the show. So anyway, a slew of documents came out, showing that oil companies in their private correspondence are like, "We're not going to bother meeting any of the Paris agreements. Why would we do that? There's nothing in it for us. We don't care." And they're just ignoring it in their private correspondence, while of course, they're all publicly like, "Oh, we're so committed to it." And it's just like, and the.... You know, and this isn't like weird conspiracy stuff. The Democrats introduced this in Congress, you know? And it's just like one of these things where it's just like, well the oil companies shouldn't be allowed to exist anymore. That seems fucking obvious, right? Anyway, I don't have a better tactical idea. And that didn't work in Gladiator. So I don't recommend it. Flash floods killed at least 169 people in Kenya in April. About 150,000 people in the country have been displaced by the rains. More than half of the country is facing intense flooding right now. Dubai got two years' worth of rain in one day at the end of April. It was 10 inches in 24 hours, the heaviest it's had in the past 75 years. The more center and center-right media is like, "Oh, it's because they're doing cloud seeding. They reap what they sowed." But the Washington Post article I read about this was like, "It wasn't fucking cloud seeding. It was fucking climate change." And that makes sense to me. Hurricanes. I promise you hurricanes. Colorado State University researchers are predicting a very active hurricane season this year. They're guessing there will be 24 named storms. And the way that we like named storms is that there's like 21 letters of the alphabet that we use. I don't know why it's 21 and not 26. I didn't bother looking it up. And then they're like, "Oh, fuck, we're out of things. And then they like do other shit, you know? Because when they first started naming hurricanes and tropical storms, they didn't really imagine that there would be more than 21 of them in a year. But now this is the third or fourth year. There's been like three years in the past couple of years where they've run out of names. And this one, they're expecting probably 24. They're guessing--again, this is all forecasting and this is not certain--that starting June 1st with hurricane season they're guessing it'll be about eleven hurricanes with five of them being major because the accumulated cyclone energy in the...mother of storms--it probably is a science name, but Mother of storms is cooler--is twice normal. And this is bad. It's like only a little bit worse than the new normal. So it's like bad, and the new normal is bad,  but what I'm not saying is "2024 year is gonna be the worst ever, and we're all gonna fucking die in hurricanes. And everyone needs to leave New Orleans." is not what I'm saying. Although, maybe? But it's just the new bad and a little worse than usual, a little incremental. **Brooke ** 33:05 Maybe they need to give those four-five sidelines letters a chance at being part of the naming process and then-- **Margaret ** 33:14 What five letters is it? I bet it's like X-- **Brooke ** 33:17 Yeah, and Z. Give X a chance. **Margaret ** 33:21 What about Xereses? Does that start with and X? **Brooke ** 33:24 There we go. Zeus.  **Margaret ** 33:26 Well, Xerxes is probably not in the Roman alphabet anyway. We can transliterate things however we want. **Inmn ** 33:36 It's kind of like the emergence of the new category six, the theoretical--we talked about it earlier this year--but the theoretical category six hurricane, which we might see this year.  **Margaret ** 33:48 Cool.  **Inmn ** 33:52 New albums about to drop! **Brooke ** 33:58 But Taylor Switft already put out a new album. What are you talking about? Oh, that's my news clip for the month. That's all I need to share. **Margaret ** 34:05 Oh, yeah. **Brooke ** 34:06 Taylor Swift put out a new album. **Inmn ** 34:08 I wonder... I wonder how many of our listeners are Swifties?  **Margaret ** 34:14 I bet a good amount.  **Inmn ** 34:15 Yeah, not a condemnation. Just a curiosity. **Margaret ** 34:18 I think about a quarter of my friends really like Taylor Swift. But the thing that I have said on Twitter that has been the most controversial and the thing that has most people thinking I'm a liar is when I said I cannot name a Taylor Swift song and would not be able to pick her out of a lineup.  **Brooke ** 34:35 What?  **Margaret ** 34:36 People think I'm lying. I'm not lying.  **Brooke ** 34:38 I think you're lying.  **Margaret ** 34:40 I'm not lying.  **Inmn ** 34:41 I do not think Margaret is lying. [Laughing]  **Margaret ** 34:44 If you put three 30 year old blonde, white singers in front of me, it would be a...I'd have a 33% chance of fucking picking Taylor Swift. Now, I'm certain I've heard some Taylor Swift songs, but I would not know they're Taylor Swift songs. And this is not like.... I'm not even saying this as a a point of pride. I mean, okay a little bit because I'm a fucking contrarian asshole, but that's not something I'm proud of. I'm not proud of my own pride about this. **Brooke ** 35:13 This is now going to be a Taylor Swift episode. Goodbye to the news. Hello to me singing Taylor Swift songs to Margaret. **Margaret ** 35:21 But then do like one of them that's not a Taylor Swift song in the middle and see if I can tell you which one it is.  **Margaret ** 35:26 Totally. Yeah.  **Margaret ** 35:29 [singing] "Where have all the flowers gone." That one's not her. **Inmn ** 35:33 That is not Taylor Swift. [Brooke singing unknow (presumably) Taylor Swift song in the background]  **Margaret ** 35:37 Wait, we don't want to get sued. And I don't want to hear Taylor Swift. Oh my God, no, I actually am a bad person. There's nothing inherently good or bad about being interested in pop culture. Alright. But speaking of hurricanes, the East Atlantic's warmth is three months ahead of schedule for the average of the past four years. Not for the old average but for the new average. The East Atlantic's warmth is, on April 2nd it was as warm as July 2nd is on the average. And then there's one other piece of bad news. But then I have positive news. Or, then I have like neutral news. The one other piece of bad news is that, as of this recording, King Charles III has not died of cancer. [Disappointed grons] I also wouldn't be able to pick him out of a lineup. That's not... I don't know if that one's true.  **Brooke ** 36:37 70 year old white man. Yeah, no. Yeah, probably not. At least not if he's in normal clothes. **Inmn ** 36:43 Um, well. Yeah, I absolutely believe all of that. Weirdly in.... I'm gonna say a controversial-- **Margaret ** 36:51 I thought you didn't believe me about Taylor Swift.said you believedno, I, I  **Inmn ** 36:53 What? Margaret I believe you. **Margaret ** 36:56 Oh, that's right. It was Brooke that didn't believe me.  **Brooke ** 36:58 Inmn trusts you about everything. **Inmn ** 37:00 I feel like I'm one of the few people that just very much knows this to be true in a real way. **Margaret ** 37:09 That's true. Inmn has seen me live in an off grid cabin in the middle of the woods. **Inmn ** 37:17 But, so, like, Arizona... I'm going to talk a little bit about Arizona. Arizona weirdly has been like, like we just had one of our wetter springs ever. And cooler springs. To the point where, there's like a big outdoor thing that happens in the last week of March every year, and we were scrambling to find new places...like an indoor venue for it because it was raining and we were all like, "When the fuck has it ever rained at the end of March?"  **Margaret ** 37:49 Yeah, you're supposed to only get rain in the monsoon season in like what, Fall or something? **Inmn ** 37:56 It's in like July-August. And then like, we do have a winter rainy season. It's just hit or miss. But March? March is weird. Like it rained like four times in a week in March. And I was like, "What's going on?" And like, just because it was a big outdoor performance was the only reason I was like that asshole who's like "Why the fuck is it raining in this desert?" you know? [Everyone laughing] **Margaret ** 38:24 "I moved here for one reason: I hate water." **Inmn ** 38:27 Yeah. But I have some other updates from Arizona. Shout out to.... Shout out to Logan, who is a bud who always texts me like weird, really in-depth updates about headlines that we touch on and then is like, "Inmn, the story is so much bigger than you thought it was!" And I'm like--  **Margaret ** 38:48 That's cool.   **Inmn ** 38:49 Please keep sending me these updates. So on a previous This Month, we talked about this expansion of kind of like Castle Doctrine in Arizona, which is like aimed at like, you can defend your...you can like essentially shoot and kill people without repercussions for trespassing, not only into your house, but on your property. And Logan was telling me that.... So the reason that this law was being pursued--you know, there's speculation about it being very anti-migrant--and it was actually in response to this criminal case where George Alan Kelly, who lives just north of Nogales, encountered some people crossing over his land, right near and along the Border, and he, suspecting them of being migrants, just held up an AK-47 and started shooting at them from 100 yards away. And he killed one of them. He killed Cuen-Buetimea, who was a 48 year old man who lived in Nogales. And some of the people in the group, who were then witnesses in the trial, attested to just, you know, crossing for work. And the person who was killed has two adult daughters who live in Nogales. And they were trying to pass this law ahead of the trial so that George Allen Kelly would not be accountable to wildly shooting a gun into the air and killing someone. But George Allen Kelly was...there was a mistrial due to jurors not being able to come to a unanimous decision. And it does not appear, as of right now, that prosecutors are going to try to refile charges. So yeah. Some other stuff going on in Arizona is.... So this is kind of like good news, bad news. And it's gonna start with some bad news. On April 9th, the Arizona Supreme Court made a ruling upholding an 1864 law that declares a near-total ban on all abortions, carrying a two to five year prison sentence for doctors who perform abortions except to preserve the life of the person giving birth. And yeah, so this is like from.... Prior to this, Arizona was a 15 week abortion ban. And currently, as we wait, we're like still waiting for this law to go into effect in like June, I think. But, so in June there will be a near-total ban on abortion in Arizona. But the Arizona House just passed a bill that would repeal this law from 1864. And this is a law that was passed before Arizona was a state. **Margaret ** 42:15 Yeah, that was like the first thing, when someone was like.... I didn't reshare this when I first came across it because I was like, "Arizona didn't exist. This is..." Because it's always like people come up with this horrible thing that's happening. And about half the time it's true and half the time it's not. Yeah, I totally didn't believe this one at first, because I was like, "There wasn't a state called Arizona. There was a territory and they had their territorial laws." **Inmn ** 42:16 Yeah. And the Arizona Supreme Court has somehow upheld this law. But the House just passed a bill to repeal it. And we're recording this on Tuesday. As of April 30th, tomorrow, Wednesday May 1st, the Senate is expected to pass the bill that would repeal this 1864 law. **Margaret ** 43:09 Didn't even Trump come out against that law? **Inmn ** 43:13 I don't know. **Margaret ** 43:14 I think I watched a video of Trump kind of being like, "Maybe that one wasn't the move."  **Inmn ** 43:21 That would be wild.  **Margaret ** 43:23 Because that one I think, was bad enough that I think that there's  bipartisan anger at it. **Inmn ** 43:31 Yeah. Which is kind of how.... That's like how stuff has progressed in the House and the Senate is like it... It required bipartisan agreement in the House. And it will require like two Republican senators to get on board for the Senate vote, which there are two that are expected to vote for the bill that would repeal the ban.  **Margaret ** 43:54 They're just trying to not get up put up against the wall. Anyway, Margaret's in a weird mood today. **Inmn ** 44:01 Yeah, and, you know, one last kind of bad world thing--bad politics--in the realm of some Republican-led states really trying to be their own little mini fiefs and like testing state-federal stress test, whatever shenanigans. So, Title IX regulations were just updated. And they were updated.... They were amended to include specifically protections against discrimination based on sexual-orientation and gender identity. Whereas previously, it was just based on being a woman, essentially. And for folks who don't know, Title IX regulations are for educational institutions that receive federal funding, they have to abide by certain regulations in order to receive that funding, which is, you know, most public schools. And big surprise, guess which three states? Florida, Tennessee, and Texas are all essentially either instructing their education systems to not listen to, to not uphold the regulations, or just straight out suing the Department of Education over it. And the rallying cry around that is, big surprise, sports and trans athletes. Surprisingly, the new Title IX regulations say absolutely nothing about sports. So it's like they're rallying around something that the new regulations have not even codified. **Margaret ** 45:55 I mean, literally, the only time that these people pay attention to women's sports is when they're worried about trans women existing. So it doesn't surprise me that, you know. **Inmn ** 46:08 Yeah. But Margaret, you have some maybe good things to tell us? **Margaret ** 46:15 I got neutral stuff first. TikTok has been officially... The law passed that TikTok is now--not immediately--banned in the United States. TikTok has been.... Its parent company, which is based in Beijing, has nine months to sell it. And so by any realistic standard, it'll be about a year before TikTok would do any disappearing. And then of course, obviously you can ban software. But that's not a easy thing to enforce. It would get taken down off of like the Google Play Store and the Apple Store and stuff like that, but people who had it still would have it. And then it would get buggier and buggier or in shittier and shittier as updates are unable to go out, unless people use VPNs to get from another country, etc, etc. **Margaret ** 47:02 There's ways around it? What? [Sarcastically] **Margaret ** 47:06 I know. It's also completely possible that since every one involved is a capitalist, they're probably like, "Alright, well, we'll sell the fucking thing. Like, who cares?" You know? That's like my guess. I don't know, I could be wrong about that. I would be surprised if TikTok ends up going away because of this. However, the actual thing that I think ties into this is there is a bipartisan bill that people are working on, called Kids Off Social Media Act, which wants to say that kids under 13 should not be on social media, and pass all kinds of like things about how like algorithms can't focus on anyone 17 and under. And just like lots of like, "social media is bad for kids." And now I think social media is probably bad for everyone. However, to me....  I haven't given us a lot of thought. It seems like a basic free speech issue. And also, like, old people fighting the future and screaming at clouds kind of moment. And the idea of banning TikTok, I'm like.... Okay, I'm not accelerationist. I don't think things should get worse before they get better. But the idea of some fucking 80 year old liches in Congress being like, "I don't like the tocks ticking around like that." And then like, it's like, incredibly popular. I think about half of Americans have a TikTok account. Like, telling half of Americans they can't do a thing sounds like a way to get people really mad. And I know I get really excited by the idea of like.... They have their bipartisan tyranny, and there's this idea that maybe one day we'll get over this fucking culture war and we can fight back in the class war that is waged against us. And like, if TikTok is the thing that brings it, I'm fear for it. I'm too old for TikTok. I have an account. I don't know how to use it. I've never uploaded a video. TikTok doesn't need me. But like, whatever anyway. But actually, I'm kind of curious, not having a child, Me--I'm the one without a child--Brooke, do you have thoughts on this no social media for the kids thing? Like am I...am I totally off base? Is it just protecting.... Like, I don't know. What's up?  **Brooke ** 49:28 I mean I get where they're coming from with it, and all the research that's shown how negative social media is for--I mean, they've done particular studies for kids and how it affects them--but turns out it's actually bad for all human beings, the way social media has come for us and the atmosphere is it creates. So, I get where they're coming from with it. As a very involved parent, you know, my solution is always to pay attention to and engage with your children, which is not a reasonable thing for all people to have as much engagement as it would take really to have healthy social media interactions. But then, you know, the anarchist side of me says, "No, you don't get to ban things ever." **Margaret ** 50:18 Well and also like, I don't know, a lot of people are rumbling about how TikTok is why a new generation of people supports Palestine and doesn't buy into the myths about the Zionist project being a thing that represents all Jews, for example, right? And then anti-capitalism is spreading and being pro capitalism is 100% bipartisan for the ghouls who feed off of the youth and somehow live too long. This is the most ageist shit I'm ever going to say. Some people are capable of performing their jobs well into their later years and gain wisdom. The people who run this country are nightmare men.  **Brooke ** 51:00 I feel like it's, you know, the same kind of things they've said about all new technologies that have come out over the last,, you know, whatever, 30 years. **Margaret ** 51:09 And like the only person who said this stuff, and was right, was a little man who had some bad strategic and ethical ideas, but wrote that "industrial society and its future have been a disaster for the human race." At least be consistent. **Inmn ** 51:31 I was researching this for another episode once, and I didn't end up talking about it because it was hard to learn too much about, but some of the lawmakers have specifically cited youth information spreading about Palestine as a reason for the TikTok ban. It's like a specifically listed reason from lawmakers. And the other thing about the Kids Online Safety, whatever it's called, is it's heralded as a way to protect children from pornography and from the proliferation of child pornography, which is the thing that lawmakers say all the time, and pretty much all these human rights organizations who are, you know, much more aptly trying to protect children from shit are like, "This is most asinine bullshit we've ever heard this. This bill is utterly absurd." And it has other implications, which are that it's trying to herald in this idea that you could no longer be like anonymous on the internet, and that the government has a lot more to...has a lot more agency to track your goings on on the internet. So it would.... It's like the bill would require you to essentially show a driver's license in order to engage with a lot of things on the internet, which I think is just trying to...I think it's capitalists' attempt to really make a thing like the internet something that is like more of a interacting with the government process and less a whatever the internet is, you know.  **Margaret ** 53:24 That makes sense to me. and yeah,  **Inmn ** 53:26 And it kind of falls in line with the our futuristic hellscape of like the "One app," for example. Like, you gotta scan your fucking fingerprint to log into Instagram or do anything on the internet. **Margaret ** 53:43 It's funny because sometimes they use a VPN just as a basic practice and sometimes I use a VPN that's set in Europe. And when you browse the internet as a European, every site you go to is like, "Hey, do you want us to track you?" And you're like, "No." And it's like, "Okay, fine." Because the EU has some good internet laws, you know? About restricting the tyranny part of it instead of the like.... Whatever. Okay, I'm gonna do my vaguely positive news at the end. Y'all ready? **Inmn ** 54:18 Yeah, what's good?  **Margaret ** 54:21 People are sleeping more than average than before. **Inmn ** 54:25 Yay. I'm not. But good for them. **Margaret ** 54:28 25 minutes more on average for the same people--not like the same individuals, right. Because how often you sleep is dependent on how old you are and also very heavily dependent about whether you have children. But people are sleeping about 25 minutes more on average than they were in 2002. And the best guess is that it started picking up a lot recently because of remote work and a lower percentage of people commuting. The biggest cool thing, the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, has banned non-compete agreements. 30 million people have been freed from non-compete clauses. **Brooke ** 55:07 Oh, nice. **Margaret ** 55:11 The EPA is banning most use of methyl chloride, which is a paint stripper that has killed like 88 people or something in the past couple of years and it's just bad. The EPA is actually, for the first time in a while, starting to get like...they're trying to stop forever chemicals. And there's like some shit that they're actually trying to do, right? They also--do you want to guess when asbestos was finally banned in the United States? **Margaret ** 55:39 It was late. It was like the 90s. **Inmn ** 55:41 Was it last week? **Margaret ** 55:45 March 2024.  **Brooke ** 55:47 Oh, shit. **Inmn ** 55:50 I was right, sort of. **Margaret ** 55:52 Yeah, Inmn was closest. There's about six types of asbestos and one of them had been sort of.... Enough people, enough industries had been like, "But we want to use it." And so for the past 33 years, this particular type, people have been trying to ban. Because the 90s is an accurate assessment of when I think most of the others got--I don't know, I'm making that part of it up--all I know is that for 33 years, they've been trying to ban this fucking asbestos and they finally succeeded in March of this year. Also, the FDA did an emergency approval of pre-exposure prophylaxis for COVID called Pemivibart, which is a dumb name because it rhymes with farts. And nothing should rhyme with fart if it's a drug. And it is for the immunocompromised. So you would take this before, you know, if you're going into a situation where you're worried about getting COVID. And it's an emergency approval like the original vaccines were so it's not through all of testing, but it's important enough that they feel like it's safe enough. Also, recently passed phase three trials is a vaccine to pretend prevent UTIs, or urinary tract infections, which is the kind of thing that I never would have occurred to me you could run it against because it's usually, I believe, bacterial infections. But it's a really common problem. And that's cool if we can fucking solve it. **Brooke ** 57:22 And some people are super prone to them just based on, you know, bodily health or genetics or whatever. Like it's a thing. They have ongoing, chronic UTI kind of thing. So fuck yeah. **Margaret ** 57:37 It's kind of like when they finally got an HPV vaccine through and it was just like, oh my god, this is actually pretty fucking game changing, you know? I wish they would give it to fucking assigned male people. But yeah. **Brooke ** 57:47 And then conservative Christian types that were like, "Oh, we don't think that our children should have to have this vaccine."  **Inmn ** 57:54 Any kind of person can get the HPV vaccine. **Margaret ** 57:57 Oh, interesting. Good to know. **Inmn ** 58:00 Yeah, it's a different vaccine, I think. But anybodied person can get it.  **Margaret ** 58:07 That's good to know. And hopefully, next time, we'll have different news about King Charles III and cancer. But who knows? But that's This Month in the Apocalypse, which you have now listened to, or participated in if you are named Brooke or Inmn or Margaret. Unless your named Brooke, Inmn, or Margaret and you're not on the podcast, in which case you didn't participate in it. You just heard it. And then probably have a different kind of parasocial relationship with us if you share our names, especially if you're Inmn. Like, there's not a ton of you. And like, Inmn's pretty cool. So do you have like a different.... Please write in, Inmn's in the audience. Pretend to be our Inmn and we'll read a prepared script from you next time as if you're our Inmn. This is not true. I'm lying.  **Margaret ** 59:08 But what I'm not lying about is that if you want to support this podcast, you can do so by supporting our publisher, which is Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. And you can do that by going to patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. And if you do, we put up zine and podcasts. We do a lot of fucking stuff. We are your source for all of your anarchy culture. And another way you can support us this week of all weeks, if you are listening to this during May Day week, like the first week of May in 2024. Although if you listen to it in a different May Day week. It'll probably be true again. We are doing a 50% sale off of everything on our website. And that includes stuff that's really expensive, like the hardcover of Penumbra City, which is a $50 book, but now it's only $25 book. And you use the code MAYDAY24 at checkout and get 50% off because we fucking love May Day and we care more about our stuff getting out there than anything else about it. And if you support us on Patreon, we might even shout you out like we're going to shout out allium and Amber, Ephemoral, Appalachian Liberation Library, Portland's Hedron Hackerspace, Boldfield, E, Patoli, Eric, Buck ,Julia, Catgut, Marm, Carson, Lord Harken, Trixter, Princess Miranda, BenBen, anonymous, Janice & O'dell, Aly, paparouna, Milica, Boise Mutual Aid, theo, Hunter, S. J., Paige. Nicole, David, Dana, Chelsea, Staro, Jenipher, Kirk, Chris, Micaiah, King Charles III--What?! And Hoss the Dog.  Find out more at https://live-like-the-world-is-dying.pinecast.co

Episode Summary This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Colin and Brooke talk about flooding, water damage, and how to avoid having your home damaged by those things. Guest Info Colin (he/him) is a carpenter, industrial electrician, and backpacker. Host Info Brooke can be found on Twitter or Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke. Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript Live Like the World is Dying: Colin on Flood Plains and Water Damage **Brooke ** 00:15 Hello and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm Brooke Jackson, your host for this episode. And today our friend Colin is joining us again, this time to talk about flooding and dealing with water damage. But first we'd like to celebrate being a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts by playing a little jingle from one of the other podcasts on the network. Doo doo jingo here! **Brooke ** 01:40 And we're back. Colin, thank you for joining us again today. And this time to talk about dealing with floods and water damage. Would you remind your pronouns, where you hail from if you want, and a bit about your background? **Colin ** 01:52 Yeah, my name is Colin, he him. I'm from Pittsburgh. And I've been a contractor sort of on and off for the last about 20 years, as well as working in the power plants and industrial electricity, and sort of in and around industry for about the second half of my life. And, yeah, it's, I'm glad to talk about floods, because it's one of those things we're seeing more and more. And unfortunately, it's probably going to happen to pretty much everybody who's listening to this podcast at some point in their life in one form or another. **Brooke ** 02:27 Yeah. And we've talked about flooding on the podcast before. I don't know that we've ever done a whole episode on it by any means. But it has definitely come up as we've talked about news and other major events. And you and I even talked about it when we did our first episode, a little bit. So I think it's—itll be good to dig into, you know, a nice reminder of what to do and not to do in a flood. And then also, I don't think we've ever talked much about flood recovery. So I'm excited to learn and teach more about that today. I wanted to share one of my own stories about flooding, if you don't mind me kicking off with that before we get into all the do's and don'ts and how tos. **Colin ** 03:12 Yeah go for it. **Brooke ** 03:13 Okay, cool. **Colin ** 03:14 Everybody's got one of those stories. **Brooke ** 03:16 Seems like it. Well, when I was growing up in the 90s, there was a major flooding event where I live. My hometown. It was built around a river, which of course is true of most older cities, right, because access to fresh water is critical for survival. And then there are also a lot of creeks that run through my town and feed into the river. And I live in the Pacific Northwest and it rains a whole lot here. So we're kind of accustomed to having occasional sudden and heavy downpours and the possibility of some rainwater pooling or briefly flooding. It's not uncommon. But this particular event when I was a teenager was something else. It was a really complicated set of weather events that led to it. But the important part is that, so the creeks that are all over town are overflowing. And then the river, it doubled its level on the first day of the heavy rains. And then within the next two days had crashed at its banks, and then for three days after that remained at flood levels. So the city's downtown area, for instance, it's fairly flat, it's right along the river, and most of the homes there have basements. So in addition to streets flooding, the basements flooded, filled with water. There were houses that got washed off their foundations, of course cars got washed away. And then even in other parts of town where there wasn't, you know they were more on the hills or what have you, there was so much water in the ground that it caused foundational issues to a lot of houses because the pressure of the water pushing on home foundations are running around it. And there had been an ice event right before the rain started that had caused his damage to a lot of pipes. So there were pipes that were bursting and breaking because they'd been weakened or already had broken because of the ice storm. And it led to all this flooding. And it's interesting as I've grown up in the town and come back to it as adult, that the damage of this event, the way it's imprinted itself on the psyche of the city, even my mom, when she comes back to visit will drive around, she'll go, oh, you know, such and such creek looks a little high today. You know, this creek is, you know, she always looks around at all the creeks to see where the waters levels are kind of this caution about how high is the water. Like, are we in danger of having some kind of event again. And anyone that lived here, you know, had or knew someone that had some kind of really severe damage or loss because of that flood. So that's really imprinted into my psyche because, of course, I was still a young person at the time this happened. And it's really impactful to me. So when we talk about flooding, it's like, oh, yeah, that was one of the major traumatic events of my youth, at least collectively in my society or my, you know, my town. **Colin ** 06:13 Yeah, that's actually a really common situation you describe, of having an ice event or cold weather and then a warm front comes through, drops several inches of rain onto frozen ground, there's nowhere for it to go, and it just goes straight into rivers. Like you're seeing that more and more and that's actually exactly what I was gonna open with is that, with climate change, even if you're not living in someplace like Charleston, or Miami, or one of the other low lying areas that everybody knows is at risk for flooding either from rising ocean levels or because you're in a major floodplain. Just having these wild swings in temperature and rainfall makes flooding a much bigger issue. It's like living in Pittsburgh, it seems like we don't get mild old rains anymore, we either get four inches right now, or nothing. So it's not the, like, nice, gentle soaking rains that I remember from being a kid, it's like everything comes in a burst. And when that happens, dry ground does not soak up water nearly as well as slightly damp ground. So dropping lots of rain onto parched ground, you end up with lots of run off, and even though it's very, very dry, you end up with massive flooding. **Brooke ** 07:35 Yeah, one of our cohosts and one of the collective members was—we were talking about it and she was describing, like, if you go to water your garden and you haven't watered your garden in a while, and like the first water that you put on, it kind of rolls off. It takes it a minute to actually, like, settle and sink in, and then it's easier to water the ground. And it's the same kind of thing with these flooding events which I, you know, had never thought about but can picture in my mind how that, oh yeah, how that happens, how that works. So it's, you know, we're at risk of flooding for so many different reasons than ever we were before because of super dryness or, you know, I feel like we've seen more atmospheric rivers in the news as well. Maybe I'm just paying more attention, but that seems to becoming more common too. **Colin ** 08:26 Yeah, and with the big events, like, there is a definite limit on how much you can really do to prepare yourself short of just moving to someplace where these things don't happen, you know. Somebody told me, water always wins. **Brooke ** 08:44 Ah! **Colin ** 08:45 You're not going to beat it. It's heavy, it's powerful, and if it wants to come into your house, you're gonna have a really hard time stopping it. **Brooke ** 08:56 Okay. **Colin ** 08:57 You know, you can fight back against the inch or two, but if nine feet of water comes knocking at your front door, you're not gonna win. **Brooke ** 09:06 Sure, but surely there are some things that we could do that would, you know, maybe help prevent the smaller amounts of water or help make it less bad, yeah? **Colin ** 09:16 Oh, yeah, definitely. And especially if you're in one of the areas like sounds like you are, or like I am in Pittsburgh, where there's enough terrain that I'm not worried about a flood filling up the valley nine feet deep, because if that happens, you know, we have bigger problems. The issue is more, you know, an inch or two of water flowing along the surface running down the street, coming across the yard and down to the basement steps. Like that kind of stuff you can defend against, and it's really not that hard to do. But it takes a lot of preparation and, particularly if you're in an area where this has simply never happened before, it's very easy for that to catch everyone off guard. Sounds like that's the situation with the floods you described was this was what used to be a what they call, you know, a 100 year storm. **Brooke ** 10:07 Uh huh, uh huh! **Colin ** 10:09 Now the 100 year storms are happening every six months or so. **Brooke ** 10:13 Yeah, well, we haven't, you know, had another one quite like that since the 90s. But also, I know that a lot of, you know, houses and whatnot are much better setup for it, you know. For instance, the downtown houses that got basements flooded so badly, a lot of them—I want to say all of them, but that might not be true—had sump pumps installed after that. And, you know, I would hope that many of those houses have done a good job of maintaining those pumps. Which, you know, I think probably wouldn't prevent the kind of flooding from the storm that we had back in the 90s, but would certainly help, you know, mitigate a smaller storm or recover from it more quickly. Whereas they didn't have them before that that wasn't a common thing. **Colin ** 11:04 Right, and it doesn't really take very much water in a basement to cause major problems. You don't need three feet of standing water in your basement to ruin your day. Just an inch or two is enough to really mess things up, especially if it happens to an entire town and everyone is dealing with it at the same time. The disaster recovery services that're around to help out when that happens to one or two people can't handle it when it's suddenly 5000 people that all have the exact same problem. There's just not the capacity and you're going to be more or less on your own to at least get through, you know, a few days to a week before they can get around to helping you out. Again, with the idea of triage, like just trying to buy yourself a little bit of time before all the services come back online. **Brooke ** 11:53 My former husband worked for drain plumbing company that went around and did a lot of those installations of sump pumps and it was, like, a couple of years he worked for them and that was basically what he did. And it took, yeah, that long to get them installed in that many houses. It was a long—and that wasn't even just the recovery from the flood, but that was helping, you know, prevent it with things in the in the future. But yeah, a very long time. For sure. **Colin ** 12:28 Yeah, so just to kind of dive right into it. **Brooke ** 12:30 Yes please! **Colin ** 12:31 The first step in trying to prepare yourself a little bit better than you are is to just walk around the house and take a quick assessment of sort of where and how water can get in. Four big ones: the obvious one is rain. Things like, make sure your roof is intact, make sure your gutters work. **Brooke ** 12:55 Windows? Doors? **Colin ** 12:55 Windows, doors, but they're usually fine. Water hits those and runs off, and if water is trying to come in your door, you're already—it's already too late. Then surface water this is things like grading around the house to make sure that the water doesn't get too close, and any water that does get close goes away. After that is below grade water, so this is, you know, what you're talking about, where the ground was so saturated the pressure of the water in the ground pushing against foundations damaged the foundations. And then you also mentioned the last one which is one that gets overlooked which is burst pipes. You have water in your house all the time, it's just normally it stays inside the pipes where it belongs, until those pipes freeze, and then it ends up places that you really don't want it. **Brooke ** 13:44 Yeah. Can the pipes break from flooding, like that water pressure that damaged foundations, I imagine that could also damage then piping—pipe systems. **Colin ** 13:59 Yes. When the ground gets soft and has more flexibility in it—usually not just the water in the ground itself, but because the ground is softer—if you live in an area that has lots of hills, you end up with a higher risk of landslides and things shifting and that will definitely break water mains. **Brooke ** 14:17 Okay. **Colin ** 14:17 That happens a lot in California. **Brooke ** 14:20 Okay. **Colin ** 14:20 Where you get—you get heavy rain combined with landslide and now you have additional, either just people not having water because the mains are broken, or you have the mains flooding a section of a town because there's spewing water out. **Brooke ** 14:35 Yeah, it's not just the dirt that moved, it's all the shit that's in the dirt, like the pipes! [Laughing] **Colin ** 14:43 And that's another thing complicating factor with floods is that usually flooding is not a disaster that happens by itself. It comes with loss of electricity, loss of water, loss of gas, because all these things are buried in the ground. **Brooke ** 14:58 Yeah. Okay, now, you must and floods and we have said this several times on this podcast and we'll say it many more: don't go into the water. If it's flooding, stay out of the floodwater. **Brooke ** 15:09 I'm glad to hear that your puppy is joining us again on this episode. **Colin ** 15:09 Yes, that was my very first point before we even got into talking about any of the, you know, how to deal with things like rain surface water is, like I said before, you know, when you're in a disaster, there's always a way that you can make it worse. So don't don't get sick and don't get hurt. Floodwater is full of mud, trash, sewage. It's usually cloudy and turbid, so you can't see what's down there. The risk of you stepping on something or kicking something is really high. So just don't go into it if you don't have to. And if you have to wear rubber gloves, wear boots, try to keep it off your skin as much as you possibly can. Most people probably have some kind of rubber boots in their home, I would hope. If you don't, they're cheap, I'd recommend keeping a pair around. The one thing that people probably don't think about is rubber gloves—even dishwashing gloves are fine for keeping the water away from your skin, but they're not very sturdy. So if you're doing work in floodwater, put on rubber gloves, and then put on some kind of regular work glove overtop of that to protect the rubber, and make sure that barrier stays intact. Just the inexpensive knit work gloves from like Harbor Freight or something like that, that are $1 a piece. It's all you need. All you're trying to do is keep that robber from getting cut by sharp things in the water when you're handling them. [Dog barking] **Colin ** 16:40 Yes. There's somebody outside that doesn't belong there, clearly. It's probably the mailman **Brooke ** 16:46 That's all right. We are dog friendly on this podcast. **Colin ** 16:51 Okay, so, rain is probably the easiest one to keep out of the house. It's the one that everybody is aware is a problem because you see on a fairly regular basis. And for the most part, it's not that hard. You know, it's, make sure that there's no holes in your roof, make sure your gutters actually drain the way they're supposed to and don't get clogged. And the one part that people occasionally overlook is: make sure that your downspouts discharge far enough away from the house. You're not pumping water back in against the foundation. **Brooke ** 17:23 Yes, **Colin ** 17:25 I work in houses all the time, I see the downspout that comes straight down off the roof and dumps on to the ground six inches away from the wall. And just like, that's just going to end up straight in the basement. So. **Colin ** 17:37 Yeah. **Colin ** 17:38 This is something—a lot of the things I'm gonna talk about, you really kind of need to be the homeowner to do, but moving downspout discharge further away from the walls, even if you're gonna rental, that's something you can do. Get a piece of plastic pipe, anything to just move it as far from the house as you possibly can. **Brooke ** 17:56 Yeah. That's a cheap, that's a cheap and fairly quick fix that can make a world of difference. And even if you don't have a basement, just the water pouring into the foundation at one consistent spot over and over and over again can, you know, damage that part of it and cause a much bigger problem. **Colin ** 18:17 And the biggest one, if you are the homeowner, is take a look at the grading around your house. This is something that, at least in the area that I am, I would say 75–90% of the houses that I see have inadequate drainage. You're supposed to have ideally 10 inches of fall in the first 10 feet away from the house. Six inches is the bare minimum, but 10 is a lot better. In most cases I see no fall at all, or even the yard slipping back in towards the house. When you have that means that any water that lands in the yard is gonna try to come into the house. It doesn't take a whole lot of elevation change to really dry out a basement. **Brooke ** 19:08 So those who aren't construction nerds like the two of us, when when Colin's talking about grading here he's talking about the incline or decline, the direction that the ground is going towards the house, away from the house. That's what "grading" means. Just in case somebody needs that. **Colin ** 19:24 Yes, you are 100% correct. This is a thing that is—it's labor intensive, but it's actually fairly cheap. I don't know what dirt costs on average across the country, but where I am it's around $50 per ton for just—you don't need topsoil, it doesn't need to be good quality. It just needs to be dirt, and does not require any skill at all. If you can wield a shovel, you can fix the grading around your house. **Brooke ** 19:58 How would they check the grading, Colin? **Colin ** 19:59 For that you need a level—it can tell you, you know, when something is level. If you own a cell phone, you already have one, because cell phones have accelerometers in them that can tell the phone which position it's in. That's how it knows how to change your screen from one orientation to the other when you move the phone. So there—are there are apps that are just a visualization of a physical bubble level. All it's doing is telling you, you know, how tilted is the phone? They're not the most accurate thing in the world, but for grading dirt, we're not going for high precision, you just need to know more or less where level is. **Brooke ** 20:37 Yeah, okay. All right. So you mentioned like buying dirt. So if people have a spot in the yard that's higher than the where the foundation is, are you—are you saying they should put dirt between the high spot in the house to make it level? Or go the other way? Are there other ways to solve it? Sorry to get so pedantic. **Colin ** 20:58 No, no, it's a very good question. And that's why the rule of like, you know, 10 inches in the first 10 feet or 6 inches in the first 10 feet, if you can't manage that, is a rule of thumb. But you kind of have to look at your yard. And unless you have a perfectly flat manicured yard, you've got humps here and there and some parts are higher than the other. Having one or two high spots near the house, not really a big deal, as long as the water is generally going to go away from the house. And this is one of those things that you kind of just have to look at it and eyeball where downhill is. If nothing else, you know, you can take a five gallon bucket of water, dump it on the ground, and see where it goes. If it heads towards the house, hat's bad. If it heads parallel to the house and kind of away from the house, that's probably fine. **Brooke ** 21:53 Yeah. Okay, so solution might be taking away dirt. You might buy dirt to regrade, or you might need to dig out some dirt and haul it some place. **Colin ** 22:03 You can have a very, you know, lumpy yard, you can move dirt around. Really what you want is just to pay attention to that 10 feet immediately around the house. And make sure that's as high as you can possibly get it. If you can't get it high enough, there are other options like French drains and building drainage swales and berms. Those get more complicated. They're still well within the capability of the average homeowner, but you kind of need to see a demonstration of it. So that's what YouTube is for. **Brooke ** 22:36 Got it. Okay, sorry to spend so much time on that. **Colin ** 22:38 Those are fantastic questions. I can go on and on about drainage swales for the rest of the hour, but— **Brooke ** 22:43 [Laughing] Yeah, how about we not. Now tell me about some other ways to keep the water out. **Colin ** 22:52 Okay, so the one that everybody knows about and has seen and news and movies are sandbags. And they're okay in some situations. But the problem with them is that sandbags leak. **Brooke ** 23:09 Yeah. **Colin ** 23:10 So no matter how good your sandbag wall is, it's not going to stop the water, it's just going to slow it down. And once the water is on the wrong side of your wall, now you have to get it back out. And that means using a pump of some kind. And as we've already said, if you're in a flooding situation, there's a good chance that you're going to lose power. So relying on any kind of active pump to keep your house and your basement dry is not ideal. So your comment about people having sump pumps in their basement, that's fantastic for average storms and normal amounts of rainfall where you just have a trickle of water coming into the basement and nothing is really going that wrong. But when you get to the point where, you have, water sheeting across the ground several inches deep, lots of water coming into the house, most sump pumps aren't going to be able to keep up with that in the first place. And even if they are, the risk of you losing power at some point and now you have water in the basement is too high. So that's why I'd normally recommend, if you can do it, do it with grading, do it with dirt. Keep the water from ever getting close enough to the house to be a problem. Don't rely on being able to block it with things like sandbags. **Brooke ** 24:30 Yeah, okay. That makes a lot of sense. So should people not use sandbags or just...? **Colin ** 24:37 Oh, no, they're fantastic when you have, you know, things like hurricanes where you have a lot of water coming in a hurry, and you're just trying to keep the entire house from going underwater. Or if you have an area where you have water sheeting across the yard towards the house and overall your drainage is fine, ou just need to deflect the a little bit. So you can build temporary wall of sandbags just to kind of get the water pointed in a better direction. Relying on them to actually totally barricade the house is not going to work. **Brooke ** 25:12 Make sense? So this there's some limitations. **Colin ** 25:14 Yeah, the last one that almost nobody thinks about is what's called backflow prevention. And this refers to the sewer line that, ideally, you want your poo to go into the sewer and away from the house and not come back. **Brooke ** 25:34 Always. **Colin ** 25:35 When the poop comes back, you're gonna have a bad day. **Brooke ** 25:40 I want that on a sweatshirt now. Whoever's listening, somebody make us a sweatshirt design—a tshirt or something with that. I want that. When the poo comes back, you're gonna have a bad day. Okay. **Colin ** 25:54 This is something that, if you live in an area, if you're in a floodplain, if you have a high water table, where there's a risk that the sewer system is going to flood at the same time as the ground floods, look into this. It's a very complicated topic, and I am definitely not qualified to talk about it. This is the thing that, you know, you need a PhD to understand the exact, you know, flow of everything. The poo flow It's very complicated. It's not that expensive, but beyond what a homeowner can do by themselves. **Brooke ** 26:31 Do homeschool you have some kind of backflow prevention, or is that not common? **Colin ** 26:35 It depends. If your house is older than I'm gonna say 50 years old, it's very, very unlikely that you have it if you haven't installed it yourself. In Pittsburgh where I am, we have what's called a combined flow sewer system. Which means the sanitary sewer from your toilet and the storm sewer from the drains in the street all go into the same set of pipes. **Brooke ** 27:04 Okay, yes, so do mine. **Colin ** 27:05 Yeah, it's, again, not uncommon in older systems. But it means that every time you get heavy rainfall, all that water has to go into the sewers, and it overloads them. So in Pittsburgh, every time we get more than about a half inch of rain, we just end up with sewage flowing straight into the rivers and they put out an alert, you know, don't go into the rivers for a couple days until everything has a chance to clear out. But when you do that, it also means that the risk that you're going to overflow the sewer and cause backflow into houses that are lower down on the sewer system goes up. So if you happen to be one of those houses, look into getting a backflow valve installed on the sewer where it leaves the house so that the poo stays on the correct side. **Colin ** 27:52 So once the water gets in, the first thing to know is you're probably not going to get it back out by hand. I have occasionally seen advertisements for the little tiny, like, siphon hand pumps at Home Depot, the other big box stores, advertising: you can use this to pump out your basement. No. Just no. **Brooke ** 27:52 Yeah, geez louise. The shit we do to our rivers. [Laughing] Alright, so keeping the water out, check. We've got some methods for that. Okay, what about after the water gets in. **Brooke ** 28:29 Why not? **Colin ** 28:31 Water weighs—I'm gonna say 64 pounds per cubic foot. **Brooke ** 28:37 7 pounds a gallon, roughly. **Colin ** 28:37 Yeah, 7 pounds a gallon. And if you have even a small house, say like 20 by 30, and you got a foot of water in your basement, that's something like 19 tons of water— **Brooke ** 28:38 Oh my gosh, wow. **Colin ** 28:50 —that you have to lift up 6 or 8 feet to get it high enough that it's above ground, and then move it out of the house. **Brooke ** 29:03 Okay. **Colin ** 29:04 You're not doing that by hand. There are—there are really big pumps that are designed for places where there's no power and you have to get water out of mines and things like that. They work very well. They're also I want to say between $5,000 and $10,000. **Brooke ** 29:20 Oh my gosh. **Colin ** 29:21 So you're... **Colin ** 29:24 Not practical. So sump pumps: fantastic as long as you have electricity, but if you don't have electricity, you're gonna be in trouble. You're probably going to have to wait until the water level goes down and it's able to drain back out on its own. So you're not gonna be cleaning up 3 feet of water in the basement. You're going to be dealing with the last inch or two that doesn't make it over to the drains and out of the house on its own. So for that your two best weapons are honestly a good old fashioned floor squeegee, and a wet/dry vacuum with what's called a dust separator. It looks kind of like a 5 gallon bucket with a cone on top of it. And it works by pulling the air into the cone and spinning it like a cyclone. So all the water gets flung to the outside, the air goes up the center and the water falls down into the bucket. The advantage of those is you can work kind of like a bucket brigade, because it's just a lid that goes on top of a five gallon bucket and that way your shop vac never fills up. **Brooke ** 29:24 Not practical. **Brooke ** 30:40 Oh! I was just picturing using my shop vac for this because I know it can do water. And then it's like, oh yeah, and then we're talking about the weight of water just now. I have to stop, unclick the lid, you know, take it out or hand it out or whatever, wait for them to go dump it, bring it back in, put the lid back on. So, but man, something that attaches to a 5 gallon bucket which is like such a common thing to have around. That's awesome. **Colin ** 31:02 The first time I saw one of those it was revelation. I was like, oh my god, I need one of these. And then, yeah, it means you have, you know, one person vacuuming, filling buckets, and the other person running them outside and dumping them. It dramatically speeds up the process. And they're—I wanna say they're between $20 and $50 depending on where you get them and what the exact design is. You don't need anything super high quality, all you need is a way to separate the water and the air so that you can get the water back out of the house as quickly as possible. And then the floors for squeegee can move a lot of water in a hurry, assuming you have a working for drain. And also really good for getting mud moved around because it kind of scrapes the floor as it goes. Again, that's the thing that is not very expensive. **Brooke ** 31:51 Yeah. Cool. I was just just—for price purposes, I just quickly looked on like Amazon for—and it looks like the— no sorry, not the squeegees, but the cyclone dust thing is maybe starting about 50 bucks and going up from there. **Colin ** 32:06 Okay, they've gone up a little bit since I bought mine. **Brooke ** 32:07 Yeah. **Colin ** 32:08 It was a few years ago. **Brooke ** 32:09 Yeah, if you're doing some community emergency preparedness, and if you work with friends or whatever to collect and have some of these tools—I'm trying to do more of that in my own life so that we don't all own every single tool you might need. Might be a good one to go in on together and, you know, somebody stores or keeps track of it or whatever. **Colin ** 32:30 Yeah, definitely. And a lot of the preparation for construction-related disasters is tool and equipment heavy. And there's no reason for everybody in your social circle to have duplicates of all the tools, because you're also going to need lots of hands helping out. So as long as one person has the tool that you need, everybody has access to it. **Brooke ** 32:56 Okay, awesome. I'm just adding one of those to my wish list now to look at some more later. Okay, so that's some of the ways we get the water out of that. And I assume that, like, if you're in a basement, and you've got stuff in your basement, you probably want to like get your shit out of the basement and then start attacking the water, right? Like get your belongings to dry ground before you do that, or, you tell me. **Colin ** 33:24 Um. It depends on sort of, you know, do you have a place to put all of your belongings or are you going to need to move them out into the front yard once the rain stops? So it's kind of a judgment call as to whether you can deal with water first or get your belongings out of the house first. It's whatever you have time and space and energy to do. As long as you are making progress on one of the fronts, it's all going to have to happen at some point in the next, you know, 24 to 48 hours. The exact order that things happen doesn't matter all that much. **Brooke ** 34:03 Nobody's sleeping for a little while after the disaster, and that's okay. **Colin ** 34:06 Yes. **Brooke ** 34:06 I mean, it sucks, but. **Colin ** 34:10 So yeah, that is the next point is dealing with all your belongings. And step one is just separate the wet and dry things. Anything that has managed to avoid the water, get it out of the basement and get it out of that damp room as fast as you possibly can. Because once things get wet, your next big issue is going to be mold. Even if you have things sitting in the basement that didn't get wet with the floodwater, they're now in a damp space that has been contaminated with all sorts of wonderful biological material for mold to grow in, and basements tend not to be the best ventilated places in the house. **Brooke ** 34:53 Yeah. **Colin ** 34:54 And your mold spores are everywhere all the time. You can't avoid them. All you can do is try to make a environment that mold does not like to grow in. And once the house has been flooded, mold becomes very, very, very happy. **Brooke ** 35:09 Okay. Yeah, a lot of moisture. **Colin ** 35:12 So get everything out of the basement, dry things can go upstairs, wet things need to be moved someplace away from the dry things so that they don't contaminate those as well. So if it's—ifyou have things that are totally soaked, furniture, carpet, things like that, they're not going to get any worse by just chucking them into the front yard. So you can put down a tarp to keep them out of the mud. But once they've been soaked, the damage has already been done, just get them out of the house, that's easier. Throw a tarp over it to, you know, keep the worst of the weather off. But your big concern is getting the space emptied out. And also, mold does not like UV radiation, and we have a great source of radiation outside in the form of the sun. **Brooke ** 36:04 Hey! **Colin ** 36:04 So just parking things out in bright light is going to help slow down that mold. **Brooke ** 36:08 Yeah. And so even if you've got an apartment or what have you, you know, if you can put things out on a porch. If you've got things that are really soaked, you could take them into the bathroom and you can put things in the in the tub or the shower. And, just as the initial, like, letting some of that water run off, while you then go deal with other issues, or sending them in a sink—not for long term but, like, short term places to stick things if it's still raining outside and you've got wet stuff. **Colin ** 36:38 Yeah, put them someplace where they can drain and start to dry out a little bit. Your most important thing is keep the airflow going. Because if you've got good airflow, that's going to slow down the growth of mold. **Brooke ** 36:52 And even cold air flow, right? Like— **Colin ** 36:54 Even cold air flow. **Brooke ** 36:55 —blowing a fan even if it's, yeah, okay. **Brooke ** 36:57 Okay, but what about if it was like brief flooding in your carpet—like this is not quite we're talking about, but if a pipe burst—a waterline burst in my basement and gets everything wet? I get that turned off and dried back out. **Colin ** 36:57 So once you have your belongings out, take a look at the walls and flooring. And pretty much anything that is wet and porous, like drywall or carpet pads., if it's wet and porous, it's probably trash. It's not in most cases worth salvaging carpet that has been totally saturated with floodwater because you're never going to get the mud and all the sewage back out of that carpet. Now you have your antique oriental rug, that can be salvaged. But just regular old wall to wall carpet and the padding behind it, it's going to be cheaper to replace that than it is to try to salvage it. **Colin ** 37:56 Yeah, that is salvageable. For that you don't need to trash it. I was thinking more along the lines of, you know, muddy, sewage filled water in your basement. But no, if you just have—if you have clean water on a carpet, as long as you can get it dried out before the mold starts, you'll be fine. **Brooke ** 38:13 Okay. **Colin ** 38:13 And again, this is where that shopvac and the dust separator really shine, because you can suck the water out of the carpet. And that means there's a whole lot less work for the fans and the dehumidifier to do to try to get that carpet dried back out before the mold starts. **Brooke ** 38:30 Okay. So the type of water matters a lot. Like if you're basement window, the seal breaks and you've got maybe your downspout water is going into the basement. That might be salvageable, again, if you don't have mold and stuff, right? **Colin ** 38:45 Right. If it's clean water and you can get it dried out, you're fine. But once it has been contaminated with groundwater, think long and hard about how important it is to salvage it. Because, again, once you have stuff like sewage and mud into the carpet and into the backing, the odds that you will develop mold problem later on if it gets wet again are significantly higher, because now you have all that food for the mold to grow on. **Brooke ** 39:14 Yeah, and then that mold of course, you know, ongoing health issues can be caused, you know, mold sucks. But yeah, it's not just that mold sucks and it's gross and smelly. It's like literally bad for you. **Colin ** 39:31 You're two best weapons, in addition to air and light, are honestly vinegar and borax. Both of which are available at pretty much any grocery store. They both work by the same mechanism but at opposite ends of the spectrum. Mold needs a certain pH to be able to grow. Believe it's between 4 and 8. But it can go as far as between like 3 and 9. And vinegar is just outside that range on the acidic end, and Borax is just outside it on the basic end. **Brooke ** 40:10 So I should pour vinegar on my carpet, **Brooke ** 40:12 Oh, okay. **Colin ** 40:12 You can do that. **Colin ** 40:13 Yeah, just use full strength vinegar, put it in a sprayer or, you know, slosh it around, you know, spread it out the squeegee. But if you— **Brooke ** 40:21 Full strength do you mean the normal, like 5%, white vinegar at the store? **Colin ** 40:25 5%, yeah. **Brooke ** 40:25 Okay, because you can buy, in case folks don't know this, 10%, 20%, 30% vinegar at department stores that works well as a weed killer. **Colin ** 40:35 Yeah, that's actually what I keep around for cleaning because it takes up less space, and if you have the 30% vinegar, you just dilute it with water to get it back down to 5%. And now you have— **Brooke ** 40:45 Just don't spill it on your skin. **Colin ** 40:47 Yes. **Brooke ** 40:48 I've done that. **Colin ** 40:49 Coming back to the safety issue. You do not—like, even regular strength vinegar, I've used for cleaning walls in a basement before and walked back into the room after I had a chance to off gas a little bit and walk right back out again because I couldn't breathe. Vinegar is pretty safe, but it's still an acid and your lungs don't like breathing it. So open the windows, wear gloves, keep it off your skin, and by all means keep it out of your eyes. Same is true for borax. As chemicals go, they're pretty safe, but you still don't want them in your eyes. Safety glasses, chemical goggles if you have them. Again, Harbor Freight, 2 bucks for a pair of inexpensive plastic goggles is all you need. **Brooke ** 41:39 Hopefully at this point, a lot of us have respirators, you know, post COVID and protests and whatever. You probably don't need to go that hard, but you can, right? **Colin ** 41:51 Correct. **Brooke ** 41:52 Yeah. **Colin ** 41:53 So it's just the full strength vinegar, the 5%, on anything that is going to take a long time to dry out or you don't have time to deal with. So if you have a pile of soggy bedding, and your washing machine doesn't work because you don't have power, just go ahead and dump vinegar all over that. Vinegar is fine for most fabrics. And as long as it's acidic, as long as the clothing is too acidic for mold to grow, it can sit there for a week and it'll be probably fine. **Brooke ** 42:26 So you could like, put them in your sink, stopper it, and pour some vinegar over the top of the bedding or the clothes or whatever it is that you need to soak. Do they need to be like, do they just need to be damp with the vinegar, or do they need to like sit in vinegar? **Colin ** 42:40 It depends on what you're trying to do. Vinegar will kill mold, but it takes a long time as chemical methods of killing mold goes. You figure, most people know, like, bleach will kill mold in a couple minutes. Full strength vinegar can take an hour or more depending on the surface. So if you're using it to disinfect a surface, it needs to stay on there for a long time. Usually with fabric if you just dunk it in vinegar and hang it up to dry, by the time the fabric is dry, the vinegar has been on there long enough that anything that was on there is now dead. So even if your clothes aren't clean, dunk it in vinegar, hang it up outside on a clothesline, let it dry, and the vinegar will keep any mold from developing in the time that it takes the clothing to dry. **Brooke ** 43:32 If bleach is so much faster and more effective, why not use bleach to clean the walls, clean the carpets, all of that kind of stuff. **Colin ** 43:42 You can do that. Bleach, as everybody knows, is a little more dangerous. Not good to get on your skin. Not good to breathe. And bleach bleaches things. So if you use chlorine bleach on your, you know, vintage clothing, you're going to be in the market for some new vintage clothing. **Brooke ** 44:05 Yeah, okay. **Colin ** 44:06 Vinegar is—if you read online, there are articles of clothing and fabric that you're not supposed to use vinegar on. But I can attest to the fact that you can get away with using it on pretty much anything, including—the friend of mine that I've mentioned, I think last time, that had the apartment fire was using vinegar to clean a lot of like vintage suede. And it wasn't happy about it, but it survived and it came through it. **Brooke ** 44:37 So you can use bleach, it just comes with more caveats and dangers and you're less likely to maybe screw something up if you're using vinegar as your agent. **Colin ** 44:47 Right. **Brooke ** 44:47 It sounds—that's what I'm hearing, is that accurate? **Colin ** 44:49 Bleach will definitely work. Vinegar is nice because almost everything, you can just dunk it in vinegar and let it dry and it's not going to do that much damage to it. I used it on furniture, leather clothing, silk, everything. Even things that you're like, oh this should be dry cleaned only. Eh, vinegar is generally okay. It's not gonna love it but it'll be fine. **Brooke ** 44:51 [Laughing] Gotcha. **Colin ** 44:52 Borax is, you know, you've probably seen it in your grandmother's basement as a laundry booster. Borax is a— **Brooke ** 45:27 White powder **Colin ** 45:28 Yeah, white powder, sodium metaborate, I think? It's a caustic alkaline salt. So it has the advantage of being persistent where vinegar is not. So once the vinegar dries out, it's gone. Which is nice because your clothes will not smell like vinegar forever, you know, after a week or two, the smell totally goes away. Borax, it's like table salt. Once it dries out, you're left with a white powder on everything. **Colin ** 46:00 Which is probably not what you want for all of your possessions because you don't want them covered and white powder. The advantage it has is that it does stay around. So if you are trying to get mold off of the walls and the joists in your basement, if you spray them with borax, once the water dries that powder is still going to be there and it's still going to prevent mold from growing. So the borax, once you put it down, will continue working until you clean it up. Yeah, so if you have a basement that has a major mold problem, just coat everything with borax, you can leave it on, there even when you put drywall and insulation everything back up, it's not going to hurt anything. **Brooke ** 46:00 Okay. **Brooke ** 46:42 Okay. You're wet clothing that's at risk of molding. Can you dust that with borax? Does that work? **Colin ** 46:47 You can. That would work just fine if you happen to have borax not vinegar. So the vinegar I like just because it doesn't leave a residue on things. You can use it on everything. So when you have a giant pile of belongings, of some clothing, some furniture, or some antiques, just hose everything down with vinegar and sort it out later. **Brooke ** 47:08 Yeah, I was imagining a circumstance where it's, you know, I can't get to the store, the store is out of things, and I have half a gallon of vinegar and half a jar of borax and, you know, Dollar Store tiny container of bleach and, you know, what can I use where and what can't I use where and how would I spread out what I have available? **Brooke ** 47:30 Why not? Sounds like fun! **Colin ** 47:30 You should not mix the vinegar and the bleach, that's the first thing. [Laughing] **Colin ** 47:35 For some definition of the word fun, yeah. It's exciting. In general, don't mix anything with bleach because bleach is a sodium hypochlorite I believe is the chemical? There's different versions of it. But anyway, it contains chlorine. And when that chlorine breaks three of the things that are holding it to the rest of the molecule, you now have chlorine gas in your house, and that makes it really hard to breathe, and it's a good way to put yourself in the hospital. So if you're going to use bleach, do not use anything else. Vinegar and borax, they can actually be mixed. If you do that, the downside is that because vinegar is acidic, and borax is alkaline, you pull the pH a little bit closer to the center and it's not going to be as effective against mold. But then when the vinegar disappears and evaporates, the borax will still be there to help prevent the mold from coming back. So there's no harm in mixing them. And a lot of websites that talk about mold cleanup will actually recommend it because the Borax is persistent and the vinegar will generally be enough to kill them all quickly and the borax keeps it from coming back. But for the purposes of just trying to inhibit low growth immediately after the flooding event, either one is fine. You don't need to mix them to get the best effect and you'll be able to cover more of your possessions if you're not using both products on everything. So vinegar on some, borax and others, there's no reason to hit them double strength. **Brooke ** 49:18 Right. Yeah, so I'm imagining, like, I might bleach spray the walls, dust some powdered borax on the carpet, soak the clothes and vinegar. Again, this is like, if I don't have enough of one thing or a couple things to do everything that needs to get done, you know, what benefits the most from each thing or how can I use each one individually most effectively. But yeah, very good, important thing about mixing chemicals. There's another one too I think ammonia and bleach you're not supposed to mix, it also has a bad chemical...? Yeah. **Colin ** 49:48 Ammonia and bleach does the same thing. It's still—the chlorine is the ones gonna get you. Chlorine gas is nasty nasty stuff. **Brooke ** 49:54 Seems like they use that at one point and like did bad things to people with it. **Colin ** 49:58 Yeah, yeah, we don't like chlorine gas. It's not fun. **Brooke ** 50:01 Yeah, I'm not a history person but boy, that sounds familiar. **Colin ** 50:04 Speaking of gases, one of the things that people may see, as far as mold abatement goes, is the use of ozone. **Colin ** 50:12 And I have used that. I actually have an ozone generator, and it does a fantastic job of getting rid of the, you know, the few mold spores that are in places where you can't get to them. But I will say, in general, for anybody listening to this, don't bother. **Brooke ** 50:12 Oh, uh huh. **Colin ** 50:30 Oh, okay. **Colin ** 50:30 The ozone generators that you can afford are not going to be big enough and powerful enough to take care of like an entire room. And ozone is maybe not quite as bad as chlorine gas, but it is still a nasty toxic gas. And it can cause both you and your possessions serious harm. The reason it works is because it has—it's O3, so it has an extra oxygen atom or molecule—attached the molecule. That makes it very, very active, and it tries to oxidize everything that it comes in contact with. Which if it's coming in contact with mold that you want to kill, that's fantastic. If it's oxidizing all of the plastics and all of your synthetic fabrics and turning them into, you know, various nasty compounds like formaldehyde, that's not so good. And I've read horror stories about people getting, you know, small ozone generators off Amazon and saying, well, you know, this is not powerful enough to get the levels up high enough in an hour, so I'll just let it run for three days. **Brooke ** 51:41 [Laughing] That's three days, that's not an hour. **Colin ** 51:45 Yeah, when you do that, it's sort of like the difference between baking something in the oven at 150 degrees for 8 hours versus searing a steak at 500 degrees for 5 minutes. They do very different things. And letting everything just kind of stew in ozone for a very long time is not a good idea. You do not want to do that. And I would just say steer clear of those. Leave that to the professionals. Save your money. Buy more vinegar and borax. **Brooke ** 52:19 Okay, that's good to know. And if you want to learn more about chemical combinations, I created a board game for children. That's totally an aside thing. Okay, I want to go back to one thing here and I'm sorry, I'm risking going long, but um, we talked about removing like walls and carpet and I sidetracked us and talking a lot about carpet. You mentioned briefly about, like, taking out what drywall material, right, if there's water damage. And with the carpet I had asked about like freshwater versus, you know, sewage water. Does the same thing go for removing walls? Like if I have a pipe burst and it's, you know, just fresh water that person got the walls wet. Can they be recovered? Or is that a situation where, sorry, it got wet, you pretty much got to take it out? Um, I don't know I'm asking. **Colin ** 53:12 It depends on how wet it got. If it's just a pipe that burst in the ceiling and it sprayed a little bit of water on the wall, that's probably fine. That's salvageable. If you have a pipe burst inside the wall and it saturated all the insulation and soak the drywall through, that needs to come out. Not because the water is necessarily going to damage the drywall, but now you have created a damp space with no airflow inside the wall. And if you can't get that opened up and dry it out, you're going to end up with mold. **Brooke ** 53:45 Can you dry out insulation? Like if you take out a piece of wet insulation and put a fan on it and dry it out, can you put it back in or does it get ruined? **Colin ** 53:56 With fiberglass insulation, you could do it but there's no reason to. **Brooke ** 54:02 Okay. **Colin ** 54:02 The cost of replacing the insulation is going to be less than probably the cost of trying to get it dried back out and salvageable. **Brooke ** 54:11 Okay. Okay. **Colin ** 54:13 And a lot of houses have insulation that has already been contaminated somewhat with mold over the years. Usually when insulation comes out of walls, it's not perfectly clean. It already has some mold and things in it just because temperature fluctuations, you know, that's why you have the insulation there is to help slow down the temperature changes. But that means that the insulation is constantly going up and down in temperature. It has a small amount of condensation in it. Over time, little bits of organic matter and mold start to grow on it. It's not a huge problem until it gets soaked and now it takes off. So basically once installation gets wet, it's trash. And along those lines with drywall, another thing that I've seen a lot in basements that have had some water damage is either the homeowner or the contractor that they paid to do the recovery was trying to be as... **Brooke ** 55:12 Cost efficient? **Colin ** 55:13 Cost efficient, yes, that's a good way of putting it, as possible. Fake cost efficiency. And they pull out the bare minimum of insulation and drywall, basically the only things that came in direct contact with water, and they put new drywall back up, and six months later you have a mold problem, because there was still moisture higher up in the wall that was not addressed. So once a wall gets wet, you want to remove the drywall to, I'm gonna say, a good foot or more above the waterline at minimum. If you want to take out the entire wall, that's probably overkill but it's not the worst idea. But, you know, minimum of a foot above the waterline. And then for any insulation in the wall, reach your arm or up inside the bay as far as you can and get out anything you can possibly reach. The more space and the more airflow you get inside that wall, the better off you're going to be in the long run. And coming back to the borax, if there's any doubt about whether or not you've gotten anything, hose some borax water up inside there, let that dry out, and now you have something that's going to inhibit mold growing in that space for the remainder of the life of the house. **Brooke ** 56:34 Okay, now I know this is going to be probably beyond the average homeowner's ability to to judge, but what about the framing, the studs, you know, the the wood that's in the walls that your your drywall is attached to and your insulation runs between? Any tips on being able to tell whether or not that needs to be replaced? Or is it just a, sorry, you got to call a contractor at that point to figure out if that needs to get redone. **Colin ** 57:04 It's probably going to be fine. I'm sure there are exceptions. But, you know, wood is used to being outside. And as long as it has a chance to dry back out after it's gotten wet, it'll be fine. If it's sitting in water for weeks or months, you may have an issue. Your biggest problem honestly, with wet wood, is that it attracts termites. So you don't want to have damp wood. But as long as it gets dried back out, again, not too much of an issue. **Brooke ** 57:37 Okay, that's really great. Okay, I feel like I am much better prepared to deal with flooding, hopefully make it happen, less things to look out for. And then definitely after it comes, knowing what I should do immediately and fairly quickly in that process. And that's awesome. I like learning things. Is there anything more you want to say about dealing with flooding and/or water damage that we haven't talked about? **Colin ** 58:10 Oh, the one thing I didn't didn't get to was the burst pipe. **Brooke ** 58:13 Sure. **Colin ** 58:13 So let's run through that real quickly. **Brooke ** 58:15 Okay. **Colin ** 58:15 This is something pretty much everybody's gonna experience at some point in their life. I don't know of anybody that has not had to deal with leaking pipe or burst pipe at some point, even if it's not during a disaster. It's just like, sometimes it just happens because pipes get old and they break. So we talked about, you know, in the triage episode, the know where your shut offs are, and hopefully you can just run them down to the basement and shut the water to the house off, and then you have as much time as you need to deal with the broken pipe. If that doesn't happen, because you don't have a working shut off or you can't get to it, there are these brand of plumbing fittings called SharkBites which don't require any real skill to use. Sort of like, if you are capable of using a can opener and putting a cork in a bottle of wine, you can use a SharkBite fitting. Go on YouTube, there's good demonstrations of how to use them. And all you need is a set of cheap tubing cutters for cutting through the pipe, and either a valve or cap to go on the pipe after you cut it. I recommend, if you're going to keep one thing around, keep the tubing cutter and a valve. Because if you have a valve, you can use that for capping off a pipe that is under pressure. So if you can't shut the water off in your house, and you have a leaking pipe, you're gonna have a mess on your hands. But what you can do is cut through the pipe, open it all the way up. Now you have a pipe spraying water everywhere, and if you try to put a cap on that, you're fighting against the pressure and you can't do it. But if you've a valve, you can put the valve onto the pipe in the open position. So the water just flows through the valve and you close the valve and the water stops. **Brooke ** 1:00:10 But that's—that whole set's only going to be true if you have like a PVC or PEX pipe, right? If you have— **Colin ** 1:00:17 No, they work against copper too. **Brooke ** 1:00:20 Okay, but you need a different tool to cut—well I have like galvanized steel I think it is or, you know, much older pipes than that that are metal. **Colin ** 1:00:29 Cast iron. **Brooke ** 1:00:30 Yeah. **Colin ** 1:00:31 That's a different story. But if you have PEX or copper or PVC, the little cheap tubing cutters that will kind of like a C clamp with a little blade, and you just clamp it down and spin it in the circle until the blade cuts through, one of those and a 90 degree shut off valve is going to get you through a lot of problems because it works against pipes that have pressure in them. And again, there's demonstrations of how to do this on YouTube. It's kind of hard to explain an audio format. But once you see it, you're like, oh, yeah, that's really easy. **Brooke ** 1:01:02 Yeah, I'm visualizing it really well, only because I've built water systems with PEX pipe, and I've used shark bites and all of that. So it's clear to me, but no sense of if it translates if you don't know that. But um, yeah, okay, that's really great. But just the caveat, it doesn't work on all types of pipes. Most types, apparently, I didn't realize the copper also. So that's pretty great. **Colin ** 1:01:24 No, so yeah, it's—watch the videos, familiarize yourself with how you do it beforehand so that you know what to do. But it's really, really simple. And it'll buy you plenty of time until the plumbers can come out and fix the right way. **Brooke ** 1:01:38 Cool, great. And again, that's only if you can't get to the shutoff valve because that would be your first choice in handling that, is to get to the shutoff valve rather than trying to cap the pipe off flowing. **Colin ** 1:01:49 Yeah, cutting into your plumbing is the last resort. Hopefully you can just turn it off, but... **Brooke ** 1:01:54 [Laughing] Just wanted to make sure we say that one twice. **Colin ** 1:01:59 [Laughing] Yeah, that should be the last resort, not the first resort. Excellent point. **Brooke ** 1:02:04 Thanks. All right. Colin, thank you so much for joining us today. I have learned a bunch of stuff and I've had a really great conversation with you. And I'm so happy that you're willing to do this with us again. Do you have anything that you want to plug or promote or otherwise share in closing? **Colin ** 1:02:22 Nope, that's it. **Brooke ** 1:02:27 Okay, that's it, folks. To our listeners, thanks so much for listening. If you enjoy our podcast, please share it. Feel free to drop a comment on any of our social media pages or Patreon account. We do read all of your comments and we talk about them collectively. And personally, I love engaging on these subjects further with you all when you reach out to me. I can be found on Mastodon @OgemakweBrooke, that's Brooke with an E. This podcast is produced by the anarchists publishing collective, Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. We are on Twitter @tangledwild and also on Instagram. Plus, we have a rad website at tangledwilderness.org where you can find our extensive list of projects and publications. This podcast and much of the work of Strangers is made possible by our Patreon supporters. If you want to become a supporter, check out patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. There are cool benefits at various support tiers on Patreon. For instance, if you support the collective at just $5 a month, we mail you a monthly zine. 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Episode Summary This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Margaret and Dean continue to talk about the ways that mutual aid helps communities prepare for disasters that are already here and disasters that have yet to come. They talk about what things like hope and success can look like even as the world crumbles around us. Guest Info Dean Spade is an American lawyer, writer, trans activist, and associate professor of law at Seattle University School of Law. You can find Dean's work at Deanspade.net, and you can read the article that Margaret and Dean talk about, "Climate Disaster is Here--And the State Will Never Save Us" on inthesetimes.com. You can also find Dean on Twitter @deanspade or on IG @spade.dean. Host Info Margaret (she/they) can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript Live Like the World is Dying: Dean Spade on Mutual Aid as Preparedness pt. II **Margaret ** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host, Margaret Killjoy, and this is part two of a conversation with Dean Spade. So I should probably listen to part one, but I'm not your boss. This podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts, and here's a jingle from another show on the network. **Margaret ** 00:42 Okay, I have a kind of final-ish question, I think. And it can be "ish" on the final part. But at the beginning of this, you said that your politics have been moving towards anti-statism, or, you know, possibly anarchism, or whatever. And I'm wondering if you want to talk about that. In some ways, I feel like you've implied a lot of maybe what has drawn you more towards those politics, but I'm really curious about the kind of route you took--not like where you've landed, and what labels you want to throw on things--but what has led you towards those politics? **Dean ** 01:56 I just talked with somebody yesterday who I know from the anti-Zionist Jewish world who was talking about the. . . about how he feels like people haven't thought. . . that he hasn't thought a lot about anti-State or anarchist politics, and he was like, "Why do you think some people haven't and some people haven't?" and I was like, "Oh, I think people just come to our politics. Like, we just kind of stumble into them." It's like, if somebody stumbled into a punk scene in 1999, they probably found anarchism sooner than me. I stumbled into all this queer, anti-police stuff, and we were doing a lot of identity-based work, and people weren't talking about political tendencies in the same way--in part also, because it had been really divisive, at certain points, in our movements where people had gotten so obsessed with their ideology that they'd been able to work together and got really insular. So there was a lot of, I think, push away for some people from that. I think, also, we have lived in times for the last, at least 100 years, that are so deeply reactive anti-anarchist, in particular, because of the history of anarchism in the US and elsewhere. There's a really great piece by William C. Anderson that came out a while--like not that long ago--after the Atlanta indictment about how policing in the United States itself developed through policing anarchism, that I highly recommend. But anyway, I think a lot of us also just haven't gotten. . . Like, it's like you were told, "Anarchists are just people who want chaos and who are dirty white people," or whatever. There's a lot of things that erase the contributions of anti-colonial anarchists and anarchists who aren't white in all these things. Anyway, Or, anti-State tendencies that aren't anarchism in the European sense. But for me, I think what happened is that I've been in movements that have been benefiting from a range of genealogies, including women of color feminism--specifically Black feminism--and other political knowledges and methods that have been anti-institutional, in really great ways have had critiques of the borders and the cops and the military have also had a focus on practices of collectivity and horizontality with us, you know, inside our movements, which are very. . . You know, that really parallel with a lot of anarchist methodologies like "Let's not have a boss in this group," you know? And so all of those things really dovetail with anarchism, but I wasn't ever studying anarchism itself. Some people who were in groups I was in maybe identified as anarchists, but it didn't seem like an essential thing for me to study for a number of years. And I didn't think a lot about whether or not that was my position, because also I just had the same caricatures in my mind that other people did. And I also was like, "Do anarchists think that people shouldn't get welfare?" I don't know. I had some of my own, you know. As somebody who grew up on welfare, I had some questions about that, that I didn't have resolutions to. And then over time, especially doing abolitionist work, it just was so clear to me more and more not only that everything I was already doing dovetailed with anarchism: my interest in mutual aid, my interest in horizontal tactics inside our groups, and building group culture where we learned how to share with each other, and not boss each other around, and all that stuff. But also, the ways in which, I think, abolitionist frameworks are just. . . like, they're so deeply anti-State. It's like, 'Yeah, don't build a better cop. Don't build a better jail. Don't build a better prison. Don't build a better social services framework that's actually still a cop," or you know. And, that you can't have a country without cops, borders, and military. That's what a country is made of, you know? You can't have a Capitalist economy without a boot on everybody's neck making us participate in it. So I just came to realize like, I'm not only--I always knew I was against the United States settler colonial slavery project--but I was like, "Oh, my God, I'm against countries. I'm against that." And then I did start actually reading about this stuff and I was like, "Oh, my God, they're a recent invention. They don't need to be able to organize themselves. That's not how people have always organized themselves." And I also started to see how it actually makes a difference in our tactics about what we're going to do today, if we know this about ourselves, right? Like how we're going to get basically co-opted by projects of "Oh, let's let's do a let's do a million local elections and try to take over a city council 'thing.'" A lot of that work steals the oxygen out of local movements really intensely. And I'm not gonna say it should never ever be done, but I just feel like so much of it actually has a lack of a conversation about what can happen in those spaces behind it and then is incredibly resource intensive and doesn't lead to the things I think people hope it will lead to, like, "Oh, we're gonna have an abolitionist prosecutor and abolitionist city council person or mayor and it's gonna change everything," right? And then not seeing that happen. I think we've seen that it's played out. Or the, you know, I think this is even sharpened for me with the period of the "Defund [the police]" work--which I care a lot about, trying to defund the police--and seeing the fights inside city councils and how deeply impenetrable--like even when you supposedly, in 2020, get the whole city council saying we want to defund the police and there's so much effort on that side--it's like our cities are run by real estate developers, chambers of commerce, and police departments. And the entire apparatus of the city councils--which is in some ways more accessible than any other level of government, of course--is still unmovable. Like you can't. . . you can be right all day long. You can do every kind of research. You can show you can turn up with all the people every single time. And as soon as they can turn around and reestablish their nonstop march to constantly increase the police budget, that's what they'll do. And that is what they have done since 2020 after all this amazing work by so many people. So I think I'm just continually evaluating "Wow, where are there still parts of my own approach to politics that are assuming we can convince governments of things?"--even while I want to get rid of those kinds of governments--and why do I ever think they will voluntarily put down their weapons? And why do I think about getting any different people inside there, inside that machine? I don't believe that about the military. I'm not like, "Well, maybe if Margaret Killjoy was the general, it would all be fine." I know, that's not true. So why do I, and where have I still. . . And I, you know, I forgive myself and all of us. We're all just trying shit our whole lives. And there's so many things I've been involved in that I think were not that generative, but you know, we couldn't have known that. Or, where there was a backlash so that the thing that was generative for a while stopped or, you know, was turned on us in a way that undermined our hopes. But I think that for me it's just an ongoing deepening with different anti-State frameworks, an ongoing deepening of reading history, and understanding why different revolutionary projects that then took on State forms became authoritarian, trying to understand what this kind of insight--which is very hard, because it's about letting go of a lot of hope and a lot of tactics that people are putting a lot of effort into--like, what it directs us to do to most immediately support people's well being, and take down the apparatuses that are hurting us that are, honestly, just like continuing to grow. Like they're all. . . Like the level of surveillance we are under right now compared to five years ago. Like, the capacity for political repression that the State has right now compared to five years ago. I don't know if you saw this, but like-- maybe it was this week--Georgia is going to outlaw bail funds, is going to criminalize bail funds. Tennessee's trying to do the same thing. Like, tiny things we have in our movements to try to support people facing repression, even those they are directly going after. So, yeah, it's really hard to face these conditions. And also, I see a lot of people working really hard on the ground blaming themselves for the effects of the conditions like "Oh, why can't we? Why can't we do a better job stopping these homeless sweeps in our city?" It's like it's not because you're not doing a really good job trying to. There are a lot of really bad conditions. And I think that it goes back to this humility, like, "Okay, wow, things are so dire. What if I let myself know this so that I could talk with my friends about what's possible--given how things actually are--and let go of some of the fantasies?" I think I talked to you briefly before we started the podcast but I recently rewatched those two videos that Naomi Klein and Molly Crabapple--both of whom I really, really respect--made a few years back. They're both videos about what the world could be like after the Green New Deal and after many wonderful uprisings. And they feel so, so misleading to me, watching them right now. Like they imagine a world in which people just protest a lot. And then everyone has things that are better. And also, we still have countries and jobs. It very weirdly doesn't get rid of Capitalism or the nation state. But it's like, there's a kind of like. . . I think that it's very dangerous, those fantasies, that we can do certain kinds of tactics and our opponents will just turn over. And I think those are inside a lot of people's--a lot of very wise people's--messages. And I just increasingly, when I encounter them, feel much more concerned about what they teach us and how they mislead us. **Margaret ** 11:00 I just think that we have to always look clear-headedly at what our actual threats are, at what's actually happening, and then make our decisions based on how to actually address that, rather than being like, "I want to become just like this person I read about in history, so I'm going to do whatever they did." And this could be true of, "I want to be a principled pacifist and get arrested just like Gandhi," or whatever, right? You know, it could also be, "I want to be just like the following anarchist in the 1880s who decided it was time to start shooting people," you know? We just need to actually look at what's happening and make our decisions based on that. And it's hard, because what we're facing is different from what anyone else has ever faced in history. Not necessarily worse--although the overall ecosystem is worse than anything minus whenever all the. . . you know, before humans evolved, and various other mass die offs that have happened or whatever. But it's different and it's bad. And we just need to look at it and then come up with solutions. Or even some of this is, "How do we solve this problem?" And some of it is like, "How do we live with this?" Not accept it but accept that it's going to have consequences on us and that fighting it isn't going to be easy and we might not win. But what are the best tools by which we can fight it, and/or what are the best tools that we can use to live meaningful lives in the process? You know, so that when we inevitably die, at 103 or 33, we can be proud of who we were. You know, and obviously, there's theological or metaphysical considerations into exactly what that process looks like that'll be different for different people. But, you know, I think that that's what to do. **Dean ** 13:06 It's also about not trying to feel better. I think there's just something so intense about how people are like, you know, "If you talk about collapse, it makes me feel bad." And there's an assumption that that will demobilize me. And it's like, actually, Capitalism is like, either feel bad or feel good, you know? And that's not how life is. Life is like, fuck. . . For example, you have a terrible loss and you live with grief. And you also still enjoy this beautiful meal. And you're still grieving. And you're in pain. And being willing. . . or--I see a lot of my students--they're like, "Oh, my God, the things I'm learning in your class, I'm so worried about these terrible things in the world that I didn't know we're going on. This is so awful." And they want to instantly know what to do to feel better. And I'm like, I can't make. . . I don't want you to do things feel better. I want you to do things to try to be part of something and you'll never know if they worked or not. Because that's the nature of it. You don't know what our opposition's next countermove is or whether we'll regret some parts of it, but it's the trying stuff, it's the listening to feedback about what didn't go well or how it hurts somebody else. The goal is connection and belonging with each other and experimentation. And, you know, it doesn't always feel good to receive negative feedback, but often it's like incredibly growthful. It's like feeling good can't be the goal. Feeling, Yes. And sometimes feeling good. And pursuing pleasure, absolutely. But not like, "I want to have a pat" happiness where I don't have to worry or be concerned or be critical. Like of course nobody who sees themselves as radical should be wanting that, but I still think that craving--when it comes to conversations about collapse--where it's like I want the one thing that will make me feel better. Or, people feel that about Gaza. Like, "Oh my God, I just found about about this horrible genocide that's happening. I've not known about this before. I want to be able to go to one action and feel I did something and to then be better and post it on Instagram. And it's like, A) love them for waking up to what's happening in Gaza. I love, love any moment where people become more interested in the wellbeing of all people and stopping violence, and we have to be willing to take in how overwhelming this is, how unmovable the war machine feels, and still take action against it, but not because we're guaranteed that what we did today works, or something. You know what I mean? Like that feels--that simplicity--really cheats us of the really complex position we're actually in, that if we can let ourselves be in it, might allow discernment towards better action, hopefully, you know? **Margaret ** 15:30 No, and I like how you tie that to the way that capitalism makes us think that happiness is the goal. Like, I like happiness. But my goal in life is not specifically to lead a happy life; it's to have a meaningful life and to have as complete of a life as--I mean, every life is complete. And, you know, when you look at. . . Anyone who's ever known a child who's died has had to come to terms with the fact that every life is complete, you know, is a thing that I've been dealing with because of some stuff. And, you know. . . Yeah, the idea that you're just supposed to be happy is some fucking McDonald's shit. You know? And don't get me wrong, seek happiness. Do it. It's great. You know? But yeah, sometimes you just need to accept. . . Like, I want to live a beautiful life and I think that is a different thing, you know? And maybe because I'm like a goth, or whatever, I find a lot of different things beautiful than some other people. But. . . No, I. . . I like that. And it does. It helps get people beyond the like, "Oh, good, I can sleep at night because I went to one protest," you know? And instead, like learning to sit with the discomfort of all these things happening and understanding where we do and don't have agency and. . . Imean, don't get me wrong, people should be going to these protests. You know, if nothing else that are good ways to find the other people who care. **Dean ** 17:04 Yeah, meet other people and try stuff. I mean, I want to live in reality. I want to know that. . . I want to. . . If I've been working on a strategy for 10 years and it has actually not been helping, it's been hurting people, I want to know. I don't want to keep doing it just because my ego is attached to it, or my paycheck. I've seen that a lot in the dilemmas with the [uninterpretable] movements, you know, where I want to. . . Yeah, absolutely, I'm like, be promiscuous about the stuff you try. Go to all the protests. Go to anything. Try anything. But it's that willingness to keep open the possibility that I'm going to get feedback or learn that. . . learn the impacts, or learn my position on the world, or learn how the clothes I'm wearing impact people who made them, or what. . . I just like, I just want to be in reality, and that includes the reality of how unbearably beautiful being alive is, how the entire... how my entire body was structured to receive pleasure from this incredible landscape. That reality too, which is Capitalism also shuts down and tells me to only be entertained by video games and chips, or whatever. You know, I want to live fully in the reality of how beautiful and abundant and gorgeous this life is and how heartbreaking and devastating these systems are, and how little control I have over them. And then, the moments when I do feel a connection, or am of service to something in my community, like how that is--like all of that, you know? But not through the filter of liberalism, that's just like, "I need to find out that I'm a good person. TM [trademarked]," you know? **Dean ** 17:04 Okay, so in that vein, to bring it back to kind of some of the preparedness stuff that you've been writing more about and engaging with more, I was wondering if you want to talk about, like, what do you what is preparedness looking like for you right now? Or, you know, how is it affecting you as much as you feel like talking about anything personal? Like, how is it affecting the kind of decisions that you're making about how you want to live or how you prepare? **Dean ** 18:55 That's such a good question. I mean, in general, my study of collapse is affecting a lot of things for me. I'm thinking a lot about the ethics of the fact that I travel on planes and how to reduce that or eliminate it. And also I don't want to get stuck somewhere really far away from my people when things are bad. So I've been thinking a lot about shifting and changes around that. I've been thinking a lot about how much I want to work a job. What are the other options here? You know what I mean? Just like when will I know that I don't want to do that? Or whatever. I've been writing a book for 10 years that's kind of like a relationships self-help book for radicals, you know, kind of thing, because I've spent so much time in our movements watching people, you know, tear each other in our groups apart with our own unexamined relational patterns that are very, you know, the pattern across the culture. So, I've been writing a book about that. And part of me is like, "At this point, I just need to recognize I'm writing this for pleasure. Like, I don't know that there's time for this to be of any use to anyone," you know what I mean? That's an interesting move to shift from thinking the, you know, probably totally ridiculous fantasy any of us have when we write anything, that people will read this and it will help them do something, and be like, "Or not?" Or I'm just really working on a book for 10 years, just for me...because that's what I did with those 10 years of my life. Okay. Like, that's an interesting move to let go of outcomes even more than ever. And I don't think I ever thought that I would have been terribly impacted by even the little hope of that. **Dean ** 18:55 Yeah, I think just to. . .just to gas you up really quick. I've seen your cultural impact for years now, and it's always been positive. So I appreciate it. But please continue. **Dean ** 20:44 I mean, I think about whether I want to live in the country, whether the cities will be the hardest places to be. And I have friends who have moved to rural places and like really cultivated deep relationships with people, even across political differences in the places they're living. And I'm like, "Huh." And then I think about some really, some really, you know, detailed specific things. Like, if I'm going to live in the country, in the Pacific Northwest where I live, how can I live less near all of the scariest...you know, right-wing neo-Nazis and closer instead to some of the rural people who are a little more like fruits and nuts, you know? So I asked myself that question. I think about what that would look like, you know, off grid? You know, I'm not somebody who can like buy a vacation house or something. So like what kind of off-grid small sort of thing can I do with anybody I know who already has a land project. I think about that. I think about. . .I think I've been thinking a lot about--I think maybe I mentioned this to you--of thinking a lot about doing something like go bag parties even in subcultural scenes in my own town. Like doing things to get more people to talk about disaster and collapse, you know? And if they want to think about it as an earthquake go bag, awesome. That's a danger in Seattle for sure. If they want to think about it like that. You know, like, having people just, I was thinking about, like, how do you make those parties fun? Like, you know, having there be giveaways, having there be like. . . having people bring. . . You know, is it also a clothing exchange? Like, is it a sex toy exchange? Like, I've been just imagining different, you know, what would that look like for my queer-er friends versus what will it look like for people on my block, versus what would it look like with my students? Like, just kind of what would be different. . . what would help different people try it and then also think they could put one on, you know? Like, just how to really--especially because I feel like this podcast is very user-friendly in that way, so I've been really inspired by some of your episodes to think about what are the ways I could take what I love about mutual aid organizing, how I love meeting people, and I love making an event happen, making it welcoming, having people make new friends, and how can that be oriented towards people thinking about preparedness? And how much--some of the questions I've asked myself are--how much would there be any talking and programming at such an event or how much would it just be like, "come and grab this stuff. And here's some printouts of things you could have in your go bag. And here's a pile of bags. And there's a pile of, you know, emergency blankets. And here's a pile of whatever," right? So I've had those kinds of questions about how to do. . . I think that's what's next for me is to actually try on some of that organizing with some people that are actually interested in that. **Margaret ** 23:10 When you do that, can you come back on and talk about how it went? I feel like people will learn from that a lot. **Dean ** 23:15 Yeah, and I'd love to, if other people have tried it--I'm curious--please reach out to me. Curious to hear their experiences. **Margaret ** 23:21 Me and one of my friends who does this kind of work too, we put on a day of preparedness. We did a, you know, where you get. . . There were a bunch of different talks by different people who lived in that area who came and they talked about the projects they're working on. There was someone who was like, "Oh, I'm really into mesh networks." And someone else is like, "Oh, I'm doing things like water collection and rainwater and things like that." And there were multiple. . . There were, I think, a total of maybe about six events at. . . So you could pick between two at any given point, like the way that conferences work, or whatever. And it was, you know, a local food. . . a local food distro did lunch that was free for everyone. But then dinner was a giant potluck. And I've actually never seen a giant potluck work so well as the one that I went to. It was cool. And then there was a big talk that was everyone and it was more in the evening. Some people only came for that. And it was, you know, we used me as sort of a keynote-ish person but then it was. . . Immediately from there. It was a facilitated roundtable of the people who live in that town talking about their needs and how to meet them. And I'm now thinking maybe I talked about this before on the show. I have no idea. And then at the very end, we made a long term food bucket. You know, a mylar bag, rice, and beans thing, which is way easier to do if you buy it all in bulk. And then it was kind of fun. And it was. . . My favorite part about it was that theoretically I was organizing it. And I know how to make the bucket. But I don't know how to necessarily make the 15 people figure out how to make sure that all the food goes evenly to these different buckets or whatever. And people were like, "How do we do that?" and I was like, "Figure it out. I don't know." And then everyone's self organized it and it worked perfectly fine. And then like everyone felt more invested, because they were...everyone was in charge and figuring things out together. And it was like a nice little microcosm of those, those nice moments in so many ways. And, you know, and then it was. . . I would say a good third of the people didn't have any money--and so didn't pay for their buckets--and a good third of the people were like, "I can easily pay twice as much as what this bucket cost," you know, because those buckets, if you make your own are only like 20 bucks. If you buy them at a prepper store--if you buy them at a reasonable prepper store, they're 50 bucks--if you buy them from Alex Jones and all that shit, then they're not very good and they're way more than that. And so that worked, that model works really well. And we're hoping to replicate it. And so, but I really like the way that you're talking about it. I really like the idea of like, yeah, how would it be different? How would the go bag party be different for your block versus your students versus your queer friend group, but I'm fascinated. I want to hear how it goes. **Dean ** 26:07 Yeah, I love what you said about people having to figure things out. I noticed this a lot when we had that police free zone in Seattle during the 2020 uprising, how many people who showed up who'd never done anything political in their life. they've never, ever, ever, and they like to come to it. Like they're coming to the movement. And they arrived at the field, at Cal Anderson Park, and they wanted something to do, you know? They wanted to do part of an art build, or they. . . Like people don't want to just sit and watch, you know? And then once you are a part of doing something, you're helping move a barricade--whatever--then you're like, it's like a transformative. Like, "I was there and I was part of it. And I was important to it." It lets you have it be your...it's your identity, instead of "I went and watched the movement," you know? Whatever it is, I just thought that moment, when you said--"agency" is the word you use earlier--I feel like that you can. . . that can happen anywhere. But part of the way it happens is not like overly babying, you know, everybody. You know, yes, making things accessible and trying to make it really welcoming, but also putting people to work if they're up for it helping coordinate, you know? **Margaret ** 27:11 This actually goes full circle to something we were talking about at the beginning. We were talking about how we talk about disasters with people, right? And the note, the words that I wrote down in my notes that I take while I'm interviewing people, is I wrote down "disaster fatigue," because that's the. . . like the way that I think about it, you know, the. . . The way that I. . . A long time ago, I did forest defense and I would go sit in trees and fight against clearcutting and stuff like that. But I, I actually avoided going to West Virginia and fighting mountaintop removal for a long time, even though I knew it was happening, because it was too much of a problem. A clearcut is something that is a horrible crisis. And you can wrap your head around it even as people kill ancient trees. The Appalachians are like older than air, or something. I don't even know. They're old as shit. They are some of the oldest mountains in the world, right? And, the fact that people were clearcutting the mountain, like blowing up the mountain, was just too much. I couldn't wrap my head around it. And so I just didn't think about it. And I think that overall, that's what people do with climate change. There's big, major things that are happening, that are really big. And I'm not trying to say that other crises that are happening aren't really big. Climate change is the mother of all crises. You know? It is the most existential threat to all life on Earth that has existed since there was sentient life. And I'm not just including humans in that, you know? And, so people don't want to think about it. And I think that makes sense. And I think that the people who put in the work to be like, "Hey, come to Mountain Justice Summer Camp, or Spring Break Camp or whatever, and made these spaces where people could show up and learn about what was happening and get engaged. I think that maybe climate change. . . Yeah, it's the. . . Have people show up and give them something to do or tell them that work needs doing and that they can figure out what to do, you know? But we kind of, as a movement, a little bit too much are like, "I don't know, just figure it out." Because then the current people who like making. . . There's actually some people doing amazing work. There's a lot of people fighting pipelines and there's people fighting extraction. And I'm not even like mad at the people who like throw food at paintings or whatever, but it's not something that invites a lot of people in--from my perspective. I'm not. . . Honestly, I try not to talk shit on tactics. I try to be like...I try to do the "more stuff" model of critique where instead of talking shit on their tactic, I should do a different tactic. And what am I doing? I mean, whenever. I'm running around trying to help people get prepared. I actually think I'm doing a lot. But anyway. I just got excited about what you were saying. **Dean ** 30:11 Yeah, that thing. I mean, it's like. . . I think a lot about how the Young Lords said--you know, who are. . . they're fighting Puerto Rican liberation in the 1970s and modeled themselves after the Black Panthers. And they said in their early texts, you know, that they believed that their own people seeing their people fight in the streets with the cops would radicalize people. So that like having escalated tactics--and this is similar to the Ireland story you told--escalated tactics, confrontational tactics, liberals will tell us we're going to alienate people. . . What did you say? **Margaret ** 30:44 Setting fire to trash on the streets. I really like the Young Lords. **Dean ** 30:47 Yeah, like, escalated tactics don't alienate people, they bring a lot of people in. And the people who think they're alienated from them might feel scared of them and stuff, but the cultural shift and change that they produce still brings people along. In the end, they're like, "Oh, no, no, I'm not racist," or whatever, you know? It's like it moves everyone. It moves the needle. And so I think we need escalated tactics and we need invitations and inroads. And for a long time, I've said I think mutual aid is one of the best on ramps, and historically has been one the best onramps for movements. **Margaret ** 31:16 Absolutely. **Dean ** 31:17 Most people get involved in movements through trying to immediately help somebody, you know, because that's what. . . when you're fired up, that's what you want, or because they got help through a mutual aid project of some kind and that's what politicized them. They're like, "Who are these people who are giving away this thing that I need that I can't get anywhere else," you know, "Who are not mean to me and who tell me it's not my fault, and that, actually, the system's fucked, huh? What are they saying? And they're right," you know? So that, I believe deeply in the mutual aid onramp. And I also think that moments like riots and stuff can be an onramp when people are like, "I'm joining in. And now I'm burning a cop car," and that feeling that kind of power. And then, "I want to learn more about who these people were, who I met in the streets," or whatever. And for some people, the on ramp is that they first encounter. . . I mean, I have a friend who's a really incredible anarchist organizer who does really massive mutual aid projects, and is just so brilliant, and told me that they're. . . they first were like. . . they joined the Bernie campaign. And then we're really involved in the Bernie Sanders campaign and then we're like, "Wait, I don't know if this is really working," you know? But like, everyone comes in somehow, you know? And so part of it too, is that we should be in all those places trying to encourage people to learn more about movement history or horizontal tactics or bold tactics that are. . . I just went to an amazing event at an anarchist space in Seattle called Pipsqueak. The event was surrounding. . . they had collected all these accounts of kind of sabotage and vandalisms and shut-down types of actions related to opposing the genocide in Gaza. So many stories I hadn't heard, you know? They collected this huge amount. They had this really wonderful hour of like, you could come and read this zine they'd printed out with all this stuff and think it through, and then a really, really well facilitated discussion for an hour and a half. And I was like, that's like. . . Like, making sure people can find out about the rad stuff that's happening, that's not going to be reported in the news. That's so cool. And also then people got to discuss all their dilemmas about tactics. Like, "Oh, my gosh, I've been going to all these kind of more, you know, media spectacle events about Gaza. I thought these things about that. What's it like to learn about these other things people are doing?" You know, people get to have those juicy conversations about what they think about the tactics they're using. **Margaret ** 33:28 I love it. And we talked about twice as long as we thought we were going to and now this is two episodes. So you all listening had to wait an extra week to hear the other half of the conversation. Do you have any kind of last thoughts on preparedness, mutual aid, how your thinking has shifted, all the topics that we've been talking about today? **Dean ** 33:50 Well, the thing that's spurred us having this conversation was that I wrote that piece for In These Times that was about my experience of reading two sci-fi--cli-fi novels--one is "Ministry of the Future," and one was "The Deluge." And I encourage people to read that piece if you want to hear my thoughts on those books. But one of the things that happened from reading those books and then writing about what I thought was a failure of different aspects of those books was how now--I did think about this because you are an amazing fiction writer--like how part of what happens to me now when I read almost any speculative book, any book, that's fiction that takes place somewhat in the future, is I am like, it feels instantly conservative because it never includes collapse, right? Because inevitably they've got us 50 years ahead and there's some AI. Or there's been some disruption from climate stuff. Like, it's never as bad as it actually is. And that is fascinating to me, you know? And they always have all this intense tech development in such books in ways that I like--I really recommend people actually listen to Kelly Hayes podcast episodes about AI. Really useful for me in trying to understand the hubris of the tech sector, and the way they talk about AI and the way they're making people afraid of or hopeful about AI, and how off base it is, and kind of what the deal really is. But anyway, I just want to say that I have historically found speculative fiction to be a vital place for trying to help myself think about crisis and collapse and also now I feel so strongly because I--I think I may have mentioned this to you, once--I've been very moved by this person Jem Bendell, who's like this. . . in many ways, he does not share all of our values. And it's coming from a very different place. But he's this academic kind of whistleblower about how bad climate stuff really is. And he. . . I find myself often like, I find myself going into my own denial about what's happening and retreating from what I know and then I listened to the introduction to his book, "Breaking Together," again to remind myself about the stakes of what I'm living through. And I feel like in some ways I used to use--and I still somewhat use speculative fiction in that way--but I'm just increasingly like. . . even most speculative fiction is telling us the wrong message about how long the systems we live under are going to last and how much they're going to flourish with the technologies that I just don't think is real. **Margaret ** 36:12 You know, what's funny, some of this--a little bit of it--is baked into a problem of writing fiction where if you. . . I've actually gotten--not in trouble with--but I've had editors take out dates in my writing before, right? Because I'll write a short story about a sort of collapse-y world or whatever and I'll be like, "After 2022, when the. . ." because I wrote this in like 2018, or whatever, because I was trying to write on a realistic timeline where I was like, "Oh, the world's not gonna be the same in 2022." And I feel like I was pretty accurate about that, right? But they have to future proof their magazine, right? And so, you know, you don't want to make certain types of claims about the next three years because you want your story to be...to have a shelf life of that long. And so some of it is baked in as a problem in publishing and in science fiction writing. And that said, I think most people. . . Did you ever read that book "Desert," the green nihilist book. . . **Dean ** 37:12 Yeah, I've read like half of it. **Margaret ** 37:15 I haven't read it in a long time. I remember reading it and being like, "Well, this is naively optimistic." [Laughing] **Dean ** 37:23 That's the one where they're like, "7/8ths of people are gonna die." **Margaret ** 37:27 Yeah, I can't even remember exactly. **Margaret ** 37:28 But yeah, it was like climate change isn't going to be stopped, and we have to re-address how things work on a fundamental level. And because where I've been at. . . I don' t know. I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm with you on. . . like, when I read stuff about the future, where it's like, "And then it'll all work." I actually still really like "Ministry for the Future," and maybe actually should have you on just specifically to talk about "Ministry of the Future" at a different point. But it. . . you know, because it's a complicated. . . It's a caveated, "I like this book," you know? **Dean ** 37:28 It's intense. **Dean ** 38:02 That's how I feel about "The Deluge." It's like, I like "Deluge" even though I think it also has the same problem. **Margaret ** 38:06 I haven't read "Deluge" yet. **Margaret ** 38:08 Oh, there's no character development in "Ministry." **Dean ** 38:08 I think it's really worth reading. I think it's way better character development than "Ministry." It's way better. **Dean ** 38:14 Oh god, yeah. "Ministry" is so dry. **Margaret ** 38:17 Kim Stanley Robinson does not write people. Kim Stanley Robinson writes ecosystems. **Dean ** 38:21 Yeah, and "Deluge" really ropes in a lot more of rise in fascism with climate crisis and has characters that are more different class, race, gender than "Ministry" and is just like. . . it's way more compelling, unfolding, even though in the end it still imagined that states will turn around and like fix things. **Margaret ** 38:47 Well, I think there's plenty more we could talk about. And I hope we get to talk about it soon at some point. But in the meantime, how can people find you or your work? Or what would you like people to. . . or if you want to shout out any specific projects that you want to draw attention towards whether they're yours or other people's. **Dean ** 39:07 Mostly everything I do I put on--I mean, I'm kind of bad at it--but I'll put a lot of things at deanspade.net, which is my website where I collect the things I write and the videos and the many things. So that's a pretty good source for the backlog. **Margaret ** 39:23 If people want to read the specific article that we've been talking about, if you just. . . it's called "Climate Disaster is Here and the State Will Never Save Us." But also if you type in--the way I found it just now while we're...when I was trying to come up with the title--I just typed in "Dean Spade, Kim Stanley Robinson," personally, and it came up, you know. But, okay. Anything else? **Dean ** 39:47 Thanks for having me. **Margaret ** 39:48 Thank you. **Margaret ** 39:54 Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, then you should run around screaming that the sky is. . . No, don't do that. You should make bug out bags for your friends or do whatever you want. You should think about. . . Whatever we already told you what we think. But you can also support this show. And if you want to support the show, you can do so by telling people about it. And you can support the show by supporting us financially on Patreon. Do not feel obliged to do it. This is a free show. However, we're incredibly grateful because people's donations are how we manage to pay our transcriptionist, which is very important to us the show is transcribed, and then also our audio engineer. And one day--I keep promising this but we don't know when this day will come--one day, it'll pay the hosts or the guests. But for now it doesn't. 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Trixter To Sell Catalog, Name & Likeness For $30 Dollars And An Alpine Pull Out Cassette Deck Plus Cheap Trick Talk With B.J. Kramp

Episode Summary This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Margaret and Dean talk about the ways that mutual aid helps communities prepare for disasters that are already here and disasters that have yet to come. Guest Info Dean Spade is an American lawyer, writer, trans activist, and associate professor of law at Seattle University School of Law. You can find Dean's work at Deanspade.net, and you can read the article that Margaret and Dean talk about, "Climate Disaster is Here--And the State Will Never Save Us" on inthesetimes.com. You can also find Dean on Twitter @deanspade or on IG @spade.dean. Host Info Margaret (she/they) can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript Live Like the World is Dying: Dean Spade on Mutual Aid as Preparedness **Margaret ** 00:24 Hello and welcome to Live Live the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host today Margaret Killjoy. And today, I'm gonna be talking to Dean Spade, and we're gonna talk about so much stuff. We're gonna talk about so much stuff that this is going to be a two parter. So you can hear me talk with Dean this week and you can hear me talk with Dean next week. Or, if you're listening to this in some far-flung future, you can listen to it both at once in between dodging laser guns from mutants that have come out of the scrap yards, riding dinosaurs. I hope that's the future, or at least it wouldn't be boring. This podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts, and here's a jingle from another show on the network. **Margaret ** 01:53 Okay, we're back. So if you could introduce yourself with I guess your name, your pronouns, and then maybe a little bit about how you ended up doing the kind of work that led you to be on this show talking about mutual aid and collapse and preparedness? **Dean ** 02:10 Totally. Yeah, I'm Dean, I use he/him. And we could start anywhere. I became politicized primarily, like in the late 90s, living in New York City. You know, Rudy Giuliani was mayor/ There was a really vibrant, like very multi-issue, cross-class, multiracial kind of resistance happening to his range of anti-poor pro-police politics happening in the city; people, you know, in the fight around immigrant rights, in the fight around labor, sex workers being zoned out of Time Square. You know, there was just. . .it was a real moment. And I was part of queer nightlife. And people were experiencing a lot of intense policing. And a lot of us were part of work related to, you know, things that had spun off of Act Up, like a lot of direct support to people who were living with HIV and AIDS and trying to get through the New York City welfare processes, and dealing with housing. So a lot of mutual aid in that work from the get, and a lot of work related to that overlap between criminalization and poverty, from a queer, trans, feminist perspective. And that work was also tied into like, very, you know. . . a broader perspective. Like a lot of people were tied to the liberation of Puerto Rico, and the fight against the US Navy bombing Vieques, people were tied into the fight around Palestine. So it was very local--hyperlocal--New York City work, but it was very international because New York City is a very international place, and those politics were very international. So that really shaped me in a lot of ways. And I went from there to becoming a poverty lawyer and focusing on doing Poverty Law for trans people, you know, really focused on people in jails and prisons and welfare systems and immigration proceedings and foster care and stuff like that; homeless shelters. I did that for a number of years, and then increasingly felt like I. . . I just felt the real limits of doing that work as a lawyer and really prefer unpaid organizing and not being do not doing that to kind of the nonprofit and sort of like social services, legal services frame. And so my job, for now 15 years, has been that I'm a law professor. It's like a really great job that's not like. . . you know, it's not a nine to five, and that's wonderful. You don't have a boss really, and things like that. And so I teach to kind of pay my bills and what my life is really about is, you know, a lot of. . . it's been a lot of local abolitionist stuff. Like, you know, site fights around different jails and other facilities or police stations or whatever and mutual aid work and, you know, tied in for years with various aspects of like Palestine movement, especially around trying to push back against pinkwashing. And like writing stuff and making media and collaborating with artists and and, yeah. So, that's like that's that same. . .I've always think I've stayed the same, but also, I think my ideas have changed a lot over time. I've gravitated more towards anarchist or anti-state thought. And thinking a lot more in recent years about the ecological crisis and collapse and just kind of like what that means for the tactics and strategies we're all engaged in kind of all these different movements spaces. **Margaret ** 05:41 I think that that's probably--that last point--is kind of the core of what I want to ask you about and talk to you about, because while you were talking, I was thinking about how like, you know, all of these things that you're talking about--the activism you're doing in New York, for example==I mean, it's all preparedness, right? Like us, helping each other out is being. . . like, aware of actual threats and working to mitigate them? And that's what preparedness is for me, right? And, I actually think activism is a very good, solid place to come from for preparedness, right? I'd rather have a bunch of activists and organizers around me than specifically people who like, know how to skin squirrels. I like people who can do both to be honest, but you know, as compared to the traditional assumption of what a prepper or someone who's involved in preparedness, what their background would be. But I also. . .okay, so it's like I want one, I kind of wanna talk about the activist-preparedness pipeline. But the thing that I'm really excited to talk to you about is kind of the opposite, is the thing that you just brought up. What does awareness of ecological crisis do to our activism? What does it do to how we make decisions around what to prioritize? How to live? Like, for me, the thing that started this show was that I was like, "I'm very aware of this coming ecological crisis. I feel a little bit distant from other people because I feel a little bit like I'm running around screaming, 'the sky is falling.' Because I could see it and I don't understand why no one else can see it," you know? And it was basically like, how does this inform the decisions we make? Right? Which is where the title sort of literally comes from. But I think you've done a lot of work around this, around how awareness of ecological crisis impacts how we choose to be activists. And I'm wondering if you could talk about how it's impacted you or how you've learned to help communicate this to people. Right, because that's one of the biggest scary things is how do we not Chicken Little while needing to Chicken Little? You know, we need a little bit of Chicken Little--a little. Yeah, okay. I'm done. **Dean ** 08:05 I want to come back to the pipeline later. Let's remember to do that. But one thing that your question brings up for me also is just, I just want to talk--and I'm curious about your experiences of this--I want to be real about how much denial there is like. And I think this is really interesting. Like, I find an extreme amount of denial about the level of the crisis, even amongst people I know who are incredibly radical and spent their lives trying to end denial around other things they care about. Like we spent our lives trying to be like, "Look what's happening in prisons and jails in our society," or "Look at what poverty is," or "Look at what the war machine is." But then when it comes to like, "Hey, y'all, I think that, like, collapse is nigh, and that might affect our strategies." People are like, "I don't want to hear about that." Literally, "Don't talk to me about that," because it's so scary, and there's so much stress. And then I get like a certain set of like really common denial reactions like, "Well, the world has ended before." And it's like, yes, every time colonialism is happening a world, a way of life, a way people have been together is ending. Absolutely. And there is something unique and specific about this particular mass extinction event. And it's okay to say. . . it doesn't mean that those things didn't happen or aren't happening. But they're. . .but that feels to me like sometimes a phrase people use that's just like, "I don't want to think about this anymore." I'm like, let's think about that and this because actually, they're all happening together. Right? Like, obviously, colonization is ongoing and it determines who is feeling the heat fastest, you know? That, I get that one a lot or I get like, "Well, humans are bad and maybe the world should just end," kind of thing. Like, let's hasten it, or like, you know, maybe not, "Let's hasten it," but like, you know, that feels really messed up to me. That feels like skipping over and denying how much meaningful suffering we want to acknowledge and recognize and also try to prevent, and it ignores the fact that not all humans have made this happen. Actually, most humans who ever existed have fought against extraction and states and wars, and it's like just elites running state formations that have made this happen. Like that feels really not right and unjust, that kind of frame. I just get a lot of autopilot denial statements from people when I try to talk about this, that are from people like who I love and who really share my other values. And I'm just like, what's going on? How can I get people to talk with me about this in a way that's not--I'm not trying to just kick up fear and terror. And also, it's probably reasonable to feel fear and try to hold that with each other, because that's a reasonable response to the fact that I'm. . .I feel very certain that my life will end earlier than it likely would have ended because of the collapse of systems that I rely on--all of which are like terrible systems of extraction that I wish I didn't rely on to live, but I do. Like, I want to talk about that with people I love. And, you know, I think it makes such a big difference in our political movements because we're so often in conversations that are about unrealistic timelines of change by trying to persuade people, trying to. . . you know, let's persuade Congress, let's persuade. . . like, I don't know, these are kind of moral persuasion, long-term frameworks for transformative change that are dubious on many levels but also are just really unrealistic with what we're staring down the barrel of. So to me, potentially, awareness of the level of crisis that's happening, would allow us to be very humble and pragmatic about immediate needs and preparation, as opposed to being invested in.... One other thing I'll say about denial is I think one of the things that produces so much of this denial is there's so much fake good news about climate. It's like "This person is developing this cool thing to put in the ocean," or it's all tech-based and it's like tech is gonna save us somehow. And it's those kinds of, "I feel good because I read one good thing about how one species is on the rebound." That is a whole news machine telling us not to be worried and also that experts have an under control, and someone else is going to fix it. And don't look around at the actual overwhelming evidence of, again, living through another hottest year on record, you know? And so I guess I'm just--I'm sorry I'm all over the place--but I just, I really feel strongly about what would it take for the people in our communities who are so. . .who dedicate our lives to reducing suffering of all living beings, to let ourselves know more about what's happening, and see how that would restructure some of our approaches to what we want to do with this next five years, you know? **Margaret ** 12:50 I think that that's such a. . .it's such a good point because one of the things that we. . .one of the mainstream narratives around climate change--you know, I mean, obviously, the right-wing narrative is  that it's not happening--and then the liberal narrative--and it's the narrative that we easily fall into, even as radicals and progressives and anarchists an ect--Is that, "Hey, did you know that we're in trouble by 2050?" You know, and we're like, "We better get our shit together in the next 30 years." And I'm like, "I'm gonna be dead 30 years from now and not of old age." You know? And, I, maybe I'm wrong. I hope I'm wrong. I'm often wrong about this kind of thing, right? But I need to take into consideration the very likely possibility that that is going to happen. And I need to--and there's certain things that I can do to like mitigate the dangers that I'm facing--but overall, it's the same thing that you do by being born, where you're like, "Well, I'm going to die," right? And so you're like, I need to make decisions based on the fact that I'm gonna die one day. And so I need to choose what's important to me and, like, do my YOLO shit. I don't think anyone says YOLO anymore. But, you know, I need to, act like I know that I might die at any moment and make my decisions based on that. And people are like, "Yeah, by 2045 It's gonna be so much trouble." And I'm like, "2030." You know, this year, last year, two years ago, COVID," you know? And we just need to take it into consideration. All of these things that you're bringing up is a really interesting me. I took a bunch of different notes. I'm going to talk--I'm going to also kind of scattershot it. And one of the things that came up recently, we do a This Month in the Apocalypse and we do a This Year in the Apocalypse or "last year in the apocalypse," and the last year we did Last Year of the Apocalypse-- whatever the episode we did recently about last year--you know, we got some feedback where people were like, "Y'all were a little bit more cynical and doom and gloom than you usually manage," and it's true. And I try actually fairly hard with the show, because if you're completely doom and gloom all of the time, it's pretty natural to just shut down and eat cookies and wait for the end or whatever, right? And that's like, not what I want to promote. But on some level, I'm reaching the point where I'm like, "Yeah, no, this is. . . it's bad. The asteroid's right there. We can see it. It's coming. We need to act like that's happening, you know? And there's only so many times and ways you can say that. But the thing I.... Okay, one of the things I really like about what you brought up, is what that timeline does. In some ways it disrupts--including radical projects, right--like, one of my projects is social change and cultural change and one of my projects is to help people--and especially next generations of people--operate in a more egalitarian way, you know, in my mind a more anarchic way but whatever. I honestly don't give all that much of a shit about labels with this, you know? And that's like, a lot of my work, right? And then I'm like, I wonder how much that matters? You know, right now. And I wonder how much--and I think it does in kind of an.... I think this comes from the Quran, "If the world were ending tomorrow, I would plant a tree today." You know? I always saw it as like the cool activist slogan. And then eventually, it was like, "Oh, that, I think that's a Quranic slogan." And that's cool. And so as an anarchist that influences my thinking, right? About like,, okay, this slow cultural work has a point but isn't necessarily what we're going to do to save us--as much as "saving" happens. But it also really disrupts--and I think this is what you kind of mentioned--it's really interesting how much it disrupts the liberal perspective of this. And I remember having this conversation--I don't want to out this person as a liberal, [a person] that I love dearly [and is] an important part of my life, is very much a liberal--and when we're talking about, "Oh, I wish we would have a green New Deal, but it just, it won't happen. There's no way it'll get through Congress." And so at that, this person throws up their hands, they're like, "Well, what would save us is a green New Deal and it's not going to happen. So okay." And it's just, to me, it's like, well then what? You know? And you get into this place. And I think overall, I think anarchists and some other folks have been kind of aware of this for a while, where revolution is actually less of a long shot than electoral change on something that has a timeline, like mitigating the worst effects of climate change. And revolution is a shit fucking record, just an absolute garbage record. But it happens faster--but electoral change also as a garbage record and is slow as shit. **Dean ** 18:04 Yeah, and also, if everything's falling apart.... So like, I think that the systems that we live under, like the food system and the energy system in particular, are, you know, I think we saw this with COVID, the supply chains breaking down really quickly. Like the whole global supply chain is already like a shoe-strung, ramshackle, broken, messy, really violent thing and it falls apart--it's barely patched together--and it falls apart quickly when it's disrupted. And there's no reason to think we wouldn't have more pandemics soon. And there's no reason to think we won't have other major disasters, both resulting from political stuff and from ecological stuff and from economic access. So, if we know that the things we live under are falling apart, it's not like. . . It's like it's not even like a revolution like some people topple something. It's like things are just cracking, toppling unevenly across space and time across regions. And how do we want to be thinking about our lives? I like that you brought up that "YOLO," sharpens your own priorities, like who do I want to be near? What do I want? Who do I want to be with? How do I? What kind of person...skills would I like to have when that comes up? This relates to the kind of activist-prepper pipeline thing. Like, learning how to facilitate a meeting with a lot of people who are different from each other is really useful. Like my beloved, beloved, dear friend lived through Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. She lived in a really big apartment building that's part of a complex of two really big apartment buildings. And she was like, "The thing I really wish I'd known how to do would be to facilitate a great meeting for that many people--even if everyone didn't come." People were already supporting elders in the building, trying to help each other in every way possible, but she wished there had been big meetings to help facilitate that more. So those kinds of skills, knowing how to help people share stuff, knowing how to help deescalate conflict, knowing how to...what to do when intense men are trying to take things over, you know, and knowing how to organize around that. These are things that a lot of activists who are in any number of movements know how to do. So like knowing those skills and then also knowing it's going to actually be really...like it's going to be really local. There's going to be a level of just like, "Do people have stored water on my block? How much? What stored water do we have to share? If I get more people on my block to store more water now, then when the water stops flowing we'll have more water on the block." I think a lot about something you said in one of your episodes about how it's more important to have a tourniquet than a gun. Like just things that you can share. Partly, it's like, if more people are carrying tourniquets or Narcan or any of the things we know are about how I'm then a person who doesn't need that and I'm a person who could share it. So just that aspect of preparation, that's already what works. You know, we already live in a bunch of crises. Like, lots of our community members are in prison, people are living outside. Like, we live with so much crisis. We already kind of--if you're working on those things, you know a bit about what that's like, what you want to have in your bag, what kind of things would prepare you for the fight that's likely to break out or emotional crisis people are likely to be about to fall into or whatever. So I feel like that kind of thinking, it's like when we get to this level of awareness about the crises we live in and we're like, "It's not 2050. It's already happening/it's the next pandemic, which could be much a worse pandemic and start any day now. Or it's the next storm coming to where I live or fire or smoke," or whatever. Like when we accept that more, which is like this whole difficult process about accepting our own mortality, accepting that things change, accepting. . . ridding ourselves of like, nationalism that tells us the United States is forever and will always be like this, you know, all these illusions are like so deep in us, like when we do that, it just clarifies what this short, precious life is about. You know what I mean? It gives us a chance--and there's a lot of heartbreak. It's like, wow, I won't be with all the people I love who live all over the country or all over the world when this happens. I don't know when this is happening. I don't know how it's gonna unfold. There's so much powerlessness. And, what are the immediate things I want to do about appreciating my life right now and setting things up as to the extent that I can--I mean I can't prepare to prevent it--but I can be like, "Yeah, I'm gonna store some water," or "Yeah, I would rather live closer to this person," or whatever it is, you know? I feel like people deserve a chance to ask those questions of ourselves and then, politically, to stop doing tactics that are based on a lie, that things are going to stay this way forever or even for a while. Because that feels like. . . I'm like, I want to stop wasting our beloved, precious time, you know, on shit that's too. . . It's on a timeline that's not real. You know? **Margaret ** 22:45 I wonder if it's like. . .To me--I don't talk much about my romantic life on the podcast, but I'm polyamorous--and one of the things that distinguishes a partner versus a sweetie is that I make my life plans incorporating partners, you know? Not necessarily like, oh, we're gonna live together or whatever. But they're like, these are the people that I like, from a romantic point of view, and being like, I am going to make my decisions absolutely, including these people. It's like we need to date the apocalypse. We need to just accept that the apocalypse is our partner. Like, we need to make our decisions incorporating the uncertainty and. . . the uncertainty about what's to happen, and the likelihood that what is coming is very different than what is currently--or certainly than what was 10 years ago. I mean, even like. . . I don't know, talking to my friends who I've been friends with for 10-20 years, I'm like, we'll talk about 10 years ago and we'll be like, "That was a different world politically," right? It was just a completely fundamentally different world. And, you know, the future is going to be really different. And that is, you know.... For me, the biggest decision I made was around preparedness--and everyone has a different relationship with their families--I moved a lot closer to my family. I moved within one tank of gas to my family and back. And, you know, that is the single biggest step that I took in terms of my preparedness, and you know, that's far more important to me than the, probably, about nine months' worth of food, my basement. But, you know, I live in the mountains and have a lot of storage. **Dean ** 24:41 Yeah, I think there's a piece of this about getting to divest. Like, I mean, so much of what liberalism is and what nationalism is, is it tells us that if you're mad about what's happening, where you live, you should appeal to the people who govern you and you should further invest in their system and show up and participate in it. And maybe you should even run for office. It's all about going towards, because that thing is going to deliver you what you want or not depending on how well you appeal to it. And when we're like "That thing," you know, "first of all is rotten and is never going to deliver us anything but war and destruction and that's what it was made for. That's what it does." But also, like, even those of us who know that, even though those were like, "Yeah, I hate the United States. I'm not trying to improve it or fix it or make it into a wonderful.... Even those, we still, you know, we're still very invested. Like, you know, I have a really mainstream job or there's people I know, who want to own a home, all these things that we've been told will make us safe, it turns out they won't? It turns out already they didn't and haven't for lots of people for lots of reasons for lots of times, you know? See 2008 crash, see, you know, hurricanes did taking out all-Black property and displace Black people. All the things. All the uneven, horrible, terrible violences of Capitalism and crisis. But it's really a dead end. You know, when people ask me all the time about going to grad school and I'm like, "I don't know, do you want to spend the last--possibly the last-- few years of your life doing that? Will you enjoy it? Like will it let you do art and activism and whatever else you want or will it be a slog that you're just putting in this time because you think in 10 years, you'll have the job you want? In which case, no. Like for me that kind of invitation to divest from things that I don't really want or believe in any way or to really be like, ?Why am I saying yes to this? Why am I saying no to that?" is one of the liberating aspects of accepting how dire things are that I want people to get to have. Because it's about letting go of stuff that doesn't work and that was never going to work, but like really, really, really. . . Like the Green New Deal. Like if I dedicate my life to passing and Green New Deal and Medicare for all in this political climate with this time, like, it's not gonna happen, you know? And even I think many people who are liberals know that, but it's like, what would happen? Like, do I really? Do I want to produce my own abortion drugs and hormones for my community out of my basement? Do I want to. . . Like, what do I want to do that is immediate support to people I love and care about instead of deferred, you know, wellness, "hopefully,"--if we can convince elites? **Margaret ** 27:19 I like that idea. And I'm going to think about that more. I really liked the perspective of just specifically divesting, and I even. . . It's one of the things I sometimes try to convince the liberals in my life is that the way that incremental change happens isn't from people asking for incremental change, it happens when you're like, "Oh, we don't need you anymore. We've created our own thing," then the State is like, "Shit, shit, shit. No, we can do it too. We promise!" You know? And make them rush to catch up with us. And to compare it to something with my own life, when I when people ask for professional advice in a creative field, one of the reasons I like pushing DIY as a good intro--and even as someone who, you know, I do the show, which isn't quite DIY, it's collectively produced, but I'm one of the collective members, but started off DIY--and then I also have a corporate podcast, right, where, I get my salary from doing a podcast. And the way that you do things is you do things so well that the people who gatekeep look for you to invite you in, rather than going to them and begging for access. You declare that you're too cool to go to the club, and then the club asks you to come in, you know? And in order to do that, you have to genuinely be too cool for the club. But then sometimes when people give you salaries, it's fine and you can use it to fill your basement with food and give it to people and shit. And I think about that even with the Green New Deal stuff, it's like, well, that's not going to happen--probably at all--but it would need to be them co-opting a successfully organized wide-scale, decentralized movement, you know? **Dean ** 29:11 And the Green New Deal is like the prior New Deal, it's a deal to try to save Capitalism and extraction. It's very drastically inadequate for anything that would. . . I mean, so much of what's happened environmentally is not preventable at this point anyway, you know--in terms of what's already been set in motion--much less the idea that something. . . I mean, it's all based on the idea of maintaining a Capitalist job framework. I mean, it's just, it's really, really, really, really, really, really inadequate. And the United States is the world's biggest polluter ever and has. . . The US military is the most polluting thing ever for reasons. It's not just gonna be like, "Oh, you know what, those people those hippies were right, let's stop." You know what I mean? Like, the idea that our opponents are gonna just change their minds because we tell them enough. You know? It's just so. . . It's like, we've been told. . . And it's so like. . . We've just we've been given that message so relentlessly that if we're just loud enough, if there's just enough of us in the streets. And I think a lot of people saw Occupy and saw 2020 and see like, "Wow, this is so. . ." you know, Standing Rock, see these moments where people really, really show up and put everything on the line and are incredibly disruptive. And our opponents just right the ship and suggests that we don't live in a democracy--and we never have. They're not persuadable. Like, it's not going to happen through those kinds of frameworks. And yet, I think that the kind of like brainwashing or the fiction version of the Civil Rights Movement that we've been given is so powerful. Like people really are like, "If I go to a march then. . ." I guess one of my questions at this point in life, too, is how can we bring new people into our movement, because more more people are like unsatisfied, miserable, terrified for good reasons, wonderful mobilizable. How do we bring people in and have ways that we engage in action together that help people move towards a perspective that isn't liberal? So help people move away from love, just thinking they need to get their voice heard to like, "Oh, no, we actually have to materially create the things we want for each other." We have to directly attack our opponents' infrastructure. And we have to have solidarity with everybody else who's doing that instead of getting divided into good protesters and bad protestors, and all that stuff that you see happening, you know, every day. That to me, that question, like, what's the pedagogy. . . What's a pedagogical way of organizing that helps people move out of those assumptions, which are so powerful and are really in all of our heads. It's just a matter of degree. Like, I feel like it's a lifelong process of like trying to strip liberalism out of our hearts and minds, so to say. As they say. As liberals say.  **Margaret ** 31:55 I really liked that way of framing it. I think about how one of my friends always talks about the way to judge the success of actions--and I don't think that this is the only way. I think that sometimes, like "Did you accomplish your goals?" is a very good way. But I think that one of them is, "Does this tend to give the participants agency? Because I think that agency is--I mean, it's addictive--but it's in the same way that air and water are addictive, you know? The more you experience agency--and especially collectively produced agency--the more I think that people will tend to stay in the movement, even as their ability to express that agency, like even when the movement ebbs, right, people who learned. . . You know, there's this thing that I think about with 2020, and 2020 has been memory hold completely, but on some level, everyone in 2020 who had never before seen a cop car on fire or never before seen the police retreat, I remember really clearly the first time in my life I saw the police retreat, because it never seemed like it was a thing that could happen. I've been doing direct action protesting for like eight years before I saw that police retreat, because the way that US tactics tended to work in protest didn't tend to do things that made the police retreat. And that protest where I saw the police retreat, we did not win our strategic goals, right? But it's part of why I am still in this movement is because I can't forget that feeling. And so, yeah, I think that for we people are systematically stripped of agency, learning to invite people into space to collectively create agency is really important. But that said, I do think that actually--especially sort of anti-State leftism, which tends to be less structured, which I actually don't think is inherently a positive or negative thing about it--is that I think one of our biggest stumbling blocks is we're bad at bringing people in. **Dean ** 34:13 Yeah, the insularity of some of the more insurrectionary work is, I think that is exactly it. It's like yes, you can have your little cell that's going to go into an amazing sabotage action or an incredible, you know, deface something or, you know, make something about the more machinery of the prison system or something harder, but how do people join? How are people? And also how to take those steps from like, "Wait, I'm really mad at what's happening in Gaza," or  "I'm really pissed about what's happening with the environment," or "I'm really scared about how the police are," or whatever, to finding what's most available to find, which will often be organizations or groups that are doing a good job recruiting new people but maybe using not very bold tactics. How do we have those groups also be in better. . . You know, I was just reading Klee Benally's book and one of the things Klee talked about is de-siloing the above ground from the underground, like having there be more solidarity is something I've been very concerned about, especially since the recent indictment of the forest defenders and in Atlanta. How do we not have people be like, "Well, the ones who were just flyering are just good protesters, and the ones who, you know, did sabotage and lived in the forest are bad." How do we build such a strong solidarity muscle--which means we have to break ties with like the pacifism narrative--how to build the strong solidarity muscle so that people can get recruited into our movements wherever they get recruited, whatever interests them, whatever tactic they first stumble upon, and then can take bolder action and take more autonomous action, cause there's also kind of passivity in our culture. Like, wait for the experts to tell you. Wait for the people at the nonprofit to tell you. Wait for the group that organizes protests to tell you when to go home, instead of like, "What do me and my friends want to do? What do I want to do? Where it's my idea to go, go off and do something else that's potentially very disruptive to our opponents?" So how to have people get what you're calling agency, or what I might call a feeling of autonomous power and inventiveness and creativity and initiative that isn't just "I'm waiting to be called to come to the march once a year," or once a month, or whatever. But instead, like, "Yeah, I might go to that, and I also then met some people there, and they're going to do this wild thing, and I'm gonna do that," and then how good it feels the first few times you break the law with other people and don't get caught. Like having those joyful feelings--people talk about the joy of looting a lot and after 2020 there were a lot of great references to that--you know, those feelings of like, "Oh, my God, this entire system is fake. I can break the rules in here with others, and we can keep each other safe, maybe. And we can see that we don't have to abide by this rigid place we've been fixed," you know? All of that, I think does--like you were saying--it keeps people in the movement or it feeds us. Given how difficult. . . I mean, you know, it's not like anybody's doing something where they're like, "Yeah, this is totally working." So you need a lot of. . . You gotta get your morale from some kind of collaborative moments of pleasure and of disobedience that can like. . . You know, including hating our opponents and hating what they're doing to all life, you know? **Margaret ** 37:22 I really like the way that you talk about these things. I'm really. . . There's like, so much more I'm gonna like to keep thinking about as I go through this, but one of the things that makes me think of is, you know, what does it take to take ourselves seriously, right, as a political force? I think that there's this. . . Either, some people take themselves too seriously, but are not actually providing any real threat. Right? I would say that the sort of--don't get me wrong, I've worked for nonprofits before and I don't think nonprofits are actually inherently bad--but like the nonprofit, activisty, professional activism world, right, will often take themselves very seriously, but not present any fundamental threat or accomplish systemic change. And some of the people who actually do present a real threat, don't take themselves seriously. They're like, "Oh, we're just kids acting out," kind of attitude. You know, I mean, like, well you're 30, what are you doing? You know and they're like, "We're kids acting out," and like I'm like, okay, whatever you can, you can call yourself kids as long as you want. I remember one time I was hitchhiking when I was 26 and I was like, "Oh, yeah, we use the word 'kids' instead of like, the word 'punks.'" You know? It's like, "I'm gonna meet up with these other kids." And the woman who gave me a ride hitchhiking was like, "You're an adult." And I was really offended. I was like...I'm an adult, that's true. **Dean ** 38:36 I'm not a square. I'm not a square.  **Margaret ** 38:38 Exactly. And one of the things that I think about, I remember. . . Okay, there's two stories about it. One was I was I was in Greece 10 years ago or 12 years ago, shortly after a lot of the uprisings that were happening in Greece, and after that kid, Alex, I believe his name was was. . . a like 16 year old anarchists kid was killed by the police, and then half the nation, you know, rioted around it. And I remember talking to this older anarchist about it, and he was saying that there were people who did studies and they were saying that the average person in Greece basically believed that the police and the anarchists were equally legitimate social forces. Like not like each. . . I think some people were not even like they're both. . .they're all the same. We hate them both. But instead, people being like, "Oh, well, the anarchists, that's a perfectly legitimate thing that these people are trying to do, right, as a legitimate social force. And usually when people use the word "legitimacy" they mean squareness and operating within the system, and I'm not trying to use it that way. I haven't come up with a better word for this. But I think about that a lot. And then because of the history research I do, I, you know, spent a lot of time reading about the Easter Rising in the early Irish Revolutionary Movement. And, you know, I haven't gotten to read Klee Benally's book yet. I got to start it. Someone had a copy of it. But it was sold out for obvious reasons. Although, by the time you all are listening to this Klee Benally's book, which is--what's it called? Sorry.  **Dean ** 40:16 "No Spiritual Surrender"  **Margaret ** 40:17 "No Spiritual Surrender" should be back in print from Detritus books. And anyone who's listening, we talked about it before, but Klee Benally was a indigenous anarchist who recently died and had been doing movement work for a very long time. Might have actually hated the word "movement work," I'm not entirely certain. But, you know, the de-siloing of the above ground and the underground, I think that the more successful movements do that. And I think that, you know, the Easter Rising, one of the things that was really interesting about this thing in 1916, or whatever--you can listen to me talk about for literally, four hours if you want because it's a four part episode--but one of the things that happened with it, that I didn't realize, it gets presented most of the time in history as like, "Oh, well, there was a big. . . Everyone agreed that we should have this revolution." That is absolutely not the case. Absolutely the--I think it was called Redmond-ism, or something. There was like a guy and he was basically the liberal-centrist and vaguely wanted some a little bit of more freedom from England. And that was absolutely the political position of the average person in Ireland at that time. And then these crazy radicals, some of them nationalists and some of them socialists and some of them complicated other things, threw an uprising. And they threw that uprising, and it just fundamentally changed. . . That political position, that centrist position ceased to exist almost overnight. And I'm not suggesting that that is the way it will always work. But there is a way in which you say, "We are not embarrassed. . ." like sometimes you have to do things underground because you don't want to get caught, right? But instead of being like, "Oh, well, I know this is unpopular," instead being like "I'm doing this, and it should be popular, because that makes so much sense." You know, and I actually think that the Atlanta folks in the US are some of the people who have been doing the most work about doing above ground and underground work in a movement that is like. . . These are all the same movements. Sorry, that was a long rant. **Dean ** 42:24 I thought it was great. It made me think about how--and I really will listen to those episodes. I love that you're doing history. It made me think about how sometimes I feel tension--I'm going to be overly simplistic right now--but between the parts of. . . In all the movements I'm in, there's a part that's more nonprofitized, and where people, I think, don't know whether they're interested in taking over the State or not, but because they are not sure and I'm not thought about anti-State politics there, they tend to actually accidentally be statist or some of them are more explicitly really trying take over the State or believe in that fantasy. And so that set of people, when you when you have a belief like that shaping what you're going to do and you imagine yourself and you're like "We're going to run the FDA, or we're going to run. . ." you know, when you imagine the scale of the nation and then you think about your people trying to get it, even though you know your people have never had it and aren't anywhere near getting it, and maybe want to get rid of some parts of it altogether. Like maybe you want to get rid of the Border, get rid of the cops or something, that is not a non-humble framing. And it often includes a distrust of ordinary people and a sense that they still need to be managed. And those I think are like subtextual beliefs inside the work that is often happening at the more legitimized nonprofit side of our movements. And then more scrappy, you know, sometimes anarchist or less institutionalized parts of our movements are often much more humble. Like, could we stop one of these sweeps? Could we feed a hundred people in the park tonight? Could we. . . They're very like, it has less of a like, "We're going to take over and make a utopia out of this whole joint," which I think is a very unrealistic and also dangerous framework for a number of reasons, including to look at who else has tried that, you know? I think the idea of running other people in that massive way is just very dangerous and leads to different kinds of authoritarianism, honestly. But also, I think, for me, what happens when I really take into account the crises we're living in and that are mounting and the unknown intense kinds of collapse that are coming soon, it really points me to that kind of humility. Like what's doable here and now with what's going on now? And what would I do if that were my focus? And it really leads to things like direct attacks, like sabotaging, like direct attacks on our opponents, like making their jobs harder. It leads to immediate mutual aid efforts to support people's well being and preparation for things we know are about to happen. Like, what would make this less dangerous when this thing is about to happen? Like, that's the stuff. Yes, it makes sense to just have masks now because more pandemics are coming, and the current one is so bad. You know, it makes sense to have certain things around or it makes sense to build certain skills and not to be overwhelmed. I think some people get really overwhelmed by the idea of, "Oh my God, I'm such a turn my whole life around, become a hunter, become someone who can farm tons of food," I know that's not gonna happen for me. I'm not going to become an expert farmer and hunter. I'm not going to have the skills of somebody from the 1800s in the next few years. It's not what I built my life to do. My body wouldn't be good at it. But what is within reach that's. . . How does it reorient me towards these very humble things that are both humble and that have a little more faith in other people? Like a little more faith that if we stored more water on my block--I don't need everyone on my block to become interested in this--but if a few more people in my neighborhood were interested in this, we could store some more water. And if it feels. . . I just need to find some people who are interested. I don't need to have every single person be interested. And I don't need to convince everyone this is happening. But I also shouldn't just do it by myself. Like somewhere in the middle. And this relates also to the pipeline question, like why are people who've been involved in organizing and activism often good at prep? One of the things is like--as I think your podcast does a great job showing--prep should be collective and not individualist. It shouldn't be about "How can I have the biggest gun to protect my horde?" And instead, it's like, how do I care about people even if I don't like them. And that is something that our movements are about. It's like, how do I care about people, even if they're annoying, even if they don't speak all the same kinds of terms, even if they don't have my exact identities? How do I care about people because they're around me and they're thirsty? And that skill, that's also going to be about "Who do I want to be in the end times?" Like, I'm living through a very, very hard time in human history, what kind of person do I want to be? I hope I'm generous. I hope I'm thoughtful. I hope I am oriented towards attacking things that hurt life and caring for life. And it's not easy to do those things in this society. And so what would I want to change about what I've learned and what I know how to do to get a little closer to that. I'm going to die either way. Like we're all gonna die even if we're totally wrong and there's no collapse and everything's great. We're all going to. So these questions aren't bad to ask even if things turn out totally fine.  **Margaret ** 47:28 No, I, I really liked this, this way of framing it. And it is. . . One of the things I've been thinking about a lot lately is I've been thinking about my own cynicism. And I don't feel like. . . I feel like misanthropy is not the right word, because everyone I know who's like a misanthrope is kind of an asshole about it. You know? But it's like, once you realize that everyone is disappointing, you no longer have to judge the disappointing people as much, because then you realize that you're disappointing, right? You know? And I'm like, "Oh, everyone kind of sucks." And then you're like, "That includes me. I'm not better than everyone else. So now I should look after these people who kind of suck." And like, all of a sudden, I no longer have this thing where I'm like, oh, queers or anarchists or queer anarchists are the enlightened people and all the cis people are terrible and all the straight people are terrible. And I'm like, look, there are systems that privilege people of certain identities over certain other identities, right? But there's nothing about being a lady who likes other ladies that makes me a better person than someone else, you know? And like, and so then I'm like, okay, well now I care about everyone because I dislike everybody. This is not what I actually advocate for other people to do. But this is kind of where I'm at a little bit personally. I really like this idea of pointing out how we care about people that we don't necessarily like? And this is the thing that's always felt strongly about communities. Community is the people who you're doing a thing with or like to live near or, you know, whatever, rather than the people where you all agree about the current way to define the following word. And that said, I mean, there's people who are like, "Well I might live near them, but they're a racist who wants to hurt my friends." You know? But then again, I've also seen people--I know it's controversial--but I've seen the people do the work of be like, "Hey, white person to white person, don't be such a fucking racist. What the fuck is wrong with you?" And I've seen that work. Or, I've been part of a queer land project in a rural area where the neighbor starts off a little bit like, "What? What's a pronoun?" you know? And then it's like, "I don't really get it, but you can use my tractor."  And I'm like, "Great!" Now we're on the same side in terms of certain important decisions, like should we all starve to death when the food system collapses.  **Dean ** 50:00 And safety can include--I think we see this a lot with people who've been working around domestic violence and intimate violence in our communities--where you're like, "Yeah, there's a guy who lives down the block and he has a lot of guns and he's really, really reactive and he's someone we all need to be aware of." It's like not everyone is gonna move towards us. And so preparedness can also be about how we are currently supporting anybody who's living with him? And how are we preparing to support us all in regard to him if that need be? Like that kind of just frankness, you know? Like just being clear with ourselves about. . . But that's different. I do think that one of the downsides of social media has been--for me--like doing activism for many years before it started and then how it exists now, because it gives us a feeling that we could reach anyone--which of course, isn't true. Most of us just reach people that are in our own little silos or a lot of nobody looks at it at all. It's like there's a fantasy that I could find my real people and I could have a real set of people who really understand me as opposed to just these jokers I've been stuck with on this block or in this school or in this job or whatever and actually who we are stuck with. That fantasy that we have. . . It's true that it's beautiful when we find people to share ideas with and that some of that happens over the internet, and I love all that. But ultimately, nobody gets to live in a little world of people who perfectly understand them. And when you think you've found those people and then you actually hang out with them, it always ends up that there's actually tons of still intragroup differences and struggles and patterns. And so moving away from hoping to find the right people or climb to the right space where people will be truly radical--not that we don't stop looking for our people everywhere--but also just be like, "Well, who's here now? And what would it be like to learn how to care for those people? And also protect myself from them--to the extent that I need to.  And also try to make them more into what I want by showing them the cool ideas and hoping they come along?" You know, all of that, but not being in a fantasy that if I could just get these other people, then I would be happy. Like, that's Capitalism just telling us to claim everything, you know? **Margaret ** 52:00 I like that sometimes you'll say the thing and I'm like, "No, I just agree with you. That makes a lot of sense. And I got to think about that." And like, I like it. Okay, I've got kind of a final question, I think. . .  **Bursts ** 52:15 [Interrupting] But oh dear listeners, it was far from her last question. Stay tuned for the hair-raising conclusion of Mutual Aid with Dean Spade next week, on Live Like the World is Dying. **Margaret ** 52:40 Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, you should tell people about it. And all of the things that I always tell you to do, like hack the algorithms by leaving me. . . I hate anything that I say that involves me making that voice. I'm terribly sorry. I will never do it again. However, leaving reviews does tell machines to tell other people's machines to listen to this. And that has some positive impact on the world that is falling apart. And I need to tell you that that's what I do all day, is I tell you about the world falling apart. But you can support us as we try to alleviate it. We are saving the world, and if you don't support us, it is your fault when people will die. That's what I'm trying to say. That's "not" what I'm trying to say. Put your money towards whatever you think is best. If what you think is best is putting it towards Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness so we can continue to produce this podcast, pay for our audio editor, pay a transcriptionist, and one day pay the hosts, then you can support us on Patreon at patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. That supports all of our shows and all of our different projects. And in particular, we want to thank Amber, Ephemeral, Appalachian Liberation Library, Portland's Hedron Hackerspace, Boldfield, E, Patolli, Eric, Buck, Julia, Catgut Marm, Carson, Lord Harken, Trixter, Princess Miranda, Ben Ben, anonymous, Funder, Janice & Odell, Aly, paparouna, Milica, Boise Mutual Aid, theo Hunter, SJ, Paige, Nicole, David. Dana, Chelsea, Staro, Jenipher, Kirk, Chris, Mic Aiah, and Hoss the Dog. Alright. That's it. I'm done recording. I'm gonna go play with my dog and I hope that you can do whatever makes you happy between now and the end of all things which might be a long time from now. Maybe. Talk to you soon. Find out more at https://live-like-the-world-is-dying.pinecast.co

Episode Summary This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Colin talks to Brooke about how to asses damage to structures after disasters, what you can do when you're stuck in a building after a disaster, and ways to make your situation easier and safer. Guest Info Colin (he/him) is a carpenter, industrial electrician, and backpacker. Host Info Brooke can be found on Twitter or Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke. Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript Live Like the World is Dying: Colin on Structural Triage After a Disaster **Brooke ** 00:15 Hello and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for it feels like the end times. I'm Brooke Jackson, your host for this episode. Today I'll be talking with Colin, an experienced construction and trade worker, about how to prepare for and perform structural triage after disasters. But first we'd like to celebrate being a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts by playing a little jingle from one of the other podcasts on the network. Doo doo doo, doo doo. **Brooke ** 00:48 And we're back. Colin, thank you for joining us today to talk about structural triage after disasters. Would you introduce yourself? Let us know your pronouns, where you're from if you want, maybe some of your background in the construction industry. **Colin ** 01:19 Yeah, I'm Colin, he/him. Lived in around Western Pennsylvania pretty much my entire life—mostly in the Pittsburgh area. I picked up carpentry right after college just as a way to earn some money. Been in and out that for a while. I worked as an industrial electrician in the power industry for about seven years, and then decided I'd had enough of that and went back to doing carpentry. **Brooke ** 02:10 Okay, so is your—is your background in those trades the reason that you're interested in this topic, or was there something else that sparked you or made you kind of get into learning about it? **Colin ** 02:23 Actually, the impetus for this was a little over—actually, seems like ages ago, but actually less than a year ago, a friend had an apartment fire right after Christmas last year. And it's still that big cold snap. And fortunately, we managed to get them recovered from that, but it was only due to the fairly heroic efforts of a lot of friends. And after that I started thinking about, you know, like, what are the ways that, you know, if you don't have people looking out for you and willing to come bail you out, what can you do if you're stuck in a damaged building for a few days while you're waiting for utilities to come back online, first responders to work through a backlog? Just, how can you make things easier in the immediate few days after disaster? **Brooke ** 03:14 Nice. So is this something that you then have you had to put into practice, or other people around you have put into practice? Or are we mostly theoretical at this point and haven't tested all these things—not that we don't trust your experience here. **Colin ** 03:31 Yeah, no, I have done some of these things more in the context of camping and backpacking, just like, there are things you can do that will make the situation easier and safer. Also, a lot of my background in working in power plants involved constant safety trainings about how do you do things safely? What do you have to look out for? What are, you know, things that you just need to be aware of when you're in dangerous situations? And I'm continually surprised at how many of those applied to everyday life, and how much of that stuff we just don't have to think about when we're living in a house that has already been designed to be safe. But when you have a disaster, obviously things break. And suddenly, things that are—things that normally have the engineering and safety built into them no longer work the way they're supposed to, and suddenly, you have to take care of all of that on your own. It's not that hard to do, or even that expensive. You just have to do the planning and preparation before it happens. Because once you find yourself in that situation, it's too late. **Brooke ** 04:46 Yeah, that makes sense. And we're gonna get into those details in a second. But for the listener, I just wanted to share that Colin had reached out to us with this really great list of different things we could explore on this topic. And as I said to him, the the part that stood out most to me was he was talking about how to shelter in place in a compromised building and how to do structural triage and first aid that can make the eventual recovery easier. So we may get into a lot more than that today, we may have a second episode at some point to talk about other things because Colin has a lot of great info to share. But that was the part that really struck me and the areas that I wanted to focus on. And so right before we get into the details, another question I wanted to ask you was, how broadly is this applicable? Like, you know, there's all kinds of different disaster situations, right? We've got floods, fires, earthquakes, tornadoes, unnatural disasters. Do you have different tips for different scenarios that we're going to talk about, or is a lot of this like works across multiple possibilities? **Colin ** 05:50 It's some of both. A lot of the things you need to be concerned with sheltering in place, or just being aware of what are the things that change when systems go offline. So when you don't have power anymore and you're relying on batteries or a generator, or you lose your gas, now, suddenly, you're relying on kerosene heaters or lamps. All of these things change how you have to think about your safety in a house. Obviously, people have been living with fireplaces and wood stoves and oil lamps for a very, very long time. It's not that hard to do. But if you're used to being able to flip a switch and have the lights come on, you're going to have to make some changes. And if you don't do those things, you can cause yourself serious problems. **Brooke ** 06:38 Okay, so let's talk about the first part of that where work. Let's say we're in a situation where we've just had a disaster, we're in a compromised building—whether it be like—I guess mostly we're talking about homes, or maybe your apartment complex too, not necessarily, like, work structures. So let's say we're in that in that situation, we're in this compromised building right after a disaster, what's one of the first things that we need to do? **Colin ** 07:01 So the very first thing is always keep yourself safe, because there's no disaster that you can't make worse by getting injured. And this is especially true— **Brooke ** 07:12 [Laughing] That's a good line, yeah! **Colin ** 07:12 That's especially true when you have, you know, something like the ERCOT disaster down in Texas and 2021, and you have an entire city that is struggling, and your first responders are overwhelmed. **Brooke ** 07:28 Was that when they lost power? **Colin ** 07:30 Yeah, they lost power for I want to say a week or two? I don't think it was continuous. I think it went off, and then it came back on, and then it went off again. The estimated death toll from that was like somewhere between 250 and 700 people, which is—that's like 10 times the number of people that die from an average hurricane season. And most of it was due to things like hyperthermia and carbon monoxide poisoning. Just because people were trying to stay warm and making bad decisions either because they didn't know any better, or they didn't have the tools they needed. Most of it could have been avoided. But obviously that was a terrible situation, and Texas is still recovering from that. So yeah, you've got to keep yourself safe. Couple parts of that. The easiest thing is the personal protective equipment side. Because that's just a matter of throwing a little bit of money at the problem, and it doesn't even take very much money. This is stuff like have worked gloves around so that you can protect your hands. Keep safety glasses around, because getting an eye injury will make life real bad and real tough right now. Earplugs. Disasters are often loud, and even if they're not, things are going to sound different. So having earplugs can help you sleep better. These are, like, not—things that do not cost a whole lot of money. But the most important thing is just to look at the situation and take a beat and figure out what has changed and what you need to do to stop the problem from getting worse. So the first part of this is anything that is broken or not working the way it is supposed to needs to be shut down. So like, do you need to get the power turned off? Do you need to get the gas turned off? Do you need to get the water turned off so your pipes don't freeze and burst? These are things that the average homeowner can do: turning off the power, as long as you have access to the circuit breaker, it's a matter of flipping a switch. Water should just be a matter of closing a valve. The problem is a lot of times the shutoff valves for water don't work the way they're supposed to because they haven't been maintained. I have run into that a few times. And— **Brooke ** 09:42 I know I know at my own house, shutting off the water is a much bigger deal than it should be. **Colin ** 09:48 Right and most of the time that's fine, until you have pipes that are actively spraying water, and suddenly it's not fine. Getting the gas shut off. Usually, again, just matter of going outside with a wrench and turning the valve at the meter. But you have to have the right size wrench and you have to know where that valve is. **Brooke ** 10:09 Okay, so here's a neat—sorry to interrupt you. But I've had—for a long time I've had—I don't know if this is good, so you tell me. I got a wrench that's like specifically for shutting off your gas, it's this bright red one, and you zip tie it next to your gas main. And then if there's a disaster, you should have to go cut the zip tie and use that wrench. **Colin ** 10:32 Yeah, that is a fantastic idea. **Brooke ** 10:34 Okay. **Colin ** 10:35 I would suggest maybe string or something that you can just yank to break it loose, because having zip tie on there that you have to cut, that's one more tool you have to find before you can get to the wrench. Zipties are fantastic because they are very secure. Sometimes so secure that you can't get them off. **Brooke ** 10:50 So I might have to replace the string once in a while, but string would be better. **Colin ** 10:53 Or, the meters normally magnetic, you can put it on a magnet, you can just have it— **Brooke ** 10:58 Oh, yeah! **Colin ** 10:59 —duct taped to the side of it. Something you can get off without tools. And it's always there. And then periodically, every six months, just check and make sure it's there. And, you know, a raccoon hasn't stolen it. But no, that's a fantastic idea. **Brooke ** 11:13 Okay, so that's a good planning ahead. But if you haven't planned ahead, then, you know trying to find a wrench is generally the tool you're going to need, right, to shut that off if you have gas? **Colin ** 11:22 Yeah yeah. Then if you live in an apartment building, usually you will have access to your electrical panel, but not always. You may not have access to the main water shut offs for your apartment. You can probably find out where in the building those are. You're not going to be able to tell if they're working the way they're supposed to before something happens. But have a plan for how to get into whatever room the shut offs are in. If you have to go through a door, this may mean keeping a sledge hammer or pry bar around so that you can get through to the shut offs in the case of an emergency. And yeah, your landlord is probably going to be unhappy and you may lose your security deposit, but it's better than having your apartment burn down. **Brooke ** 12:12 Yeah, seems like it. **Colin ** 12:13 Yeah. **Brooke ** 12:14 Okay, so step one is, like right after the disaster, donning some protective gear and then going around to shut off compromised utilities. **Colin ** 12:24 Right, anything's not working, get it turned off so that the situation stops getting worse. Once everything's shut down, then you can take your time and figure out how to make things livable until systems start to come back online. The other thing to do with preparation is make sure all your smoke alarms are working, and make sure you have fire extinguishers. Because, again, fire when you don't have first responders available is very, very bad. So hopefully everyone has these things to begin with. But if you don't, I highly recommend going out and getting some as soon as possible. **Brooke ** 13:01 Okay. **Colin ** 13:02 So you now have everything turned off, you have your fire extinguishers, you've dealt with the immediate problem. Now you're faced with, how do I make the structure minimally safe for the next few days? If you have broken windows, damaged roof from storms, things like that. **Brooke ** 13:25 Okay, so it's assuming your residence is still some amount of livable and/or you just don't have anywhere else to go and you kind of have to stay. **Colin ** 13:35 Yeah, as long as you have a roof and three walls, you're gonna be fine most of the time. **Brooke ** 13:44 What about—what about the fourth wall? Why don't we get a fourth wall here, Collin? **Colin ** 13:48 I mean, four walls is great. Three walls is enough to keep the roof up. **Brooke ** 13:55 That's a really good point though, no, genuinely. **Colin ** 13:58 If a tree comes through the front of your house, you can still deal with that. It's gonna suck, but it's not the end of the world. And the things that you need to make the situation better than it would be? Not that complicated. It basically boils down a lot of times to having some plastic sheeting or tarps and a staple gun. If you can get something over your openings to keep the wind and the water from entering the house, that's going to buy you a lot of time. If you've ever been driving through, you know, the back roads and rural counties and you see the houses that have the plastic tarps over their roofs that have obviously been there for many years, those houses are still functional. They're still standing. A lot of times people are still living quite comfortably inside those houses. Doesn't look very good, but it's gonna work for a while. And oftentimes, that's all you need. **Brooke ** 14:50 Yeah, that's one of the reasons you see tarps up there for so long is that they're doing what they need to do and they don't need to do more than that. For folks that don't have that kind of stuff sitting around, I imagined that maybe grabbing some sheets or blankets or something and throwing those over the opening would still be better than just leaving it open? **Colin ** 15:10 Yeah, even the bed sheet over the window is going to stop rain from blowing in and my dogs barking in the background. I apologize. **Brooke ** 15:19 That's okay. We are a puppy-friendly podcast. **Colin ** 15:25 A staple gun is something that you should definitely own if you don't, because that's the easiest and fastest way of getting any kind of sheet, whether it's cloth, or a tarp, or trash bags with plastic sheeting attached to walls really fast. A staple gun will set you back maybe $20 tops, and makes life a whole lot easier when it comes to covering openings. If you don't, if you don't have that, duct tape will also work. However, it doesn't work as well as you would expect, especially when the weather is cold or if surfaces are wet. **Brooke ** 16:01 Sure. Yeah. Thumb tacks if you have those sitting around. **Colin ** 16:06 Thumb tacks. Hammer and nails. **Brooke ** 16:08 Yeah. **Colin ** 16:09 Anything to do to secure a sheet. At that point, you're not really worried about damaging the house because the damage has already been done, and fixing a few nail holes is peanuts compared to trying to fix, you know, several hundred gallons of water that have been blown in by high winds. **Brooke ** 16:25 Okay, so we close our openings to protect from water, from cold temperatures, probably from other elements too, right, if—blocking the sun? **Colin ** 16:36 Yeah, sun. If you're in a hot area—this is a totally different topic on its own. But trying to keep the sun out of your house, if you're in a hot situation is just as important as trying to keep the heat inside the house if you're in a cold situation. If you lose power and you're relying on air conditioning to keep your house livable, the best thing you can do is get all of your windows covered as soon as you possibly can. Because solar gain through glass will drive up the interior temperature really quickly. Doesn't matter what you have. Again, plastic bags will work. Anything, just block the amount of light that's coming through the glass. Cardboard, sheets, blinds, you name it? **Brooke ** 17:24 All right. So we've covered up our holes. What do we need to do next? **Colin ** 17:30 Covered up the holes. Things are shut down, turned off. Now you have to start worrying about how am I going to actually get back to living inside this damaged structure for as long as I need to until help can arrive and start doing major repairs that need to happen? And a couple of things you want to look at, the—obviously we're coming up on winter. So the first thing to talk about is how do you stay warm? Hopefully you have blankets and sleeping bags and things that will keep you warm overnight. But you can also look at how you can take a single room and the house and make that one room more pleasant for the duration. So like, if you are struggling to keep your house warm because either you've totally lost power or your furnace can't keep up with the temperatures, shut everything down except for one room—preferably a room that has water and power in it. So you have all of your basic necessities in one spot. If you have a bathroom basement—or a bathroom in the basement is ideal because it's usually going to be interior walls, you've got water, you've got power, and if you throw, you know, a pad down the floor you can even sleep in there. You've got all your necessities in one spot. **Brooke ** 18:56 Now are basements fairly safe places in the face of most natural disasters? Are there times when you wouldn't want to hang out in the basement? **Colin ** 19:03 It depends on the disaster. **Brooke ** 19:04 Okay. **Colin ** 19:06 Obviously if you're dealing with a flood, the basements not where you want to be. **Brooke ** 19:10 [Laughs] Sure. What about if there's been fire damage to like the upstairs of your house? **Colin ** 19:20 That depends on how stable the structure is. If there's fire damage, usually you don't want to be directly over or directly under the damaged section. **Brooke ** 19:31 Hm. Okay. **Colin ** 19:32 So that if it collapses, it doesn't land on you and you don't go through the floor. **Brooke ** 19:37 Okay. Makes sense. **Colin ** 19:38 So fire—like talking about a fire damaged structure is probably beyond the scope of what I'm qualified to do, and beyond the scope of most of the people listening to the podcast because it requires you to be able to look at the damaged structural members and evaluate, you know, how compromised are these? Is this floor burned but otherwise stable, or is this going to collapse in the next five minutes? And that's a skill set entirely on its own. **Brooke ** 20:11 That's a good point. **Colin ** 20:12 If something looks burned and unsafe, just don't go near it. **Brooke ** 20:18 Yeah, and of course, you know, burned structures and objects can be very carcinogenic too. **Colin ** 20:26 That's also true. **Brooke ** 20:27 They can really impact your health. So that's a really good point that a lot of this maybe is really not applicable to the situation of having been in a fire. **Colin ** 20:35 Now, that said, if you've lost half of your house to fire, and you have a few rooms that are still relatively untouched on one side of the house, and you can seal off the burned section of the house, again, using plastic, just so you don't have the smell of the burned material getting into the living area as much as possible, you're still better off inside the house in that situation overall, if you don't have anywhere else to go, then you are trying to, say, camp out in the backyard. Because solid walls and a solid roof offer you more protection and better insulation, even when they're damaged. **Brooke ** 21:16 Okay, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. If you have a really bad kitchen fire and lose your kitchen, that doesn't mean you have to move out of the whole house necessarily. Okay. **Colin ** 21:24 Correct. Yeah. And obviously, the best thing to do is leave and go someplace else if you can. But this is: your stocking place because the roads are impassable, or you literally have nowhere else to go. **Brooke ** 21:37 Yeah. Okay. All right. So moving into the basement, a good idea if you can, but in general is secluding yourself in part of the house. And to throw in a personal anecdote, we had this ice storm here in Kalapuya territory in Oregon—it was almost three years ago now. And most of the town lost power. And it was one, two, three days, a week, seven days, ten days for some folks—long time. And, I kind of without knowing any of this, just sort of instinctively moved us into the living room where a fireplace was because we had lost power and we lost it for a week. And we all just camped out, you know, slept, ate, played in the living room, because the only source of heat was the fireplace. So that's what we gravitated to. Anyway. **Colin ** 22:27 Yeah. And if you have a fireplace, if you have a room that's already set up for that kind of thing, like a living room, that's fantastic. I mean, there's no reason to hide out in the bathroom, if you have a place with a working fireplace. Yeah, good, go for the fireplace room. **Brooke ** 22:42 Yeah. On the downside, we had to pass into the, you know, 40 degree, 30 degree weather in the rest of the house to get to the bathroom. One in the back of the house. But, you know, for everything else, we were cozied up and warm in our one little room. Which, you know, we drove each other crazy. I will say that too being trapped in the one room together. But it was the only place that we be worn for that week. **Colin ** 23:06 Yeah, like having just a contained place that you can keep as warm and comfortable or as cool and comfortable as possible is your best option. Don't worry about trying to keep your entire house up to temperature, whether that be warm or cold. Because that takes a lot of energy to do and it's just probably not gonna be possible in most situations. **Brooke ** 23:28 Okay, here's a scenario question for you: Let's say same set of circumstances, like, that I went through, but something crashed through my big living room window, and we have to tarp over it. Is it? Is it? Is it better? Like, if I have to stay in my house at that point, is it better to still be in the living room with the fire in the tarped up window, or should I try and move to a different room and figure out some other heating source? **Colin ** 23:54 I would probably still stay in the living room. If your concern is keeping yourself warm and you have a fireplace, that's going to be your best option. **Brooke ** 24:06 Okay. **Colin ** 24:06 The issue of the window being broken and the tarp—the one problem with tarps is in high winds, they tend to flap a lot and they're just kind of annoying. The easy solution to that is back it up with cardboard. Cardboard does not like to get wet, but as long as it stays dry, it's a fairly good insulator and it's solid. And it's cheap. You can—everybody has a pile of cardboard boxes and their front hall from Amazon waiting to go out in the recycling. So take some of those boxes— **Brooke ** 24:37 I'm just gonna close this door behind me... **Colin ** 24:41 Take some of these boxes, break them down, put a few layers of cardboard on the inside just as a backup to the tarp so that your plastic is keeping the water out, but your cardboard is blocking more of the wind and keeping the plastic from flapping quite so much. **Brooke ** 24:57 Okay got it. So staying close to that the best heat source is still the way to go. **Colin ** 25:03 Yeah, it's always gonna be a judgment call as to what that is. But if you have a fire, and you are comfortable using it, and you have a good wood supply, that's almost always going to be your best bet. **Brooke ** 25:16 Okay? Makes sense. All right, so let's see, where are we even at not in our to do list here? **Colin ** 25:24 Okay, so we have a warm place to stay. And, assuming you have a fireplace, we've got that taken care of. The trickier situation is when you lose power and suddenly you'd have no heat at all. And even if you're relying—if you use natural gas for your heat, pretty much every furnace these days has an electric blower unless you have one of the, like, direct vent wall mounted furnace units that are basically just a gas flame that's passively heating. But if you're using forced air, it's using gas for the heat source, but you need electricity to move that warm air through the house. So if you lose your electricity, you lose your heat, even though you still have a fuel source. And that's something that a lot of people don't think about, especially in winter, they're like, oh, it's not a problem. If you lose electricity, big deal, I have gas. Well, that's not going to help you. **Brooke ** 26:25 That was my circumstance. Gas furnace, but needed the electricity and we didn't have that. **Colin ** 26:30 Yeah. So if you can get yourself down to a fairly small room, a bathroom, a small bedroom, even a large walk-,in closet, it doesn't take a whole lot of energy to keep one of those spaces warm. You can get the small, portable, like, propane heaters, little buddy heaters. They don't cost a whole lot, but then you have the issue of combustion in a confined space, which is a good way to end up with carbon monoxide poisoning or asphyxiation or, yeah. It can be a very bad scene. So if you're going to do that, be sure you have a portable carbon dioxide alarm. Just go to Home Depot or wherever, pick up another one of the nine volt battery powered smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, and keep that in whatever space you're running that portable heater. It doesn't matter if you have smoke alarms and carbon monoxide heaters or detectors throughout the house. Those aren't going to help you if you have sealed yourself off from those alarms so that you can try to keep the space warm. **Brooke ** 26:41 Makes sense. **Colin ** 27:22 And actually, my recommendation, even more than one of the small portable heaters, is a kerosene lamp or propane lamp of some kind. A lot of the old ice fishers for heating their ice fishing huts in the winter just used Coleman lanterns. One of the propane Coleman lanterns will put out almost the same amount of heat as a 1500 watt electric space heater. **Brooke ** 28:11 Oh wow! **Colin ** 28:12 They are very, very warm. Now also, it's still combustion. So you have to be aware of that. And they do get very hot. So you need to have a place to hang it to keep it away from fabric and other things that can catch on fire. But they will make a room surprisingly warm on their own. And then that also gives you light source, which is another thing that you're going to need if your power is off. **Brooke ** 28:39 Now, what if—what if it's a reverse circumstance. You've lost power and it's very warm climate. You're in, you know, hot temperatures. Are you still trying to stay in one room? What tools do you have to get cold? **Colin ** 28:55 That is a much more difficult situation. There are some things you can do, but it's going to require more tools and more planning. If you've ever seen the giant black tubes coming out of pit toilets, usually like a national parks, what those are doing is pulling a draft on the underground part of the toilet by using a thermal chimney. That black tube gets hot in the sun and hot air rises, you're pulling the hot stinky air up from out of your bathroom, and pulling fresh air in. So you can do the exact same thing with a house by having some kind of large black chimney. You can do this out of pipe or even black cardboard if you live in a very dry area. But this is something you're going to have to know how to build and plan for in advance. It can be done, but it's probably going to be on—be beyond the scope of what most people can do in an emergency. So really, in the situation where hat is issue, the best thing you can do is stay out of the sun and try to move as little as possible. Outside if you can, like wherever you can get fresh air, any kind of breeze, air movement, is going to keep you cooler than sitting inside. **Brooke ** 30:24 Yeah. If you know how to make like a swamp cooler kind of thing—let's say your water, you can still get coolish water coming out and you've got—well I guess you need electricity for the fan. Damn. **Colin ** 30:36 You can use the swamp cooler, you can build a passive swamp cooler. Again, it relies on that thermal chimney to create the draft. But those do work, assuming that you're in an area that is dry enough that you have evaporation. I live in western Pennsylvania, and usually in the summer if it's hot enough to need air conditioning, it's also about 95% humidity and swamp coolers do not work. **Brooke ** 31:02 And I think they can even be dangerous, right? Making it—because they can make it too humid—unsafely humid? **Colin ** 31:09 Yes. **Brooke ** 31:12 Sorry, you're getting outside your realm. **Colin ** 31:17 No, no. So the swamp cooler, you know, for listeners who are not aware of what this is, it's a—basically the same thing as a wet rag that the moisture on the—in the cooler evaporates and evaporation requires energy. So you're pulling heat out of the air and using that to evaporate water. And what you end up with is air that is cooler than it was before, but also more humid. So obviously, before that can work, you need to have air that is dry enough that it can absorb some amount of moisture. If you already have close to as much moisture in the air as it can possibly handle, you're not going to change the temperature significantly by evaporation. **Brooke ** 32:03 Okay. Make sense. All right, so we we've gotten ourselves down to one room, we figured out a way to heat ourselves, and we're hunkered in and it's gonna be a few days that we're in this situation. So what now and what next? **Colin ** 32:22 So now you have to think about, you know, the basics of survival. You need food and water. Food, hopefully you have some stores around. If not, you know, at least in the United States, getting food is not that difficult most of the time, it may not be good. But you're probably not going to starve if you're in your house. **Brooke ** 32:52 Even if you're iced in and can't—can't literally get out of your house, you probably have something in your pantry, it might not be what you want to eat, but there is calories available. **Colin ** 33:02 Yeah. You have calories. They're maybe not the best calories, but their calories. Water is trickier. Hopefully, you have at least a little bit of a stockpile, but not always. And if you have lost your water supply, or if there is damage to the mains—like again, using Texas as an example. Once your water mains freeze and the pressure in those pipes drop, you start having issues with groundwater making its way into the water mains, and that results in a boil order. So it's entirely possible to be in a situation where your taps still work, water comes out, but you can't drink it. And now you're faced with a problem of, like, how do you make this water supply drinkable again? And if you have a small water filter like the Sawyer Mini, it's popular with a lot of backpackers, a LifeStraw, anything like that, those are great. If you don't have one of those, the reason it's called a boil order is because you can always boil the water. Again, assuming that you have a heat source with which you can get the water hot. If you have a gas stove, most of the time natural gas is not disrupted by natural disasters with the exception of earthquakes. But if you're relying on electricity, if you're cooking like a lot of people do and you lose electricity, now you're kind of out of luck. So you need to have some kind of way of boiling water. If you have that Coleman lantern or a kerosene lantern, a lot of those get hot enough that you actually can boil water in a small container over one of those lanterns. It's not ideal. My recommendation is actually just one of the old school Coleman propane two burner backpacking stoves. They are absolute workhorses, indestructible. My brother just inherited the one of my parents, which I think is pushing 50 years old and still works just fine. You cannot kill those things, and you can pick one up off eBay for somewhere between $20 and $50, depending on what kind of condition it's in. And the other great thing about propane is that it has an indefinite shelf life. So if you have one of those stoves sitting around and you have one of the green one pound cylinders of propane, that you inherited from your grandparents, plug that in. It doesn't matter if it is twice as old as you are, it's still going to work just fine. Same is not true of gasoline and a lot of the other fuels. They're hard to store, they smell, they have other issues. But propane is fantastic. So you can buy it, you can stash in your basement, you can forget about it, and it'll be there when you need it. **Brooke ** 36:01 Now a complicating factor to be aware of ahead of time, of course, is that you can have a big propane tank like you might use for your barbecue, and then you can have those little green ones. And they're not—they don't necessarily all hook up into the same canisters, you know, the camp stoves versus barbecues, right, so you might not have the right size of—like if you're—if you have a camp stove and you're like, I can hook my barbecue propane tank up to it, that's not going to work with what you normally have, right? **Colin ** 36:31 With what you normally have. There are adaptor hoses that are designed to do exactly that. And a lot of times if you have outdoor events, they will use those two burner stoves but they will hook them up to the barbecue tanks because the little one pound cylinders get expensive if you're relying on those for a large amount of propane. You also can't refill them like you can with a barbecue tanks. **Brooke ** 36:54 Right. So it's so frustrating. **Colin ** 36:55 Yeah. So if you have a bar—if you have a barbecue grill already, then, you know, there's your heat source. You have to go outside to use it, but you can put a pot of water on your barbeque grill and bring it to a boil, it'll work just fine. Or if you have one of the little two burner backpacking/camping stoves, they make the hoses to go from the barbecue tank to that kind of stove. And now you can bring your propane tank inside as you need. Again, under normal circumstances don't do this. But in a disaster you can. And run the propane inside. **Brooke ** 37:35 Check your venting, check your C02 levels... **Colin ** 37:38 Again, there's a very good reason that they tell you not to do this. And if you're cooking inside with a stove that has not been designed to do this, you need to have your fire extinguisher, you need to have your carbon monoxide alarm, and as soon as you're done with it, get that fuel back out of the house, because obviously propane is flammable. **Brooke ** 38:00 Alright, so we've got a way to get some water, hopefully, and to warm up some food or cook some food if we need to. So we've got those basic elements that we can survive and subsist for however long we're gonna be stuck in this compromised building in this disaster. **Colin ** 38:18 Yeah, so the next part is, don't get sick. This means how to have a way to keep yourself clean. [Everyone dissolves into a fit of giggles] Hot tip! Don't get sick. Life is better when you're not sick. **Brooke ** 38:21 [Laughing] Yes. **Colin ** 38:40 Keeping up with sanitation when you don't have running water, especially when you don't have hot running water, is hard. If you don't have water, you also probably don't have a functioning toilet anymore. And that's going to be a problem sooner than—real quick. Takes about 24 hours, possibly less, and suddenly it's unpleasant. So have a way of dealing with all that when you don't have running water. The easiest solution is a five gallon bucket and something for urine. You want to try to keep those things separate because you're in, you know, you can take it outside, you can dump it in the grass, it'll be fine. The same is not true of feces. You need to at the very least compost that. You can get fancy composting toilets that will set you back several thousand dollars. **Brooke ** 39:41 Yeah **Colin ** 39:42 They worked really well. They have fans and tumblers and everything else. But for the van that I use for camping, my solution is a five gallon bucket with a gasketed lid and plastic bag full of chopped straw, and it works just fine. It doesn't smell that great when you open it. But honestly, it's not terrible. As long as you keep the feces covered with a layer of either chopped straw or peat moss or something else that will absorb all the excess nitrogen is really what you're after. You're fine. **Brooke ** 40:21 A brief segue as we talk to Colin's husband/wife/romantic partner. How do they feel about the shit bucket? **Colin ** 40:30 Not a fan. On the other hand, given a choice between the shit bucket, and going outside, when it's pouring down rain in the middle of the winter, and we're camping? [Laughing] The bucket is better. It's not ideal, but when you need it, you're really glad that you have it. And it's something that you can keep around, it'll set—it'll cost you maybe $10, and throw it in the basement. Hopefully you never need it. But if you do, it's there, and it will get you out of a bad situation. And it doesn't require you to put a whole lot of thought or effort into dealing with it. And then once everything is back online, and you have trash collection, again, if nothing else, seal the bucket up, put it in the trash can, and let the whole thing go to the landfill. Composting it is great, that's what I do. But if you just don't want to deal with it, put the entire bucket in the trash. **Brooke ** 41:28 Or an even poor man's version of this, you can put a plastic bag in a trash can and put your business in there and then tie up your plastic bag, set it outside. And repeat, if you forgot to get a bucket ahead of time. **Colin ** 41:43 Yes, that also works just fine. The nice thing about the bucket is then you have a sealed lid so it keeps the odor inside, and you can keep it in the house where it's warm and dry. Because there's nothing worse than having to poop in the middle of the night when it is sleeping and five degrees outside. **Brooke ** 42:03 Yeah, that's pretty awful. **Colin ** 42:05 Food waste and trash are two other big things. Trash collection, we take for granted. But if you've ever had a couple bags of trash sitting in your garage for a week because you forgot to put them out on trash day, they get real unpleasant real fast. So again, if you're in a situation where you know you're going to have to be living with this stuff for an extended period of time, try to keep your food waste separate from your trash that doesn't stink. So plastic bags, solid stuff that will be dry and relatively odorless in one bag. Food waste, again, can go in a sealed bucket, or in a smaller bag, you can keep further away from the house. If you're familiar with Bokashi, I think that came up on one of the episodes about composting. It's not, it's not composting in and of itself, it's a bit more like fermenting—kind of like making sauerkraut, but with food scraps—and basically does the same thing. You just get a bucket with a sealed lid, put your food in there, let it sit and it will slowly ferment on its own. And it can take pretty much anything. Even things that normal compost can't. So it can handle small amounts of meat and protein, cooked food, things like that. We have a bucket of that just under our sink that all the food scraps go into. And it probably gets emptied maybe once every two weeks, so that we don't have to have any food going into the trash. And yeah, it's—it's funny, like I will occasionally go to people's houses now that are just using trash cans the way people do where everything goes in the trash can. And I walk into the kitchen. I'm like, why am I smelling, like, food waste? Like I smell rotten food. What's wrong? It's like oh, right, it's because you're putting in the trash can where it sits and rots. So if you can just keep those two things separate. It will make the situation a lot more pleasant. That's a great tip. And yeah, just, you know, as much as you can, wash your hands and do all the things you are supposed to do. Brush your teeth, floss, things like that nature. Just take care of yourself and try to keep yourself together for as long as you possibly can. The situation will improve if you can just avoid making it worse. Human body is amazingly tough. All you have to do is sit and wait and most situations disaster-wise will improve on their own because the pressure on first response yours and utilities will ease up and things will start to come back online, as long as you can make it through that first critical period. **Brooke ** 45:08 Okay, do you mind now if we shift to talking about structural triage and things that we do to our actual residences, dwellings, things to look out for and know in disasters, and sort of that aspect of it? **Colin ** 45:28 Yeah, definitely. Did you have anything in mind in particular, where you wanted to start, or? **Brooke ** 45:32 Well, we talked about, you know, turning things off, of course. And then closing up holes. There's lots of other things in the house that can get damaged, in, you know, different scenarios, earthquakes and tornadoes and floods. So I'm curious, like, if there are other structural indicators or things to look for, you know, that, you know, from sort of your construction perspective that, like, oh, that's a sign of this thing is unstable, that you might not know just as a normal person. **Colin ** 46:09 Yes, generally when you get into questions of structural stability, like is this house going to fall down? If you have any doubt, the best thing to do is vacate the structure. Because actually looking at structures from an engineering standpoint, and determining when something is safe and when it's not, is beyond the scope of most people, myself included. I know what structures are supposed to look like and I can tell you when something is damaged, but I can't necessarily tell you how close it is to falling down. But the big things to look for are just like, do you see cracks in the foundation that weren't there yesterday? **Brooke ** 46:54 Okay, **Colin ** 46:55 You're probably familiar with, with how your house looks. If you see something that looks unfamiliar. investigate further, as much as you possibly can. This is kind of the best advice that I can give. **Brooke ** 47:08 Okay, what about things like crack new cracks in the wall? Like, is that is the wall crack itself a sign? Or was that—would that be like, okay, now and go look at the foundation and see. **Colin ** 47:18 If you're talking about cracks in interior plaster walls, those are not necessarily an issue by themselves. Because buildings can have a fair amount of flex to them before they fall down. Like you look at the number of houses that have an alarming lean to them and have been standing for two hundred years. Like, structures are remarkably resilient until they're not. **Brooke ** 47:45 Okay. **Colin ** 47:45 But if you have any doubt, the best thing is, get yourself out of the structure. **Brooke ** 47:50 Okay. I guess I'm also thinking about it from, like, the opposite perspective of something you might see and worry about and think you need to leave, but then actually it's okay and you could stay. So that's, you know, like the wall cracks, that might not actually be a big issue if you've suddenly had a crack on the wall. **Colin ** 48:10 Yeah, so the best thing you can do is try to get yourself into part of the house where you have as little as possible above you and as little as possible below you. So if you have a three story house, you don't necessarily want to be on that second floor for any reason. Because that's kind of the worst of both worlds, because you could go through the floor or the roof could come down on you. The best thing you can do, again, is get yourself into a small space where the only thing above you is the roof and maybe some insulation, and the only thing below you is concrete slab. Still not a guarantee that you're safe. **Brooke ** 48:54 Sure, yeah. **Colin ** 48:55 But you're gonna be better off there than in a multistory structure. **Brooke ** 48:59 Right. Yeah. We talked about how, you know, things might come through the windows or the walls, but as long as you've got your three walls in your roof, you're okay. What if you have four walls and a hole in the roof? Like things come through the roof. **Colin ** 49:13 Yeah, if you have a damaged roof, the best thing to do is get up on the roof and patch it from the outside. But that's not always possible. Especially if you have a multistory house and you don't have an extension ladder that can get you up to the roof, which is true for a lot of people. So then you're stuck with, how do I deal with this hole in my roof from the inside? Sometimes, assuming you have access to the attic, you can get into the attic and if you have, you know, a gaping hole where say a meteor came through your roof and punched a big hole in it. [Laughing] You can feed things in from the outside and then pull them back down against the roof. So you can build your patch and feed it through and pieces. Reach up from the inside, lay it down on the outside. And it's not gonna be a perfect seal, but it will keep at least some of the water and weather from getting into the house. Usually when you have that big of a hole, if you can't patch it from the outside, things are going to end up leaking and you're gonna be faced with situation where you have to try to catch the water once it comes into the house and get it back outside the house where it belongs. Again, the key for this is a staple gun, and some plastic sheet. So just, if you can hang plastic underneath the area that is leaking, or tarp to catch the drips, and then divert that water to a collection point, whether that is a bucket if it's a very slow leak, or a improvised funnel if it's a faster leak. It's not hard to make a funnel, if you have a garden hose and a two liter bottle, the garden hose thread is close enough to the spread on two liter bottles, that you can literally just screw the bottle onto the garden hose. And if you cut at an angle, cut the bottle at an angle, you can make something that is big enough that you can make a channel in your tarp, they will direct that into your two liter bottle funnel into your garden hose which you can then, you know, run down out of your attic and out of window. **Brooke ** 51:35 That's really cool, I might need to do something like that—not for disaster reasons, but just for gardening stuff this summer. **Colin ** 51:44 The two liter bottle to the hose connection will probably leak a little bit. **Brooke ** 51:49 Shhhhhh, kill my dreams. **Colin ** 51:51 Duct tape will fix that. Or if you have any of that self-fusing silicone tape they sell for emergency plumbing repairs, that works too. But honestly, as long as the water that's flowing through the bottle and into the hose is not under any pressure, the leak is probably going to be slow enough that it's not gonna be an issue. **Brooke ** 52:14 So roof damage is not necessarily something to run away from. **Colin ** 52:19 Roof damage is not the end of the world. It's bad, especially if you can't get up on the roof to fix it. But there are things you can do to keep it from totally destroying the house, the first thing to do is just figure out how you're going to keep the water from getting in. And if you can't do that, figure out how you're gonna get the water that's inside the house, back outside the house. **Brooke ** 52:44 And is that one of the biggest risks in the in any kind of natural disasters is water damage? **Colin ** 52:49 Water Damage is the hardest and the most insidious, because once water gets into the house and things get wet, now you have issues of mold to deal with. Once you have mold that can render a structure uninhabitable in a matter of days. As long as things are dry, they can last a very, very long time. But once they get wet, you're in trouble. **Brooke ** 53:15 Okay, what about the opposite side? Fire damage. We talked about that a little bit. But you know, let's say you had a kitchen fire destroyed the kitchen. Is there anything you can do in the aftermath of a fire that's going to do anything to help you save structures or objects and make the recovery easier? **Colin ** 53:36 Assuming that the fire was put out with water, you've got the same issue. **Brooke ** 53:41 That's a really good point! [Laughing] No, I didn't think about that. That's a really good point. **Colin ** 53:45 Dried back out. If you put the fire out yourself, you probably use a dry chemical fire extinguisher. So you have a giant mess to clean up, but it's not soaking wet. If the Fire Company had to come and put it out with hoses, not only do you have the fire damage, everything you own in that immediate area is now soaking wet and covered with soot and just generally filthy. That was the situation that we had with the friend that I talked about earlier with having the apartment fire, that it was kind of a blessing that it happened in the middle of winter because we were able to just go over there and get everything out of the apartment and throw it in our backyard and it just stayed frozen for a week until we were ready to deal with it. **Brooke ** 54:32 Ah, right. Because your winters are snowy and icy, not rainy, like here. **Colin ** 54:35 Yeah, it is generally rainy her. But it just happened to be in the middle of cold snap. So it was in the 20s for the most part, dropping down to single digits for about that entire week. So we just had bags and bags of wet clothing, wet furniture, sitting in the backyard under plastic so they stayed frozen and didn't grow mold. Because once things are wet, you're in trouble. So if it's not frozen, the best thing you can do is get fans on it, keep that air moving, and try to get it dried back out as soon as you can. **Brooke ** 55:11 That makes sense. I guess I've never thought about this, but it makes sense. The fire department, if they come in and they take a host of things, they don't come back and dry it out for you. Right, you're left to handle that part on your own. **Colin ** 55:24 You'll have to handle that part. And usually, they have broken windows in the process, because that's how they get the hoses in and that's how they control the flow of the smoke and the fire through the structure, is making holes in walls. Generally, once you have a fire, you also have other structural damage to deal with. **Brooke ** 55:43 Yeah. Okay. We're kind of get down to our last few minutes. I know there's a lot more that we could talk about and go over with all of this. But I want to make some space here for any other sort of critical things that you really want to talk about, teach and share with this episode. **Colin ** 56:01 I think we've covered most of the critical things. Again, the biggest one is just keep yourself safe and don't make the situation worse. No matter how bad it seems, take a minute, breathe, look at it, and think. I know, again, other episodes of the podcast, they've talked about the, like the threat onion from the military, which is the same basic idea as the layers of safety that they talk about in industrial design. And all these things say step one is your design and your engineering controls that make it safe. So the good analogy for that is things like antilock brakes in the car. You don't have to do anything for those to work. They're just there. They don't require any thought. Seatbelts and airbags are also great. Seatbelts, you have to remember to use them, and they only help—they only help after the accident has already occurred. **Brooke ** 57:06 Right. **Colin ** 57:07 A seatbelt does not prevent an accident. So when you're in a bad situation, look at what you're about to do, think about the situation, figure out which of those engineering safety controls have gone out the window as a result of the disaster. So you had a fire in the kitchen, you've lost your stove, you're gonna have to rely on your little tiny Coleman backpacking stove. That's great, it'll work. But you no longer have that automatic ignition, you're going to have to use lighter to light the stove. You don't have the combustion controls to make sure that the flame has a pilot light, that the pilot light turns off when the gas goes out. So you can have the gas from one of their stoves leaking if you fail to turn the valve off all the way when you're done with it. All these things that are part of normal everyday life that you just don't think about, no longer work the way they're supposed to in a disaster. So just look at what you're doing, and see what you've lost, and figure out how you can get that safety back on your own. **Brooke ** 58:22 Okay, that is really great. And I am wishing we had more time because I just feel like there's so much more that we could say and get into. But I think this has been a really, really great, you know, just kind of primer and information that would help people get through, you know, the first two or three days after a disaster for sure. So, I really appreciate that you joined us today on the podcast and share this info with us. Is there anything else that you want to plug or promote or share? **Colin ** 58:56 No, I think that was pretty much it. **Brooke ** 58:58 Okay, well, thanks again for being here. **Colin ** 59:00 Thank you very much. **Brooke ** 59:05 To our listeners. Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoy our podcast, please give it a like, drop a comment, or review. Subscribe to us if you haven't already. These things make the algorithms that rule our world offer our show to more people. This podcast is produced by the anarchist publishing collective, Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. You can connect with us on Twitter @tangledwild and also on Instagram. Or check out our website at tangledwilderness.org where you can find our extensive lists of projects and publications. This podcast and much of the work of Strangers is made possible by our Patreon supporters. If you want to become a supporter, check out our Patreon at patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. They are cool benefits various support tiers on Patreon. For instance, if you support the collective at just $5 a month, then we will mail you a monthly zine. Those contain essays, stories, poems, art, all kinds of great stuff. We'd like to give a specific shout out to some of our most supportive Patreon supporters. Thanks to Aly, Paige, Jenipher, Eric, David, Staro, Patoli, Chris, theo, Kirk, Princess Miranda, Milica, Marm, Catgut, Janice & O'Dell, Dana, Carson, Buck, Lord Harken, Nicole, paparouna, Funder, Perceval, BenBen, Mic Aiah, anonymous, S.J., Trixter, Hunter, Chelsea, Julia, Boise Mutual Aid, and as always, Hoss the dog. Find out more at https://live-like-the-world-is-dying.pinecast.co

This week Tom & Zeus review the recently released solo album from former KISS guitarist Ace Frehley, "10,000 Volts." Ace Frehley's new album has been hyped and discussed more than any other rock album in memory. Ace has made the rounds (the best being right here on SIOL), been everywhere on social media and has made claims that 10,000 Volts is his best work since his 1978 solo album. With the help of Trixter's Steve Brown and SIOL's very own Hall Of Famer, Joey Cassata, 10,000 Volts has taken the KISS Army & the Ace Cult by storm. This is the 6th album by KISS members outside of KISS that SIOL has reviewed. As usual they rank the songs and then rank the album and covers against the five previous KISS member albums outside of KISS. So did 10,000 Volts live up to the hype? Is this as good as the last three KISS albums? Ace's best work since 1978? A fun drinking game will be take a shot for every Ace impression on this episode. For all things Shout It Out Loudcast check out our amazing website by clicking below:   www.ShoutItOutLoudcast.com   Interested in more Shout It Out Loudcast content? Care to help us out? Come join us on Patreon by clicking below:   SIOL Patreon   Get all your Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise by clicking below:   Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise at AMAZON   Shop At Our Amazon Store by clicking below: Shout It Out Loudcast Amazon Store   Please Email us comments or suggestions by clicking below: ShoutItOutLoudcast@Gmail.com   Please subscribe to us and give us a 5 Star (Child) review on the following places below: iTunes Podchaser Stitcher iHeart Radio Spotify   Please follow us and like our social media pages clicking below: Twitter Facebook Page Facebook Group Page Shout It Out Loudcasters Instagram YouTube   Proud Member of the Pantheon Podcast click below to see the website: Pantheon Podcast Network Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alright Rock Soldiers, let's go walkin' on the moon with Steve Brown! Steve is here to talk about Co-writing and Producing the brand new Ace Frehley record 10,000 volts. We talk about the success of Trixter, the last big tour of the hair metal era, the return of that same era, and what's coming up next for one of the busiest men in rock! All this plus jamming with Eric Martin, and why Joey Cassata and it's available on all platforms now!Rock!

This week we provide you with the finest in Hair To Hair Combat! You got it… we are dipping our spandex-covered legs into the pool of obscure glam metal. These are groups with similar band names that we thought needed to go hair to hair to see who truly has the right to rock the name. If you like it glammy, sleazy, and trashy; this is your show!New to InObscuria? Every week your two hosts crawl down to the crypts to exhume obscure Rock n' Punk n' Metal in one of 3 categories: the Lost, the Forgotten, or the Should Have Beens. If you dig it… go dig it up and buy it! Support these artists and keep your devil horns and hair high in the air!Songs this week include:KingOfTheHill – “Party In My Pocket” from King Of The Hill (1991)Kings Of The Sun – “Drop The Gun” from Full Frontal Attack (1990)Salty Dog – “Keep Me Down” from Every Dog Has It's Day (1990)Sea Hags – “Back To The Grind” from Sea Hags (1989)Star Star – “Treasure Or Trash” from The Love Drag Years (1992)Starwood – “All My Girlfriends Have Boyfriends” from If It Ain't Broke, Break It (2004)Please subscribe everywhere that you listen to podcasts!Visit us: https://inobscuria.com/https://www.facebook.com/InObscuriahttps://twitter.com/inobscuriahttps://www.instagram.com/inobscuria/Buy cool stuff with our logo on it!: https://www.redbubble.com/people/inobscuria/og-shopCheck out Robert's amazing fire sculptures and metal workings here: http://flamewerx.com/If you'd like to check out Kevin's band THE SWEAR, take a listen on all streaming services or pick up a digital copy of their latest release here: https://theswear.bandcamp.com/If you want to hear Robert and Kevin's band from the late 90s – early 00s BIG JACK PNEUMATIC, check it out here: https://bigjackpnuematic.bandcamp.com/

This week Tom & Zeus review the recently released solo album from former KISS guitarist Ace Frehley, "10,000 Volts." Ace Frehley's new album has been hyped and discussed more than any other rock album in memory. Ace has made the rounds (the best being right here on SIOL), been everywhere on social media and has made claims that 10,000 Volts is his best work since his 1978 solo album. With the help of Trixter's Steve Brown and SIOL's very own Hall Of Famer, Joey Cassata, 10,000 Volts has taken the KISS Army & the Ace Cult by storm. This is the 6th album by KISS members outside of KISS that SIOL has reviewed. As usual they rank the songs and then rank the album and covers against the five previous KISS member albums outside of KISS. So did 10,000 Volts live up to the hype? Is this as good as the last three KISS albums? Ace's best work since 1978? A fun drinking game will be take a shot for every Ace impression on this episode. For all things Shout It Out Loudcast check out our amazing website by clicking below:   www.ShoutItOutLoudcast.com   Interested in more Shout It Out Loudcast content? Care to help us out? Come join us on Patreon by clicking below:   SIOL Patreon   Get all your Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise by clicking below:   Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise at AMAZON   Shop At Our Amazon Store by clicking below: Shout It Out Loudcast Amazon Store   Please Email us comments or suggestions by clicking below: ShoutItOutLoudcast@Gmail.com   Please subscribe to us and give us a 5 Star (Child) review on the following places below: iTunes Podchaser Stitcher iHeart Radio Spotify   Please follow us and like our social media pages clicking below: Twitter Facebook Page Facebook Group Page Shout It Out Loudcasters Instagram YouTube   Proud Member of the Pantheon Podcast click below to see the website: Pantheon Podcast Network Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week Tom & Zeus welcome original KISS member, legendary guitarist and the Spaceman, Ace Frehley along with Steve Brown from Trixter to talk all things KISS, 10,000 Volts, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, Vinnie Vincent and so much more! Well it finally happened! The guys got an original member of KISS on the show and this was worth the wait. There were no topics off limits and Ace was on fire! The guys discuss 10,000 Volts the new album coming from Ace with the exceptional help of Steve Brown and even SIOL Hall Of Famer, Joey Cassata! Ace talks about his relationship with Gene and Paul and his thoughts on some of the classic KISS songs and times. Some other topics include, Vinnie Vincent, Pandemic Paul, Music From The Elder, the "silly safe," Eric Singer Phantom Of The Park and so much more. The hilarious interview and episode everyone has been waiting for ... Ace + Shout It Out Loudcast! For all things Shout It Out Loudcast check out our amazing website by clicking below:   www.ShoutItOutLoudcast.com   Interested in more Shout It Out Loudcast content? Care to help us out? Come join us on Patreon by clicking below:   SIOL Patreon   Get all your Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise by clicking below:   Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise at AMAZON   Shop At Our Amazon Store by clicking below: Shout It Out Loudcast Amazon Store   Please Email us comments or suggestions by clicking below: ShoutItOutLoudcast@Gmail.com   Please subscribe to us and give us a 5 Star (Child) review on the following places below: iTunes Podchaser Stitcher iHeart Radio Spotify   Please follow us and like our social media pages clicking below: Twitter Facebook Page Facebook Group Page Shout It Out Loudcasters Instagram YouTube   Proud Member of the Pantheon Podcast click below to see the website: Pantheon Podcast Network Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode  I chat with my wizards of winter touring brother and dear friend Steve Brown, the founder of the 80's jersey rock giant band Trixter, who in my opinion embodies the essence of passion and perseverance in the music industry. Inspired by his father's advice to always strive for excellence, Brown embarked on his rock and roll journey in 1978, influenced by icons like Ace Frehley, Eddie Van Halen, and the golden era of music that set the standards for future generations. With a blend of athletic competitiveness and musical prowess, Brown found his calling, fueled by his fascination with both the artistry and business aspects of the industry.Driven by his desire to make an impact, Brown was inspired by Rick Allen joining Def Leppard at 16, which led to the formation of Trixter in July of 1984. Their hits like "Give It to Me Good" and "One in a Million" propelled them to success, reflecting Brown's commitment to consistency and dedication to every performance, regardless of venue size.Beyond his musical talents, Brown's passion for production and engineering stemmed from his disappointment with the limitations of his music's representation. Embracing the ethos of artists like the Van Halen brothers, he advocated for maintaining control over one's career, from attire to music production.Brown's entrepreneurial spirit extended to his guitar brand, where he emphasized the importance of understanding market needs and delivering quality products with integrity. Despite facing criticism, Brown's focus on relationships and genuine connections propelled him forward, proving that success in the music industry is not just about talent, but also about nurturing meaningful partnerships.In essence, Steve Brown's journey exemplifies the power of resilience, passion, and strategic thinking in achieving success in the ever-evolving landscape of the music business as you'll soon hear e so listen in cause this episode is full of some rockstar vibes all the way through!Support the show

Original KISS guitarist Ace Frehley has some hilarious stories about his days on the road with KISS, and drinking with everyone from the New York Yankees to actor Nick Nolte. He remembers roadie'ing for Jimi Hendrix, and what he originally thought at the time about Gene Simmons' new band discovery, Daddy Longlegs (aka Van Halen). Trixter guitarist Steve Brown, who produced, engineered and co-wrote Ace's new solo album, “10,000 Volts,” also joins to talk about the making of the record, and what it was like to work with one of his childhood heroes! Plus, Ace talks about his relationship with Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, the 1996 KISS reunion tour, and how he feels about not being included in KISS' final live show. Purchase “10,000 Volts” album: https://mnrkheavy.com/collections/ace-frehley2024 Ace Frehley 10,000 Volts tour & VIP tickets: https://www.acefrehley.com/tour_dates/index.php STAY CONNECTED:TikTok: @ChrisJerichoInstagram: @talkisjericho @chrisjerichofozzy Twitter: @TalkIsJericho @IAmJerichoYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ChrisJerichoFozzyWebsite: https://www.webisjericho.com/

This week Tom & Zeus welcome original KISS member, legendary guitarist and the Spaceman, Ace Frehley along with Steve Brown from Trixter to talk all things KISS, 10,000 Volts, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, Vinnie Vincent and so much more! Well it finally happened! The guys got an original member of KISS on the show and this was worth the wait. There were no topics off limits and Ace was on fire! The guys discuss 10,000 Volts the new album coming from Ace with the exceptional help of Steve Brown and even SIOL Hall Of Famer, Joey Cassata! Ace talks about his relationship with Gene and Paul and his thoughts on some of the classic KISS songs and times. Some other topics include, Vinnie Vincent, Pandemic Paul, Music From The Elder, the "silly safe," Eric Singer Phantom Of The Park and so much more. The hilarious interview and episode everyone has been waiting for ... Ace + Shout It Out Loudcast! For all things Shout It Out Loudcast check out our amazing website by clicking below:   www.ShoutItOutLoudcast.com   Interested in more Shout It Out Loudcast content? Care to help us out? Come join us on Patreon by clicking below:   SIOL Patreon   Get all your Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise by clicking below:   Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise at AMAZON   Shop At Our Amazon Store by clicking below: Shout It Out Loudcast Amazon Store   Please Email us comments or suggestions by clicking below: ShoutItOutLoudcast@Gmail.com   Please subscribe to us and give us a 5 Star (Child) review on the following places below: iTunes Podchaser Stitcher iHeart Radio Spotify   Please follow us and like our social media pages clicking below: Twitter Facebook Page Facebook Group Page Shout It Out Loudcasters Instagram YouTube   Proud Member of the Pantheon Podcast click below to see the website: Pantheon Podcast Network Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode Summary This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Ben and Brooke talk about communication systems during a disaster. They cover basic communication infrastructure and equipment as well as what kind of information is vital to be able to communicate when cell phone towers go down. They also cover just how awesome amateur radio is. Guest Info Ben Kuo (he/him) is an amateur radio operator. Ben can be found on Mastodon @ai6yrr@m.ai6yr.org Host Info Brooke can be found on Twitter or Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke. Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript Live Like the World is Dying: Ben on Communicating After a Disaster **Brooke ** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm Brooke Jackson, your host for this episode. Today I'll be talking with Ben about communication and sharing information after disasters. But first, we'd like to celebrate being a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts by playing a little jingle from one of the other podcasts on the network. Jingle, Jingle jingle goes here. **The Ex-Worker Podcast ** 00:45 The border is not just a wall. It's not just a line on a map. It's a power structure, a system of control. The border does not divide one world from another. There is only one world and the border is tearing it apart. The Ex-Worker Podcast presents "No Wall They Can Build: a guide to borders and migration across North America" A serialized audio book in 11 chapters released every Wednesday. tune in at crimethinc.com/podcast. **Brooke ** 01:29 And we're back. Ben, thank you so much for joining us today to talk about communication and information sharing after a disaster. We'd love to know a little bit more about you if you're willing to share your pronouns and where you hail from and anything else that you want to say to introduce yourself?  **Ben ** 01:49 Sure. My name is Ben Kuo, and I am in Ventura County, California. My pronouns are he and him. And my background in disasters is I have been very involved in responding to disasters, providing information on social media, and making sure that people, you know, get the information they need to stay safe and stay healthy and help other people. **Brooke ** 02:17 Nice. Was this something that you got into because of a disaster that happened? Or was it something you were interested in before...before it became useful in this context? If that makes sense? **Ben ** 02:28 It's interesting. I really got involved in this in 20--I believe it's 2018--when Hurricane Maria hit, and hurricane Maria was a category five hurricane, and I am...one of my hobbies--and I have many hobbies-- but one of them is amateur radio. And for folks who have never heard of amateur radio, what it is, is a hobby where you learn how to use the radio and to communicate with people. And that is locally, you know, with people in your area, that is internationally. And you can talk to people all across the globe using just a radio, a power supply, a battery, and an antenna without any of the world being up. So that's no internet, no telephone, no power supply, no power grid. And you can communicate with people all over the world. And it's fun. And I started because it was a lot of fun. But it ends up being very, very, very useful nowadays with the increasing pace of disasters. And so I became an amateur radio operator partially because of the emergency aspect of it. There's a big community around it. But also just because it's a lot of fun for the technology and playing with the technology. So the big story of how I got into the disaster is Hurricane Maria was bearing down on the Caribbean. And it is...I don't know if you've seen the trend in recent years but hurricanes have been spinning up much faster and much more intensely. And it's called rapid intensification. And because of that you don't have quite the warning that you used to with hurricanes. And so people go, "Oh, we can watch this. And we can react." or "Oh, it's gonna be coming in a week." And that's not happening as much anymore. So what happens is someone says, "Hey, it's a tropical storm. We don't have to worry too much." And all of a sudden, it goes from a tropical storm to category five hurricane. This actually happened only a few months ago in Mexico. A tropical storm, everyone says, "Oh, it's just going to be a tropical storm." Even the expert of the National Weather Service said, "Oh, it's just gonna be a tropical storm." And it went from a tropical storm to category five hurricane. And it totally decimated a resort area in Mexico.  **Brooke ** 05:16 I had no idea. And it's interesting because I feel like I seem to hear about them going the other direction so often. Like, oh, there's a hurricane off the coast and it, you know--especially on our coast here on the West Coast--and then it dissipates into, you know, just a tropical storm or what have you. So I wasn't aware that we're seeing an increase of them going from tropical storm to hurricane. That's really interesting. **Ben ** 05:40 Yeah, I think the scientists say, you know, it's an outgrowth of warmer oceans and with the climate crisis and all that, you have more energy. So it hits a warm spot in the ocean and all sudden, you know, it becomes quite crazy. So how I got involved is--I was not involved very much with emergencies and disasters, until hurricane Maria--and I was, you know, monitoring things here and there. And I learned that amateur radio was the only way to get to the...there's a little island nation called Dominica, it's not affiliated with any large country. It's kind of its own country. And they were cut off from the world by hurricane Maria. So they had, I guess they lost 90% of the roofs. They lost...they had no power system. They lost their telephones. And interestingly enough, everyone thought they were okay, because they didn't hear any messages from Dominica. They were like, "Oh, category five, it should be fine." And no one called for help. [Brooke exclaims incredulity] I got on--the amateur radio operators had already been active. There's an active Amateur Radio Group on the island. And I stumbled upon them and discovered they were in big trouble. And they were just begging for help. And so I stumbled in here--I'm all the way in California--and using the magic of amateur radio was actually talking to these folks in the Caribbean. And actually also using the internet kind of to bridge some of the parts of it. It's interesting, all the technology aspects. But the important thing ended up being that they were in a lot of trouble. There's no one to help, and they just needed to get information about what was going on. And I started relaying information to the amateur radio operators there in the region on what was going on, what help was on the way or not on the way. In the meantime, they actually had...the amatory operators actually arranged a rescue of the Prime Minister of the country. And that's like, you know, rescuing the President of the United States. Yeah, they rescued the president of Dominica, the Prime Minister. And they had...they were laying information back and forth like, "Oh, we need this. There's a problem here. People here need dialysis. How can we get help from these people? These people are trapped." At one point, I relayed information from them about someone who had been...who was able to--I guess there's limited cell phone coverage within the country--where they were able to tell somebody else that they were stuck underneath the house. And that got relayed by amateur radio operators out of the country, and I got it and it went back into the country elsewhere. And I rescued somebody. And in fact, I ended up relaying information from the US Embassy. And they actually were sending in...they actually sent in an entire warship, the USS Wasp. It's an amphibious carrier. And they were airlifting US citizens out of the country. And they would actually go in and, you know, drop people off and pull them out of the, you know, whatever vacation villa they're staying at and have them evacuate. It was a big operation. No one...no one really heard about it here. But that was kind of my introduction to the fact that amateur radio was very, very useful in really, you know, like a worst case scenario. And I learned a lot of lessons there, for sure, about how to deal with it. And eventually after Hurricane Maria hit Dominica, it actually hit Puerto Rico.  **Brooke ** 09:37 What year was this by the way?  **Ben ** 09:39 It was September of 2017. And it first hit Dominica, but then the hurricane curved up and it hit Puerto Rico. And I was involved in that. There's a huge...Puerto Rico also had no communications. And the only communications was amateur radio for a good two days I believe. And I was really relaying information back and forth there. And how this ties into social media is I was collecting all this information, relaying it back and forth. And I said, "Hey, I'm listening to all this, I can see what's going on and I might as well post it up on Twitter." And I did that. And I also put up a YouTube stream of all the radio communications that were happening.... **Brooke ** 10:25 Back when Twitter was good and useful and we loved it.  **Ben ** 10:29 Yeah, back when it was a cause for good as opposed to what it is now. **Brooke ** 10:33 Sorry, go on. Mourning the loss of Twitter. **Ben ** 10:38 Yeah, exactly. It's actually quite a thing. So interesting...that would have been it for me. I was going to delete my account. But shortly after that, there was a fire in my own county. And it's actually between Ventura and Santa Barbara County, the Thomas fire. And I said, "Oh, I've got a social media account." And one of the things about amateur radio is you learn how to listen to what's on the radio. And not...this is not broadcast radio. But this is police and fire channels, official agencies, people talking back and forth about what's going on the ground on the scanners. And I was relaying what I heard there. And my followers went from, I think, you know, a few thousand to, you know, 50,000 people because information was so useful to know. So, you know, if you think about what you see on network TV, you'll see the same, you know, Hillside burning the whole newscast, no context. Where is it? What's going on? And when you listen to the Police and Fire Radio, you can say, "Hey, I know that that is in this neighborhood. The fire is moving in this direction. We need to get people out and to safety." And, "Oh, hey, we heard that there's an evacuation here." And it takes...it takes, you know, a couple hours sometimes for the firefighters on the ground to say, "We need to evacuate this neighborhood," to actually, you know, you getting that on your phone or the press picking up on it. So that's kind of how I got into the disasters. And, you know, it kind of has kept on going because, as I mentioned, you know, I think the pace of disasters has increased. I think they just saw...there's just a report this week that said we had the largest amount of billion dollar disasters in the US in 2023 on record. **Brooke ** 12:40 Wow. Like the largest total dollar value amount or like the largest number of disasters? **Ben ** 12:48 Yes. Total dollar amount.Yeah, and so, you know, it's just an ongoing, increasing need in the world. **Brooke ** 12:55 Alright, interesting. So I want to talk about what we can do to prepare before a disaster but I think it would help if we talk about, really quickly, what you lose communication wise in the beginning of a disaster because I think that's going to help make it clear why you need to prepare, if that makes sense. **Ben ** 13:16 Yeah, you know, I mentioned, you know, we are so used to having a smartphone with us. We have a phone with us all the time. It is our way of getting information. It's our way of communicating with people. We text people back and forth. We may use Snapchat or Instagram or whatever your social media is. And people don't realize how much we rely on that today. And what happens during a disaster is the first thing that goes down is the cell phone network, right? Your cell phone network goes down. The cell towers only have so much battery before they fail. And then all of a sudden you don't have a way to say "Hey, is my you know Aunt Marge, okay or not?" right? It's, "What's going on? Where should I go? What should I do? Where can I go?" This was brought home really.... A really terrible example of how we are depending on this and what goes wrong when it fails is Lahaina Hawaii. **Brooke ** 14:22 And I don't know if you listened to it, we released, just a couple weeks ago as we're recording this, I did an episode about Lahaina and kind of reviewing what happened and where they are right now. **Ben ** 14:39 Yeah, and so you're familiar with the fact that, you know, the warnings went out too late. And then the cell towers went down. So no one knew what was going on. And so you were down to, I believe there's a video of some guy without a shirt, you know, bicycling down the street yelling at people to get out. You know, that is your early warning system because your phones don't work. And, you know, if the cell phone network goes down, you know, that cell phone that you're holding is, you know, as good as a rock. You could throw it at something I guess, but it's not going to do much good. **Brooke ** 15:20 Yep. Yep. That's right. **Ben ** 15:22 Yeah. And, you know, I don't think most people think about how much we depend on communications for all the things we do, especially in a safety situation, you know. Should I be evacuating? Where's the disaster? Where's help? Where should I not be going? That is all information that when you lose communications, you've lost, and it can be fatal. So that's why, you know, as much as people often say, "Hey, well, you know why are you doing this amateur radio stuff? You know, we have cell phones now. We have the internet. Why do we need this, you know, old fashioned stuff?" It's not really old fashioned. But, you know, that is the struggle that I often have with people thinking about disasters. And the other problem that we have is--and not obviously listeners of your podcast--but we live in a world where everyone thinks that it will never happen to them. And people don't want to prepare. They say, "Hey, I, you know, this is never going to happen to me. I don't want to think about bad things." And if you don't do that, then you're in a much worse spot when it does happen. **Brooke ** 16:33 For sure, for sure. Okay, so when it happens, you know, we lose...we lose our phones. That's one of the biggest things and basically all of the ways that we're used to communicating. So what do we do before a disaster to get ready for that scenario? What kind of things do we need to have on hand or need to know how to do? Please teach me? **Ben ** 16:57 Yeah, so. So some basic things you should do is have an alternate communication plan, or at very least someplace you can meet people. So say you don't have, you know, a radio or anything like that, you say "Hey, if we have a disaster, here's the plan," right? "This is where we go if there's a fire or a flood or whatever it is. What are we going to do?" Okay, and that doesn't require you to have communications. It just means you have to pre-plan what you're doing. But, you know, the first level up--and this, you know, there's kind of levels of how much you want to invest in communications--but, you know, you can buy off the shelf radios at sporting goods stores, which, you know, they're called FRS radios or GMRS radios. **Brooke ** 17:47 Is that a special radio then? Or is it like the old school radios we grew up with? **Ben ** 17:50 Yeah, so it's different. So, a lot of people are familiar with CB radio. And that's an old technology. And people still use it. But it's not really used a lot for this kind of thing, mainly because it doesn't have very long range. You can't go very far. But FRS and GMRS radios do have a little bit of range. And in radio, the key is something called line of sight, which is how far you can see. So if you are standing on top of a mountain, you can talk a very long distance. If you are in the bottom of the valley then you're not going to get very far. And so most of those handheld radios that you can buy don't require a license, you just have to pay your money and get them. You know, their range is probably--they say 20 miles--but really, practically, it's about two--five miles. And those are great for your family group. Or if you've got a group of folks that are in your neighborhood and you want to communicate then that is kind of the first step and you have now.... Now, you can say instead of all of sudden everyone's lost their phones, no one knows what's going on, everyone can turn their radio on--as long as it keeps it charged and knows how to use it--they can go "Hey, Jill, you're down the street. How are you? You know, are you okay?" "Oh, yeah, we're okay. You know, there's an earthquake. Oh, yeah. Everyone's okay. We're outside, right." So, you know, that's something that's very easy to do. It's off the shelf there. They're actually sold in blister packs at the sporting goods store. And it's a level one. It's like, oh, do you have a plan to at least communicate with your family and people in your neighborhood? **Brooke ** 19:40 Okay, that sounds so much like walkie talkies that we had as a kid but like a higher end farther distance thing. **Ben ** 19:48 Essentially, it is a walkie talkie. And that is what they are and, you know, they sell them as kids toys, but it's a first level of basic communications that you may want to consider, especially for your family. It's like, even if you look at some of the...if you see people fleeing from fires and from disasters, you know, see these videos of people, they can't talk to someone else in another car when your cell phone network goes down. And you can with a little walkie talkie. So that's, you know, you may have two people, one person in one car, another person in another car, and you can at least talk and say, "Hey, you know, this is what we're doing. This is where we're going." **Brooke ** 20:26 Do those--I'm getting into the weeds here but I'm just so curious to those--like, if you buy a set from the store and somebody else buys a set from the store, I'm assuming those must like cross traffic with each other? **Ben ** 20:41 Yeah, as long as you buy the ones that are licensed in the US. It's called FRS and GMRS. radios. GMRS actually requires a license, which is I think it's $25 for 10 years. But no one's checking on those. It's kind of the Wild West. I would advise getting a license, but they saw them everywhere. And a lot of people don't.  **Brooke ** 21:04 Okay, so if you get those planning to use them to communicate with loved ones and neighbors you may have other people using theirs that you'll have cross cross talk. **Ben ** 21:16 Yeah, for sure. For sure. And those are the same frequencies that, you know, the kids down the street. So you'll turn it on and go, "Oh, there's little kids playing cops and robbers." They are shared frequencies. Yeah, so your next level up is--and I advocate for this because I am an amateur radio operator--is to actually get a license. And in all the countries around the world, you can get an entry level, amateur radio license and you can use a lot more frequencies and much better gear even at a very basic level. And in the US, there's, I think it's a 25-30 question test. And all the answers are pre published. So you can actually go and, you know, cram for this thing and get it in a week if you're...if you so desire.  And so that actually can get you much, much farther. And so in the US it's called a technician license and you can actually.... With those, I've talked to someone 50 miles away direct. So that is, you know, nothing in between. And there's also things that are called repeaters that sit on top of hills, and you can talk to people hundreds and hundreds of miles away because they're all linked together. And there's actually...and there's an interesting tradition among the amateur radio community, which is they have groups that work on doing communications and they focus on, you know, those kind of bands on VHF, UHF, those things are all local. So you have a group of people.... In our area, they actually have people, you know, you're on a list, and they say, "Hey, who's on the list?" They're all licensed. And this is licensing in the US by the FCC. And they actually check to say, "Who's here? Who's not?" And it's a practice, right, to see whether or not. So it's a good thing to do, at least in our area. And I'm in California. It is, you know, men and women and kids and that sort of...anyone who can get a license, and, um, it's definitely something to think about. **Brooke ** 23:46 Okay, so anything else kind of on that part of things you can do before the disaster to help get ready with communication and information sharing? **Ben ** 23:58 Yeah, so the, you know, the other thing to do is I found that you need to know who is out there in the community that you are going to communicate with. And I think too many people do not think about it. You need to know who you're talking to and whether you trust them or not, and have your resources lined up. And I saw this in hurricane Maria where people were asking for help, but no one had ever met the folks, didn't know them, didn't trust them. And so, it was a very different thing, right? You're.... When you're talking to someone, communicating with someone, you need to have a pre-existing relationship with them. And, you know, I think in this world, you know, you're asking for some kind of mutual aid but you kind of want to have an idea of who it is or what group it is or do you trust them or not? And it's good to have that stuff kind of thought of, to, you know, think of think of that stuff beforehand, right? Who are the resources In our area if we had a disaster? Hey, you know, the folks in the next city, we've got to...you know, we're okay here. Do we need to bring some of them in? Do they have, you know, the resources? And would they help us if there's a problem? There's a lot of stuff that needs to be, you know, thought about, which is beyond the communication but more the organization. **Brooke ** 25:20 Yeah. Is it devastating if you haven't built out those networks yet prior to? **Ben ** 25:26 It's not. It's just hard. I think it's just harder. **Brooke ** 25:29 Yeah. Makes sense. Alright. Other things to prepare before your disaster hits? **Ben ** 25:38 Yeah, the other piece of it that I run across is because the communications folks tend to be very good at communications if they don't cover the basics, right? So you need to think about all the basic disaster stuff first, before the communications, which is, "Hey, do I have the basic food and water kind of things? Have I got, you know, all the safety stuff for myself, my family. And, you know, for yourself first, before you even think about, "Oh, do I even have a way to communicate?"  **Brooke ** 26:10 Yeah, okay. That makes sense.  **Ben ** 26:13 You're not useful in that role of communicating if you, yourself are no longer able to help. You know what I mean.  **Brooke ** 26:25 Alright, okay. Alright, shall we move into talking about, you know, you're in the aftermath of a disaster and you need to communicate and share information? **Ben ** 26:36 Yeah, yeah. So, you know, the things that happen after a disaster is people are looking for ways to get information to family and friends. And the number one thing I find is people either have to ask for help, because there's a medical issue or they need to be rescued or something like that, or the other big thing is people...I don't think people understand how much people miss knowing what's going on. Right? So if there's a disaster, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of people who go all sudden, "Hey, is my grandmother okay? Is my grandfather okay? Is my friend okay? What's going on?" right? And it is.... A lot of times people say, "Hey, if I call somebody in such and such an area, maybe they can go find, you know, whoever is missing, or whatever, or something like that, right? So this...we saw this during the Lahaina, right? There's people, you know, thousands of relatives going, "Oh no, I know somebody in Lahaina. Are they okay?" And the lessons I've learned from so many disasters is there's no way to get information into a disaster zone. Not very efficiently. **Brooke ** 27:55 That's a really good point.  **Ben ** 27:56 Yeah, so information can come out of a disaster zone, but it doesn't go into a disaster. And so, if you...so for example, if you're an amateur radio operator, generally, you could get a message out saying, you know, "Help me. I've got a problem." Or you can say, "Hey, I'm okay. Let someone know that I'm okay." If you are just someone with a smartphone, and no communications, you are just out of luck, unless you can find someone who can lay that information. And there's a lot of these systems, and I hate to...I hate to criticize some of the nonprofits that exist in the world for these things, but they have "Oh, hey, check in safety." It's like, they say, "Yo, check in on Facebook that you're okay." It's like, well, you have no way to get on Facebook. There's no internet, there's no power. How are you supposed to do that, right? Yeah, and even even the case, there's a system by a big aid organization that has a red symbol and it says, "Oh, it's a safe and well if you need to know someone's okay." And two things. One is, if you try to ask for someone's information, they say, 'What was their phone number and their last address?" And you go, "Well, how am I supposed to know that? You know, I just know that they're in this town," and whatever. There's a lot of stuff like that that's like, "Oh, do you have their social security numbers?" It's like "No, I don't have their social security." So there's a lot of stuff in the way of that. And it's a lot easier, and I found all these disasters, if someone's able to get out themselves. So like I said, the amateur radio operators can relay information to other people. So if you've got a neighbor who's an amateur radio operator, they can go "Oh, hey, I'm gonna call somebody up." This happened actually after--famously after Katrina--Katrina. Hurricane Katrina took down took down communications and there was a lot of communication out by people relaying information to other amateur radio operators they knew. So they said, "Hey, you know, this is where the Smith family is. We're at this street. Can you let somebody know at our family that we're okay." And they would pass on a phone number to call or someone to text or something like that. I did that a lot in Puerto Rico. So a lot of people who are in Puerto Rico, they have family somewhere else, they have no way to tell them that they're okay and they really don't need anything, but people are worried, right? Imagine your family is in the middle of a hurricane or something like that, or wildfire, and how do you let people know you're okay. **Brooke ** 30:45 Yeah, that makes sense. With the amateur radio networks and whatnot, you know, I know you just mentioned a few times about how you can relay information through those. And I'm curious if they're sort of existing networks of communication at all. I mean, obviously, there are folks that know each other. But do you guys have any kind of, I don't know, pre existing.... Like, do you already know where some of your people that you talk to live? Like if you had to get information to, I don't know, Montana--random example.  **Ben ** 31:27 Yeah, there's an established network to do that. I have my own opinions on how effective it is or not, but they do have a.... It's actually one of the reasons amateur radio exists in the US. It was very early in the 1900s when there were disasters, radio was the only way to get out information. And so they actually started doing that back in the days of Morse code, believe it or not, when they were relaying it. And that's part of the reason why the hobby has such a strong tradition in the communications and emergency area. And so, you know, I mentioned I was doing a lot of stuff online about, you know, wildfires and hurricanes on Twitter and what's going on. And a lot of what I do and have done is stuff that the hobby, as a whole, has been doing since its beginnings. **Brooke ** 32:22 I didn't think about how deep those roots are. But that's kind of cool to think about going all the way back to, you know, using Morse code to relay the information. **Ben ** 32:32 Yeah, well, in fact, you know, if you think about it, you know, everyone knows SOS in Morse code, right? Did, did, did. Dot, dot, dot [making noises like someone speaking in Morse code] All that came from--an amateur radio started around the same time as all that kind of communication was going on, you know, like the Titanic or whatever else like that. So, that is, you know, a long standing tradition. And before the internet, before we had phone networks, we had radio networks. So that's kind of the long tradition there. **Brooke ** 33:06 Yeah, that makes sense. So you said you have some opinions about the efficacy of the system of relay that they have now and it sounds like maybe you're not entirely happy with the way that works. I'm curious to know what you think there are and why? So, you know, if there's a limitation that we need to understand. **Ben ** 33:29 Yeah. So they have a very regimented way of sending messages. And they try to pass messages...they try to do it the old fashioned way, which is you get a message, you know, here and then you pass it. Say I want to send something to Boston. Well, they may send it to somewhere in between. And then it goes through the neighborhood and then eventually, at some point, it gets there.  And nowadays, I think it's more effective to just get out of your disaster zone and get the message there. And so, you know, for me, what happens is during the hurricane issues that I had, trying to use that network didn't work because I said, "Hey, I just need...I have a real disaster here. This is not pretend. This is not a simulation. I have people who need to know that their family's okay." I had a text on my phone from people--it was actually relayed from a boat after a hurricane--saying, you know, "We're docked here. We are okay. We just want to let someone know. And so this is the boat name. This is our location. And here's the neighborhood. Here's our relative. We need to let them know that we're okay. They don't need to send the Coast Guard." and trying to send that through a network which is used to passing it by hand, it's like can someone just call them? Like, we don't need to do this. It's great practice. But when it comes to a real disaster, why are we doing all this stuff when we can just call them up? The first person who's on a cell phone network can call them up and say, "Your relatives are okay."  **Brooke ** 35:04 That's a good point. And, you know, the children's game of telephone that you're practically doing with passing it from one place to the next place to the next, you know, is not ideal, as we all know, for many reasons.  **Ben ** 35:22 And I think that's their legacy is they don't use it as much as they ought to. And maybe they're using it more now with the disasters we have. But there's a lot of experts in the world who've never applied their knowledge. I find that also the case in just disaster preparedness in general. You have a lot of people who are disaster preparedness experts and they've never had to deal with a disaster. And the worst is that people sometimes they'll say, "Hey, you're a prepper. Blah, blah, blah," and I go, "No, the preppers don't have any concept of actually reacting to a real problem." The pandemic was the big one that I saw. All these folks who said, "Hey, watch out for the zombie apocalypse, we need to, you know, stock our homes with guns and MREs." And then when there's an actual, you know, pandemic, they go, "We're not wearing masks. We aren't gonna get vaccinated." You're going, "Oh, my gosh," you know? So there's, you know, there was a miss, a complete miss, because they're just not...you know, they call themselves one thing, but they don't have...they didn't have the experience or the right mindset going into it. **Brooke ** 36:40 So I'm curious about the types of information that we need to share. You know, we talked about after a disaster, you know, being able to relay that, you know, this person is okay, you know, finding so-called missing or unknown people and figuring out what's going on with them. But what else...like what other kinds of things do people need to relay that this network could be useful for after a disaster? **Ben ** 37:08 Yeah, help. Help is number one. So life threatening information. So if somebody is trapped or needs help, medical help. And, obviously, you have to know where to get it to. But in most cases, if you can get that information to the authorities, somebody is going to come and help you. And they just need to know it, right? So your local fire department, right? Or, maybe it's a search and rescue team or something like that. You need to be able to get that information to them. And so that's definitely a big one with communications. I don't know if you've ever seen that 911 systems go down in the US all too often.  **Brooke ** 37:53 I have heard.  **Ben ** 37:54 And if you don't have 911, you have to be able to call for help, right? And so we haven't seen that a ton where people have used radio to do that. But it is one thing. So if our 911 system here goes down, I know that I can call somebody else who can get to, you know, fire and rescue or whatever it is. So, help for sure. And the other part of it, the communications, is for your community, is helping out in the community, is knowing more situational--it's something called situational awareness--what's going on? Where are the issues? What's happening? And, you know, that's not just for you to communicate. It's another thing to listen. So, you know, the nice thing about radio is you can both listen and also communicate. And being able to listen to know what's going on is a huge piece of it. So you'll find that even if you're not somebody who's on the air communicating after a disaster, you can at least listen and hear what's going on and know what to watch out for. Like, hey the freeways shut down, so don't go that way. Or, you know, the fire is in this area. Or, you know, in hurricanes, hey, you know, this is where the aid center is, or whatever it is, or this is where someone's distributing food, you know? So there's all that information. It is really helpful as a part of a disaster plan is how do you know what's going on and where things are happening. In the amateur radio community, which is something that everyone should do, you know, they actually share information. So there's people all around town and they go, "Hey, no one said this on the news. There's no information about this. But you guys can't go there. The bridge is down."  **Brooke ** 39:42 That makes sense. So, escape route, maybe for lack of a better word, but just like, you know, communicating infrastructure issues. That's really interesting. Other things that you can think of that are, you know, types of information that people need that can be useful in sharing, if any? If not, that's okay. **Ben ** 40:09 Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I think it's the general awareness. And this is a tool, you know, the radio stuff I talk about is just a tool for what's going on. And, what I'm sharing on social media, it's not just the radio stuff, although it's a big part of it, but it's things like, you know, where do you get information about evacuation zones, right? Where is--during fires we can see maps of where the fires are. You can look up... You can look up evacuation centers. You can get maps of flooded areas. There's a lot of information sources. And I think on the communication side, even if you're not cut off, there's a lot of things that just letting people know about--and that's what I do--is what is this situation? Where are the issues? What's going on? I mean, today, I've been sending out messages about flooding. And I don't know if you know, but there's huge waves off the coast of California right now. And they're parts of Santa Cruz, there's parts of the Pacific Coast Highway that are underwater because of these big waves. And just knowing about that stuff is useful in that general awareness. And this whole area of communications, you know, the situational awareness is something that in disasters, you know, it really does make a difference. And I've had people say, "Hey, you know, we knew, because you were paying attention to what's going on with the fire, that we needed to get...we needed to take our horses and get them evacuated," And it takes a while to evacuate horses, right? And, "Oh, our house, we knew that our house was in a threat area. We needed to get...we needed to get our aunt, you know, to safety." And it's just that time, that information, you know, you don't want to be the last person to know that something's happening in your neighborhood. And this whole part of the aspect of listening to the radio helps with that in just the general situational awareness. **Brooke ** 42:11 There's, you know, kind of a component after the radio, because not everyone's going to have the radio, you know, if then, you know, if you are the one who gets the information via the radio, then how you go out and disseminate it. But that's maybe kind of another topic, unless you want to get into it. But, you know, do you put up posters? Like, you know, letting other people know, "Oh, I found out that such and such bridge is down. How do I communicate that to folks that don't have a radio? How do we spread that wider? **Ben ** 42:41 Yeah. And that...I don't think we've solved that problem in general, you know, just how do you get the information faster. I, you know, I talk about the rate just because that puts you on the knowing side of things versus the not-knowing side of things. And it's just...it's just one of those things in disasters, having that awareness--even if you can't communicate out--knowing what's going on gives you an advantage to you know, safety and health and all that. It is really helpful. **Brooke ** 43:12 Yeah, okay, I've got one last question for you, I think. I think, unless something sparks in my brain here. But is this useful in all types of disasters, natural disasters, emergencies, whatnot? Or are there ones that this tool would not be useful or effective for? **Ben ** 43:34 Yeah, that's a good question. Um, I think it's actually useful in most cases. It's very used during hurricanes. It's used a lot during wildfires. It is used a lot in earthquakes. Most of the folks that I know who are licensed here in my area, who are older than me, are, were licensed because of the Northridge earthquake. They all said, "Hey, we..." you know, the typical problem was, "Oh, I was at work. And my wife was one place and my kids were somewhere else and we could not communicate." And they said, "How do we fix that problem?" And so they said, "We're gonna get licensed as an amateur radio operator." And so earthquakes are a huge driver in California. But I think in general, I found it useful in all sorts of situations, whether it's an emergency. So yeah, and even interesting enough--and maybe it's more of a social thing, because there's a social group built in--but even with the pandemic, we we had a group who started out on the radio. And it's...maybe you could have done this on Zoom or on the phone, but there's a bunch of folks on radio who started talking every day. And you knew what's going on and you were able to trade information. Even today, now I go, "Oh, hey, there's a big outbreak of COVID," because, you know, three of the people on the net--we call them net like, it's like a round table or networ and people check in--and someone goes, "Oh, you know what, our whole family just caught COVID." And you go, "Oh, you know, I haven't heard that for a while. So maybe something's going on." You know? It is interesting. It's just another way of getting information about what's going on. And it gives you a little bit of a network. And that network also operates.... You know, the nice thing about what we do is that operates when all the power goes. In California, they've been shutting down power during high-wind events. And that often takes down cell towers. They're supposed to.... They've got some laws in now and they're supposed to put them back up, but it's not there yet. And so they shut things down. No one knows what's going on. They hop on the radio, they go, "Hey, I got a blackout here. What's going on?" Somebody who's outside of the blackout looks it up and says, "Hey, they shut down your whole part of town because of the wind danger," or whatever it is. So, it is useful. **Brooke ** 45:57 Yeah. And going back to our Lahaina example, that's a thing that would have been helpful in preventing some of those fires, if they had shut down power lines with what was coming in. And that is, unfortunately, because of the age of our power system and the lack of maintenance we've done on a lot of our infrastructure. Shutting off the power is one of the things that power companies are doing more often as a safety measure. **Ben ** 46:29 Yeah. And you know, some of that is...is liability, because of the number of fires that have happened and all that. And some of it, interestingly enough--and this is a climate issue--is some of that damage is just happening much more often than it used to. And, you know, some of the things I didn't talk about, but, you know, part of what we do as amateur operators is you don't just have the radio, but you also have to consider how am I going to charge it? How am I going to do that? Do I have a battery bank that works? Do I have a solar panel? There's a lot that goes into that, you know? It's kind of a general resiliency thing, which is...is very relevant in that case, right? Your power goes out and your cell phone tower is now down, how do you know what's going on? Most likely, somebody who's an amateur radio operator has a battery-backed up radio and knows what's going on. Because you know, and it doesn't matter. I can talk to Brazil when none of my neighborhood has power just for fun because it's there and running. **Brooke ** 47:42 Yeah. And before anybody asks me about it, I am not trying to say that the power company shutting down the power is a good thing or a bad thing, only observing that it is a thing that is happening and it has benefits and costs to it. **Ben ** 47:59 Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And it makes sense. I mean, most of the...many wildfires here have been caused by power lines. So, you know, the converse thing is when they shut down the power the, you know, like I said, the cell phone tower doesn't work anymore. And that's what happened in Lahaina, the power stopped working and you lost the cell phone towers and then all of a sudden you're in trouble.  **Brooke ** 48:21 Yep, yep. Alright, I think that brings us to a conclusion on this topic for today. So Ben, I want to thank you so much for reaching out and offering to have this conversation with us and making the time to sit with me and talk about it. I have learned some things today and I'm excited about that. Is there anything else that you would like to say? Anything that you would like to plug, social medias, charity groups, anything like that? **Ben ** 48:51 Yep. So um, I am nowadays on Mastodon. So if you want to follow my disaster emergencies and random musings on life, I am ai6yrr@m.ai6yr.org. So that's my...that's actually my callsign, my radio callsign, ai6yrr@m.ai6yrr.org. And, you know, as much as I talked about the disaster part of the hobby is there's a lot of fun stuff too. We can talk to astronauts in space. We have our own satellites. There's all sorts of science stuff you can do. And it is really quite a...it's not just for disasters and emergencies. It just happens to be a useful part of it. **Brooke ** 49:43 Well, thanks for putting that in. I appreciate it. You can also find me on Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke, that's Brooke with an E. And Ben again, I just really want to thank you for coming on today and talking with us. Yeah, **Ben ** 50:00 Hopefully someone learned something. So thanks a lot. **Brooke ** 50:06 And to our listeners, thanks so much for listening. If you enjoy our podcast, please give it a like, drop a comment, or review. Subscribe to us if you haven't already. These things make the algorithms that rule our world offer a show to more people. This podcast is produced by the anarchist publishing collective Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. You can connect with us on Twitter @Tangled_Wild and also on Instagram. Or check out our website at tangledwilderness.org where you can find our extensive list of projects and publications. This podcast and much of the work of Strangers is made possible by our Patreon supporters. If you want to become a supporter, check out patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. There are cool benefits at various support tiers on Patreon. For instance, if you support the collective at just $10 a month, we will mail you a monthly zine. 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Episode Summary This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Inmn is joined by two humanitarian-aid workers who have been providing care to asylum seekers along the Mexico-Arizona border near Sasabe where Prevention Through Deterrence policies are playing out in realtime as thousands of asylum seekers are left out in the winter desert by Border Patrol. Guest Info Groups like the ones these volunteers work with can be found at nomoredeaths.org/, www.tucsonsamaritans.org, and www.gvs-samaritans.org. Groups in California like borderkindness.org are doing similar work. Host Info Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript Live Like the World is Dying: Crisis on the Arizona Border **Inmn ** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host today Inmn Neruin and today we're gonna be talking about some pretty horrible things going on in the world which, you know, of course, we never talk about horrible things on this podcast. It's always really good and wonderful things. But yeah, we're going to be talking about a crisis that has been going on on the Arizona border near the town of Sasabe. And it's gonna tie in a lot of things that we've talked about on the show before, especially from the No More Deaths interviews. So, if you haven't listened to the No More Deaths interviews, they're not...it's certainly not required. But if you do not have a...like a broad understanding of the history of border militarization or fucking dumb things that Border Patrol does, it might be helpful to go back and listen to those episodes first. But yeah, but before we get to all of that, we are a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchists podcasts and here is a jingle from another show on that network. Doo doo doo doo doo. [Singing a simple melody] **Inmn ** 02:54 And we're back. Thanks you all so much for coming on the show today. Would y'all Introduce yourself with your names, pronouns, and I guess a little bit about like what you do in the world that relates to what we're going to be talking about? **Bryce ** 03:24 Yeah, Bryce, he/him. I've been working with various desert aid organizations over the past couple of years, Tucson Samaritans, No More Deaths and some search and rescue search and recovery groups. **Ember ** 03:42 I'm Ember, he/him, and have been working with No More Deaths around Arivaca, Arizona for the last year and a half. **Inmn ** 03:53 Cool. So there's been a lot of stuff happening at the wall recently, which, you know, is what we're here to talk about and, yeah, I don't know, do y'all want to just tell us about what's what's going on at the wall? Ember04:18 Yeah, I'll just preface it by saying, you know, we're very much just speaking as individuals who've been involved with wall stuff around Sasabe, Arizona, which is about an hour south of Tucson and we'll talk more about it but to just step back, this is a crisis that's happening all over the border and we're really going to be speaking primarily to the situation that's been unfolding around Sasabe in the last months and weeks and not speaking on behalf of No More Deaths or any other groups. **Inmn ** 04:58 Cool. Cool. Yeah. Yeah, it seems like a huge, huge, huge, sprawling crisis of horrible things. Bryce05:07 But yeah, so I think there's been a lot more media about what's happening in Jacumba or in Lukesville, where hundreds or thousands of people have been coming through the wall, not a port of entry, to seek asylum, and have been left out there in sort of makeshift camps for days or weeks at a time waiting to be apprehended by Border Patrol. And something similar has been happening east of Sasabe, which is this tiny, tiny, tiny little town, as Ember said, about an hour south of Tucson. For the past couple years, people have been doing a similar thing of coming through gaps in the border wall to seek asylum because they're blocked from presenting themselves at ports of entry. So over the past couple of years, it's mostly been like the Tucson Samaritans and Green Valley Samaritans that have been helping these people out, because pretty much the situation was that if you don't call Border Patrol to come apprehend them then Border Patrol will just never come. It's a super remote area of the desert. There's a road that goes along the border wall that you can easily drive to get to these people, but Border Patrol just won't do it because it's not really worth their time. And so at times, there would be people stuck out there for like three or four days. I ran into one group that had written SOS in rocks and had built a fire just trying to get Border Patrol's attention. And this is like two years ago before any of this was even in the news. And just...it's kind of just slowly escalated until the beginning of November. A lot of violence broke out south of Sasabe on the Mexican side. And it's just.... Between that and just other dynamics happening, it just shifted things so that we suddenly started seeing just hundreds of people there on the border wall seeking asylum. And where usually there were gaps closer to Sasabe where they could present so that Border Patrol could just show up in buses or vans and pick people up, now people were showing up much further east in more remote areas that are much more difficult to get to because of Biden's new border wall construction that blocked off access to some of these closer areas. So now the situation quickly became that Border Patrol would take a very long time to pick anybody up. And because of the high volume of people, they're now 20 kilometers, or 30 kilometers away from the actual port of entry. People are having to hike are left overnight just in the middle of nowhere, just building fires or doing whatever they can to survive the night. And, yeah, it's been about a couple of months of that now. Ember08:20 I'm going to just reiterate that, you know, a big call of a lot of groups is to open ports of entry because this is stemming from the point that people can't claim asylum at a port of entry, people are being forced to use this bullshit CBP app and wait for insane amounts of time, if ever, to be allowed to present for asylum. And so as we kind of hear the mainstream propaganda about what's going on, there's very little emphasis on the fact that the reason people are coming through gaps in the wall in really remote areas is fundamentally because they can't claim asylum at a port of entry and because the gaps are being closed nearby and that's just really important to ground it because there's just so much misinformation about that. **Inmn ** 09:10 For folks who don't know, why can't people claim...apply for asylum at a port of entry? Bryce09:17 I think there's a lot of confusion and misinformation about this. A lot of people I think thought that that was going to change when Title 42 was repealed or thinking it had something to do with the MPP, the Remain in Mexico Policy, but this actually was, it was a separate policy decision that at first got some media exposure. It started with metering back in like 2017 or something--sometimes during--where they would where they would just let in a certain amount of people and then CBP agents would actually block people before they got to the port of entry and say "We can't take any more people. You have to show us your passport," all this stuff. And then that turned into during COVID, "We're just not going to take anybody." And then now with Biden, it has continued, where if you don't have a CBP One app, CBP agents will just turn you away at the port of entry. And there's been a lot of legal stuff about it. Like, I think in San Diego there were a couple big court cases where they said, "You can't continue doing this," but the Biden administration has come out saying, like, "We don't actually turn people away at the port of entry. We don't do turn-backs." But clearly on the ground, that is what's happening. And so I think people think of it as like that there's some big law that needs to be changed or that, you know, people are trying to do something sketchy by coming between ports of entry, or at the port of entry, or that there is a legal pathway through the CBP One app and people just aren't doing it. But really, the CBP One app forces people.... It's essentially the remain in Mexico Policy but without the Remain in Mexico Policy. And then if people try to present themselves at the port of entry, which they should be allowed to do, they're just turned away. And there's not some...there's not some big thing causing this to happen. It's just pure policy that could be changed very, very soon if they actually had the desire to do it. **Inmn ** 10:29 Yeah. So it's like with this app, people are being asked to download an app to apply for asylum through and then they just wait for a notification? Bryce11:48 Yeah. And then once the.... This should all be.... Nobody should take my word for this because I'm not like a fucking asylum lawyer or something. This is just from talking to people, my understanding of it. So definitely don't.... Don't take it too seriously. But from what I understand, people are...people download the app and once they get the notification that they have an appointment then they have to get to the port of entry where that appointment is within 24 hours or something. And then just get to it. But there's no like.... The people will wait, you know, a couple months, six months, a year, and they just are sort of in limbo until they get their appointment. **Inmn ** 12:35 Golly, it sounds like.... This sounds like a sick joke of like people like.... Wait, I'm not even gonna make the comparison. This sounds like a sick fucking joke. But um...and so this has been happening for quite some time. But very recently, things kind of got a lot worse in Arizona, or like around Sasabe. Bryce13:05 Yeah, I mean, and it definitely seems like a big part of it is...whatever fighting between rival factions of the cartel south of the border. It's hard to really say exactly, but at the same time, that.... People started coming in higher numbers in the last two months. People also started coming through the San Miguel gate on the Tohono O'odham Nation in even higher numbers than here. And over there, there's not nearly as much.... Border Patrol was promising to, you know, set up structures and give water and all that stuff, but in the end, there's just really not a lot of support over there like, you know, what we have here. There's been a lot of community committee support and donations coming in, which has been great, but over at San Miguel, there's not even that which is already inadequate. **Inmn ** 14:08 Yeah, yeah. And maybe this is sort of me asking a question that I've had about all of this: I've heard that the town of Sasabe is like.... I've heard it referred to as a ghost town right now? Bryce14:27 Yeah, I mean, I think there's like 20 residents left or something like that. I have...a couple of friends of mine went down there recently to visit a friend who's still living there and she runs a migrant outreach center in the town, which hasn't really had people in it, but it's doing fine. The garden is still going. [Inmn "Hell yeahs"] I do know people are definitely interested in coming back if and when things calm down. **Inmn ** 15:00 Do...I guess do you want to talk about what y'all have been experiencing in kind of like the last week, I guess? Ember15:08 Yeah, I mean, pretty much as Bryce was saying, there's been folks responding to this, primarily the Samaritans as a formal group from Tucson and Green Valley, who have been responding to this for much longer. But folks involved with No More Deaths really got involved more significantly about a month ago because of the massive increase in the numbers of people out there and people being pushed further out into the desert. And that response has grown quite a bit. It kind of started with a few people from No More Deaths who were getting involved and then has exponentially increased in the last week. It was a situation that was really, really challenging in terms of the amount of resources and supplies needed for stuff. Like, basically hundreds of people, primarily a lot of children and babies and families and elders, stuck out in the increasingly becoming winter temperatures with completely inadequate supplies, most people who expected to be picked up immediately and we're instead waiting for up to three or four days in the winter conditions in very remote areas of the desert. The border wall outside of this area goes just right through very, very mountainous terrain. And so the border wall, you know, there's a road on the border wall, but it's basically, as you get far out, just being completely out in the middle of the desert. It's an insane road. It just goes straight up and down mountains. And so people are stuck out there for, at times, up to multiple days and may have been waiting on the other side for some days before they crossed. And so a lot of the original response as our group started to get involved was just primarily supply distro and medical care and medical triage. And I mean, just to give a context of how many people were out there, I think we originally had an emergency request for $10,000 and we used that money in about a week. **Inmn ** 17:41 Oh my god. Ember17:42 So that's primarily for food, water, blankets, you know, over the counter meds, and gas for the trucks, and things like that. Things really came to a head. I mean, it was a very untenable situation or unsustainable situation in terms of people going out there regularly and being like, "People are going to die out here. This is a really fucked up situation." People tried to pressure and call Border Patrol to pick people up, which they were slow to do. So sometimes they would do it regularly. Sometimes they would take a lot longer. But last Friday, there was a massive rainstorm. And we had...those of us who had been involved in organizing support around it had already started to put out larger calls for support, realizing this was way out of the depths of just what our group could respond to. And so we were putting out larger calls for support from the Tucson community, from Arivaca, which is a town about 15 miles from Sasabe, and we were preparing a little bit for the rain in terms of...the day before we set up some tarp structures at some of the places people were waiting. But what happened on Friday, I think really expanded the calls to mobilize and got way more people involved. And yeah, I'll leave it to Bryce if you want to talk a little bit about what happened on Friday. Bryce19:25 Sure. Yeah. I mean, I guess some other context would be that, increasingly, we had to do a lot of advocacy for emergency situations because, like Ember said, it was really just, you know, kids, infants, people that were not prepared to be out, you know, 30 mile...30 kilometers from a road, coming just with the clothes on their backs or maybe a little day pack or something but really kind of expecting to be picked up by Border Patrol immediately. And there's a lot of people that had started out with very serious medical conditions even. There's at least a few cases that I was personally involved in of people coming to the United States specifically to seek medical care for their children. So, it'd be like a kid with kidney disease or, you know, needing some kind of medicine daily that hadn't had it for multiple days are really serious things, you know, or some woman who is nine months pregnant and having medical issues. I mean, really serious things where somebody should just not be out in the middle of the desert. And the kind of advocacy we had to do for on 911 [calls] was just really obscene. Like, we call 911, say, there's somebody out here with some particular medical emergency, they'd ask the nationality of the person, whether they were entering the United States illegally, things like that, and then transfer us to Border Patrol. And Border Patrol would either drop the call or say, "Okay, we're sending somebody." and then we sit there for six hours and, of course, nobody comes. There were times when Border Patrol would actually come out. They'd check out like two or three 911 calls, say, "Okay, this person is not going to die today," and then leave. And then we eventually were able to convince some ambulances to occasionally come out for very, very serious cases. But even then, they started getting upset with us for, quote-unquote, "Crying wolf." And just the amount of advocacy that we had to do even to get that response was just...I mean, it was...it would just be hours of calling everybody we knew with connections to be able to get an ambulance down there. And then, even then, we would get threatened with arrest by Border Patrol for transporting people to the highway to rendezvous with an ambulance, even with permission of the ambulance. And so when the rainstorm came, it was this sort of perfect storm where we had a system in place where we were sort of prepared to medivac the most serious patients out of there and just sort of keep everybody else alive until Border Patrol came to pick people up because.... And then we would advocate for, "Okay, these people really need to be taken first. You need to take these people first." Which in itself is a really compromising position to be in just because we're acting as an intermediary between people and their physical safety and the asylum process. It's like this weird.... Like, we're not the government, but we're fulfilling this weird government role. And, yeah, it's a very weird thing. But when the rain storm happened, we were not prepared for the reality of Border Patrol just not showing up at all. They had been pretty consistently, even if we don't see them all day, they eventually show up at like five or six, especially if we call a million times and advocate and call 911, and all that. And so, the roads were muddy, but we were doing it in our janky little trucks, we were driving back and forth just fine. And somewhere around like two or three, it started...we started to realize that just nobody was coming. And they were.... Like, I don't know why, after everything we've all been through, that anybody would have had any faith in Border Patrol to avoid, to want to avoid a mass casualty incident. But here they were, seemingly, just like willingly causing one. Just to give an example of what the scene looked like, we showed up, things were already pretty bad. Like people were in good spirits, just because, you know, they've been traveling so long, they're glad to finally be there. And having a good sense of humor about things is kind of the only way to survive something horrible like that. People were still kind of in that space when we showed up. We handed out food and water. Most people, even though we had built some really rudimentary tarps structures, people generally opted to just keep walking because they didn't want to just be stuck out there in the cold and rain. And every time we drove back and forth along the wall, we just noticed people getting increasingly more desperate as they realized that they're just stuck out in the middle of the desert in this rain. And to the point where there was just no way to properly triage. There would just be.... We were just sort of bouncing.... Or, instead of actually helping people out, we were just bouncing around from emergency to emergency Yeah, we would be on our way to an emergency and then just see somebody laying in a puddle of water, just in agonizing pain--because even, you know, somebody gets a muscle cramp and can't stand anymore and then they're just laying in the cold and rain. And they don't have warm gear, they don't have anything waterproof. They're just laying there and it becomes a medical emergency just because they're stuck out in the elements in this rainstorm. And so we'd be on our way to some medical emergency and have to drop two people off to go deal with another one and then just hope that another of our trucks would come back to get people. And yeah, we started just having to treat it as--I mean, Ember could speak more to the medical stuff as an EMT--but there were...we had nurses with us and other medical people who essentially just started treating the triage as if it was...as if it was going to be a mass casualty incident. Ember25:55 Yeah, I mean, Friday set historic rainfall records. In Tucson, there was an inch of rain. And there was probably almost that much where we were and we're talking about, you know, winter desert rain. So you know, 4000', almost 4000', elevation, like freezing...almost freezing temperatures and dumping, dumping rain, including large amounts of thunder and lightning. And with the lightning, keep in mind that everybody who's there is against this 30' metal border wall. And so, just a really, really scary situation. And it very quickly became obvious, as Bryce said, that we were...it was going to be way overwhelming for the capacity of the amount of people who are out there to respond to. It kind of started in the morning, there were a few Samaritans', a group out of Tucson and Green Valley, a few Samaritans' vehicles out there and then a few No More Deaths trucks came out. But one of the first things we did when we really understood the scope of the situation was just put out a massive call for more support, which was really inspiring to see really come out that night. But obviously, it takes time for people to mobilize. So we really tried, those of us who were on the ground there really realized, "Okay, this really has the potential to be a really horrific mass casualty situation." And I want to say, I have no illusions about Border Patrol, no illusions about the State giving a shit about people seeking asylum dying in the desert, but I was surprised, based on my experiences in the few weeks prior, I was genuinely surprised that Border Patrol completely refused to come out at all. And once that became clear, I think our plans really changed, because those of us who were responding that day, our plans for the rain were really to try to build, you know, to have some some shelters but fundamentally to keep people okay until they can get picked up by Border Patrol and brought to an actual place to be warm and dry. And as it became clear that Border Patrol was absolutely not going to come that day--and we had Border Patrol liaisons on the phone with them--and they were being pretty explicit about, "Yeah, we can't come. It's raining." Obviously, they can. They have trucks way better than our trucks. And they chose not to at all. And once that became clear, I think our mission really changed quite drastically too, to where, "Okay, we need to get as many people to these shelters and we need to build more shelters, but, fundamentally, we need to get people off the wall, just from a medical perspective." I mean, I was rolling out in the morning with my friend who's a nurse who has been in a lot of disaster contexts and situations and he was like, "Holy shit, this is one of the worst things I've ever seen." **Bryce ** 29:01 I think he said, "This is [emphasis on "is"] the worst thing I've seen." Ember29:03 He said, "This is the worst thing I've seen," and equated it to when he was in Haiti after the earthquake. It was where I think those of us out there were.... Once we realized the extent of the situation and thought that we are going to see a lot of children die today. A lot. You know? It was--and I will preface this by saying that, as we know of, nobody did die that day. And I think that was because of generally just choices of people responding on the ground, people taking care of each other who were out there on the wall, and pure luck of breaks in the rain are the reasons for that. I think it was a situation that could have.... A lot of people absolutely could have and would have died. But, you know, before the rain storm, there had been a lot of conversations about, you know, "Should we be driving people to the substation?" which is, you know, where people can be processed by Border Patrol--that has a certain capacity limit--in the town of Sasabe. And there were a lot of these conversations about the legal risks of that and the potential dangers to people seeking asylum because, to keep in mind, like most people, when we've been out there for the time any of us had been out of the wall, most people wanted rides to the substation. That was, you know, a big thing people wanted and needed. That's where they were trying to get to. And there were all these conversations about the potential dangers of that legal risk. And what we encountered on Friday in the rainstorm was a situation where there was simply no choice. I mean, we were able to have some janky makeshift shelters at two camps along the wall that people, some people, did stay in, and we're trying to treat and warm and dry and triage those people, but there were about 150 people--there was over 300 people out in the wall that day and there was about 150 people who were walking past the last camp the 12 to 15 miles between the camp. And by camp, I mean a very shitty janky tarp structure setup. I don't mean a real camp. But there are about 150 people walking between the town of Sasabe that like 12 to 15 miles from the camp. Those people were out in the rain with no protection whatsoever. And so after we did some triage and made sure that, you know, the people further back on the wall were at one of these makeshift camps, we made the decision--that was not even really a choice--but just fundamentally that like people are going to die if we don't drive everyone to the substation. So we made a choice to evacuate everyone on the road in multiple caravans of trucks and shuttles to the substation while calling Border Patrol, telling them what we were doing, making it clear that it wasn't really a choice, that people people are going to die if they don't get to get to the station. And we weren't really sure how they would react to that. They, Border Patrol, did process everybody that was brought to the station. They got buses down from Tucson. And at the same time, they were being pretty hostile with volunteers that were evacuating people there, including a lot of threats of arrest, that people would be arrested and to "Not be doing this." But no volunteers were arrested. And everybody who was evacuated to the substation was processed within the next chunk of hours. And so, yeah, that kind of changes the whole dynamic in a sense. And the other thing that changed the dynamic is just this massive call for mobilization and support. So a lot of people from Tucson and Arivaca came down to support that evening and we were really in a triage situation all day and night of evacuating the most vulnerable and medically unwell people to the Border Patrol station and trying to do our best to make the makeshift camps slightly safer. But fundamentally, they were extremely inadequate shelters for people in the conditions that we were in. **Inmn ** 33:34 Dang, yeah, that sounds harrowing and just fucking terrible. I I don't have a real emotional response to it because it's just...it's just fucked. But I don't know, it's like this thing where it feels like things we've talked about on the show before with Sophie and Parker from No More Deaths talking to us about Border Patrol's kind of...their tendency to create a humanitarian crisis that they then refuse to respond to. But they, at the same time, you know, they claim to...like, they claim all the time to rescue people from the desert. Or, like, framing themselves as these humanitarian actors when they're the ones who are creating these crises and then completely not responding to them or like.... I don't know, like, hearing more confirmation of discrimination of medical dispatchers and stuff to respond to calls or to pass that off to Border Patrol who then just doesn't respond. I don't know. It's just terrible. And it's like... Like Border Patrol's perfectly capable of responding to these crises, right? **Bryce ** 35:24 Oh, totally and even in this case with the same.... Because eventually they do get everybody. So if they just...they're basically making the choice, in addition to like border wall, asylum, all that stuff, even with the current situation as it is, they're making the choice to leave people out there versus if they just went and got everybody. They say their issue is capacity for processing people. But why not have them wait in Sasabe or near the station or somewhere where they're not in the middle of the desert? They could just go get everybody, bring them to the station, and have them wait where an ambulance can arrive, where people can easily show up and give them help, where they're not just.... I mean, there's vigilantes along the wall, there's like gun battles. For many days, we were hearing automatic gunfire just south of where people were waiting for asylum. Like it's very much even outside of the danger of the desert itself. It is not a good place to be waiting. These people are freaking terrified. But the benefit of them being there for Border Patrol is that they're totally invisible. So they're just sort of hiding what...a thing that should be happening in public view in front of the Border Patrol station, in the middle of the desert where there's just extreme danger. If they wanted to, they could bring everybody to a safer place. It would be bad for PR, because then we'd have a bunch of news articles about like, "All these people are like being kept in an open air detention facility," or whatever. But they're essentially doing the same thing. But because it's far enough away from the public eye and from their own facilities, it just becomes invisible in a way, the same as, you know, Border Patrol's nonsense that they get up to with other kinds of people crossing the border with Prevention Through Deterrence, all of that policy; the suffering really is the point. I think they're hoping that people will tell stories back home that they, "Showed up and things were really bad and we almost died and there was this rainstorm," or whatever, "Don't do it this way." And the same way that their narratives kind of push things on the quote-unquote "smugglers" as being these predatory people that--which they are--but as being like, "It's them that's doing this. They're the ones that are causing this," and just really outsourcing any blame of anything on to on to other people. **Inmn ** 38:05 This situation makes me wonder if Border Patrol is making this conscious choice to, where with open air detention facilities they're--in Arizona at least--are just like, "Oh, we don't want to deal with that." or, "We don't want to deal with the PR. We just don't want to deal with it so we're gonna do this other thing to push people further out or to really invisiblize it," like you're talking about? I mean, that seems like a very Border Patrol thing to do. Which is horrible to laugh about but.... I guess you talked a little bit about Border Patrol's responses to what's going on, or to interventions that people are taking, and I'm just wondering if there's any more, anything more to say about how Border Patrol is reacting to how people are intervening in the situation? **Ember ** 39:09 There's been significant threats of arrest to people as we've continued to evacuate people to the substation, and to people that are just walking to the makeshift camps. There have been continual threats of arrest. Some volunteers had their IDs taken and said they were coming back for them to arrest them. Fundamentally, we feel extremely strongly that, obviously, we would be doing it even if it wasn't legal because it's the right thing to do, because we're not going to...we're going to do what we can to keep people from dying. But fundamentally, we feel very strongly that it is completely legal what we're doing and we will not back down from threats from Border Patrol and have been pretty explicit with them about that, **Bryce ** 40:00 Yeah. Also, after one of those threats of arrest, they did go up to the further camp, which usually is a lot of women and children, and they picked up just a few people. They could have picked up way more. They just picked up a few people and said, "Wait in three lines. We're coming back for the rest." The people all--it was, I think, like, maybe 100 people or so--they all waited in lines. Border Patrol left and then just never came back. And so people ended up standing in lines for hours, thinking that they were going to miss their place in line or mess up if they left the lines. And [it was] just this really cruel display of--and this is right after we got some media attention for the thing that happened during the rain, so maybe [Border Patrol was] punishing them for what we were up to or, you know, who knows how those people think? But that was one thing that we saw. Another thing is, we've actually been caught by Border Patrol while transporting people. And they stopped and essentially thanked us. So there's, in addition to threats of arrest, we've also gotten that, because, I mean, if you're a Border Patrol agent, and you have an...you believe your own bullshit about like, "You're a humanitarian," and all these things, or whatever, then by those standards, hypothetically, we were actually doing your job and you should be thankful for what we're up to by moving people. And this one agent that we've run into a few different times has definitely had that attitude, which is.... Yeah, I don't know whether.... I don't even know how to think about that. But it's made it so that it's given us a little bit more confidence in what we're doing, but also has set up a weird thought of like, "Oh shit. At what point are they going to stop picking people up because they think we're gonna do it? At what point are we really just unpaid fucking Border Patrol agents?" And so I think there's a big.... And even just our role in the camps and all this stuff, like, how much of what we're actually doing to save lives is playing into the wants and needs of the Border Patrol? And so trying to figure out ways to--we have been talking a lot internally about ways to ways to push back on that and sort of change tactics of what we're doing in order to...in order to pressure them to be doing the right thing, rather than this unsustainable thing in which we're clothing, feeding, housing, and triaging hundreds of people a day, which is just like wildly unsustainable. **Inmn ** 43:01 I mean, it seems like this thing that's become very wildly unsustainable. And I know that y'all have recently put out this big call for like, what? For like things needing to be different? Pr like, just like broader kind of community support? Just wondering if y'all wanted to talk about that a little bit? **Ember ** 43:28 Yeah. The calls for support really started to come out of, you know, conversations after a few weeks of folks in our group responding really heavily to the situation and realizing that we needed way more support. And also, I mean, for one, supportive people autonomously responding to the situation outside of our organization, and also more like visiblization what's going on because it was very invisible. There's a few news stories about things going on in other parts of the Borderlands, similar situations, or even worse situations, but really not the attention that the extent of the situation demanded. So those calls for support went out before the rain, but the rain day really amplified it. A lot of people from larger networks in the area came out that night. And it led to huge...way more numbers of people getting involved. And part of it is us really trying to encourage a non--outside of our organization--an autonomous response from more people regionally to the situation that can obviously look a lot of different ways and I don't think any of us presume to know what the best strategy or way to go about this is, but that, you know, making it more visible and having more people being involved is is an important and good thing. And I will add to that, this is obviously a situation going on throughout the Borderlands. But I think we're in a unique position because of where we are, because of our proximity to Tucson because of networks of mutual aid and support that exists in these areas, because of the proliferation of aid groups that exist in these areas, and just generally, yeah, large networks of individuals that are down to support with something like this. I think there's a potential for us to really build a lot of mobilization and support here that hopefully can also help spread and support other places where people are trying to respond to the crisis in their areas, some of which, as Bryce was talking about are, are significantly worse than what's happening here. But it obviously also breeds enormous questions about like, what are we actually doing? What is our role here? And, yeah, and what are we doing? And I don't think, you know, anyone presumes to know the answers to all questions. **Inmn ** 46:06 Yeah, I think in terms of what the role of aid groups is.... Just just wanting to bring up this like, kind of weird, maybe complexity of like, I don't know, it sounds, it sounds really, it sounds really weird to have to put yourself in the position of helping people get to Border Patrol or like helping people get to situations that are a potential open air detention facility or a detention facility that's as hellish as it is out in the desert. But like, I don't know, that.... It seems like a real...it seems a real mindfuck. And I don't know, this isn't really a question, just a thought. **Bryce ** 46:58 It's fucked up. **Inmn ** 47:01 Yeah. Yeah. I was...we talked a little off air about this, but so there has been a little bit of media attention and I know that y'all have not been exactly happy about the media, like what large media sources are saying about what's happening? I was wondering if y'all wanted to talk about what kind of media myths or narratives you see going around that don't reflect what's happening? **Ember ** 47:44 Yeah, and I think on a personal level, just those of us that were out Friday that had been out for weeks before, you know, there have been a lot of conversations about the role of media and our general hesitation with media with most of our other work. But it just became clear that there had to be a significant push for a lot more media outrage about what was going on and about what happened that rainy day, because it was just a question of that this is just going to continue to happen and we need to visibilize this more. There was a journalist, a local journalist, who was out, who came out during the rainstorm and wrote a solid story about what was happening, but the larger mainstream media attention to it has been pretty horrific. I'll say the New York Times came out here a few days ago and wrote a disgusting propaganda piece that basically...it was a piece about how, you know, hordes of people are coming into the country and Border Patrol is overwhelmed and doing everything they can and trying to rescue as many people as they can. But they're so overwhelmed. It felt very much like the liberal media version of like an "invasion of the country," and Border Patrol being overwhelmed. I mean, I think it's really scary that those are the...are the stories that are taking shape in the more kind of centrist or liberal mainstream media with no context of why people are coming here, no context of why people are being pushed out into the remote areas of the desert, no context about how much money Border Patrol has, and their absolute refusal to do their job in this case, which is to process people that are seeking asylum. None of that context. And instead, a story that literally is about, you know, Border Patrol just like trying to do everything they can to save these people being manipulated by smugglers. And it was also in the New York Times, was next to an article about the--kind of fear mongering--about a large migrant caravan that's coming up through Mexico right now. And it just felt very much part of this media narrative that is really just playing into the worst fascist impulses. So, yeah, it was a pretty horrific article. **Bryce ** 50:20 Yeah. And in addition to that, I mean, the New York Times article, in addition to other articles that ended up talking about the rainstorm and some of what we've been dealing with, we're really tucked into a different story about the record number of migrant apprehensions. It seems like all these news media outlets were just sort of waiting for those numbers to get released and then they kind of had these pre-written articles and anything about the humanitarian disaster was just sort of tucked into that, which that narrative is always like, "There's too many people at the border. Border Patrol is overwhelmed," or they're not really interested in any other narrative whatsoever. And, which is just really bizarre, because, I mean, when a journalist comes out and we talk to them, the first thing we explain is [that narrative] is so much the opposite to what we actually see on the ground. Like, the migrant apprehension data is inflated because there's now, rather than people seeking asylum at a port of entry, they're coming through irregularly where that gets put in as a Border Patrol migrant apprehension. So it seems like numbers-wise that there's some huge surge of, you know, the numbers are just off the charts and they've "never seen anything like this before." But these people actually should be under an entirely different system altogether, coming through a port of entry and, in which case, the migrant apprehensions would probably not change that much at all. And so there's this narrative that gets pushed forth where you look at this increase in numbers, which is totally fake, and then you get to show Border Patrol in a place where we've been going out and just seeing...dealing with the most horrific medical emergencies every single day and watching Border Patrol do nothing to stop it and also [Border Patrol is] causing the situation in the first place, and it shows them, like...rescuing people. I think the New York Times article specifically said like, you know, under the caption for one of the pictures, it was like, "Border Patrol's leaves with a group of people and rushes off to go rescue some more people," or something like that, which as you're saying before, it's like, they cause a problem and then give themselves credit for rescues, which is just not...is just upsetting and false and just like, insulting on a human level, you know? **Inmn ** 52:57 Yeah. Yeah, they're really...they're quite...they're quite adept at what they do, which is creating humanitarian crises that they then pretend to respond to so that everyone thinks that they're humanitarian actors. Meanwhile, they're sitting on their asses doing nothing. **Ember ** 53:25 Well, I mean, literally. When we were evacuating people to the station that day, they were sitting on their asses doing nothing, not wanting to get up. "Well, there was a massive rainstorm," and asking us, you know, like, "How do you know these people are cold?" as a question. **Bryce ** 53:42 Yeah, literally. **Ember ** 53:43 That was a question. I was literally asked. And this was with a group of like, mostly children who had been out in the freezing rain and were in severe danger of hypothermia, and they [Border Patrol] literally were like, "How do you know these people are cold?" **Bryce ** 54:00 And then since we started building shelters, they would ask, "Oh, do they have shelter?" using our little like, half-assed, last-ditch effort to fucking have people not die against us or as an excuse to not go pick people up because they have, quote-unquote, "shelter?" You know, I mean, it's just horrific. And Ember, do we have permission to say that correction thing? **Ember ** 54:26 Oh, yeah, I think we should say it. I mean, yeah. **Inmn ** 54:31 I'm so curious about what's going to be said. **Bryce ** 54:32 So, the New York Times, their original article that they published, so we all sat together and read it together and we're like, "Oh!" we're all yelling like, "What the fuck? That's bullshit. Like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like, that's totally..." and we get to the end and see that they have a paragraph saying, "Last friday, Border Patrol had to evacuate 300 people during this rainstorm that almost caused all these deaths," or whatever. And we were just like...I almost threw the computer across the room. It was like, you know, we expected an awful narrative but to have not just a lie but the literal opposite of what happened, like the people that caused the problem.... You know, because it would have been messed up no matter what it was on that day, but we expected, stupidly, Border Patrol to show up in the same way that they had been. And so by not showing up, they actually caused a potential mass casualty incident. So to give them credit for averting something that just outside of anything, any context, just was going to happen, and Border Patrol "rescued" people...and not that some random scrappy punks from Tucson wandered down into the desert and under threat of arrests drove a bunch of people to the Border Patrol station was just like...like, I don't even have words for.... Like, what do you even fucking do with that? Like? Yeah, it's...it was, so we...one of our media people forced them to make a correction. And they quickly did. They didn't fix the rest of the heinous fucking article, but they at least changed that, which they also seem to credit it to Border Patrol. But our person was there during their [NYT's] interview with Border Patrol, and at no point did Border Patrol claim to have rescued anybody on that day. So this was just New York Times on their own just coming up with some bullshit out of thin fucking air. **Ember ** 56:37 And then when they corrected it, they never...there's no note in the article that says a previous version was...had this lie in it and it was corrected. But I will also add that the article on the website was also next to an ad for Exxon Mobil and the other articles next to it were defending the genocide of Palestinian kids because IDF spokesperson says "It's justified." So we also obviously shouldn't be, you know, shouldn't be surprised. **Inmn ** 57:06 Yeah. I mean, you know, it's like, we see the same thing over and over and over again, of governments causing horrifying things to happen and then blaming it on some shadowy thing and then taking credit for fixing it. Or making it worse. Wow, yeah, that's fucked up. Like fucking shame. Shame on the New York Times. I know this is not a new thing for anyone to hear, but fucking shame on y'all. Yeah, it's upsetting. It's beyond upsetting. Well, I, you know, I want to end on a positive note. What's some like...what's some inspiring shit? Because also, this is...this is like, I don't know, it's...I feel like it's easy to get wrapped into this, the horrifying reality of like, "Oh, we're just doing Border Patrol's job for them." Or, like, "How sustainable is this?" But y'all I've been doing...like, people have been doing some truly inspiring shit and I think that's like really worth reflecting on and y'all will continue to do really amazing things to respond to these horrifying things. **Bryce ** 58:42 But also, just right afterwards, the huge community mobilization that happened and continues to happen has just been not surprising but just really amazing like knowing that in some situations like this people can just…the Tucson community will just throw down so hard and so quickly for some shit is just… like I think brought us all to tears the next day when we went down to collect donations and stuff. **Inmn ** 1:00:13 Yeah, the supply drives have been wild. Like that's... Yeah, I don't know. Ember, you got any inspiring shit to go out on? **Ember ** 1:00:25 I mean, everything Bryce said. And just like, I mean, the night with the rainstorm, where it's like, what we really realized we needed at a point is just like, people are building tarp structures, people are taking care of each other, but what we really needed at a certain point was just more trucks to drive people and evacuate people to the substation. And we would just get, kind of, convoy after convoy, late in the evening and at night of friends or people we don't even know, through our networks, coming down. And it was really fucked up because it wasn't Border Patrol, who we needed to fucking pick people up. But to just see so many people come out on really last minute notice and be able to help with evacuating lots of people, what we needed was those vehicles and more and more people. And people really showed up and continue to show up. And it's the same thing people are doing all over the country in response to this, you know, from cities where people are mobilizing to support asylum seekers that are, you know, just being dropped off in random cities, and to just like other places along the border where people are responding to this at its inception point at the wall. Like, it's really.... Yeah, the amount of mobilization is pretty awesome, just people like trying to take care of each other on all levels. **Inmn ** 1:01:52 Are there any things you want to say before we...before we break? Any, you know, broader call things people who are listening hundreds or thousands of miles away can do? **Ember ** 1:02:12 I think, you know, on a small scale people are gonna do what they can in the places they are, but on a larger scale, it's like...a lot of these media narratives, a lot of the right-wing push, all of that is really going to continue to grow and push for harsher, gnarlier border policies. And I think that really the thing that can push back against that is people mobilizing together and organizing against it. And I do think there is power for...or potential for, with enough, you know, people, power for things to actually not get gnarlier but, you know, go in the other direction. And I think we really have to keep that in mind that we can't just submit to the idea that, you know, the right-wing and the mainstream news outlets are just gonna push this narrative and policies are gonna get stricter and stricter. Like, we have power to push back against that as people everywhere, mobilizing and organizing together. **Inmn ** 1:03:18 Great. Well, I mean, you know, not great, but...shit. Great that people are doing great things in response. I'm a little emotionally dead end right now because this...because everything's just really fucked. Thanks, you all so much for coming on today and talking about what's going on. And, you know, if anyone in the Arizona area wants to donate 4x4 trucks, donate your 4x4 truck. **Ember ** 1:03:58 It will die a glorious death. **Bryce ** 1:04:03 Yeah, a couple of trucks have already died on the border wall roads. So, trucks are very needed. **Ember ** 1:04:11 I will add too, obviously, we preface it that we're just talking about this one area, but maybe we could link in the show notes to just some of the other struggles of other groups and communities, you know, pushing back and mobilizing for similar shit. **Inmn ** 1:04:28 Yeah. **Bryce ** 1:04:30 I mean, yeah, it's all over too. I mean, the stuff in California has gotten a lot of coverage. But also in Texas this stuff is happening just as much. So it's really like border wide. And it's somehow managed to be pretty invisible or co-opted into other narratives. But yeah, pushing...pushing back on that I think is super important. **Inmn ** 1:04:52 Cool. Well, thanks y'all for coming on today. Hope you get some rest. **Bryce ** 1:05:02 Yeah, thank you. **Inmn ** 1:05:07 Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this show, then do what you can to fight border militarization and do what you can to support asylum seekers in your city. Or go out and respond. If you're near a place where similar things like what's happening in Arizona and Sasabe are happening, then go out and get involved, see what you can do to help. And also, if you like the show, you can support it. You can support the show by liking, subscribing, following, and whatever.... These words are.... I'm clearly actually detached from how the algorithm works. And you can also just tell people about the show. It's one of the better ways to support it and one of, just one of the best ways that people hear about the show. You can also support Live Like the World is Dying by supporting our publisher, Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness is a radical publishing collective. We put out books, zines, and other podcasts, obviously. And you can support Strangers by buying books. You can support Strangers by listening to our other podcasts, like my other podcast, Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, or our other podcast, The Spectacle, which was formerly the Anarcho Geek Power Hour. You can also support Strangers by supporting us on Patreon. If you support us on Patreon, for $10 a month, then we'll mail you a cool zine every month, anywhere in the world. And you can subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. And if you support us at $20 a month, then we will give you a really awesome thank you at the end of all of our podcasts, which are the names that you usually hear. And what I think is really cool about the acknowledgments tier of our Patreon is that you can put whatever! You know you can put whatever name you want there and we will thank and acknowledge it. 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But yeah, anyways, I hope that everyone's doing as well as they can with everything that's going on. And we will see you next time. Bye. Find out more at https://live-like-the-world-is-dying.pinecast.co

Episode Summary This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Margaret and Leah talk about disability, preparedness, and covid. Guest Info Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (They/She) is a writer and structural engineer of disability and transformative justice work. Leah can be found at brownstargirl.org, on Instagram @leahlakshmiwrites, or on Bluesky @thellpsx.bsky.social Their book The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs can be found: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-future-is-disabled-prophecies-love-notes-and-mourning-songs-leah-lakshmi-piepzna-samarasinha/18247280 Their book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice can be found: https://bookshop.org/p/books/care-work-dreaming-disability-justice-leah-lakshmi-piepzna-samarasinha/16603798 Host Info Margaret (she/they) can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript Leah on Disability and Preparedness Resources Mentioned: StaceyTaughtUs Syllabus, by Alice Wong and Leah: https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2020/05/23/staceytaughtus-syllabus-work-by-stacey-milbern-park/ NoBody Is Disposable Coalition: https://nobodyisdisposable.org/ Power To Live Coalition: https://www.powertolivecoalition.org/ Disability Visibility Project article about Power to Live : https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2019/10/26/call-for-stories-powertolive/ Power to Live survival skillshare doc: http://tinyurl.com/dissurvival Long winter crip survival guide for pandemic year 4/forever by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Tina “constant tt” Zavitsanos https://www.tinyurl.com/longwintersurvival Pod Mapping for Mutual Aid by Rebel Sydney Rose Fayola Black: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-QfMn1DE6ymhKZMpXN1LQvD6Sy_HSnnCK6gTO7ZLFrE/mobilebasic?fbclid=IwAR0ehOJdo-vYmJUrXsKCpQlCODEdQelzL9AE5UDXQ1bMgnHh2oAnqFs2B3k Half Assed Disabled Prepper Tips for Preparing for a Coronavirus Quarantine. (By Leah) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rIdpKgXeBHbmM3KpB5NfjEBue8YN1MbXhQ7zTOLmSyo/edit Sins Invalid Disability Justice is Climate Justice: https://www.sinsinvalid.org/news-1/2022/7/7/disability-justice-is-climate-justice Skin Tooth and Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People (A disability justice primer): https://www.sinsinvalid.org/disability-justice-primer DJ Curriculum by Sins: https://www.sinsinvalid.org/curriculum Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies: https://disasterstrategies.org/ Live Like the World is Dying: Leah on Disability & Preparedness **Margaret ** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host, Margaret killjoy. And I always tell you that I'm excited about episodes, but I'm really excited about this episode. It put me in a better mood than when I started the day that I get to record this episode. Because today, we're going to be talking about disability and preparedness. We're gonna be talking about Covid abandonment. And we're gonna be talking about a lot of the questions that... a lot of the questions that people write us to talk about that they have about preparedness and I think that we can cover a lot of those. Not me, but our guest. But first before the guest, a jingle from another show on the network. Oh, the network is called Channel Zero Network. It is a network of anarchists podcasts and here's a jingle. [sings a simple melody] **Margaret ** 01:08 Okay, and we're back. So, if you could introduce yourself with your name, your pronouns, and then I guess just a little bit about how you got involved in thinking about and dealing with disability and preparedness. **Leah ** 02:00 Sure. Hi, my name is Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. She and They pronouns. Right now I live in Pocomtuc and Nipmuc territories in Western Massachusetts. And that is a great question. I will also just plug myself briefly and be like I'm a disability justice and transformative justice old sea-hag, aging punk of color who has written or co-edited ten books and done a lot of shit. Okay, so when I was sitting on the toilet thinking about "What do I want to tell Margaret when we get on the show?", I was actually thinking that my disability and my preparedness routes are kind of one in the same because... So I'm 48 [years old] now and I got sick when I was 21-22. So like back in 96-97. And, it was the initial episode that I got sick with chronic fatigue, ME, and fibromyalgia. And I was just super fucking ill and on the floor and was living in Toronto as somebody who was not from Canada. And, you know, I was just sick as hell, like crawling to the bathroom, like sleeping 18 hours a day. The whole nine. And I'd been really really deeply involved in anarchist of color and prison abolitionist and antifascist organizing and lots of stuff. I had a community, but it was 1997, so most of my community was just like, "What you're sick? Why didn't you make it to the meeting? We have to write all the prisoners with the [untranslatable]." And I was just like, "I just.... Okay, great." Like it was a really different time. There was no GoFundMe, mutual aid, Meal Train, someone brought me some soup. Like, know you, we weren't really doing that. And people really did not have a consciousness around, "You can be a 22 year old brown, nonbinary femme and be really, really sick and be disabled." So something I think a lot, and I've said before, is that disabled people are really used to the concept that no one is going to save us and we are really not surprised when state systems abandoned us because we live in that all the time. And so I was just like this little 22 year old sicko weirdo who'd read my Octavia Butler--and, in fact, that was part of the reason why I was like, "Toronto, great, there's gonna be more water and less heat." Okay, wasn't totally right about that. But, you know, I mean, I really had to save myself and I kind of was like, "Alright, I don't have..." Like, I'm working off the...I'm working under the table. I have hardly any money. I'm gonna make my own herbal medicine. I'm gonna grow a lot of what I eat from my backyard. I'm going to store water. I'm going to run a credit card scam and get a lot of dried goods and live off of those for like a year. [Margaret Hell Yeahs] Yeah, stuff like that. I feel like from there, over the last, you know, 26 years like it's....like, that's the route. The route was, you know, similar to a lot of people, I think of my generation, we were like on the cusp of looking at the current crises of like hot fascist war, hot eugenics war, hot climate crisis, and being like, "It's coming," and I started being like, "Yeah, like don't...don't think that it's all going to work out okay and that somebody else is going to fix it for you." So, I would say that's where my initial route--and then do you want to jump in? Or can I jump ahead like 20 years or something? **Margaret ** 05:10 Honestly, you could jump ahead 20 years later. I'm gonna come back and make you talk more about Octavia Butler. But we'll do that later. **Leah ** 05:16 Let's talk more about Octavia Butler because I have a lot of stuff about Octavia Butler and how she thought of--and I think sometimes misused--like nowadays [this is probably not the word but it's untranslatable] and also about disability. [Margaret "Oooohs" curiously] I know. We can get to that. Okay, so that's one route. And then, you know, I mean, I was always kind of like a little weirdo, where it's like, yeah, I grow most of my own food--or as much as I can--and it's not a fun green hobby. It's like, I'm broke as fuck and I need to grow a lot vegetables that fucking, you know, I can mulch and that can stay growing into December, you know? I stashed stuff. Something I also think a lot, is that as disabled people--and we talked about this a little bit when we're emailing--I think we're always prepping whether we call it that or not. Like most disabled folks I know just do shit. Like if you get a prescription and you have extra, you store it, you know? Like, if you can get a double dose, you put that aside. And then maybe you have it for yourself. Or, there's so many disabled mutual aid networks I've been a part of where someone's--I mean, before Facebook clamped down, this is really common on a lot of Facebook disabled groups--someone would be like, "Yo, does anyone have an extra five pills of such and such?" and I've seen total strangers for 15 years of disability justice be like, "Yep, what's your address? I do. I'm gonna mail it to you. I have my old pain meds. I've got this. I've got that." But, um, yeah, like doing the jumping forward that I promised you, so for people who don't know, disability justice as a movement was founded around 2005 by a group, a small group of disabled Black, Asian, and poor and working class, white disabled folks, who were all pretty, you know, gay, trans, and radical. And they were like, "We want to bring a revolutionary intersectional out of our own lives and experiences and issues. We want to create a disability movement that's for us and by us that's not just white, single issue, often cis, often male, often straight." Like, we want to talk about the fact that 50% of bipoc folks who were killed by the cops are also disabled, deaf, neurodivergent, etc... just to give one example. So, you know, that was '05 in Oakland, you know, Patti Burn, LeRoy Moore, Stacy Milbern, Ely Claire, Sebastian Margaret, Stacey Milbern Park, you know, the six. And I was living in Toronto and I moved to Oakland in '07 and I was kind of around for some of the beginnings of it. There's two stories I want to bring in. One actually predates my move. It was right when I was getting ready to leave Toronto, I got invited to go to this reading by a bunch of queer--I think all white--disabled radical folks. And I was just like, "Oh?" And I did the whole, like, "Am I really disabled enough?" and then it was like, "Oh, it's gonna be really depressing." And then it was really awesome. And I was like, "Whoa, disability community. Life saving." But it was kind of one of my moments of being brought into the disability community because there was this writer who was there who, their reading series was actually a choose your own adventure where there's four disabled, queer, and trans folks who are having a sex party and the zombie apocalypse happens. And then they have to figure out how to survive it without abandoning each other. And it was all like, "Okay, you all get to the van, but then there's no ramp. What do you do? Oh! You get this accessible ramp, but it smells like perfume and somebody has NCS. What do you do? And I was just sitting there with my mouth open--and it was also interwoven with like, 'Yeah, and then somebody's fucking somebody else with like, you know, a dildo strapped to their prosthetic,'" and I was like, wow, I fucking love disability. Like, sign me up. But I gotta say briefly, that was one of my first examples of like, you know, there's a really important phrase in Disability Justice, which is, "No one left behind, " right? Like, that's one of the core organizing principles. And that was kind of.... Before I even heard that phrase, I was like, "Fuck like this is..."--because I'd been around antiauthoritarian, quasi prepper, like "shit's gonna happen, we have to get ready." But I was always kind of quiet in the corner closeting my disability being like, "Well, shit, like, what if I don't have my meds? Or what if I'm too.... What if I can't run away from, you know, the Nazis or the zombies because I have a limp and I walk with a cane? Like, what if?" And that was my first example of this cross disability fantasy space of like, "We're going to escape together and we're not going to let anyone get eaten and it's going to mean really being creative about access stuff." Okay so jump ahead to, right, then I moved to Oakland and then I ran into actual Disability Justice community through Sins Invalid, which is an incredibly important foundational Disability Justice group, and through a lot of friendships I started making with other QTBIPOC disabled folks and my really, really good friend Stacy Park Milbern, who, people should totally know her work. She's incredible. She was one of the best movement organizers that the movement has ever seen. And we met online. And she was living in Fort Bragg, North Carolina with her family on the base because her family's military. And she was a queer southern, working-class, Korean and white, you know, physically disabled organizer from when she was really young. And then she was like, "Okay, I love my family, but I'm literally hiding my gay books in the wall because my mom's Pentecostal." So, yeah, and she's like--I literally realized she tells the story a lot--she's like, "Yeah, like, I realized I hadn't really left the house for a couple months and like, this is gonna be it," and she's like, "I was literally watching Oprah. And Oprah said, 'No one's coming to save you.'" And she was like, okay. She's 21 years old. And then through online, disabled, queer of color community there was this--or she organized--this initiative called To the Other Side of Dreaming where she moved crosscountry with Mia Mingus, who's another queer Korean organizer who was a friend of hers, ad moved to the Bay Area. And so that was around 2010-2011. And then in 2011, what happens but the Fukushima nuclear accident, right, disaster? And we're all on the West Coast--and it's completely ridiculous bullshit, looking back on it now--but all of these Bay Area folks were like, "Oh my God! Radiation!" And some people pointed out, "Look, you know, we're not.... There's...it's a big ocean. The people who really have to worry are in Japan and areas around it, so whatever?" But it was one of those times where we were like, fuck, this is a really big nuclear accident and we are sort of close and it's making us think about disaster. And I remember just going to fucking Berkeley Bowl, which is this big, fancy, organic supermarket and people had bought out all of the burdock all the fucking seaweed. And I was like, "Oh, my God, these people." But out of that, Stacy started having conver--and I and other people who were in our organizing network of disabled, majority BIPOC--were like, "What are we going to as disabled BIPOC if there is an earthquake, fascism, like another big disaster? And Stacy said, really bluntly, she's like, "You know," and she was a power wheelchair user. She used a ventilator. You know, she's like, "Yeah, I am supported by electricity and battery dependent access equipment." And she's like, "Well, I'm going to be really honest, my plan has always been, if something happens, I'm just going to lay down in my bed and die, because I don't think that any emergency services are going to come save me and the power is going to run out in 48 hours. And then we were like, "Okay, that's super real. What if, through our amazing collective access stuff we're doing, we could figure out something else?" And we had this meeting at Arismendy bakery, which for folks who know, is like a worker owned co-op chain, Our friend Remedios worked there. It's wheelchair accessible. We met there after hours. And it was just like, 12-15 of us who started just sitting there and being like, "What are the resources we have? What are the needs we have? And we made this map, which I still have, which I think I shared with you, which is just like, "Apocalypse, South Berkeley/Oakland Map 2011," where we were like, "Okay, you know, when the power goes down, the communication goes down. We're gonna meet at this one traffic circle because people who are wheelchair users can roll up. And we're gonna bury note paper in a mason jar with pens and we're gonna leave notes for each other. But we're also going to agree to meet there the day after at noon." And I was like, okay, my collective house, the first floor is wheelchair accessible. We have solar, we have a landline. And we have a lot of space. So like, let's meet there. And then someone was like, "We've got the one accessible van. And we know, it's only supposed to fit 4 people, but we can fit like 12 in there." And we started.... Like, I just think about that a lot because it's, I think it was a really important moment where it was important...the stuff that we did like that--you know, the actual strategies and the resources we started talking about--but it was also that it was the first time in my life that I was like, "Okay, we're not--not only are we not going to just die alone in our beds, I'm also not going to be the one person who survives. Like, I can actually survive with, and because of, other people. And we're all disabled BIPOC with a couple of disabled white folks. And we can actually collectively strategize around that. And this will be my last leap forward, because I see that you're like, "I want to ask you stuff." So, you know, eight years go by, and in that time we all do an incredible amount of Disability Justice organizing and strategizing. And, you know, in 2019.... And a lot of it started to be around climate disaster on the West Coast. Like, I moved to Seattle in 2015. The wildfires started being really bad a year or two later. A lot of us were involved in mask distributions, just spreading information about smoke safety and survival. And then 2019 was the infamous year where the wildfires came back and Pacific Gas and Electric, in all of its fucking glory, which is the main--for people who don't know--it's the main utility electrical company in Northern California. They announced two days before wildfires were going to really impact the Bay, they were like, "Oh, so we've decided that our strategy is going to be that we're just going to shut down all the power in Northern California. **Margaret ** 14:52 No one uses that. [Sardonically] **Leah ** 14:53 No one uses that. And they're like, "Oh, if you have a medical need, call this number, and we'll make sure to leave it on at your house." and Stacey was, "Okay." She had just bought her house, the Disability Justice Culture Club in East Oakland, you know, which was her house but also a community center, de facto community center, that housed a lot of disabled folks of color. And she was like, "I was on the fucking phone for eight hours. Like, I never got through." And she and some comrades started this campaign called Power to Live where they were like.... It started out as, "Okay, we can't save everybody, but we're not going to just lay down and die. What do we do?" So it started out as like, okay, let's identify who has housing that still has power. There's some people in Richmond, there's some people in this neighborhood, but then it also developed into this thing where it was just this amazing crowdsource survivalist resource where it was everything from, she's like, "Here's a number. Here's an email. If you need something, text us, call us, email us. We have a team of eight people. We'll figure it out. If you have something to offer, do it too." And then some of it was that people were sharing everything from generator information, to generator shares, to people in different areas-- like I was in Seattle and we were like, "Okay, we will mail you generators and air purifiers, because it's obviously all sold out in the Bay, but we can get it here and get it to you." The thing that always stands out to me is people being like, "Oh, yeah, here's how you can use dry ice and clay pots to keep your insulin cold if refrigeration goes down." And there's a lot more I could say about that action and how amazing it was. But for me, when I think about the through line, I'm like, that moment in 2011, when we all got together, and were like, "What do we do?" we were prepping for what we couldn't fully predict, you know, the exact manifestation of eight years later. We're there and we're like, "Okay, there's wildfires, there's smoke, there's no fucking power, and we've not only built our organizing base, we built our relationships with each other so that we can actually trust each other and more or less know how to work together when this shit actually is hitting the fan to create something that's really life giving. Okay, I'll shut up. That was a lot. **Margaret ** 16:52 Now I have so many questions about all of it. **Leah ** 16:53 Yeah, ask me all the questions. **Margaret ** 16:55 Because there's a couple...there's a couple of questions and/or feedback that we get with Live Like, the World is Dying a lot. And some of them are very specifically disability related, and you covered most of them, but I want to highlight some of them. Like a lot of people write and are like, "Well, I rely on the following thing that is provided by civilization. So my plan is to lay down and die." Right? This is a--and I know you've kind of answered it--but I.... I want to ask more. Okay, I'll go through all the things. Okay. So to talk more about what "No One Left Behind," means? And then the other thing that really stands out to me is that, you know, when we were talking, when we were talking about what we were going to talk about on this on this episode, I was saying, okay, we can talk about, you know, making sure that preparedness is inclusive and open and includes disabled folks, or whatever, and you pointed out, really usefully, the, the necessity to reframe it. And I think that the story you just gave is a really beautiful example of this, where it's less about, like, "Hey, make sure to pay attention to the people who need canes," you know, or whatever, right? Like, you know, "make sure you keep track of folks based on disability." And more than like the thing you just described, is the thing that we're always trying to push, which is that you need to make a list of all the resources and needs within your community and then figure out how to meet those needs and instead of assuming that we can't meet those needs, figuring out how to actually do it. And so I love that it's actually like.... It's actually disability justice movements that we should be learning from, I mean, or participating in, depending on our level of ability, or whatever, but I just find that I find both of those things really interesting. And so I wonder if you have more that you want to say about alternatives to laying down and dying, and specifically, to tie into the other thing that I get asked the most or that I get the common feedback is--because we talk a lot about the importance of community for preparedness on this show--a lot of people don't feel like they have community and a lot of people write to be like, "I don't have any friends," or "I don't know any other people like me," or, you know. And so, I guess that's my main question is how do.... [Trails off] Yeah, how do? **Leah ** 19:22 So how do you make community when you don't have community? Alternatives to lying down and dying? And was there a third one in there? **Margaret ** 19:28 I was just highlighting how cool it is that y'all sat there and made a list of resources and needs, which is exactly what.... Instead of deciding things are impossible, just being like, "Well, let's just start doing them." You know? **Leah ** 19:40 And I think.... Okay, so I'll start there. Like I think that like.... You know, Corbit O'Toole, who's like a, you know, Disability Rights Movement veteran and like older Irish, disabled dyke, you know, in Crip Camp, the movie, she's like, "Disabled people live all the time with the knowledge that the society wants thinks we're better off dead," right? Like one...back in the day, you know, there's a--I think they're still active--one of the big Disability Rights direct action organizations was called Not Dead Yet, right? [Margaret Hell Yeahs] I think this is the thing is like I think that sometimes abled people or neurotypical people are not used to sitting down and making the list. And I think that even if disabled people aren't preppers, we're used to being like, "Okay, what do I need? Fuck, I need somebody to help me do my dishes. Oh, I can't bend over. I need to figure out what is the access tool that will allow me to pick up something from the floor when my that goes out? Like, if my attendant doesn't show up, can I have a..." You know, like, my friends always like, "Yeah, I've got a yogurt container by the bed in case my attendant doesn't show up so I can not piss the bed. I can lean over and piss in the yogurt container." Like there's a--and I think that.... God, I mean, there's been so many times over the years where I've done or been a part of doing like Disability Justice 101 and me and Stacy would always talk about crip wisdom and crip innovation and people will just look blank like "What are you talking about? You guys are just a bunch of sad orphans at the telethon." It's not just about making the list, it's also about how disabled disability forces you to be innovative. Like, Stacy would always share this story where she's like, "Yeah," like, she's like "Crip innovation is everything from," she's like, "I save a lot of time sometimes by pretending I can't talk when people come over and want to pray over me. You know, I just act like a mute and they fucking leave and they go on with their life," and she's like, "You know, I realized one day, if I took my sneakers off, I could ramp a step if it's just two steps. I could just put them there and I could roll up." Or I mean, there's a million examples.... Or like, because I think it's about prepping and about making the lists and it's also about whatever you prep for, there's always going to be the X Factor of "Oh, we didn't fucking expect that." And I think that's where a lot of prep falls apart is people have their "Dream Bunker." They're like, "Oh, okay, I know exactly what the threats are going to be." And then of course, it doesn't fucking happen that way. I really hope I can swear on your show. **Margaret ** 21:46 You can. Don't worry. **Leah ** 21:47 Great. So, I mean, one example I could give is I'm remembering at, you know, a Sins show when we were in rehearsal, where everyone drove over from Oakland in Patty's wheelchair accessible van, and then the ramp broken wouldn't unfold. So we just were like, alright, who do we know who has welding equipment? Who do we know has lumber? Like, I think we ended up going to a bike repair shop and then they had tools. And then we're like, okay, we'll just bring the rehearsal into the van and do it that way. Like, you have to be innovative. And that's a muscle that I think society doesn't teach you to flex and that often, I think that even people who.... I think there can be a lot of eugenics in prep, you know, whether people are overtly fascist or not, there's a real belief of like, "Oh, only the strong and smart," --which looks a certain way-- "survive," and that "We should use rational thinking to make it all work out." And I think a lot of crip intelligence or wisdom is actually knowing that shit can go sideways 48 different ways and you have to adapt. And you have to just kind of be like, "Well, let's try this." So I think that's one thing. And I think, you know, one thing I'll say is, yeah, just speaking to kind of the reframing we were talking about, I think it's less like, "Oh, remember the people with canes," but, I mean, that's good, but also knowing that we're already doing it and that abled people actually have a shit ton to learn from us. But also, I mean, something.... I mean, the title of my last book is "The Future is Disabled," and it comes from something--it's not unique thinking to me--it's something that a lot of disabled people have been thinking and saying throughout the pandemic is that we were already at like a 30% disabled world minimum and we're pretty close--we're probably at majority disabled right now. Because what, 2% of the world didn't get Covid? Like, how many people have Long Covid? How many people have complex PTSD? We're all sick, crazy, and, you know, needing access equipment. Disability is not out there. It's in here. Like there's no such thing as doing prep that's like, "Oh, only the three Uber Mensch are gonna survive." Like fuck that. And that actually--I mean, sorry, this might be a side note, but a lot of people have probably seen The Last of Us. And I'm just gonna SPOILER ALERT it. You know that famous episode three of those two gay bear preppers in love? Yeah, I loved a lot about it. I was so pissed at the ending, which I'm just going to spoil. So you know, the more artsy, non-prep guy....[interrupted] **Margaret ** 21:47 Yeah, they don't survive. **Leah ** 22:47 Well, no, but like, not only did they not survive but one of them gets chronically ill. And I was just like, grinding my teeth because it's like, "Oh, he's in a wheelchair. Oh, his hand tremors." And then they end up deciding to both kill themselves rather than do anything else. And I was so furious at it because I was like, these are two people who are so innovative. They have figured out all kinds of problem solving. They have an entire small city for themselves. And it's all like, "Oh, no, he can't get up the stairs." And I'm like, really? There was no accessible ranch house you couldn't of fucking moved to? **Margaret ** 24:38 Or like build a bedroom on the fucking ground floor. **Leah ** 24:40 Or youcouldn't get meds? You couldn't? I mean, when his hand was shaking, it was like, "Oh, it's so sad. He's being fed." I'm like, there's tons.... First of all, it doesn't suck to be fed. A lot of things that seem like a fate worse than death are not when you're in them. And also, there's like all kinds of adaptive utensils that they could have fucking raided from medical supply if he wants to feed himself. Or I'm sorry, there's no cans of Ensure? They absolutely have power. They couldn't have made smoothies? Like, what the fuck is this? But beyond that--and I think that a lot of people who have talked about that episode did, I think, have some good analysis of it where, you know, the whole way they set up their prep was they were like, "Oh, it's just the two of us," and the one super prepper guy was like, "I don't even want friends to come over." And the other guy was like, "Hey, actually, we need to make alliances because there's things they have that we don't. And we also need more than just the two of us because I love you, but I'm gonna kill you." And I think that's something to think about is really moving away from the idea that just your little you know, the utopic queer rural community that so many fucking city queers fantasize about or, you know, lover are going to be enough, because it's not. So that actually leads me to, "I don't have community. Where the fuck do I get it?" And I'm like, yeah, that's super real. Right? And I think it's something I actually wrote about in "The Future is Disabled" is that I have people be like--when I write about different crip communities, just even when I talk about stuff on Facebook.... Like my friend, Graham Bach, it's going to be his second year death anniversary in like two weeks, and he was like, you know, white, psychiatric survivor, super poor, amazing sweetheart of a human being, he died.... I mean, he died in his, you know, rent to your income apartment because he was really afraid to go to the hospital and he had cardiac stuff going on. And he was an anarchist, he was amazing, kind, complicated human being. And, I was writing about, like.... I'm going to tell the story and there's a couple things I want to pull out of it. So I was writing about meeting Graham when I was in my early 20s through radical Mad people community, and somebody was reading it and was like "That sounds so great." And I was like, "Yeah, it wasn't utopic. Like, I had to yell back at Graham because he would scream at me and I'd be like, "Shut the fuck up!" Like, there was so many fights. There was so much racism. There were so many older white cis dudes who had electroshock who were jerky or gross, you know? And I guess that was the thing is, I was like, they're like, "Well, how did you find each other?" And I was like, it wasn't perfect. Also, it was very analog working class. Like my friend Lilith Finkler, who is an amazing Moroccan, Jewish, working-class queer femme psych survivor, she would just go to the donut shop where everybody poor hung out and would talk to everybody who wass there who wass crazy who no one wanted to talk to and be like, "Hey, do you want to come hang out at this meeting at the fucking legal clinic? We have a room. We have a snack plate. I'll give you tokens. Let's organize." So I think that's the first thing is that it's not--and I don't mean this in a finger-wagging way--it's not automatic. And also, one of the really big ways that community is often ableist, and that a lot of us get cut out from it, is that a lot of us who need it the most are not particularly easy to love in ableist neurotypical worldview. It's like we're cranky, we're wounded, we're in a bad mood, we're weird. So a lot of the time, I think it's thinking about, first of all, what's one step, one move you can take towards it. Like, can you make one fucking acquaintance and build it. And really think about what it would mean to build some kind of relationship. I think the other thing that I really want to highlight is that a lot of the communities that I see that keep each other alive, that I'm lucky to have been a part of making and being supported by in disabled community, they're not static and they're not perfect. Like, I have networks with people who piss me the fuck off and who, you know, I've sent 20 bucks to people who I'm just like, "I really don't like you, but I can see that you really don't have food," you know, and we're not going to be friends and we're not going to like each other, but I don't want you to die. And that's not...I mean, it's bigger.... There's also people who I'm like, "Okay, you're my ex-abuser. I'm not gonna give you $5. Someone else can give you $5. **Margaret ** 28:42 There's this person who puts a lot of their effort into talking shit on me on the internet and I...they're also broke and have a lot of chronic health issues and I send them money every month. And every now and then I'm like, could this like...could you stop talking shit now? **Leah ** 29:03 I think this is the thing sometimes is like, hey, how about this is the deal, like maybe just say "Thank you," or maybe just talk shit even like 20% less? Because you know, I'm really doing we keep us safe here. I just really want a "thank you." **Margaret ** 29:16 I don't want you to die. Like, I don't want you to starve to death, but I really wish you would be a little bit more open minded to people having different opinions on yours. **Leah ** 29:26 Oh yeah, nuance, right? Yeah, it'd be fucking nice. **Margaret ** 29:29 God forbid. Anyway. **Leah ** 29:31 No, it's good. I guess my TLDR would be to start where you are and start with "what's one thing you can do? What's one person you can reach out to?" And I think, you know, I don't know if this is true for everyone who reaches out to you and it's like, "Well, I don't have anybody," but I think that social media and online connectivity is a real double-edged sword because for some of us who are isolated, it can create both online communities that can sometimes become in-real-life community and, either way, can be sources of some community or support. But I think.... I mean, you know, I'm a Generation X'er and I've just seen social media get more and more chokehold and just turn into fucking the panopticon meets a mall, you know? [Margaret laughs] And I think it's hard because 12 years ago I was part of really early online disabled spaces, which were great because so many people were like, "Well, I'm so isolated in my small town or in my city," or "I can't leave bed, but this is great. I'm meeting with other people and we're building these connections and it's actually more accessible for me to be real about my stuff from like my bed with a heating pad." And now I just think it's so chokeholded that it's hard for us to find each other. So it's much more common for people to be like, "Wow, I'm seeing all these people who have millions of followers and a shiny brand and I just feel like even more of an isolated loser." And then at the same time, I think people are like, "Well, how did people meet each other before this?" And I was like, "Yeah, like, you go to the coffee shop or the donut shop. You put up a flier. You go to the library. You like, I don't know. I mean, I just remember people I met on the food stamps line, you know, when we got there at six in the morning. And not everything's gonna stick, but maybe something sticks. And I also think about like, I'm going back to 13 years ago in early Disability Justice community spaces where--I mean, I think back to [untranslatable] when I went back to Toronto--which, yeah, big city--but I remember I had so many people come to me and be like, "You're..."--because I was starting to be more out about disability, cuz I was like, "I'm in the Bay and there's these wild people who talk about it and they're not all white people." and so I have so many, especially Black and brown disabled femmes be like, "Hi, you don't really know me, but I have fibromyalgia too," or "I have Lupus too. And like, no one I know talks about that. How do you do it?" And I'm specifically thinking about this time that this person I'm no longer in touch with--but we used to be friends--who's like, you know, queer, brown nonbinary person was like, "Let's just have a meet up of other chronically ill femmes of color," which is how we were identifying a time, and it was four of us, four heating pads, a bottle of Advil, and just very tentatively starting to share things about our lives. And I was like, "Yeah, that was four people." But a lot of that hang out then rippled outward. And it was like, I think it's also important to be like, it's scary to build community. Some tools I want to shut out like, so Mia Mingus, who I mentioned before, she has a lot of really great writing on her blog Leaving Evidence and she created this tool a long time ago now--that some people might be familiar with but for folks who aren't--it's, you know, it's her tool that she calls Pod Mapping. And she actually created it as part of a collective she founded called the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective that was working on doing transformative justice interventions into intimate violence, specifically childhood sexual abuse a lot of the time, and she had this framework that I find really helpful. She's like, "A lot of..." she was talking about in community accountability, transformative justice spaces and she made a really good point where she's like, "Sometimes we talk about like, 'Yeah, bring in the community. Like, everyone has a community.'" And she's like, "Most people don't have a fucking community, let alone one that can interview in childhood sexual abuse." So she created this tool where she's like, "Let's broaden the idea of what community is." Like, maybe it's that one cousin, that you only talk to once a year, but you could call them in a jam, or it's this hotline, or it is like, yeah, they're a weird church, but you really like their food banks. She's like, "You have to really bring in.... Like, start where you are and do the resource mapping we were talking about" I really liked that tool a lot as a place for people who are like, "What's my community?" because I think it's a big word and really being like, "What does that even mean to me?" and like, "What's one place that can start building it?" And I also want to shout out, Rebel Sydney Black, who's a friend of mine who passed this June, at the beginning of the pandemic, he created this tool called Pod Mapping for Mutual Aid that was specifically aimed at disabled folks who were trying to pod map during Covid--and we can provide the link and stuff like that--but I would say that those are two places to start and then I want to get to alternatives to lying down and dying. And then I'll stop. **Margaret ** 34:04 Okay, wait, wait, before we get to that I want to talk more about the building community thing. **Leah ** 34:08 Yeah, please. **Margaret ** 34:09 I think you brought up a lot of really interesting points. And one of the things that I really like about it, you know, talking about having like...you're broadening the idea of what counts as community, which I think is really useful. And one of the things I realized is that a lot of times when I was younger, I was like, "Y'all say 'community' and you just mean the people that you like," right? And that didn't make any sense to me. Community seems like the people where you have a shared interest, whether the shared interest is you live on the same block, or whether the shared interest is an identity, or whether the shared interest is an interest that you're trying to see change, or whatever. It doesn't mean people you like. It's a different thing. Friends are the people I like, right? Well, mostly. I'm just kidding. I love all of you. I mean, there's a lot of people I love that I don't always like. Anyway, so I don't know, and so I think that one of the things that stuck out with me about what you're gonna say and I want to highlight is the idea that--or maybe I'm misreading it--but like "pick issue to work" around seems like a good useful way. Especially if you struggle to just have friends, right? That's not like the thing that you're good at. But maybe there's a thing that you want to work on? Or having that meetup where it's like, oh, all the following people who have the following things in common, let's meet up and talk about it. Or honestly, activism is a really good way to meet people and work closely with people about things. And it doesn't necessarily have to mean these are now your friends. But they can be people where you rely on each other. And that doesn't have to be the same. I think about it a lot because I live in a fairly isolated and rural environment where there's not a lot of people around me who are culturally.... Whatever, there's not a lot of out, queer people where I live. There's not a lot of punks. And I'm like, that's okay. I talk to my actual neighbors instead. I mean, some of them, not all of them, but most of them, you know, they're who I would rely on in a crisis, because they're right there. It doesn't mean that we have the same ideas about a lot of stuff, you know? But we have similar ideas, like, "Let's not die," right? And so that's enough sometimes. Anyway, I just wanted to.... **Leah ** 36:12 No, I really appreciate it. And I mean that makes me kind of think about, when you were talking, I was like, yeah, you know, there's friends, there's communities, and then there's survival networks, which can include contacts, right? Because I just think about what would I do right now, if some should happened? And I was like, I've got long distance kin and long term friendships and relationships ofvarious kinds and I also have--because I moved to where I live, which is like semi-rural, but definitely more rural than where I've lived before--and I'm just like, yeah, I have a small number of friends. But there's like people who I know who I can...who are neighbors who like, maybe we don't know a shit ton about each other but I could be like, "Hey, this thing?" or "Hey, do you have water?" or, "Hey, let's do this." I think it's a lot about thinking about what are your goals? Is your goal intimacy? Is your goal survival? Is your goal friendship? Because you need different levels of trust and commonality depending on those things, right? I also think, and this is the thing too, I think something.... I think a lot of times because I've had people be like, "Well, I don't have community," also, I've heard that. And I think that a lot of times the context, I hear it in is people being like, "Well, I have care needs, but I don't have any community." So then there's also the really big thorny question of "need" and like being cared for is actually very complicated. It's very risky. It's very vulnerable. It's not safe a lot of the time. It may feel a lot easier to just be like, "I don't have any fucking needs." And so there's a lot, I will just say that there's a lot of unpacking that needs to do around like, "What would I need to be cared for? What are my lower risk needs that I need help with? What are my higher risk needs?" right? Like, there's people who I can.... There's some needs I have where I'm like, I don't need to trust you super, super deep politically or on an intimate level to let you do that. There are certain needs where I'm like, that's only going to be people where we've really built a lot of fucking trust because if this goes sideways you could really stuck with me. Right? And I think that when you're starting from nowhere, I think often where people get stuck is like, "Where I am feels like I have nobody and nothing. And I want to get to like the thing I've read about in your topic science fiction, where you know, it's Star Hawk and everybody loves each other. And how the fuck do I get from A to B." And I think the solution is like, yeah, you're not gonna get to fucking "Fifth Sacred Thing" right away--and that book is complicated. **Margaret ** 38:29 Yeah, It was very influential on my early.... **Leah ** 38:31 Oh yeah, when I was 18, I just wanted to fucking move there. And now I'm like, "Oh God, this is embarrassing. There's some shit in here." I'm like, "Wow, everybody's mixed race, but everyone's Black parents are dead." Wow. Cool. Nobody really thinks about race. I'm like, I'm gonna throw up. And like, you know, BDSM is just violent....Okay, sorry. We're not going to get into that. **Margaret ** 38:47 Oh my God, I don't remember that part. **Leah ** 38:49 Oh, yeah. No, where it's so violent. Like, "We're just loving." And I wrote a really no passion paper for school, because we actually had to read it in a college class I was in, and I was like, "Why are they not into leather sexuality?" And my professor was like, "Okay, 18 year old..." but yeah. **Margaret ** 39:04 I mean, legit. You 18 year old self had a legitimate critique. **Margaret ** 39:08 Yeah. **Leah ** 39:08 Yeah, no, there's a lot there. But, um, but jumping back, I guess it's just like, you know.... And I think this feels like disabled wisdom too, it's like, what can you do with the spoons or the capacity you have? Like, what's one move you can make that small? And then can you build on that? Yeah, but can I talk about alternatives to lying down and dying? **Leah ** 39:28 Yeah. Well, I think...I mean, this is the thing, is like, I'm a survivalist, but I'm not like anti-civilization in the ways that some people are. Like, I want meds, you know? And I think that's something that other crips I know talk about a lot, which is like, you know, we're really against this way that some people, including some people who would like align themselves with like Healing Justice who are like "We're like, oh, yeah, we just have to go back before colonialism and capitalism, and just everyone lived on herbs and it was great." and I was like, "Nah, bitch, I need surgery and meds." Like I want it all. Like, I love non-Western pre-colonial traditional healing. Absolutely. And I've had friends who died because they didn't get their surgeries on time. Like my friend LL died because nobody would give him a fucking kidney because they said he was too fat. And I'm just like, my good future involves.... I mean, and he's one of millions right? So like, my good future involves that we have surgical suites. And I'm just like, you know, honestly, also, a lot of times that worldview just seems so white to me, because I'm just like, listen, a lot of like, global south places figure out how to have field hospitals, right, in really dire and low-resource situations. So I'm sorry.... **Margaret ** 40:40 I mean, only Europoe's ever figured out surgery. No one else has done surgery until Europe showed up. [Said sarcastically implying the opposite] **Leah ** 40:45 Yeah, not fucking ever. [Also said sarcastically] **Margaret ** 40:46 Said the people who are like, "bite down stick and I'll saw your arm off." **Leah ** 40:49 Yeah, so I mean, I guess one thing I would just say is like, I would say that and I would say like, you know, really...I want to like lift up and encourage people to look at--and they can be hard to find--but look at cultures, look at organizing initiatives where people were like, "We can have our own ambulance, we can have our own like..." And when that's not there, to think about what it would mean to have medical care after the apocalypse, right? What would it mean to make hormones, make drugs, synthesize chemicals, and it's not impossible. I think that we're still in the in between of like, okay, we gotta figure out how to do that. But, um, you know, I'm thinking about, Ejeris Dixon, who's my friend and comrade, and, you know, we co-edited "Beyond Survival" together, which is a book we wrote that came out right at the beginning of the pandemic about stories and strategies from how people are actually trying to create safety without the cops. Ejeris always talks about how they were like, "Yeah, like, in Louisiana, you know, in the South, you know, like in the 50s, and 60s, and before I believe, there were all kinds of Black run ambulance and 911 services," because regular 911 wouldn't come to Black communities. Right? And they, I mean, something that I've heard them say a lot over the years is like, "We don't have the people's ambulance yet. But we could." And then it makes me also jump to some friends of mine who were in Seattle who were really active as street medic crew during the rebellions after George George Floyd was murdered by the police in, you know, 2020 in the summer, and specifically in, as some people remember, Seattle managed to have 16 square blocks break off from the city for a while, CHOP, Capitol Hill Organized Front. And so what people don't know is that the cops were like, "Okay, fuck you. We're not going to...If there's any 911 ambulance calls, we're not going to fucking let anyone go in there." So the street medic crew had to deal with a lot of really intense situations. And then after that, like a lot of us folks, like some folks were already nurses or EMTs and a lot of folks who were involved went to nursing school or EMT school and we're like--and I don't know where it's at now--but they were like, "We want to create,"--because right now in Seattle, there's, if somebody is having a crisis on the street, like a medical or a mental health crisis or an altered state crisis, there's no non-911 crisis response that you can call. There's either you go down the stairs to talk to somebody or there's the cops, right. And they were like, "We can get a van. We can get medical equipment from eBay." And you know, I don't know where they're at with that, but they were really organizing around like, "Yeah, we could get a defibrillator. We could get oxygen. We could get blood pressure cuffs. We could get fucking..." you know? And I think that that shit gets complicated in terms of insurance and regulation and the State and the medical industrial complex, but I want us to keep thinking about that. I also, and then I'll wrap up because we have other questions to get to, but it also makes me think about, I mean, I don't know if folks are familiar with Gretchen Felker Martin's amazing science fiction book "Manhunt," right, which is about.... **Margaret ** 43:50 I haven't read it yet. **Leah ** 43:52 It's so fucking good. Okay, so I won't give it away. But just for people who don't know, I'd say it's the one kind of gender sci-fi book where "Oh, a virus, you know, affects people with certain chromosomes or certain that dih-dah-dug that's not TERFy because it's a book that, you know, she's trans, and it's a book that centers trans women and nonbinary communities and there's like one or two trans masculine characters. But the two main trans femme, like trans women characters in the book, they're like, they have to, they're like, "Yeah, like, we're going on raids to get, you know, hormones, and, you know, different, like chemical drugs we need. And we're also figuring out how to synthesize them from herbs and different substances." And it's not easy. It's a struggle. But there are organized communities of trans women and allies that are fighting to do it. And I'm just like, yeah, and I mean, it's an amazingly well written book, and she's incredible, and I fucking loved it. And it's just beautifully written and really just--sorry, I won't gush too much but go read it, it's incredible--I just really also appreciated it because she was like, "Yeah, of course we're gonna get our hormones after the end of the world. Like of course it's possible." And I will also.... I have some criticisms of the ableism in it, but M.E. O'Brien and--fuck I'm forgetting the second author's name, but every you know, "Everything For Everyone," that book. I appreciated how in the good future society, they're like, "Our priority is making sure that insulin and chemical drugs and hormones are accessible and free to everybody." And I was like, I guess I would just push people towards there are ways of imagining the future where we can defeat capitalism but still have medical care of all kinds. We can have Reiki and acupuncture and we can also hormone surgery and transplants. And we might be doing it better because it's not controlled by fucking corporations and assholes. Sorry, that's my soapbox. Um, okay. I will say in terms of people being like, "That's really nice. But what about me?" I would be like, you know, I mean, right now in the war on trans America, there are so many people already who are like, "Yeah, I'm stockpiling meds. I like doing meds trading." I would say it goes back to what we started about, which is like, "Okay, what are your needs? What are the things that you're worried will not be there if the world ends?" Right? And we also need to recognize that the world's already ending and it's ended for some of us a bunch of times already. But I would be like, make that list and then really be like, "Alright, how do I get it?" You know, and if I can't specifically get it, are there like backups that I can get? And it may be stuff that you can research on your own. It also might be stuff where it's like, "Okay, are there trans [untranslatable], disability justice organizations, nationally, globally, locally, that you can hit up and be like, "What are folks thoughts about this? Are there ways that we can resource share?" Because I think it's about pills. I think it's also about durable medical equipment. So in terms of stuff that requires power to live, I think about generators and I think about generator shares. And I think about things like...there's a story when Hurricane Sandy hit New York 10 years ago, there were a whole bunch of us where...there's a guy Nick who's in community who, physically disabled guy, 13th floor, accessible apartment, you know, the lights went out, you know, really dependent on electricity to change out the batteries on his ventilator. There's a whole crew of disabled folks, like people walked up and down those fucking stairs every eight hours to take the spent batteries, figured out, "Hey, you know, what still has power, the fucking fire department." People were walking down recharging the batteries every eight hours. And it was allies, it was ambulatory, it was disabled people who could walk. It was fucking hard. But people were like, we're not.... Nick and his friends were like, "We're not just going to die. We're needed." So I wanna shoutout that and just for possibility modeling, I really want to, one other place I want to shout out, is an org that used to be known as Portlight but was now known as the Center for Inclusive Disaster Strategies, which is a disabled-led organization that is about like, yeah, when there's a climate or other disaster, they figure out ways of getting like accessible fucking evacuation methods to places because they know...we know, there's millions of examples of people who are just left to die in nursing homes or like, "Oops, the bus doesn't have a ramp," or, you know, I really want to name that during Katrina, some people might know about, you know, the situation with the nursing home that was there were a lot of folks who were wheelchair users or had high care needs were fucking killed by medical staff because the medical staff were like, "We're gonna actually euthanize these folks without their knowledge or consent." [Margaret exclaims] Yeah, no, there was actually a movie on HBO about it I think semi recently. Because "that's easier than figuring out how to fucking get people in the medivac ," right? Yeah, and so the Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies, I'm still getting to know them, but I have friends who are involved and they're like, "Yeah, we're aware this is an issue." So yeah, let's work with the fucking Cajun fucking Navy to like make sure that you can get folks with different bodies onto evac boats. Like let's figure out what disabled survival looks like. And I will just say, and this is the last thing I swear, for me, I mean, we all know water is important. Like, I can't lift 54 pounds. Guess what? So can't--which is, you know, a seven gallon right, like a five or seven gallon whatever--I'm just like, yeah, so I can actually have smaller jugs of water that I can lift. So yeah, I have a bug out plan, but I also have a real Shelter in Place plan because I'm just like, yeah, my apartment's accessible for me. So yeah, I got a shit ton of water right here and I'll be good for a while. And I also have a plan B for.... Okay, there's...I've got my filtration equipment, so when that runs out, I'm close to some water sources where I can go and I can filter that shit. And that's me thinking about what works for my body. Think about what works for yours and then plan out from that. Okay, I'll really stop talking now. **Margaret ** 49:44 No, no, but there's so much there. Even just like to go to the weight of water, right? The thing that I ran across that I'm like--I'm reasonably able-bodied and such like that, right--but I live alone and so obviously there's this specific thing where like.... Well, one, I mean, abledness is always a temporary position.... **Leah ** 50:04 Yeah, you're going to get disabled, you're gonna get sick and disabled. **Margaret ** 50:07 Like it literally happens to--unless you, I don't know, die very quickly, very suddenly, probably violently, you're gonna go through a period of disability in your life, you know? And so my argument is that machismo is anti-prepping. And one of the ways that I would say is that like, there's now, I think.... Okay, so cement bags, they come in 50 pound bags traditionally, right? But now there's more and more, I think, there seems to be more and more 30 pound bags, right? And I used to be like, "Oh, whatever, I can lift a 50 pound bag. So I should carry the 50 pound bag." And then I'm like, well, it was not a helpful way to look at it. It is far better for me to just have 30 pound bags of cement because they're easier to carry and I'll get tired less. And I, you know, at the time that I was pouring these bags, I lived up a hill about probably the equivalent of a seven storey walk up to this cabin that I was building, right. And so I had to carry each and every one. It was way nicer that I carry 30 pound bags. And if your preparedness doesn't include the fact that your level of ability will change in different situations, then it's not very good preparedness. And and so like, I don't know, I mean, like most of my water jugs are four or five gallon jugs. I use jerry cans. I think most of them are five gallon. And I hate the six gallon ones and the seven gallon ones. They're just heavy and annoying. And it's like I can give lift them but there's no reason why I should. Unless I'm specifically working on lifting weights. And then the other thing that you talked about that I really think about a lot, you know, is this idea, of does your version of disaster mean that every doctor dies? Or like, does your version of disaster mean everyone who's ever made insulin dies? Like, it's possible. Sure, you could have 90...if almost everyone on Earth dies, then everything is a little different. But most disasters don't actually..... Most disasters destroy ways of living and large numbers of people, but not the majority of people write. Most people survive most disasters. And, people are like, "Well, our organizational systems are what produce insulin," and like, no, people produce insulin and they use organizational systems with which to do it. But different organizational systems can also produce insulin. Like different organizational systems can use the same infrastructure sometimes and make the things that we rely on. And it came up with this like whole thing where people on the internet were like, "Ah, if you're an anarchist, you hate disabled people because in anarchy, you can't have insulin," **Leah ** 50:28 That's gross. **Margaret ** 52:40 It is a complete misunderstanding of anarchism. It is not a lack of organization, it is a different type of organization. **Leah ** 52:46 Anarchy is responsibility. **Margaret ** 52:48 Yes, totally. **Leah ** 52:50 Sorry, sorry. **Margaret ** 52:52 That's why people don't like it. People are afraid of it because they actually have to.... It's the accepting no one is coming to save us except us. You know? No, I love that way of framing and it also annoys anarchists when you tell them this too. **Leah ** 53:07 Okay, well, I mean, you know, so I worked at Modern Times books, which was, you know, is no longer around, but was a long time anarchists and anti authoritarian radical bookstore in the Bay. And we had the only public toilet in all of the Mission because everybody else was like, "No, you gotta buy something." and in my interview, they're like, "How will you make the store better?" And I was like, "I will make the bathroom not smell horrible." Because, you know, it was just like a bust, everyone was pissing in there. And so I taped up a sign that said "Anarchy is responsibility. If you spray the fucking toilet with urine, please wipe it up. Together we can have a toilet." And somebody called me out and was like, "That's capitalist." And I was like, "No, just wipe your piss up or we're not gonna make the revolution. Like, come on." But yeah, they got pissed at me about that. [Both laugh] But yeah, I mean, I think that's a really good point. And it's like, you know, I mean, I think that it does point to, you know, I think a structural problem in a lot of our movements, which is like, yeah, we don't we need more people who know some basics of chemistry and can synthesize stuff. Like, that's, you know, we need more people who've gone to some kind of science or engineering school who can figure out how sewage works and how you synthesize insulin and how you synthesize hormones and like, basic surgery. And I think there's a lot of hopefulness because I--maybe it's just the folks I hang out with--but I have a fair number of friends who are like, "Yeah, I'm gonna be a nurse practitioner. I can give you an abortion. I can sew up your wound. I can help you figure out this thing." And I'd love for there to be more of us who can go to PA school or

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Episode Summary This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Inmn is joined by Sophie and Parker from No More Deaths to talk about the militarization of the US-Mexico border and the most recent installment of the "Disappeared" report series "Separate & Deadly." Guest Info The Disappeared report can be found at www.thedisappearedreport.org. No More Deaths can be found at nomoredeaths.org, on Instagram @nomoredeaths_nomasmuertes, or on Twitter @nomoredeaths. Host Info Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript No More Death on The “Disappeared” Reports & Border Militarization Pt. I **Inmn ** 00:14 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcasts for what feels like the end times. I'm your host today, Inmn, and today we have some folks coming on that I've really wanted to get on the podcast for a while because I think that the work that they do is just really incredible and I want more people to know about it. So we have two folks from No More Deaths, or No Mas Muertes, coming on. And No More Deaths is a humanitarian aid group whose goal is to, you know, prevent death and suffering in the borderlands. And they work primarily in southern Arizona in response to rampant border militarization. And I'm really excited that they have this new report coming out in their series of reports called the "Disappeared" series. And their new report, "Separate & Deadly", just came out. And we'll have links in the show notes to where to find it to read the whole thing. And I'm really excited to have folks from, specifically, the abuse doc, or abuse documentation, working group, coming on because I think a lot of focus gets put on the physical doing, the putting out water, and all of that, and that stuff is really important, you know, obviously, but I also think it's great to really highlight the work that a lot of people have been doing to document the reason and the need and the reactions from Border Patrol and other governmental bodies in response to this humanitarian aid. And so yeah, I don't know, I'm really excited to highlight this particular aspect of that work. But before we get to that, we are a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show on that network. Doo doo doo. **Inmn ** 03:19 And we're back. Thanks, y'all so much for coming on the show today to talk about this thing. Could y'all introduce yourselves with your name, pronouns, and I guess what your role is with No More Deaths and this report? **Parker ** 03:37 Yeah, I can go first. My name is Parker. I use she/her pronouns. I have been involved with No More Deaths since about 2015. I came down and started volunteering in the desert. Moved to Tucson a little bit after that. So I've been involved with desert aid and then also involved with the abuse documentation working group producing the Disappeared report that we're going to talk about. Sophie and I were co-coordinators for several years working on that project and then have both been involved as volunteers. **Sophie ** 04:10 Hi, my name is Sophie and I use she/they pronouns. And I've been a volunteer with No More Deaths since 2011, volunteering with desert aid and also with community-based search and rescue and I'm a co-author for the Disappeared report series and co-coordinated with Parker on this report. **Inmn ** 04:29 Cool. And for folks who don't know, what is No More Deaths? What does No More Deaths do? **Parker ** 04:49 No More Deaths is a humanitarian aid organization whose mission is to end death and suffering in the borderlands. No More Deaths was formed in 2004 in response to rising deaths of people crossing the border. There's a number of different working groups and projects under the No More Deaths umbrella. So Sophie and I have been a part of the abuse documentation working group, documenting the kinds of things we're seeing in the course of the work. There's desert aid. They do water drops, where we bring out water and food and leave them on migrant trails in the remote borderlands. We maintain a humanitarian aid camp where people can come and get food and water and respite. We do a community-based search and rescue project where there's a hotline and we get reports of people who have gone missing while crossing the border and can send out volunteers to do search and rescue. We also do some support in Northern Mexico for post-deportation or pre-departure support. Yeah, so there's a lot of different projects under this umbrella but all for humanitarian aid trying to provide support for people who are crossing the border in southern Arizona. **Inmn ** 05:59 Cool. Yeah, y'all do so many different things. And I've been wanting to get someone from the group to come talk about stuff for a while now. I used to volunteer with y'all and I reference border-aid stuff on the podcast a lot. So I'm just really stoked to have you all here to talk about this. And the new report was a great opportunity to wrangle some folks into coming on. I was wondering, though, if y'all could share a little bit about like the...I guess the context of the border and, specifically, border militarization and Border Patrol's role in that to kind of build a little foundation for what we're going to talk about today. **Sophie ** 06:51 Yeah, so, when talking about the militarization of the US-Mexico border, usually, we're kind of looking at a time period of the last 30 years or so starting in 1994--which certainly wasn't the start of border militarization--but was a signal year in terms of the enforcement strategy on the border really shifting gears. So in 1994--many people remember that year because it was the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which had really huge consequences for migration. We know that NAFTA contained neoliberal economic reforms that took away tariffs and barriers to trade and lead things like US subsidized corn to flood the market in Mexico which drove down prices and then spiked this labor-driven migration of people who had historically been able to make ends meet through farming heritage corn and no longer could compete. So we know that NAFTA sparked this labor-division migration. We know that's not the first time that US policy has sparked migrations across the border. But what was different in 1994 was at the same time the US Border Patrol came together to come up with a policing strategy of how they were going to control the border given this expected rise in labor-driven migration from south to north. And so Border Patrol met with security heads from the Department of Defense, who are versed in conducting regime change and low intensity conflict doctrine throughout Latin America in the 80s. And they produced a new strategy for how they're going to police the 2000 mile southern border. The strategy that they came up with is called Prevention Through Deterrence, which is kind of a technical and clunky title for a really nefarious strategy. So the theory was that the southern border couldn't be sealed off entirely despite all the rhetoric we see about, you know, border walls, sealing the southern border. The Border Patrol observed that the border couldn't actually be sealed from migration, but that the flow of migration across the border could be controlled. And so Border Patrol sought to concentrate enforcement resources--so, personnel, vehicles, infrastructure like walls, surveillance technology--in and around ports of entry in urban areas along the border where migration had historically flowed as a mechanism that would then push people attempting across the southern border without official permission out into remote areas along the border between ports of entry between cities. so especially huge expanses of desert along the border. And the strategy document--which is public, you can look at it online--specifically says that the strategy intends to push people out into remote areas where they can find themselves in mortal danger as a consequence of being exposed to the elements without access to food, water, or rescue. And the belief was that by pushing people into these remote areas, a certain number of people would not make it. They would be deterred, either having to turn back or they would perish and that this would then dissuade others from attempting the journey. It would prevent rising levels of migration. This was the theory, Prevention Through Deterrence, that by making the border as deadly, as costly as possible to cross, that this would deter others...it would prevent others from attempting the journey. And so what happens is that Border Patrol puts up walls, installs surveillance technology in and around ports of entry in places like El Paso/Juarez, in places like Nogales, in places like San Diego/Tijuana, all at the end of the 1990s. And indeed, this shifts patterns of migration, undocumented migration, out into these really remote regions of the desert, where people are having to undertake multi-day journeys on foot through really rugged geography. And immediately we start to see hundreds of remains, human remains, recovered from remote areas of the border by 2000, 2001, and 2002 as a result of this policy, people who are dying from things like exposure to the elements or whose death cause is actually not able to be determined because their remains have decomposed so much before they've been located because they're perishing in such remote areas. So this humanitarian crisis opens up on the border in the early 2000s. And this is what humanitarian groups like No More Deaths and others start attempting to respond to. And this is still the policy that we see on the southern border. Of course, it's been bolstered by things like the 2006 Secure Fence Act, which really increased the number of Border Patrol agents on the line dramatically and allowed agents to start to patrol remote areas and rural communities in addition to being stationed in cities, to push people out into the desert, and also extended funding for walls. We also have seen more recent walls go up under the Trump administration. And now Biden's also funding that, But this is still the strategy under which Border Patrol is policing the southern border. And, again, this was never a strategy to close the border but to try to control the rate of crossing by making it as deadly or dangerous as possible. And so the thing about Prevention Through Deterrence is that it's been incredibly successful in pushing people out into remote areas where they find themselves in mortal danger, that that, indeed, was a prediction that that did come to pass. We know that the remains of at least 10,000 people have been recovered from the southern border. And experts estimate that the true number of deaths are probably three to ten times higher than that number, because so many people are perishing in such remote areas that their remains are never found or if they're found they're never identifiable. So we call this a crisis of death and disappearance on the border due to that phenomenon. But we also know that Prevention Through Deterrence has been a real failure in terms of preventing undocumented crossing on the southern border. This policy has coincided with a lot of measures to cut off legal paths of entry, shrink asylum programs, refugee programs, and further criminalize migration. And as a consequence, more and more populations are being caught up into this system. And more and more families are moving to the US permanently rather than risk multiple crossings to migrate seasonally for work or things like that. So this is the same system under which a lot of people fleeing conditions in the Northern Triangle as a consequence of US policy in the hemisphere, they're being caught up in this system of migration too. And we know that there's at least 13 million people now residing in the US who don't have documentation or full status or protection or rights as a consequence of this. So this is really the context in which humanitarian groups are trying to respond by providing food, water, and even improvised emergency medical services in these remote areas. And it's also a context in which, in terms of abuse documentation, there's a real need for witnessing and documentation of what's happening on the ground out in the back country where Border Patrol agents are operating daily with no witnesses and virtual impunity. So this was really kind of the context that gave rise to the abuse documentation project in general and these reports more specifically, **Inmn ** 15:38 Cool.... Or I mean, you know, not "cool," but thank you for walking us through that. I've heard a lot...you know, over the years, I've heard a lot of...been to a lot of trainings where there's like a border militarization context and I don't know that I've ever heard it put so succinctly and neatly. So that's...that is incredible. And, yeah, it's funny, because when I was putting together notes for the show today, I had like a little note, like, "Oh, make sure to talk about the Deterrence Through Death strategy." And then I was like, "Wait, is that what it's called?" And then I couldn't remember if that's like, what it was officially called, or not. And then, yeah...remembering that it was maybe not called that-- **Parker ** 16:33 No, that's just what it is. **Inmn ** 16:34 Yeah. That's just what it is. Okay, well, could y'all, I guess, maybe with that foundation, what is the abuse doc working group then do? And like how did the "Disappeared" report series come to be? **Parker ** 16:52 Yeah, the abuse documentation working group, it's been, you know, around through a number of different projects with different volunteers leading them. A lot of the earlier reports that No More Deaths was putting out were focused on detention. So we put out a report called "Culture of Cruelty" that really focused on really inhumane conditions, abusive conditions, within Border Patrol custody--so short term Border Patrol custody before people are deported or turned over to ICE--and focusing on things such as denial of food and water, denial of medical care, psychological abuse.... Just yeah, really horrible conditions, people being held longer than they're legally supposed to without being given phone calls and things like that. So that report primarily was done through interviews with people who had been deported and just kind of arose out of the conversations people were having with people through our support work at shelters there and hearing the conditions that they were being held under. So "Culture of Cruelty" was one of our earlier reports. We put out "Shakedown," which focuses on Border Patrol's, seizing up people's belongings when people are in Border Patrol custody without returning it. And both of those reports really focused on advocacy and trying to, you know, push for policy changes in response to these patterns that we were documenting. And I think people sort of had the experience of, you know, providing really clear documentation and then seeing that Border Patrol is still just denying the same things that, you know, we're showing proof of and not seeing the changes that they wanted to see come out of those reports. The "Disappeared" series, I think was a shift, organizationally, in wanting to really document what's happening in these remote borderlands areas and really push our messaging to call for the abolition of Border Patrol and really just say what we wanted to say politically and document things that there was really no documentation of at that time. So the "Disappeared" report series, it's focusing on the actions of Border Patrol in remote borderlands areas where there's, you know, there's no transparency whatsoever about what's happening, because there has been this intentional push to push migration into wilderness areas and really focusing on Prevention Through Deterrence but also the way that the day-to-day actions of Border Patrol agents are consistent with this logic of increasing the risk of death to people who are migrating in the ways that that logic is carried out on the ground. And it was a collaborative project. So the "Disappeared" report series started as a collaboration between No More Deaths and another organization called La Coalición de Derechos Humanos, who has been really vocal against militarization from the very beginning. At the time Derechos Humanos, they were operating a missing migrant crisis line, similar to what No More Deaths operates now, so they were receiving this huge volume of calls from family members reporting their loved ones who were missing. And No More Deaths started to collaborate with them with doing search and rescue in the field when they received a call where there was a viable possibility that that person was still alive and could be rescued. So that collaboration led to the "Disappeared" report series. And, yeah, so we've put out, this is the fourth installment of the "Disappeared" report series. **Inmn ** 20:32 So what have the other parts of the "Disappeared" reports explored? **Parker ** 20:37 Um, yeah, so the first report focuses on deadly apprehension methods, particularly on the practice of Chase and Scatter in the wilderness. So this is documenting a practice that, you know, we see and hear about every day in the course of this work, where Border Patrol chases groups of migrating people causing them to scatter and become separated from each other in the remote wilderness, often not detaining a lot of the people who have become separated. And this is really the beginning of a cycle of death and disappearance because when people are scattered in the wilderness like this, they can become injured in the chase, they become separated from their group, which may include family members that they were traveling with, separated from a guide, they become lost and disoriented, you know, people are crossing in this area that have no familiarity with the landscape. So a lot of the time when we encounter people who are, you know, in a life threatening situation, it's because they've been chased and scattered by Border Patrol. And so they're now lost and alone in the wilderness. People lose their belongings in the chase, lose their food, water. And so this is something that, you know, with the hotline where we receive calls from family members, a lot of the time they're saying, you know, "My loved one was chased by Border Patrol. They don't know where they are. They're separated from their group. They need to be rescued." This is so routine Border Patrol really doesn't see it as an abuse. They see it as the way that they are enforcing the border. But it is an extremely dangerous enforcement practice. **Sophie ** 22:10 In the practice of chase and scatter that we examined in part one, we looked at surveys conducted in Nogales as well as the Derechos hotline cases and found that chase and scatter by Border Patrol agents is incredibly common, as Parker was saying, that we found that 40% of people who had been chased by Border Patrol became injured or even killed through the process of that chase. 40% of people who had been chased and scattered became lost. And 35% of the emergency cases that we looked at that involved chase and scatter ended in the disappearance of the person who came into distress after that enforcement context. So it's really a way in which Border Patrol's daily activities are reinforcing the strategy of Prevention Through Deterrence on the ground by sending helicopters and vehicles and agents on foot and dogs after people in remote areas who run in every direction often late at night when Border Patrol agents have night vision goggles. And, you know, we looked at the way in which they've actually documented this activity themselves on the Cops-style reality show, Border Wars, that has many scenes of chase and scatter. So we looked at some of that in which Border Patrol is actually documenting their own crimes and using it as propaganda for the agency. **Inmn ** 23:55 I didn't know that that TV show existed. That's...yeah...that's absurd. **Sophie ** 24:02 I don't recommend it. But it was helpful in kind of...you know, we're interested in the way in which these agencies are providing evidence of their own abuses. **Inmn ** 24:20 Yeah, and I like for.... I guess, for the chase and scatter protocol, like, you know, not that I would prefer that people get apprehended, but why.... I guess, why do the chase and scatter thing instead of apprehending people, which seems to be what Border Patrol like tells the public they're trying to do versus like what they actually do. **Sophie ** 24:48 I mean, I think that chase and scatter is part of a more general pattern where we're seeing migrating people being treated as enemy combatants, enemies of the state, against whom it's somehow appropriate to deploy all the weapons of war. And I think watching Border Wars, you really do see this as war games to an extent. And I think that, you know, the other piece of that, beyond just wanting to, you know, use the kind of military-style equipment that they're given--and we're talking about this, by the way, in the context of like, we're on US soil where this is happening. This is like anywhere from the border line all the way to 100 miles within the US interior is the terrain in which Border Patrol is operating. And when you look at death maps, you can see recovered remains kind of scattered far into the US interior. But really, you know, from Border Patrol's perspective, whether they apprehend a person or they scatter them so that they become lost, disoriented, and in harm's way, either of those outcomes reinforce the strategy of Prevention Through Deterrence, right? On the one hand, you have increased apprehensions as a way to, you know, in their minds, deter others from attempting the journey. And on the other, you have injury and death as a way to build up that deterrent. Again, we see that that deterrence ultimately doesn't work when measured against the conditions that people are leaving or fleeing from in order to cross the border. But both outcomes absolutely serve the overall strategy of Prevention Through Deterrence. And I think it's just another way in which we see people's lives, who are crossing the border, being treated as disposable and not deserving of the kinds of protections afforded to us, right, that it's not important to them whether they apprehend everyone, whether people become lost, and those people are not even counted. So I think that that sort of a deeper structural violence at play in these scenarios. **Parker ** 26:56 Was gonna say the same thing. I think there's sort of just like an institutionalized lack of concern for the outcomes that people face, especially because the outcome of someone potentially dying is baked into the strategy. I remember one of our co-authors talking about when they released the "Chase and Scatter" report, talking to a Border Patrol agent, who I think at the time was the head of they're Missing Migrant Initiative, just saying, you know, "Oh, yeah, I never even thought about what happened to people after we chased them." So, you know, they scatter a group, they arrest a couple people, they call it a day. They don't think about it, and if that person is lost and alone and doesn't have water, well, that's consistent with their enforcement anyways. **Sophie ** 27:37 Right. And the border is just a kind of erratic and contradictory zone where on the one hand, the US-Mexico border zone is one of the most heavily surveilled places on Earth, right, in which enforcement can consolidate in these moments and become incredibly violent. You can be, you know, killed by a heavily armed agent with all these weapons of war, treated as this enemy combatant, on the one hand. On the other hand, you can die of exposure and dehydration and, you know, being in an area where you don't see another person for days at a time. So there's sort of these two forces of, you know, militarism and direct violence, on the one hand, these kinds of really violent kind of events, and then on the other, the forces of abandonment, right, where there's no one to help you. And these things work together. Which is sort of difficult to grasp when you're in that zone, right? If you're circulating in the border zone--and I mean, all of us know this from volunteering--you can see no one the whole day and then suddenly come up upon a heavily armed agent who wants to point their AK47 at you. You know, both of these kinds of forces of indirect violence, of abandonment, and direct violence exist in this geography. **Inmn ** 28:56 Yeah. I know this is maybe a little outside the scope of what we're going to talk about today but I was wondering if y'all could briefly just talk a little bit about the legal systems that people are facing when they are apprehended? Like what is the process of like being...going from like being apprehended to being deported look like? **Parker ** 29:22 Yeah, well, so people are, when they're detained in the field, they're held in short term Border Patrol custody, where, you know, like I was mentioning before, we've documented all kinds of abuses that people face in custody. I remember early on in Trump's presidency, there was this really high-profile news story about a seven year old who died in Border Patrol custody, who, you know, hadn't received water or medical care. And I remember us, you know, just calling attention to the fact that we've been documenting that same pattern for, you know, like over a decade. So people are held in Border Patrol custody, which is supposed to not be any longer than three days maximum. It's supposed to be shorter. Some people at that point are rapidly deported. And then we also saw, you know, these last few years, under Title 42 people being just rapidly deported immediately upon being detained in the field without any sort of legal process. And then other times, you know, people are held in ICE custody or they're held in detention centers. And then there's also Operation Streamline where people are--some people--are given criminal charges. And then they are, you know, fed into our regular criminal justice system. But they have, you know, it's this total farce of justice where they call it Operation Streamline and they'll bring 70 people a day and just charge them all at once. And that's for Criminal Entry or Re-entry. And people just have to, essentially, plead guilty to the lower charge of Criminal Entry instead of Re-entry so that they can face six months instead of two years. So we're also just feeding people into our prison system as well as into the ICE detention system. **Inmn ** 31:02 And do charges like that preclude someone from being able to apply for asylum or other kind legal processes for documented immigration. **Parker ** 31:16 Yeah, I imagine they do. I don't think it's really my or Sophie's wheelhouse, the legal immigration system. I do know that, you know, theoretically, people who are detained by Border Patrol could request asylum, but there's a lot of documentation of Border Patrol, you know, not asking or ignoring people when they do say that they want to make an asylum claim after detaining people in the desert. **Inmn ** 31:35 Yeah, yeah. Um, I guess to shift a little bit more into the current report, I was wondering if y'all could talk a little bit about, I guess, like the third report "Left to Die" as a prelude to what we're going to talk about today? **Sophie ** 32:00 Should we talk about Part Two really quick before? **Inmn ** 32:05 Oh, yeah. Yeah, there's Part Two. Sorry, we skipped Part Two. Yeah, what happened? What happened in Part Two? **Parker ** 32:11 Part Two documented interference with humanitarian aid. So pretty early on, when No More Deaths started to do water drops, we started to find that our water drops would sometimes be vandalized or destroyed. People would stab water gallons, dump them out. We put out cans of beans. People would dump those out or stab them so that they rot. And we anecdotally believed that Border Patrol was responsible for at least some amount of this destruction, just from seeing them near the drops and then finding them vandalized or just the drops being out in areas where Border Patrol is the only other person out there. But to document this, we started to put out game cameras on a lot of the drops that were regularly vandalized and trying to capture footage, which is pretty difficult. The game cameras, like they turn on anytime, you know, the wind blows and the grass moves. So a lot of the time we would come and find the battery dead, but the drop had been vandalized, but we didn't get any footage. But over the years, we did collect footage. And we got several instances of Border Patrol on camera destroying these water drops, stabbing them with knives, things like that. So we wanted to document this pattern in that report. So in addition to that footage, we did an analysis of all of the logs that we keep from every water drop that we go to, where we mark instances of vandalization and just kind of looked at the scope of it, if there were any patterns and where it was happening and when it was happening. And Sophie, do you have some of those findings handy? **Sophie ** 33:47 So just for context, the main part of No More Deaths' work over the years has been mapping migration trails. People undertake anywhere from three days to over a week of a journey through the deserts through really labyrinthian topography, especially in southern Arizona. It's high desert. So it's really mountainous with a system of canyons and there's just thousands of trail systems that have been created over time in the back country that are routes that people are taking across into the United States. So we've located, you know, certain areas of high concentration where we'll place drops of water and food and other supplies, like Parker was mentioning, to try to mitigate death and suffering in those areas. So we looked at the records that were kept by No More Deaths volunteers over three years in which over 30,000 gallons of water were left in the backcountry. And within that we were seeing that 86% of the water that we put out does get used, that this is a really important harm reduction measure to support life in the backcountry as people are on their journey. But we also found that at least 3,586 gallons of water, so over 3000 gallons of water, had been vandalized or destroyed in at least 415 different destruction events. And as Parker was mentioning, you know, really early on we got footage of Border Patrol destroying water. There's kind of an infamous video that we put out of a Border Patrol agent kicking gallons of water that had been put out at a water drop. We got more footage and, you know, have a lot of anecdotal evidence reinforcing this. And that report also then looked at Border Patrol action on humanitarian aid stations, attempts to repress or prosecute volunteers with non-governmental organizations like No More Deaths and others doing this kind of harm reduction work. And so that report looked at a series of attempted prosecutions. There were cases in which volunteers are given littering tickets for putting out water on migration trails as if water is somehow trash in the desert among other cases. I don't know if Parker wants to speak to that more directly. But we're looking at kind of that as, you know, both the destruction of water and the charging...the attempted criminalization of volunteers trying to prevent loss of life as kind of a repressive campaign that Border Patrol is leading against humanitarians coincident with the agency really trying to up its PR and branding as itself, somehow, a humanitarian actor on the border. So this report was being written at the same time that Border Patrol is doing things like publishing the number of border deaths, according to them, versus the number of "rescues" that they apparently conducted. And we'll get more into it in part three, but really trying to say...make these claims that overall, somehow, they're humanitarian actors in this gauntlet of their own making. So that was sort of some of the spirit behind that report was to provide evidence, direct evidence, to the contrary. **Parker ** 37:31 Yeah, I guess just to the interference with humanitarian aid, the interference with volunteer humanitarian aid, one thing that we do focus on in that report too is the raids of our humanitarian aid camp. So I mentioned we maintain a constant presence in the desert at our humanitarian aid camp. And Border Patrol has a history of conducting raids at this camp. So coming and surrounding it, providing a lot of like intimidation, as well as a few times when they have entered the camp and arrested people who were there receiving care. So really just like creating this atmosphere of intimidation, specifically at a humanitarian aid camp. And in one of those raids, they mentioned that they had tracked people for 18 miles until they got to the camp, at which point they surrounded the camp for multiple days until they came in and arrested people. So directly interfering with the provision of humanitarian aid. The charging of volunteers, actually, a note about the timing of that is that this report actually came out before a lot of criminal charges were filed against our volunteers. And in fact, the day that this report came out and the day that we released this footage of Border Patrol destroying water gallons, Scott Warren, one of our volunteers, was arrested six hours later that same day, **Inmn ** 38:45 Which spawned like a multi-year legal battle, right? **Parker ** 38:50 It did result in him being acquitted by a jury. **Sophie ** 38:55 Yes, Scott Warren was charged with multiple felonies, felony harboring and smuggling, for volunteering at a No More Deaths aid station in the area of Ajo, Arizona, where he provided first aid and care to patients who had sought help at that aid station. Right. And that, you know, was a huge court process. There were multiple trials. The first one ended in a hung jury and the second one he was acquitted on all charges. But there is a lot of discussion in court as to, you know, to what extent was his arrest retaliation for the releasing of our second report. There was evidence that Border Patrol agents had knowledge of the report that morning. So we really saw that as retaliatory. But at the same time, his acquittal then provided, you know, important case law within the district to provide a certain, you know, measure of protection for providing humanitarian care to people in the borderlands. So it was really important ,kind of, instruction to us regarding the legality of our work, the kind of defense that can be waged in support of volunteers. So ultimately, it was a victory that really kind of reinforced the foundations of our work in that way. There was a huge effort, huge struggle for Scott personally and, you know, really aimed to have a chilling effect on the work in the desert overall. **Inmn ** 40:27 Yeah, that trial was...that trial was crazy. Like, I don't know, I went to the...like, I attended a couple of days of the court process and I just remember listening to the prosecutor try to make absolutely absurd claims in court, that drinking water might be harmful to someone as like a reason for why humanitarian aid organizations shouldn't leave water in the desert for people. And I was like, this is like a highly paid criminal prosecutor who's trying to argue, and like get doctors to agree with, the absurd claim that drinking water might be harmful to someone who's experiencing dehydration. And I'm just like...this is a farce. **Sophie ** 41:24 Some of them were so bizarre. Well, and the smuggling charge was only based on him being seen, not heard, outside of the aid station, seen pointing to the mountains while talking to the patients. And because he was pointing north, that was considered an act of smuggling, which I thought was incredible. And there was this really powerful moment where Scott did take the stand and said "I was saying, 'There's one highway going through this huge expanse of incredibly deadly desert. And so don't walk towards those mountains because there's no help if you come into harm's way to the east. To the west, it's another 20 miles before you'll hit another major road. If you're in trouble, find the highway, right?'" So given, you know, knowing that these two patients were planning to reenter the back country and trying to give, you know, life saving information was considered to be an act of smuggling. And then I also remember the prosecutor in his closing arguments on the last day, putting up a picture that had been taken of volunteers with the patients after they'd recovered to a certain degree, where they were smiling and claiming that these patients were basically on vacation in the United States, who had gone through, you know, life or death, kind of, harrowing circumstances traveling through one of the most deadly corridors along the whole border. And they were so lucky to be alive by the time they reached Ajo. And somehow, the prosecutor wanted the jury to believe that they were just hamming it up and having a great time on vacation. And it was incredible at that trial to sit in on and relieving to see that those arguments didn't really hold water in the end. **Inmn ** 43:23 Yeah, and...but also, I don't know, it's frightening to see what the legal system can bring charges to bear on someone where they have absolutely no evidence and that it can then take multiple years and obscene amounts of community resources to defend these charges. I don't know. It's...which I don't know, is maybe maybe purposeful by them. I don't know. Just...this is also a little bit outside of the scope, but I feel like people are a little...or might be a little curious...if.... Like, under the law, like what...for people who live in the borderlands, if someone comes to your door what aid can you offer people without legal complications? **Sophie ** 44:25 Yeah. **Inmn ** 44:28 Or, I guess, like, what does the law define as aiding and abetting or smuggling or human trafficking, right, as we've seen people get charged with? **Sophie ** 44:38 I mean, I'll say that I'm not a lawyer. Parker is on the way to becoming one. But I can say to--and I think Parker will have something to add to this--but first of all, under US law, there's no obligation of any citizen to report on the status of anyone else to law enforcement. So if I know that someone is undocumented, there's no law that says I must report their status to the authorities. So there's that to begin with, that if someone comes to your door who you know is crossing through the desert, you don't have any obligation to report them to law enforcement under the law. And then, I mean, this is interesting because there's the kind of word of the law and then there's its interpretation, right? And a lot of what we.... I think what Scott's case provided is some really important interpretation of the law. So we know that, you know, there's a specification that it's illegal to further someone's illegal presence in the country. That's the language. Which means that, you know, things like food, water, shelter, medical care, rest, meals, clothing, none of that's actually furthering that person's presence in the country. So there's kind of a wide range of harm reduction that you can provide perfectly legally, right? And I think I've heard a lawyer once be like, you know, "Is taking your friend to dinner furthering their presence in the country? You know? No." So really, we get into issues of like, are you actually attempting to conceal that person from law enforcement? Are you hosting them as a guest? You know, what is the intent behind your actions? And in any felony case, it's not just simply that you're...you can't be convicted.... Part of the conviction of a felony involves your mens rea, it's your mental state when committing whatever act you committed. So it's not just that you, you know, invited someone into your house. It's what was the intent behind you inviting them into your house? And so a lot of these cases hone in on, were you hiding someone in your basement? Or were you having them in your guest room? Right? Were you driving the person as a passenger in your car? Or were they hiding in your truck? Things like this, when we get into smuggling cases, intent indicated by the way you're interacting really matters in these cases. And that was really at play and in Scott's trial, right, there was an argument that because people had been provided shelter in an indoor aid station that somehow demonstrated concealment because they were behind four walls, right? Which doesn't hold up, right? I have guests at my house and I'm not concealing them from law enforcement just because they're inside. So we get down to the nitty gritty of interpretation with these kinds of statutes. And that's why these cases really matter in how they play out in court, how further answers are being defined. Parker, did you have thoughts on that? **Parker ** 47:54 Um, I think a lot of what I was gonna say is the same as what you said, the language of furthering someone's presence, I think, has been one that in No More Deaths, sort of, like analyzing our legal exposure, have focused on. For example, if you do encounter someone who is in critical medical condition and the nearest hospital is Nogales, you know, you can drive them there. That's not furthering their presence. But, you know, I think ultimately, it comes down to I think this is sort of like a perennial question in No More Deaths as people try to define what exactly is and isn't legal. And as we all know, that doesn't necessarily have bearing on, you know, what the State will try to argue is illegal. And, you know, Scott, what Scott did was perfectly legal in all of our opinions. If we'd had a different jury, he still could have been convicted regardless. So I think the language leaves a lot open to interpretation. And, you know, with the repressive State, they can say that it's illegal. In fact, I think, even in the...we also had a number of misdemeanor charges that volunteers were facing and some went to trial for. The State in that case, was trying to argue that humanitarian aid itself is interfering with the government's compelling interest in enforcing the border. So when their enforcement tactic is to try and increase the threat to people's lives. They can see humanitarian aid, as you know, a threat to that border enforcement and furthering people's illegal presence by simply helping them to survive, which that particular argument that the State made was specifically addressed on appeal and the judge said, "This is grotesque. This is horrifying logic on the part of the government." but they still tried to make that argument. **Inmn ** 49:42 Yeah. Cool. Well, thanks y'all for getting into that a little bit. I think as like a tie in to a general theme of the podcast is, you know, community preparedness. And I think something that like...I think something that like, you know, people who don't spend time thinking a lot about community preparedness or aren't radical leftists, or like whatever, think about these questions of like, "Oh, if like I encounter someone who needs help, like, what am I going to do? How am I going to help that person?" versus like, "What is my fear of doing something illegal that could get me in trouble?" And I worry that like...I worry that people having myths or misinterpretations or listening to whatever propaganda Border Patrol is spewing, that people won't act to help people or to save someone's life because they think that they're doing something that could get them in trouble. And that fear of legal trouble is greater than the desire to help people, which I don't think is true, but like something that I think people worry about, if that makes sense. **Sophie ** 51:06 Yeah, I mean, I can say, I live in Arivaca, which is the town that No More Deaths bases a lot of its work out of. It's a rural town 11 miles from the border. And residents, they're sitting in the middle of this migration corridor and everyone who lives there has had a knock on their door of someone who's lost, often extremely sick or injured and looking for help. And it's also a town that's under virtual, you know, it's actually...it's not unique in the sense that all these towns along the border are now, you know, living under virtual Border Patrol occupation. They're surrounded by Border Patrol checkpoints. You can't go to the doctor, you can't go to the bank without passing through a checkpoint and talking to an armed guard. And there's a heavy presence of Border Patrol in and around town, which has the function of, on the one hand, they're doing these things like chase and scatter and on the other, this kind of high visibility is really intimidating to the public, right? You feel like you're up against this virtual domestic army and intimidation is real. And they're coming on to people's property without notice, often pointing guns at residents, harassing locals, especially people of color. So education and Know Your Rights trainings have been so paramount because at the same time, you know, Border Patrol policy has put these communities on the front lines as the first responders when people are coming through incredibly remote areas. And the first lights they see, the first roads they come to, the first buildings are these residents in these rural communities. They're kind of a natural source of support. And I think Border Patrol has a vested interest in trying to break apart the historic practice before and beyond organizations like No More Deaths of residents opening their door and giving a hand, getting water to anyone who's out in the desert and in trouble. So I think what you're saying Inmn has been like a real focus of organizing and I know it has been an Ajo where Scott lives as well, where they have a local project also doing Know Your Rights education and providing humanitarian resources and things like that to try to break apart Border Patrol's attempt to recruit the local population into their really deadly enforcement regime. And I think that there's been this really vibrant history of border communities, offering that support and facing down the really intimidating presence of this incredibly well resourced, militarized enforcement agency in and around their communities. You know, so I think it's critical. **Inmn ** 53:57 Yeah. And it's like seeing communities in Arivaca and Ajo and the Tohono O'odham Nation really band together to combat these narratives that Border Patrol or the government are trying to really make people think are true and I don't know.... Yeah, that has been one of the most inspiring things to me about doing border aid work or anything like that is seeing the communities that have really like sprung up to...or the communities that like have forever been doing this kind of work and like how they maintain that work and use that to build community rather than divide community. I don't know. I don't know. I just.... Like, God, I remember hearing someone once say they were like, "I don't care what the government says. I'm going to give...if someone comes to my door, I'm giving them food, dammit." And I was like, hell yeah. You're awesome. And this is like someone who I like don't expect to have any other political alignment with. But like, we agreed on that. And I was like, that's awesome. **Parker ** 54:02 No, totally, I've had a few similar experiences in Tucson of just, you know, meeting...like talking to my Uber driver or someone, you know, that I've come into contact with completely unrelated to any sort of political work, you know, and then talking to them and them saying, "Oh, yeah, I ran into someone who was crossing once and gave them a lift to the gas station so they could buy some food and water," you know, like, just thing like that, where it's, you know, there is, on the one hand, this real fear of criminalization that like Border Patrol has created, but then on the other hand, there's just such a natural impulse for humanity for people to, you know, give someone water or lift or, you know, whatever it is that they're needing. **Inmn ** 56:12 Yeah, yeah. And I know I'm just riffing off a specific organization's name right now. But it's almost like, it's really important for people to help other people and to just treat them like people because they're people. We're all just people trying to help people. [There's an organization called People Helping People] **Sophie ** 56:33 Yeah, and it's part of this kind of longer, you know, history of social movement, I think, you know, whether we're talking about Germans sheltering Jews or underground railroad or, you know, it's always been that when you have a general population get caught up in these kinds of violent campaigns that are trying to, you know, discriminate and punish people based on identity, there are always locals who won't comply. And I think that it's heartening to see that tradition, you know, continue on the border in southern Arizona, like you're saying, Inmn against really, you know, among really unlikely actors. Like many people I know in Arivaca might hold really racist beliefs but still are always going to give a person water and food a bed to stay in because they're people, right? So it's a really kind of interesting moment in which ideology sort of doesn't hold up to the needs...to the human needs of the present. And I find that really heartening. **Inmn ** 57:46 Yeah, it makes me really curious. And like, I want to try to learn more about this part of this specifically, but it's like what's going on in Palestine right now is I'm really curious about what people in neighboring regions are doing that are very similar to this kind of work right now and what people...and like what people...hearing about people in Israel who are like...who are like getting indicted with pretty scary criminal charges simply for like, speaking out against what Israel is doing right now? I don't know. **Sophie ** 58:34 Yeah, it's so important. **Inmn ** 58:39 But as a kind of unfortunate segue, so like, you know, the community is really holding it down for trying to help people who are experiencing being lost and scattered in the desert. But Border Patrol is doing the opposite of that. Could y'all talk a little bit about, I guess, the third installment of the report? **Parker ** 59:04 Yeah, the third installment is called "Left to Die," and it focuses on search and rescue. And so this is another report that came out of our experiences with the missing migrant crisis line and providing search and rescue but also out of Border Patrol's sort of propaganda, styling themselves as humanitarian and putting out a ton of PR about their search and rescue. You know, they hold these PR events every year where they show, you know, their fancy helicopter tricks. And they put out these statistics about how many people they rescue every year with no sort of explanation of what that means. Meanwhile, as they were doing that, you know, our personal experience and the experience of people with Derechos Humanos' missing migrant crisis line and with No More Deaths was complete inaction when they would try and request a search and rescue from Border Patrol. So when someone does call the missing migrant crisis line, a family member or someone who's lost, we want whatever resources possible. That's almost always what the family is asking, is for whatever resources possible to go to try and rescue their loved one. And so we would call Border Patrol. And a lot of the time, we would get no response, a refusal to respond to go in search for someone, or, you know, these really vague, just sort of like, "Yeah, we'll look into it," and then they never call back. So we were experiencing a lot of inaction in response to requests for search and rescue from Border Patrol. And we wanted to document that with this report. So the report draws primarily from the case notes, from emergency cases received by the Derechos Hunmanos missing migrant migrant crisis line. So there were I think 456 calls that were classified in a two year period as emergency cases. So these are cases where the person had been heard from within the last three days, there was some information about their location, and there is a possibility that they were still alive in the desert and in need of rescue. So in contrast to a bunch of other calls that were received from the Derechos crisis line where someone was known to be in detention, but they were missing a detention, or it had been months since they disappeared, these were the cases that were potential search and rescue. **Sophie ** 1:01:19 So like Parker, said these are cases in which the family or the person was requesting a Border Patrol response or consented to us advocating or organizations advocating for a Border Patrol response. And we'll talk a little bit more about why Border Patrol for these cases. But we looked at the outcomes and Border Patrols is kind of a notoriously opaque organization. There's so little public reporting or transparency about what they do. So like Parker mentioned, they'd publish these rescue statistics but with no information about the cases from which they were deriving them. And we looked at, you know, press releases where the headline was, "Border Patrol Rescues Man," and then you read the article and it's about them chasing someone into a pond where they almost die and then the agents pull them out of the pond, right? **Parker ** 1:02:20 And then arrest them and deport them. **Sophie ** 1:02:21 So this really kind of farcical phrasing of "apprehension as rescue." So there really wasn't data to challenge that with. So that's part of why we really wanted to look at this data set. And we found when we looked at those 456 cases that 63% of the time, so two thirds of those cases, where Border Patrol was pressed to respond to a person in immediate distress, we had no confirmation that they took any measure to mobilize a search or rescue in response to them. So nothing. No confirmation of any action being taken in two thirds of the time, in hundreds of cases, right? And then in the 37% of cases in which there was indication that Border Patrol took some action to prevent loss of life, we found that their responses just severely, severely diminished when compared against the measures that Pima County Sheriff's Department search and rescue would take if they were coming to save my life, right, if I was lost in the same area. So in particular, we saw Border Patrol, when they did deploy to search for a person who was lost in the desert and in distress, we found that the duration of those efforts and the resourcing was just really diminished when compared to the measures taken to search for a citizen or a foreign tourist. So a lot of those searches lasted less than a day and we had some that lasted less than an hour without locating the person. And then just lack of resources. Like a lot of those deployments were simply a helicopter flyover. When you look in the newspaper at the case of a missing hiker, right, a citizen hiker, you'll see that those searches will take two weeks and that the search effort and area and resources will expand with each day that the person is not found, right? More and more resources are added because it's more and more urgent. Instead we see that if the person isn't pretty quickly located in the 1/3 of the time that Border Patrol deploys at all, they will call off the search. And so as a consequence of that, we found that out of these 456 cases that a quarter of the time, the person in distress was never located. So that's not a quarter of the time that they died, that's a quarter of the time that they disappeared, right? So the person was never located one in four cases and yet the search was called off. And we can see that's just absolutely an indication of deadly discrimination that, you know, if that...those are not the numbers that citizens see. And I think this was really important in combining these observations with that first report "Chase & Scatter," to really put together a full picture in which we found that looking at the kind of critical role that Border Patrol is playing in putting people into a life or death situation by chasing them and scattering them in the wilderness compared with the frequency with which they would deploy, to search for and rescue or distressed person, we were able to say that Border Patrol is two times more likely to take part in causing a person to go into distress, causing an emergency, than they are in participating and attempting to rescue them. So really, they're just always responding to these emergencies of their own making and they're much more heavily focused on their enforcement priority, right, in putting people in harm's way as a matter of policy. **Parker ** 1:06:06 Yeah, it really is this sort of twisted rebranding of Prevention Through Deterrence and the fact that people are being pushed into danger. It's like, you know, someone at Border Patrol's office was like, "I know, we can call these rescues now," because everybody who's crossing through the borders is facing a huge threat to their life. They're in wilderness areas. They're lost. They're in distress. And then because of that, Border Patrol can rebrand any arrest of somebody as a "rescue" by saying, "Yeah, we arrested this person, you know, who was like, lost, and therefore, we rescued them." **Sophie ** 1:06:42 And then use that number to somehow offset the death statistics, which is incredible to me to publish these numbers, you know, Border Patrol saying, okay, there were 300 human remains recovered this year, but allegedly, they rescued 700 people, as if there's something legitimate about, you know? That death statistic needs to be zero, right? It's sort of trumpeting, it's own death statistics, you know, in a way as a way to them comparatively have their rescue seem even more significant. And it makes you sort of forget that that statistic should be zero and that those numbers are, you know, again, hugely partial, because so many people are disappearing and never ever recovered. The other part that the report looked at was what happens when the County doesn't deploy a search and rescue like they would for a person with citizenship status or a tourist, which we'll talk about more, Border Patrol doesn't deploy, and someone is in distress. Their family knows about it. They received a distress call, right, from their child, their brother, their loved one who's crossing and we found that really often, families and communities will mobilize and improvise search on their own based on the information that they have from the person who's calling them. So we were really interested in what happens when families and communities mobilize, sometimes with the partnership of community search and rescue organizations, sometimes on their own, and Border Patrol's reaction. So another kind of focus of part three was looking at systematic Border Patrol, obstruction and interference with family and community-based search and rescues when all systems kind of failed them and found that a quarter of the time, 25% of the time, that communities and families deploy to search for their loved ones Border Patrol obstructs those efforts in some way. So we tracked a number of those issues, like refusal to share critical information that Border Patrol might have about the person's point-last-seen, denying access to eyewitnesses who might be in custody, harassing families and volunteers on the ground. So a number of really serious kinds of obstructions to anyone being able to access a search area and have adequate information. Often Border Patrol will have coordinates of where they attempted to apprehend a group and people were scattered and the person you're looking for was scattered by the apprehension attempt and needs those coordinates to go to the point that they are last seen to start the search, right? And Border Patrol refusing to share information and even cases in which Border Patrol is sharing false information with families and communities. So again, we see this as another measure that's meant to just increase the number of people who are dying and disappearing in an attempt to cross through the borderlands. **Parker ** 1:09:50 Yeah, and within that, I think one thing that we really tried to highlight in this report too, is the bureaucratic runaround that families and volunteers are met with trying to report an emergency. So like a lot of people have probably, you know, had the experience of trying to call Verizon and getting bounced around between different voicemails but that'll happen in these moments where there is a life threatening emergency that someone is trying to report. And there's no functional system. It'll happen between, you know, a county run 911 and Border Patrol where the county is saying, you know, "That's not our job, it's Border Patrol's job," and then Border Patrol will be saying, "Well, no, you have to call 911." It'll happen within Border Patrol agencies where you call one number and you're told you have to call this other number and then you get transferred to the other number. And it's, you know, a non-working number. Border Patrol will say you have to call the consulate. The consulate will say you have to call Border Patrol or the consulate's closed on the weekend. So it's a completely non-functioning emergency response system. And I think we just want to capture that and the experience that, you know, families will go through just spending like hours and hours just trying to even get someone on the phone who they can report the emergency to. And then, you know, half the time you do that and you don't even get a call back. So it's just a really infuriating system. **Sophie ** 1:11:05 Yeah, and just to add on to that as well, we have a lot of cases where Border Patrol refuses to deploy, saying there's not enough information to search and then families and/or humanitarian organizations will deploy their own search and immediately locate the person, right? So some of those efforts also reveal that even minimal effort is so significant in preventing loss of life in these cases, and yet we see agents, you know, Border Patrol, really reluctant or refusing to deploy at all. **Inmn ** 1:11:38 Thanks so much for listening everyone. This interview was unexpectedly much larger than we thought it was going to be and we're kind of just cutting in the middle of it. And we'll continue the interview next week. So tune in next week, for now that we've finally laid a lot of groundwork for what the new "Disappeared" report is about and then we can actually now talk about the new report. And yeah, it's going to be, you know, "fun" isn't the right word, but it's going to be an interesting finish to the conversation. So if you enjoyed hearing about border militarization and the other reports then tune in next week to finish the conversation. And I'm just rambling now, because I didn't write a script. And it turns out I do really well with scripts. But we will see you next time. Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, then go do border work, go do humanitarian aid work, find ways to plug into these networks wherever you live because I'm sure they exist and because, unfortunately, the border is everywhere. And there's.... Which you know, is horrible. And it also means that wherever you are, there's something, there's some way for you to plug in to deal with it, or whatever. You could also, if you liked this podcast, rate and review and like and subscribe, or whatever the nameless algorithm calls for. Feed it like a hungry god. But if you want to support us in other sillier ways that don't involve feeding a nameless and mysterious entity then consider subscribing to our Patreon. You can find us at patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. And if you sign up at the $10 a month level, then we will mail to you a zine version of our monthly feature every month. It's called the Zine of the Month Club. It's really fun. And you get a nice little letter from us every month. I think it's delightful. And you can also support us by supporting our publisher, Strangers, in a Tangled Wilderness. Strangers publishes books, zines, comics, podcasts, obviously, and a whole bunch of other stuff. And we have some exciting stuff coming out this year and next year. And in particular, we would like to thank these Pa

Episode Summary This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Elizabeth talks with Brooke about running a small scale farm, including what goes into feeding over 700 families year-round, the importance of community accessible farm space, how climate change continues to mess things up, and how taking care of the soil really matters. Host Info Brooke can be found on Twitter or Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke. Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript Live Like the World is Dying: Elizabeth on small scale farming **Brooke ** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host Brooke Jackson. And today we're going to be talking with Elizabeth Miller, a farmer, about her work in having an organic farm and some really cool stuff that she does that's worth all of us learning how to do a bit of. But before we get into that, we'd like to give a shout out to another one of the podcasts on the Channel Zero Network. So here's a little jingle from one of our friends. Doo doo doo doo, doo doo. [Singing a simple melody] **Brooke ** 01:29 And we're back. So as I mentioned in the intro, I have with me today, Elizabeth Miller, a wonderful lady who owns a farm. And Elizabeth, I'll hand it off to you to tell us a little bit more about yourself. **Elizabeth ** 01:46 Thanks for having me. I'd love to talk about farming and my community. I've been running Minto Island Growers for about 16 years here in South Salem. My husband Chris and I started the farm way back when. We were passionate about environmental science and community food systems when we met in college, and I grew up working on our family farm and it was the kid who always wanted to come back and work with plants. And when Chris and I formed our partnership we were ready to come back here, in 2008, after working at a farm in California and really building a community based organic farm. And I can delve more into what that means to me. But one of our primary works that we do on our farm is centered around our CSA program, which is an acronym for Community Supported Agriculture that's practiced in lots of different ways all over the world, really. Every farm does a little bit differently but you have a subscription based weekly produce box. And we do a main season and a winter season for that. And I can, again, talk more about that if that's of interest. And we have a farm stand where we also do lots of food: woodfired pizza and berry milkshakes and salads, things that we hope reflect all the beautiful abundance and diversity that you can grow and eat here in Oregon. And it's also just a wonderful community hub for families to come and gather and join and connect with nature and really connect with the earth. That's what I firmly believe food can do for us and feed our souls and bodies in all the really most profound ways. We do organic plant starts and we do mint propagation and we used to do native plant work that were projects that I grew up doing, but we don't do any of that anymore. And that's a short summary. And I'll stop talking so we can get into more detail. **Brooke ** 03:46 No worries, thank you. Now listeners, you're listening to this and you may be wondering why we're having a farmer come on and talk and we've definitely talked a lot about gardening, at home gardening, growing your own garden. We've talked a little bit about community gardens. And what intrigues me about what Elizabeth's doing and what I think is useful to us is that she and her farm operate on a fairly small footprint. They grow an incredible diversity of food. And it's a fairly small staff. And when I think about the future and climate change problems that we're having and the number of food chains, food supply insecurities that we have, I'm concerned a lot about how we grow food to feed a community. And I feel like what Elizabeth does with her farm does feed a large community and there may be parts of that that are replicable for the rest of us. So if we find ourselves in a time in which our supply chains have broken down or we can work together to develop a farm, there's a lot of insights from what she does that would help create those kinds of things and replicate them in other places, because she's not a large scale industrial farmer and is not mono-cropping. And really does, like I was saying, a lot on a small footprint with a small staff. So. Elizabeth, would you tell us a little bit more about some of the specifics of the farm like how much land do you farm? How much food do you produce? How many different crops? What's your staff size? Some of those kinds of things to fill in the details of what I was just saying, **Elizabeth ** 05:46 Sure, happy to. We lease about 29 acres. A lot of that encompasses non-production areas where we grow our plant starts and have our washing station and a commercial kitchen that supports the food cart. So in any given season, we are probably cultivating between 8 to 12 acres of land and that also includes lots of fallow fields that are either not in the rotation that year or hopefully are being cover cropped to add more nutrients and organic matter to the soil and to just practice good rotation. And one of the most amazing things about growing in the Pacific Northwest is the huge amount of diversity that you can grow here in this temperate climate, even with climate change. And that's going to stay true even within a climate change context. And I feel like having a diverse...a business model based on a high level of diversity can provide a lot of resilience within, you know, socio-political changes, climate change, context environmental extremes, you know, that.... Even though diversity is challenging, because it means you have to have a greater skill set per crop. And the complexity, the number of successions, and the complexity with the number of crops makes it difficult to run as lean and efficient and profitable of a business, it still provides a lot of resilience and it's really what our business model is based on. So we grow, you know, about 30 to 40 different crops and within that, over 100 different varieties. You know, just with pepper, eggplant, and tomato alone there's probably 30 to 40 varieties there, which is a little bit insane, but it's also incredibly exciting because there's so much diversity out there. And as a farmer, you know, it's just...it keeps...it's just exciting to delve into the world of diversity within varieties. And we do that both for fun, to expose our customers and our eaters and for ourselves to more options and things you don't get in the store. That's one of the fun things about gardening at home or working on or buying from a small farm is just getting access to more interesting varieties. We do that also because there's a lot of great plant breeding that goes on and can--depending on what the breeders are focusing on--there can be more resilience within a variety. That's especially true with the hybrid brassicas. So, you know, we love the seed saving. We love open pollinated varieties and heirloom varieties. But as farmers who rely on growing food for our economic living, we do buy hybrid seeds--nothing GMO, of course, because we're certified organic and we wouldn't do that anyway. But we do see it with certain crops like the hybrid brassicas--like the heading brassicas, like broccoli, cabbages, etc--having options with hybrids is really important for just vigor and yield and consistency. And even with tomatoes, we love growing the beautiful diversity of all the open pollinated heirloom tomatoes but, you know, now that we've been farming for over 16 years, we're seeing diseases we hadn't seen before, especially with the extreme.... Well, we had already seen late blight in our tomatoes, but I'm sure that it would have been.... Our very, very wet spring we had last year, we saw a bigger increase in fungal and bacterial diseases and we've seen resistance to those things in different varieties. So that's been an interesting thing we've observed in the last couple years. So yeah, our CSA model, it's changed a little bit over the years but essentially we do 22 weeks of a main season. And then we do about 7 weeks of a winter season. And our main season is June through the end of October and winter being November through February. And we could easily do a year round CSA in terms of what we're able to grow. It's those bridge months, we call them, from like February March, April, May are challenging but we have farmer friends who are really successfully do a year round CSAs because you can grow so much diversity here, especially if you utilize covered spaces really strategically, like hoop houses or even lower tech stuff like caterpillar tunnels--which are also important in a climate change context, even more so than then they have been in the past. So we do a combination for our CSA program of pack [unsure of spelling] shares, where we decide what goes in those shares. and we do two different share sizes to make it more...give more options to the community. And those get delivered to drop sites still relatively, you know, the farthest.... We used to go to Portland and then we realized at a point that we could fulfill all of our CSA shares here in the community. And so we decided to just deliver into the Salem area, which is so much better for many, many reasons. So the farthest we go out is Kaiser. But many of our drop sites are really pretty close to the farm. A few are five minutes away. Some are 10 minutes away. And that's because we really do cater to our local Salem community. And we are so proud of the relationships we've been able to build with our community over time, which I can talk more about because it's really its own thing to discuss. And then we do a market-style option, which again, different farms define this and do this in different ways. But for us it means setting up our produce at our farm stand two nights a week from four to seven. And we have a combination of fixed and choice items. And so the fixed items allow us to just have a little more reliable crop plan and make sure that we're still getting that good level of diversity out to our customers. People have to try to eat bok choy at least once a year, not five times a year, but once a year. It justifies us growing it too, which is good, you know. You want that diversity. It's good for our bodies. It's good for the soil. It's good in many, many ways. And then they get their choice items which they get to choose amongst. And like we've found that market-style option to just be incredibly popular, both for our customers and for us as a farm. It gives us so much more flexibility. It allows us to.... It justify us growing more specialty crops too because we can pick those really small amounts of like a specialty crop fully and put it out for market-style choice and we know that it'll all get taken and chosen versus like not being sure that that would all get enjoyed in our packed boxes, because we want to make sure that folks are really enjoying their CSAs. One of the big pieces...the most consistent piece of feedback we've gotten over the years, and many other CSA farms we hear this too, is that folks aren't able to fully utilize everything that's in their share. And they're usually joining a CSA because they value that local produce so much. And so trying to find ways to fit different people's needs within the CSA, you know, do the combo and fix and choice and also not...still grow specialty items but not have to grow huge quantities of it, you know. We've really fine tuned our model quite a bit over the years in the options that we've created. And then the winter season's every other week with a bigger break in the winter. And that's a combination of storage crops, but a lot of crops still coming from the field, which is really one of the things I love to talk about when I do tours is talking about just the amount you can still eat fresh from the fields where your nutrient density is still so high because things are fresh. You know, you lose a lot of your nutrients when things are picked and sit on the store shelves or, you know. They can be...not all frozen things are bad, you know. You can capture nutrients with certain types of processing techniques. But if it's not being processed in a certain way and it's just fresh, sitting on the shelf, you can lose a lot of your nutrient density that way. So the winter CSA is a really fun eating because it's still very, very diverse. And a lot of it's still really fresh. And there's some folks that just do that CSA. They might be really avid home gardeners, but they either don't have the scale or the storage capacity but they still want to eat a seasonal diversity and eat local and fresh. And so they'll come to our farm just for the winter CSA which is really neat. Yeah. **Brooke ** 14:13 And you do garden, or excuse me, "garden..." you do farm year round basically. It's not that you're...you're not working throughout those months when there isn't the CSA, right? Your farmers are still quite busy. **Elizabeth ** 14:29 That's very true. And yeah, you had asked to talk about our staff. So we--  **Brooke ** 14:34 Yeah, hold on, let me back up before you get into the numbers just because I want to review. Okay, so you're operating on eight or nine acres a year generally. And you're growing how many different crops, not including sub varieties? **Elizabeth ** 14:48 I'd say 30 to 40. I haven't encountered the actual list in a few years, but it's definitely between 30 and maybe 45.  **Brooke ** 14:58 30 to 45 crops. 8 or 9 acres. You're sort of actively actually farming and yielding stuff from May/June through winter. **Elizabeth ** 15:10 Well, with our covered spaces, honestly, it's almost February now. February or March through.... We had a really big success last year in growing a much greater amount of food fresh from the soil but in the covered spaces with the addition of the caterpillar tunnels. We were harvesting quite a bit starting in early March. **Brooke ** 15:32 You didn't say numbers on the CSA, but I just happen to know that it's about 250 families that sign up that get that weekly produce box through the summer. Plus, you still have a farmstand that people come and buy fresh at. Plus, you have wholesale. Do you know how much food you produce? Like I don't.... You know, I know sometimes I hear about tons of this or that, but....  **Elizabeth ** 15:54 You know, I don't know the statistics and I really should. We keep them all in our harvest spreadsheets for our own record keeping and for Oregon Tilth for the organic certification. And I should know some of those stats because it'd be really.... What I really should know is per acre and by crop, you know, per bed-foot yield. But it's changing. I mean.... I have two really talented.... Shoutout to my two head farmers, my harvest manager, Arabella, and my field manager, Justin, are in their fifth and sixth year of farming on our particular farm, which is important to say because you have to really learn how to farm a particular farm. You can be a talented grower, but knowing a particular farm's soil, experiencing multiple seasons of variations, both in disease, pests, cropping patterns, weather patterns, learning that level, you know, you have to know a lot about many different crops. It's a huge breadth of knowledge that you need. And so you only really get that depth by farming many seasons. So they're just at the peak of their game in their trajectory this year. And so many crops statistics that they have reported have been double or more. I mean, just.... And it was a quote, unquote, "normal year," you know, with no big climate extremes. No, you know, heat dome. No raining for the first three months of spring so that, you know, the soil tilth was so much better than last year, for instance, where we had one of the coldest, wettest springs on record. And we saw the effects on crop health, and especially disease, but just crop health generally because of the tilth of the soil. The roots...the plants just were never as healthy, especially the one-time plantings that you would have to establish in the beginning of the year when we were so pressed to get things in the ground. So this year has just been so incredibly positive and more bountiful than normally even so. It's really turning my head of what's possible growing wise, you know, because there's so much variation within a crop year-to-year. And you know that with a large level of diversity, you're never going to grow each crop perfectly. There's always going to be something that's going to have a challenge or be better than expected or have some unusual circumstance. That's the challenge but also the wonderful curiosity of farming is you're always learning something new because soil systems and ecological systems are so complex. So I should...I'll get some of those steps under my belt for the next time I have a conversation like this.  **Brooke ** 18:39 Well and that diversity, you know, another example of why that diversity is so important is that you're going to have some kind of crop failure or problem going on, right? Okay, so the CSA feeds something like 750 families. So if you had to take a guesstimate with, you know, Saturday markets and farmstand and wholesale, what do you think.... Like how many additional families worth of produce do you suppose that you put out? **Elizabeth ** 19:12 Oh, gosh, I mean, I'd say there's, you know, probably 700 to.... I don't know if we should say 1000 family units that come through the farm. You know, some people come to just have a milkshake with their kids and play on the playground, which is wonderful. My single biggest driving factor in starting the farm was that I wanted to continue a deep, and deeply important to me, and long family tradition of working within natural resources in Oregon. But most importantly, I wanted to keep the soil productive and in agricultural production so that it could be farmed for a few generations because we will need that soil and once.... If you can't afford to keep land in agricultural production and it's developed, you can never really go back from that. And two, was to give people the same opportunity to connect with the land that I had, you know? My family happens to own it. But of course the white people took all the land from the Native Americans and have abused it in many different ways over the years. And thankfully, the family tradition I was raised in, generationally it shifted, of course, because we've learned so much more about how to treat the land well. But there was always a history, like when my family was in timber. And that's where my family got its start was, you know, getting to take advantage, in some sense, of Earth's, you know, capital that it had grown for hundreds of years. And that's given me, in some way, the opportunity to have. But there was always an ethic of conservation and stewardship within my family's relationship to the land or to the natural resource that they were able to have the privilege to get to interact with. And I believe firmly that I'm so passionate about the Earth because I had the opportunity to connect with it. And so many people just don't have the exposure. They don't have the opportunity to either be out in nature or to have a garden. And of course, many people, you know, encounter that and experience it and find inspiration on their own. But it's hard...it can be hard to find that connection and that care for the earth and that perspective if you don't have the opportunity to interact with nature and with the soil. And food is such a fundamental way that we can all do that. And it connects us all. We all have to eat. So I just felt that our farm at Minto needed to be a community farm. People needed access to it. They needed to be able to connect to it and we needed to be able to connect to each other through that mechanism of growing and eating food. So that's always been a driving principle of our farm and our business. **Brooke ** 22:08 Yeah, and I'll say, you know, as an indigenous woman, how proud of you I am and how grateful I am for your ongoing.... You know, and you don't shy away from the awareness of the privilege that you have and where it came from and then the commitment that you have and have had towards land preservation and restoration and the way you take care of this piece of land. Yes, it is a business. But I think you would do things that would help the land and hurt the business because of your priority structure. Not that you would generally have to make that choice. But like if that's...if it came down to a decision between the two, I know that you're always going to take care of the land and make sure that it's healthy and strong and sustainable for generations. And that's really important culturally to me. So I'm, I'm grateful for that and to be a part of it. **Elizabeth ** 23:05 And thank you for that comment. I have so much learning to do. But I am so thankful for my family and especially my father for giving me that opportunity. He's my greatest hero and we share the same passion for plants and for soil and really the idea of stewardship that we just happen to be lucky to be able to have this relationship and that it's, you know, really.... I really wanted to examine what the idea of ownership is.... It's never made sense to me that we have the ability to own land, you know, and so there's so much more soul searching and seeking of...questioning of what that means. But I definitely see it as there's a huge responsibility when you do have the opportunity to try to do the best you can. And I'm thankful that my dad's been able to learn from me too. He still thinks we're crazy with all the amount of work that we put in. But he also understands. He sees how responsive the community has been to it. Because I believed...I knew that the community would come for this because it's just so fundamental. It's so fundamental to our wellness to be connected to the earth and to each other and to do it through food. It's like you can't really argue with it. And I am not.... This is not a discovery I'm making. This discovery has been fundamental to how we've interacted as a species since we've been evolving, you know? So um, yeah, so back.... I didn't really get to talk about the team that that makes it all happen because I-- **Brooke ** 24:53 Yeah, you must have a massive staff to produce this much food and be working this long and year round and so much land that you're doing. It must take an army to get that out, right? **Elizabeth ** 25:06 Yes, I simultaneously feel that it's huge and tiny and huge. And you know, my conception of it, my concept of it, expands and contracts depending on how I'm looking at things. But I just want to say that the people who choose to work on organic...small organic farms--or any farm really--are just some of the best people around there. They're in it because they're passionate about plants and soil and feeding their community. They're not in it because they're trying to make a bunch of money and they're sacrificing. Agriculture is often a lower paid profession. And there are very few farms, unless they're in a nonprofit structure or have figured some things out that I'm really trying to figure out, but there's usually not a benefit package to support, you know, these worker populations. And so it's just, it's a labor of love, the people that choose to do this work, and I am so humbled and proud to work with them every day. So we have a team of year-round managers. That's about four or five. And then we have a seasonal staff that expands quite a bit and quite a bit more so even this year to about between 20 and 30. But that encompasses all the farmstand staff and food cart and our perennial crew. And I haven't yet spoken about the fact that we grow blueberries and strawberries and we also have a neat  tea project. Camellia sinensis is the tea plant and all the types of teas, black, green, oolong, ect... come from that one plant. And my dad has a real innovative approach to plants and agriculture, always has, so he, with a partner, in the late 80s planted tea, and so I've gotten to try to move that project forward. And so we have managers that kind of head each part of that farm. We have a CSA manager. We have a CSA logistics person. We have a field manager. We have a perennial manager. We have a farmstead manager, a food cart manager. And often those folks will take on many other roles too on the farm or have done other.... So, it's a small but mighty team. And since we do farm year round, that core managerial staff is often working in the winter still, which is wonderful but also challenging because they work so hard during the main season that then to continue to work when it gets so much colder and wetter and muddier and everything is hard and you can't necessarily warm up and recharge your body during the day, it's.... I'm at a crossroads with our business where I'm really trying to build longer term sustainability. And we've been doing this for 16 years, so that's quite a long time and some big lessons learned and there's still a lot of resilience needed in our business model to keep going. And our managers are really the heart of the farm. I can't physically do all the work as a mother of two younger kids.  My husband, Chris, now works as a mint breeder and he still is able to work from the farm but for a totally different company. And he really supports my ability to keep farming because the economics are really challenging with small farms. So I'm just trying to think very creatively with the newer perspectives I have of how people can do this work year round, long term, and what they really want to do during the winter. I think it's an incredible niche for other folks that are interested in this as a business model. There are some beet firms that only do winter farming because so many fewer farms there do it and you can do so much. But I'm thinking of different options and different models for our farm, but that's probably a level of detail we don't need to go into today but it's.... Yeah, I'm really looking at our business model from all angles to try to build in long term resilience, just in terms of the model. Yeah.  **Brooke ** 29:24 Well, I might love to have you back sometime and talk about some specific things like winter farming or maybe.... I would love to do a whole thing on potatoes and I don't know if you want to come back for that but.... **Elizabeth ** 29:35 Well, I might stop throwing them so I don't know if you want me to. Not fully. Not fully. But if there's one crop I know we lose money on its potatoes. **Brooke ** 29:47 Wow. Okay, that's really interesting because potatoes are--  **Elizabeth ** 29:49 I'm not sure. My numbers will tell me this year but.... Yeah, we could do a deep dive on potatoes, even later in the episode if we have time, but.... People love potatoes, though. So that's a thing. There's like.... You want to grow what people love and you know they'll use. And they're nutritious. And they store. And they're so versatile in the kitchen. But....  **Brooke ** 30:12 Nutrient dense.  **Elizabeth ** 30:16 Yep. But we've had such a difficult time growing them consistently well. Last year, we doubled our yield from the previous year, and grew them better than we ever had. And then this year, it's kind of back down to, "Ehh?" normal yields. We're like, well, did we learn anything? What were the factors, you know. Sometimes there's trajectories in crops and trends and you're like, okay, I'm steadily getting better at this. I'm learning things that I'm applying to a consistently better outcome. Potatoes are not one of those crops. There just seems to still be so much uncertainty and variation in the end yields. And to me, you know, I like to think about what is really unique about a locally grown vegetable. And often there is something really special, whether it be a variety or the fact that it doesn't store well or it's super delicious, or it's more perishable, or, you know, many, many things. Potatoes, in my mind, unless it's a really interesting variety and it's a new potato, to me, potatoes are almost.... There's not that many distinguishing features that make a fresh, locally grown potato that different in comparison to everything else we grow. To me, it's more of a commodity type thing. Same with onions, but I love growing alliums and I will never stop growing them. But I could deep dive into those specific crops if we wanted to. **Brooke ** 31:43 Yeah, I think I'll save that for probably another one. But that is really interesting to know. And some of our audience members are going to have some strong feelings about not growing potatoes. And I understand that. And we've done episodes around.... Well, I don't know if we did it. I know Margaret, who's one of our other hosts who originally started the podcast, has certainly done a deeper dive on potatoes on one of her other podcasts. Anyway, sorry. If you said it, I guess I missed it, you talked about your management team but then like the harvest staff you have kind of at the height of your season, how many folks do you have?  **Elizabeth ** 32:25 Yeah, I'd say six to eight. I mean, you know, on a...Tuesday is our biggest harvest day, and there's probably, you know, six to eight people out there. Some of the managers come in to do half days, but you know, on a Wednesday, that's the second biggest day of our CSA, we'll have four or five in the morning and then three in the afternoon. So it really...it really varies.  **Brooke ** 32:50 So less than one person per acre? Not that that's how.... That's not a great measure. But, you know, if you're growing eight or nine acres, you have-- **Elizabeth ** 32:59 It's difficult to talk about the stats because you're growing...you have to do.... There's so many steps that go into the full execution of a crop. You know, onions, for instance, your crop planning in November. You're starting the seeds very, very early, actually. We used to do it in February. Now it's March. Because they're relatively slow growing and you have to grow quite a bit. You know, one onion plant is an onion versus a potato plant grows multiple potatoes. Same with a kale plant. You know, so lots and lots of seedlings, many, many flats. And then they are in the greenhouse for a long time. Then they get transplanted out and they grow all season long. They don't get harvested for storage until.... Of course we're taking spring or fresh onions out of the field starting in maybe July, but the bulk of the allium harvest isn't until August/September. And then they're stored all winter. So the labor that's spread across that whole.... You know, it's almost.... I mean, we have onions year round so sometimes an onion will be a seedling or in storage for almost an entire year. So it's difficult to fully, accurately allocate your labor across an acre or crop just because-- **Brooke ** 34:15 Sure. Yeah,  **Elizabeth ** 34:16 You know, but yeah, in peak season from June through September, I would say that there's six to eight people on average that are full time growing those crops. Growing, harvesting, delivering, etc...processing, delivery, ect... **Brooke ** 34:36 And that's what it takes to grow enough food to feed more than 250 families a weekly box of produce, six to eight folks. **Elizabeth ** 34:43 It probably could be quite a bit more. I believe, you know, with better farming techniques and, you know, I don't know if we want to go into no-till philosophy and practices on this episode, but from the learning we've been doing about some of these no-till farms that have been in operation for quite a long time. Singing Frog is one in California that's pointed to a lot because they've been farming for so long. The yields that they're getting per acre, it's almost like double or triple or even quadruple sometimes what even the best, you know, organic producers are saying they're getting. So I believe on our footprint we could be growing a much higher density of food per bed foot or per acre than we even are now, but it's very labor intensive. It's a very.... Which I think is good and challenging economically. But it's good that there is the opportunity for people to grow food for a living as their job. It's extremely enriching and gratifying on many levels. I think the economics are the hardest part. And I believe farmers should be making as much as doctors are making. I mean, maybe, yeah. Ehh, maybe not a specialist surgeon, you know, but you know what I mean? It's a very undervalued profession, especially for the crew position versus a managerial position. It's incredibly important and incredibly difficult. And food prices in our country, and across the world, it's just the way that we perceive food value is challenging. And affordability is incredibly challenging too. But there's just many things that should change in our food system to value, you know, to value food better. Not necessarily that it should cost more money for people, but the way that that work and that product is valued, there's a lot of improvement that could be made in that and you know, we could talk all about government subsidies and policy and all that another time. But I believe there's a lot.... I believe the federal government should be subsidizing small to medium diversified organic farms, not just large scale commodity farms growing GMO soy for a stupid faux green biofuel, you know? I mean, there's just so much wrong with our agricultural policy. But, again, another episode in the making maybe? **Brooke ** 35:06 Yeah, there's so much to get into there. And that's interesting. So you've had 16 years of learning and growing and it's a nonstop process, it sounds like. Partly with just because some crops are fickle and because of climate change. So, I want to rewind for a second all the way back to 16 years ago when you and Chris first started and compare, you know, what your staff size looked like, how much of the land you were farming, what kind of yield you were getting in those first few years as you were learning and developing. **Elizabeth ** 38:04 Again, I don't have those statistics. They're all anecdotal at this point. The big context for when Chris and I started the farm was that we were both more steeped in native plant and restoration work. Chris did, you know, he did Environmental Science at Colorado College and I was on that track as well but switched to more social sciences and music and.... But, you know, that's what I grew up primarily working with on our farm. We had a native plants nursery, and my dad did forestry research. And you can still see some of the cottonwoods, the native and the hybrid cottonwoods on the farm, which are an interesting thing that isn't active really anymore. But you know, those woody perennials and their kind of environmental uses, you know, from both just standard restoration to bio energy and phytoremediation, like toxic metals and wastewater clean up. And Chris and I were really interested in green roofs and urban use of plants, you know, and that.... So when we started the farm, we were passionate about food systems and we started a small CSA. We started with five people, five shares. And LifeSource was actually our first sale of Romaine. I still have the receipt framed. We sold them some romaine. And we're not currently selling to them right now. But we have sold them quite a bit in the past. And Marion Polk Food Share is currently our large wholesale account. But yeah, we started with five members, one who is still an active member of our CSA, which I love. And we actually had a largely Latino crew. Pedro and Maria were husband and wife. Pedro used to work with my dad doing the hybrid poplar harvest. And Maria and her sisters and her nieces were our core crew for quite a long time. And they are amazing people who I miss on the farm. And that's another whole topic, of just agricultural labor and how that's changed so much. But it's interesting to think back to that because that's a very different population of people. And they are such skilled agricultural workers. And I miss so many aspects of that on the farm. And currently most of our worker population are young students. It's a lot of Willamette students, other students, people who are transitioning to other professions, people who are going into horticulture, you know, who are plant and science based people all mostly in their early 20s or 30s. It's.... How to do this work into your 40s, 50s, and 60s, and 70s is a whole nother thing that I'm thinking about quite a bit now as I'm entering my early 40s. But yeah, very different demographics of people who were working on the farm. And Chris and I were doing so many native, woody plant-based projects at that time. We were in mint propagation, and that was both really positive because we were really passionate about that work and it's really interesting work, and Chris had been working at a living roof ecological restoration company down in California before he moved up to Oregon. And it also spreads really, really thin across the farm and across many projects. And it didn't...we didn't have the.... Now, in hindsight, I realize it. Doing too many things just doesn't allow you to really focus in and hone your skills and get your discipline, especially with the economics, in your key project areas. And so we grew our CSA model and the direct-to-farm model really quickly. I think we said, "Yes," to everything. Like "Yes, we'll do the Wednesday farmers market. We'll do the Salem public market, we'll do the Salem Saturday market. We'll do the Tuesday OHSU farmers market and then oh, while we're up at the Tuesday OHSU market, they want to do wholesale for their institutional bid at OHSU, and they need a new CSA farm for all of their drop sites. And I thought, well, what an opportunity. They're one of the largest employers in Oregon there. They have an in-house nutritionist who is incredible, who's still there and still passionate about food systems, and what an amazing opportunity. And it was. I mean, I don't know.... It felt to me at the time it was, but really, it just, I think, spread us too far and wide and thin. And so that's one of the biggest hindsight reflections I have at this point of just.... And I encourage anyone who's interested in this type of farming model is t to make this model successful, to actually not burnout with an injury, to burnout psychologically, like my husband, Chris did, and physically doing this work, to not get into debt, you know, to have a good business plan, and to be disciplined about your numbers, you just have to plan well, and you have to be diligent about your expansion. And I think we just...we had so much enthusiasm and so much demand for our products, so we just grew really fast without really understanding the economics of that growth. And so there was a mid period where our first really.... Tim, who's now a farmer in...he was a Willamette student and now a farmer in New Orleans. And a very wonderful farmer himself, now. He and his partner, Madeline, also a really talented farmer, they're both from Willamette. But Tim was our first kind of longer term staffer who became a manager. And he really.... He and Lindsey, another wonderful Willamette student, they were so gung ho about scaling up our CSA, and also doubling our market sales at the Saturday market, you know. They had these personal professional goals that they brought to the business. And we had never before had the capacity for that kind of growth because we hadn't had folks that were like, you know, quote, unquote, "like" Chris and I, that kind of had that same bird's eye view perspective and were really interested in the business side of things and the strategy and we're kind of doing the business planning with us and really had the capacity to take on that growth. And so they wanted to expand the CSA by like 40 shares one year and they were in their fourth year of farming. They had the capability. They're both incredibly bright and incredibly hardworking. And they were also young. They had that 20 year old energy. It's really something and it's unique, you know?  And so those were some of those mid years of growth, really came from those strategic managerial staffers that really when I look at the peak, the growth spurts that we've had over the business as the business has expanded and also gotten better and more efficient and gained the knowledge and depth, it's because of these...it always has coincided with the peak of these managerial staff that have come into their third and fourth and fifth seasons. And they go in cycles. And they eventually have to cycle through because they want their own farms or they can't physically, they don't physically want to do the work anymore, or, you know, there's a combination of reasons, but it's always a cyclical thing. And that's a pattern that is now known to me, but it also is still a vulnerable pattern. So those are the patterns I've had, yeah, the kind of patterns I've been able to recognize at this point. Yeah.  **Brooke ** 45:49 So if people are doing this model, either for business or, you know, in the context of trying to develop a small farm like this for community support and perhaps a climate collapse situation, knowing that sort of rotation that people will go through and helping make sure that, you know, whoever's.... Even if you're collectively running the farm and everyone sort of equal partners, knowing that there is sort of that learning and burnout cycle to be aware of and, you know, having the members of your community that are doing this together supporting each other and taking some turns with it over time, like that sounds really important. **Elizabeth ** 46:29 And trying to build structurally into the business ways to prevent that burnout. So even this next season that I'm looking towards, where those two key managers are moving on, and we've known that and we've been planning for and they're going to help us transition at the beginning of the next season, thankfully, but we're looking towards, you know, training a new set of managers. The expectation for that new set of managers is going to be completely different. I want every manager to be able to go on vacation during the peak production season for at least like a week or a long weekend, a Friday, Monday, or four or five days. They need that. They need that physical and psychological break. They need that recharge. Everybody needs it, everyone deserves to go on vacation and to not work, especially farmers. And there was never that.... Our previous managerial staff, they're just, that isn't a common expectation on most farms. You're just sort of expected to to work your ass off, excuse me, and you will anyway. So, it's up to the owners, or to the collective leaders, to find ways to build that structure of balance into the structure from the beginning, but this is the advice I would give. Because the work is hard no matter what. It's some of the most challenging work you're going to do no matter what, especially in a climate change context. The extremes are here. They're not predictable. You might have experienced one extreme, but you don't know what the next extreme is going to be like or what it's going to do in your ecological system. So you can't even really plan for it. That's the challenge of farming in a climate change context is these extremes. I'm sure there'll be some similar ones. Perhaps we'll be able to apply lessons learned. But that's been the biggest challenge of experiencing these climate extremes over the last five or six years is that it's been a new extreme each time. And so the learning curve is immense and it's stressful and it's costly and there's so much uncertainty. So that's a challenge. **Brooke ** 48:35 So really quickly then as our last thing on this, before we wrap, you've mentioned some of the climate issues that we've had, and I know I've mentioned these on other episodes of the podcast too, that, you know, for instance, last year, we had a really long, cold wet spring that went well into the first part of the growing season and it really screwed a lot of things up in a lot of different ways. And then two years ago we had some really extreme heat in that summer or a couple times over temperatures that have, you know, record breaking heat temperatures here. And so now we're looking ahead at the world and we know that there will continue to be climate issues and to some degree, you can kind of predict for your own area what's most likely to happen and what's somewhat likely to happen and what's not very likely to happen in terms of your individual climate extremes. Is that something that you actively work into your plans or is it something you deal with as it comes up? You know, how much are you looking ahead and planning for that and practicing for that on your own farm? **Elizabeth ** 49:43 Yeah, I think that we're planning for it to the extent that we can, you know. Like you've said, there is some predictability and now that we have experienced, you know, the heat dome.... The wildfires were so, just almost a completely totally different scenario, because you could hardly be outside safely, you know, but you we had to keep...some crops had to continue to be harvested or else it would make them unharvestable for a period after. You know, farms like ours, you have to continually harvest many crops. And then flooding has been really.... Wet and cold is always something we dealt with, but the extremes of last year were just far and above. And then flooding has been also greater and at times that we had never experienced before. Like we had some really intense flooding in April. I think that was like six years ago now. And so, yeah, ways that we're adapting and planning for that, you know, where we have floods...we have fields that are more flood…that are more.... All of our farm fields are in the floodway, actually. It's a pretty extreme flood plain designation from the Army Corps. But some of our fields are lower and they farm, you know, almost every winter. And so to the extent we can, we plan our rotations so that our winter crops are now, like I mentioned before, we had some crops, some of our first crops of the season in April, flood. So to the extent we can, we try to be cognizant of where that flooding might happen and try to put more vulnerable plantings in higher fields. But that's difficult for us to always do, but we try our best at it. Season extension, you know, through covered spaces is something that farmers have been doing all over the world forever, because it just gives you more flexibility, extends your growing season, and you can control your environment better. Sometimes you have less...you're less prone to pests. Those diseases can be much greater risk. So,you know, we had never had a huge amount of covered spaces. They're expensive to put in. And they're more difficult growing environments. I always like to say that they kind of expose all your weaknesses. And so since we've been spread so thin across so many projects and so much diversity and probably more scale than we should have expanded to too early, we have not always been the greatest hoop house or covered space growers. But our team's really improved in that area in the last few years. And so we've really benefited from partnerships with the NRCS. They administer the organic equip program and they give dollars towards conventional and organic farmers, the organic equip program specifically for organic farmers for many projects like cover cropping, restoration projects, hedgerows, and, most impactful for us, hoop house infrastructure. So all of our hoop houses and our caterpillar tunnels, including two more that we bought that haven't been put up, were all partially funded by the NRCS, which is really, really great use of our tax dollars. We can all at least maybe feel good about that for the use of our tax dollars. Yeah. And so that's.... Those spaces have been really instrumental in our bridge season growing, would you like to call it, especially the early season. Like, we all know Oregon springs can be cold and wet in a normal year and relatively unpredictable, and so because we are building our farm model on a CSA that starts in June, which actually really isn't that early, and people are really ready to eat seasonally from the farm in June. They're coming to us in April and May like, "When does the CSA start?" Like they think it should just all be available. And yeah, certain crops are. But to have the level of diversity and scale in June to feed that many people does take quite a bit of planning and land space. And so having just those extra covered spaces so that we can just fine tune our planting schedule and our planting mix in those early months, has been really key. And then methodologies that were even kind of pre a climate change context but just for better spring farming, like there was a practice that we were following, many farmers are doing, with preparing beds in the fall, tarping with silage tarps, and then that allows you to just pull back those silage tarps in the spring when you have a couple days of dry out. And then you can direct seed and transplant right into those beds, as opposed to having to wait for a one or two week dry window and leaving soil uncovered without a cover crop, which you don't really want to do anyway. So that completely changed our spring growing. And then adding in extra covered spaces this year was what allowed us to have such a wonderful early diversity. And then pushing, being pushed more towards no-till and regenerative practices that are, we feel, can just provide even more resilience in a climate change context, and in any in any context, you know, when you're building up the quality of your soil with the microbiology and organic matter. And from what we've researched and seen, the potential for healthier, happier crops that are produced with less fossil-fuel-based equipment and don't release carbon because of tillage, and just myriad other benefits that we've been seen and been hearing about, we were motivated to start our own no-till experimental plot. And so we had our first crops on that this year and they did well. And the soil--we didn't know how our heavier clay content soil would respond to no-till practices and from what we've read and understood, really the benefits of no-till don't take in massively so until years three to five. It takes a while to do your weed control and for your microbiology to get in there and add all that soil health. It just takes a while for the soils to adjust. Yeah, it's like how to.... How I say this to kids on tours is like, “How do forests feed themselves? How do those big old growth trees get so big? Humans aren't coming in and fertilizing those trees. It's just decomposition and micro organisms and all those amazing nutrient relationships between the micro organisms.” It's like they're just all working in this beautiful, and even more so we know now, because of these really cool scientists that are doing forestry research showing how these forest communities are this huge interconnected network with the root systems and the fungi and bacteria. It's just so much more complex and interconnected than scientists ever even thought. And so it's the same principle applied to annual or perennial farms. So we're only in...this will be year two. But we were already interested in those practices and some folks on our staff, Garabella, had studied that in college at Willamette and was already really passionate about it. We'd been doing some experiments with it, but this was our first year really biting the bullet and saying, okay, this is our no-till plot. And we're really, really enthused by the results and how well the soils responded. It's hard to break that addiction to tillage. I love tillage. I love tractors and PTO shafts and rototillers. But it's also really disruptive. SO it's breaking those habits. Yeah. **Brooke ** 57:11 And I know you can talk about this literally, for the rest of the week, but we should probably wrap it up here for now. It's been really great having you on and I do hope that we can have you again to talk about some more specifics of this and other things so we can continue to learn how to develop some of this in our communities and encourage the farms that are doing it. **Elizabeth ** 57:35 Thank you so much for having me and exposing and educating our community. **Brooke ** 57:40 Absolutely. And, you know, also to the world over because we have listeners internationally as well. And we love you all very much. Elizabeth, is there anything that you want to plug or promote here before we say goodbye? **Elizabeth ** 57:57 Just in relation to our conversation earlier, just really taking many, many steps back and looking at the communities of people that had a relationship to this land for generations before us. And there's an awesome nonprofit here in Salem run by Rose High Bear, and it's called Elderberry Wisdom Farm and they're an indigenous based nonprofit. And I'm not going to get their mission statement right. But they're educating about indigenous plant communities and knowledge bases and practices of those communities in relation to land. And I'm looking forward to learning more from Rose about their work. And obviously, they're working specifically with the elderberry plant but also indigenous youth. And so if you're in the Salem community, check out their work and support them. **Brooke ** 58:47 Wonderful. Okay, thanks so much for that, Elizabeth. We also want to say thanks to all of our listeners who check out our podcasts. If it's something that you are enjoying, please like it, share it, let others know about it. That's how we reach more voices and help more folks. If you want to comment at me about any of this you can find me on Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke. Brook with an E. Especially if you have any follow up questions for Elizabeth because she's pretty easy to get ahold of and likes talking about her farm and so I will probably try to drag her back around. So if you want specific questions answered, I'd be so happy to share those with her. This podcast is brought to you by Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness publishing collective that produces podcasts, zines, books, posters, comics, and many other forms of educational leftist media. You can check us out at Tangledwilderness.org You can find all of our latest publications there. And if you really love our work and want to help us continue, especially with the podcast production, you can support us on Patreon. We do a monthly zine mailing to our Patreon supporters. That's a really wonderful mix of stories, politics, and poems. It's a different thing that comes out every month. And we especially want to give thanks to some of our patrons who support us at the $20 month level. And those wonderful folks include patolli, Eric, Perceval, Buck, Julia, Catgut, Marm, Carson, Lord Harken, Trixter, Princess Miranda, BenBen, Anonymous, Funder, Janice & O'dell, Aly, paparouna, Milica, Boise Mutual Aid, theo, Hunter, Paige, SJ, Dana, David, Nicole, Chelsea, Jenipher, Kirk, Staro, Chris, Micaiah, and as always, Hoss the Dog. Thank you so much.

Episode Summary This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Margaret talks with Sam and Amadeo about their experiences shepherding in the Swiss Alps. They talk about the problems that shepherds are facing in Switzerland with wolves, climate change, city mentalities, and right-wing propaganda. Host Info Margaret (she/they) can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript Live Like the World is Dying: Sam and Amadeo on Sheep, Wolves, and Climate Change **Margaret ** 00:16 Hello and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the times. I'm your host today, Margaret Killjoy and this is an episode about sheep...and sheep farming. Shepherding, I believe we might want to call it, in the Alps. I'm really excited about it. We've been planning this episode for a while, because we are going to be talking to two sheep farmers in the Alps about climate change and about the return of wolves and about ecology and about why the right-wing picks all the wrong talking points and a bunch of other stuff. But first, we are a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchists podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show on the network.  **Margaret ** 01:52 Okay, we're back. So if y'all could introduce yourselves with your name...your names, your pronouns, and I guess just a little bit about your background with shepherding. **Sam ** 02:05 All right, Hi, I'm Sam, my pronouns she/her and we are in Vienna right now. And yeah, I'm an artist and also a bit of a writer, filmmaker. I do a lot of that kind of stuff. Lately I have been working a lot with metal and smithing And yeah, I went with Amadeo on a sheep farm and Alps in Valais in Switzerland. And we want to tell you a bit about our experience. **Amadeo ** 02:38 Yeah, my name is Amadeo. He/him. I'm 38. Actually, I started to work as a teacher now. I teach biology and some other stuff, politics, and so on. And yeah, This was my third year...third summer, not third year, third season to work as a shepherd but the first time with sheep, actually. Before that I worked with cows and milking and so on. Yeah, and for me it was also the first time with sheep and the first time in this area of Switzerland. I'm Austrian. But the payment in Austria is really bad so we went to Switzerland. So we are also the working migrants. Or what do you call it in English? **Margaret ** 03:31 Migrant workers, I guess.  **Amadeo ** 03:34 Yes.  **Margaret ** 03:36 Okay, so what brought you all to sheep farming or to farming in general as like the thing to go do with your summers for work?  **Amadeo ** 03:47 Should I?  **Sam ** 03:48 Yeah, you can. **Amadeo ** 03:50 So, I had this experience in 2020 and 21, I think, and I really liked it in a way. It was very hard work back then, but I learned a lot. And we met after that, actually, and decided we would like to go together. And then we just hit up the internet and looked for work and places to go and then we found this place that sounded pretty ideal for us because it was sheep farming and no milking, which is nice. I didn't want to do the milking job and do cheesemaking and so on again, I wanted to stay outside mostly, like the whole day under the sky and not in the staple. And yeah, we found this place where you don't need your own dogs, which is nice. We were working with blacknose sheep, they're called. It's like a breed that is only bred in this area. Or not only but traditionally there. And yeah, we tried to get the job and we got it. **Sam ** 05:08 I guess we also got in because Amadeo also already had a lot of experience. And yeah, they were looking for two people there and without dogs. And yeah, I also got...I was really lucky that I was with Amadeo because, you know, like some very daily stuff, he already was prepared for this job. Like, you need a lot of some equipment and know what to take. And yeah, I was really.... **Amadeo ** 05:36 The thing was that, of course, the owners of the sheep, they want someone who has some experience because it happens often that you think, "Oh, it's nice. It's in the mountains. It's beautiful." And then people after two weeks, three weeks, they say, "No way. I can't work here. It's way too hard." I mean, it's like pretty hard work. It's outside all day. With rain, with snow sometimes. And you work from sunup to sundown every day, seven days a week. And many people underestimate it because there's like, I don't know, this idea drawn of what it's like to work in the mountains and it's always beautiful. And it is. But it's also very hard work, actually. **Margaret ** 06:22 It seems really hard. It wouldn't immediately occur to me that I could just go run out and become a shepherd like tomorrow. But I have two questions. And they're related. And one is, what does an average day look like for a shepherd in an Alpine Valley? And the second question that's related is, do you get a shepherd's crook? **Sam ** 06:42 Yeah, well, the day starts with sunrise. Around five was when the summer started. We got there in mid of June. I stayed till mid of September. Amadeo had to leave a bit earlier. And the day ends with sunset. And yeah, you bring the sheep back into the night pen. You say, "pen," huh? Like a space where there is electricity on. Pen? [Said with air of not being sure if it's the correct word] **Amadeo ** 07:15 Do you know what that is? Or, did we get the right word?  **Margaret ** 07:17 Like an animal pen? Or is it a barn? **Amadeo ** 07:19 Yeah, it's like it has no roof. It's not a barn. It has no roof. It's just a fence. An area fenced. A fenced in area with strong electricity because of the wolves. **Margaret ** 07:35 Oh, yeah. Okay, it has an electric fence. Yeah, **Sam ** 07:37 yeah, exactly. And yeah, we would move every two weeks to a new pasture with the sheep. And there were 12 farmers or sheepherders. They're not all farmers. They also have another life. Most of them have another job. They work as bus drivers in heavy industry. And yeah, they also are doing a lot of work. So they're working with us there. We were there most of the time alone, but they come on weekends. They bring us food. They set up the pastures, lines, the fences too. Yeah. And so then we stay out with the sheep all day, any weather. And yeah, also, when we moved the pasture, they came for help because it's hard to change the pasture. You sometimes have to cross a river. And.... **Margaret ** 08:29 Wait, how do you cross the river? Do you just like drive them through the river? **Amadeo ** 08:33 Yes.  **Margaret ** 08:35 Like , "Go swim!"  **Amadeo ** 08:38 It was not such. It was more like a stream than the river. A river sounds bigger than it was.  **Sam ** 08:48 It was like this, like we always make a plan in the evening. Even a drawing. We were five people planning this. And then it always ends up in pretty much chaos and completely different. And in the end they were screaming, "Sam! Go! Go!" And I was like, I even had shoes on and the first sheep I was pulling, just one sheep, with all my strength through the river. And then all the sheep follow. **Margaret ** 09:14 Okay, okay. I have friends who keep sheep but in the city. And they just keep like six of them or something. And it's just a very different thing than like a free ranging sheep. And so it's hard for me to conceptualize.  **Amadeo ** 09:30 We had 400. **Margaret ** 09:32 Yeah, that's more than six. I'm good at numbers. That's amazing. Okay, cool. **Sam ** 09:38 So part of the daily routine is also to do the basic medical care. So we were introduced to that. Sometimes they have claw problems. [Claws are sheep toes] **Amadeo ** 09:38 Problems with the claws.  **Sam ** 09:39 Problems with claws. So this was a regular thing. And sometimes using antibiotics against.... **Amadeo ** 09:58 Yeah, and we had to clean the pen every day, which was like three to four hours of work for one of us. Like shoveling shit. **Margaret ** 10:09 Yeah, okay. But you didn't answer the second question. Did you have a shepherd's crook? Do you know what that is? [Laughing] **Amadeo ** 10:17 Not a real one. We had like umbrellas. Big ones that were very useful against the sun. And so preparedness thing number one, if you stay in the high alpine areas, the altitude of the higher pastures were 2500 meters [8,200ft], you need something to cover you against the sun and against the rain. So big umbrellas were pretty handy. **Sam ** 10:46 And also the sheep have horns so it's easier to catch them. You have to learn this also, but you throw yourself on the sheep and then you tackle them down. I got really good at this. And also the blacknose sheep in the valleys, they have very long hair. And, I mean, it's breeding, right? They do it for breeding, the sheepherders. So the wool, it doesn't get any money. It's nothing. It's not worth anything anymore. But for the beauty contests that the sheep go to it's really important. It's a tradition. And they let it grow.... **Amadeo ** 11:26 They have very long face hair so some of them are basically blind. Most of them have like, how do you say something that rings? What is it? A bell? Yes.  **Sam ** 11:39 Yeah, but they get lost because they don't see anything and our job was also to make them hair ties and to tie the hair. And also the sheepherders would come to do this because we could not do this for 400 sheep. Yeah, so that was also part of the job, Yeah, it adds up. There are some different tasks. And yeah, since we would move with the sheep, maybe also that.  So also the moving is part of. You're always packing your stuff. You need to think, okay, how much food we need to...how much will we eat and how much do we need to take to the next hut. So organizing this is part of it. And then we had a small hut that was flied in with a helicopter. It was... **Amadeo ** 12:12 Flown in. Flown with the helicopters for the most remote places where we would stay with the sheep because otherwise you would have to walk a long way, like 45 minutes to the cabin every day. So they brought in a tiny hut for one person, actually.  **Margaret ** 12:47 For you all?  **Amadeo ** 12:49 Yeah, yeah. Flown with the helicopter so we could stay next to the sheep.  **Sam ** 12:55 But it was so small. Like one was sleeping on the floor, the other on this little bed. And also you always need to organize this hut when you come with very wet clothes. You have no space in there. We had a little solar panel. So this was doing.... We had a fridge at least. Very high tech. I guess 20 years before, we would not have a fridge. And some light even in the cabin and a stove. A wood stove. It got crazy hot because it's so small and yeah. So organizing this hut was also not so easy. And we were lucky because there was a lot of water in this valley. Like it's full of water. And so we would get water from the... **Amadeo ** 13:43 From the springs around.  Wells? How you say? **Margaret ** 13:48 Well, I mean, a well is a hole dug in the ground and then a spring is usually a natural spring or it's like a pipe stuck in the side of a hill that the water comes out of. **Amadeo ** 13:57 Yeah, it was a natural spring. No pipe, though. Just some moss and it was nice. **Margaret ** 14:04 And so you can just go straight from that or do you have to filter it? **Amadeo ** 14:08 It depends. We had, at some points, we could just drink it from there. We didn't filter it. At the cabins we had covered springs, wells. Or springs? So we could...it was okay. But the open ones, we had to take care of where the sheep were. If the sheep can go around then it's not so good. It was better if it was higher up where they wouldn't go. **Sam ** 14:42 Yeah also good that there were a lot of springs so the sheep would get water. They need to drink. And sometimes there were pastures where they could only drink one time in the day, so they also learn when they have to drink in the morning because we had really hot days also where these blacknose sheep with all the wool, they really get hot. And yeah, then also we learned how the sheep walk in every pasture. They have the same kind of routine that follows the sun also. And you kind of learn their ways. And also maybe when it's time to act to get the sheep back, I mean, without a dog. Yeah, you need to learn this also, I guess, when it's time. **Amadeo ** 15:33 I always said, if you want to move against their will, you are the dog, you have to run around like crazy. They have their rhythm and they have their ways, you know? **Margaret ** 15:46 So, did you all use dogs? Like also? Or is it sometimes dogs, sometimes no dogs? **Amadeo ** 15:54 No, we had none. The thing is that this kind of race [breed of sheep] is very used to people and they're not moving that far. So you can walk with them. It's okay. It's just the problem is you can have two kinds of dogs, right? You can have dogs to protect against wolves, for example. Then they live with the sheep. They're inside of the flock all the time. But it's a problem with hikers and so on. Because they attack everyone that comes near, right? **Margaret ** 16:33 This explains a little bit about my dog.  **Amadeo ** 16:36 Yeah, and so you can really have them there because it's also like a recreational area. This area, like a lot of people go hiking there and so on. So you can't have dangerous dogs. And the other thing would be like dogs that help you move the flock.  **Margaret ** 17:01 Herding dogs?  **Amadeo ** 17:02 We didn't really need it, right? Because we would have not.... I mean, it was big areas but still we would stay in one area for two weeks and then we would move on to the next area. So you didn't really need dogs to guard them the whole day. **Sam ** 17:23 But it's really a calm.... The blacknose sheep are really really calm sheep. We learned this also because like certain sheep breeds, you say, right, they run way more. They run all day. And you really need dogs there. Yeah, so we.... **Amadeo ** 17:40 But with the blacknose, no, they are kind of calm. Yes. And they have a long...during the day they have a long break time.  **Sam ** 17:48 Resting time.   **Amadeo ** 17:49 Yeah, because if it's getting hot up there, the sun is very strong. It can be like, I don't know.... Like I mean the degrees don't get up that much like in the flat areas but the sun, how you say...the sun rays are really strong. **Margaret ** 18:11 Yeah, because when you're at a higher altitude there's less atmosphere to protect you, right? I know what I mean. But I don't know the words for it. **Amadeo ** 18:22 Yeah, the sheep have some...if it's a hot day, they rest for four hours during midday. They try to find, you know, shady spots and just rest. And so at that time, you can also rest. If it's rainy, you can't rest because then they are moving too. Yeah. **Margaret ** 18:48 It makes me...the no dog thing, I'm like.... My dog was bred to have a million different jobs. My dog is just a complete mutt of a lot of different working breeds. And so Rintrah, my dog, is never quite sure whether he's supposed to be herding, or chasing, or retrieving things. He just wants to do all of it all the time. And one of the proudest things I've ever had, my proudest dog mom moment, was staying with my friend who has goats and sheep and one of the baby goats just got out of the pen and was running around the yard. And so Rintrah just herded it into a corner and then like calmly barked to inform us that he had trapped the goat. And I was just like, no one taught you how to do that. He wasn't a year old. He just was like , "This is what I do." And so like, I imagine how happy my dog would be as a sheepdog, a herding dog, which isn't necessarily true because he has adhd. This is a complete tangent. I just like talking about my dog. But you all, one of the reasons I want to talk to you, you talked about how a lot of this ties into preparedness and how it feels you've learned a lot about preparedness that you're like taking into the rest of your life by having done this work. I was wondering if you wanted to talk more about that. As a complete, look how expertly I tangented...pivoted from one topic to another. **Sam ** 20:11 Yeah, yeah, actually your podcast was really a bit with us in this time. It was cool, the topic of preparedness. And yeah, for me in this way, thinking about preparedness, what's also weighed in with this work was to get somehow familiar again with the conditions of doing this work, of ways of living in this open environment, of existing there with the sheep and in this non-human environment. And also, maybe, in this threatened environment that somehow you would.... And also the organization structures, how this work is possible, that it needs a lot of people and it needs a lot of people who do this. I mean, there's the farmers or sheepherders, they do this because they love this work. Because they have done this all the time. It's tradition. And yeah, that they somehow save something. **Amadeo ** 21:17 I mean, to talk about the practical side, if you stay outside the whole day, every day, seven days a week, you learn a lot of what you really need and what you don't need. I think that was big. Yeah, it was like very valuable to me to see what I really need. And I remember listening to your podcast, and you talk a lot about being prepared in a way, like having podcasts on your phone, for example. Because if you have to stay with sheep for 10 hours a day, you need to...you had a lot of time to think. And I loved having a good book because I could read and then think for hours about it and have like, I think, yeah, more time than in the city where you are distracted from one topic to another. So this really is good to have more, I don't know, space in my head. This was a good thing. And yeah, I think looking at, how you say, like, being outside in nature everyday and witnessing all these little changes from day-to-day. This was very, very, very special. And I think I learned so much about life and also about survival because all the animals and the plants there, they are...like, they have to survive in a very harsh environment with very short growing period, for example. I mean, lots of snow during.... Winter lasts, I don't know, for 10 months, or like, let's see, nine maybe? You know what I mean? Like when we came mid June, there was still snow. And in August before we...the end was the 16th, I think, of September, but we had to leave the higher pastures at the end of August because it was starting to snow heavily. And yeah, it's like very different too.  **Sam ** 23:30 But still to also learn about the fears and the sheepherder have. And also, yeah, it's an environment that's threatened and that will change through climate change for sure. Like it is changing. And I thought also on some days that it gets hotter and hotter every summer. And also last year, the grass was really dry. So the sheep would get this disease called, in German, Lipinkin [cannot translate], which is little bit like herpes. Yeah. And yeah, they had to be treated, every sheep, and give some.... **Amadeo ** 24:05 Some cream. But do that for 400 sheep, man. **Margaret ** 24:11 Yeah, that sounds like it would take a while.  **Sam ** 24:14 Medication for 400 sheep. So yeah, they have struggles they face. And then the wolf, of course, is a new topic. And yeah, they have to deal with a lot of stuff. Yeah. **Margaret ** 24:27 Well, let's talk about wolves. Let's talk about--you all mentioned beforehand when we were getting ready to talk about how wolves have maybe either been reintroduced or are coming back in that area to a certain degree and how that threatens this way of life but like not as much as climate change does and how it all ties into the right-wing and I kinda wanna to hear about it. **Amadeo ** 24:51 Yeah, since a few years, since I was like.... 2020 was really when I was first introduced to this life, to these people in Switzerland. First of all, I came from the city and I didn't know that it's such a big topic already. Because in Austria, we have a few wolves. But not to mention, you know, maybe a dozen. But I learned that in Switzerland since the last, I don't know, 20 years, from a dozen they now have, I think, 250. Around 250. And, like, I don't know, 25 packs or something, or something like this. Which doesn't sound so much, but it's like...it's not such a big country. And they are a lot in these areas. For example, in Valais where we stayed, we knew that the nearest wolves are just two kilometers away. And they have offspring. So for them, they need meat and so on. And I mean, the sheep are puffy, you know. It's like, go get them. **Sam ** 26:01 Also, on the other side of the mountain, actually, there was another shepherd with a, I think, also around 400.... Fuck, I don't know exactly how many sheep. And there the wolf came. And he killed, I think, seven sheeps. And also one of his dogs was attacked. So it was really close. And also the fear that we might face an attack was also really with us. And also there was a guy who takes care of the area.  **Amadeo ** 26:34 A ranger.  **Sam ** 26:35 Yeah, and he came and told us, "Hey, you really have to watch out. They're really close." So yeah.  **Amadeo ** 26:42 But the thing is, the crazy thing for me is that, of course, this threatens, in a way, people that are used to putting their cattle, putting their sheep just in a meadow and leaving them, you know. Have a look once a week or something. Of course now with the wolves, it's not possible because a wolf would kill many. They start to, you know, get into like.... If they can they kill 10 and then just take one, you know. They just.... If they [sheep] don't run away and they don't run far, you know, 100 years of, I don't know, living with humans and being petted and so on, they don't have--you know what I mean? They don't have it in them anymore to really run. Because normally, if a wolf attacks a  deer, for example, the pack can't find any deer for another week or something because they're all alert. They're alert as soon as there is an encounter. With the sheep, it's not so much. So now it's a problem, of course, but there would be solutions. You just, you need to adjust. You need to change the way it works. Yeah, you need protection. You need people to look after the sheep and so on. And for many areas, this is really hard. Because if you have an alpine pasture that is very remote, steep hills everywhere, you know, it's so hard to really fence it off or something. It's not possible. So I can understand it for the farmers. It's hard. And when we talked with them about it, they were always like, "We have to kill the wolf," you know? And it's now protected. It's under national protection. You cannot just shoot them. Even if they kill some of your sheep, you can't. And there was a big--in Switzerland you have more, how you say, basic democracy. So many of the laws are decided by a vote of everyone. So there was a big vote about if the protection status of the wolves should be loosened in a way. Not that you can just hunt them but loosen in a way that you can, I don't know, shoot some if they're attacking cattle or.... **Margaret ** 29:11 Can you shoot them if they attack you? **Amadeo ** 29:13 No, we had no gun. I mean, they won't attack  humans but... **Margaret ** 29:20 I'm an American, so I'm like....Okay, so like, I think about this a lot. Okay. I'm really...the wolf thing is so interesting to me for a thousand reasons. And one is that the destruction of wolves is such a emblem of civilization. It is such an emblem of the conquest of nature, right? And you have, for example, the no wolves in Ireland thing. You know? And that the British were very into killing all the wolves in Ireland and part of that even.... Like, so you even have the Irish rebels who would be to a certain degree, would be like, "Oh, we are the wolves. Like we are the people that they're trying to conquer," because it's like they are the unconquered, you know, wild folk, or whatever fucking bullshit colonial thing that gets thrown at them, you know? But at the same time, it's like.... So I'm kind of rooting for the wolves here with what you're describing, right? I like sheep. I don't specifically want the sheep to die. And where I live, we have coyotes, right. And we don't really have wolves where I live, but we have coyotes. And they kill, you know, they kill livestock. And they also kill dogs, right? And I have a dog. And I very actively want my dog to not be killed by coyotes. And apparently coyotes will do this thing where they'll befriend a dog, and be like, "yeah, totally, come hang out with us," and then kill and eat that dog, right? And so I have a neighbor who oversees about 400 acres. And he's from France. And he carries around a handgun. And he's so confused by this. He's like, "I came to America and now I have to carry around a handgun." But he carries around a handgun in case he's attacked by coyotes. Right? And it's like, interesting to me because it's like.... The urge to be like, "Oh, we should kill all the wolves so we can happily raise our sheep in peace," like fuck that, right? That, to me, is like the example of a negative form of peace, where you have conquered and like flattened everything. Sorry, it's a little bit of a rant, but I'm going somewhere with it. I promise. And then, but at the same time, there's this balance, right? Like, I'm not going to let a coyote kill my dog. Or if I was around wolves, I wouldn't let the wolves kill me, right? I mean, whatever I...as much as I can control that, you know? The coyotes are kind of on the other side of the hill. So I don't carry a gun around my property. But that would be a thing that I would need to consider in certain circumstances. So, it's just really interesting to me that, like, I get why the sheep farmers are like, "Oh, we got to get rid of all these wolves." But I'm also like, "Whatever. Fuck you. Let the wolves be." But then I'm also like, it's complicated. And I get why you have to defend the sheep. But I don't know. Anyway, that's where I'm going with it. I guess I wasn't going anywhere with it after all. **Sam ** 32:15 Yeah, no, I think it's a really complex situation. Yeah, there is not an easy answer to like kill the wolf or.... Yeah, I'm also pro Wolf. And there needs to be a different solution. And yeah, like to see what the sheepherders really face, what kind of struggles they face with this was really interesting. And also, I think the problem is that it's super instrumentalized [wonders if that's the right word]...instrumentalized by right-wing people politically.  **Margaret ** 32:55 Weaponized? [Offering a different word] **Amadeo ** 32:58 Yeah. In a way. I mean, the thing is, it also turned in Switzerland, for example, into a city versus countryside. Because at the vote, most people from the cities would vote for the wolf for what keeps the protection. But many people in the countryside, with also more like conservative political beliefs--and the conservative parties--said, "No, no, no, we have to change that because it threatens our way of living around in the remote areas in the countryside. And so this is somehow so stupid because.... **Sam ** 33:37 Yeah, that's also covering certain other threats, right, like climate change. They don't talk about climate change. The only thing they speak about is the wolf and the wolves. And yeah, that's really.... So it's somehow a weird thing that it's so taken over by this discourse, which is, yeah.... **Amadeo ** 33:57 Yeah, you can shoot climate change. That's the thing. It's easy to say, "Oh, it's all the wolf. We have to kill the wolf. And then we get rid of this problem." But on the other hand, climate change.... [interrupted] **Margaret ** 34:11 I can think of some ways to solve climate change with guns, but.... Anyway.... **Amadeo ** 34:16 I mean, I got so sad up there because it's so special. I mean, this area was a natural reserve too. And it has golden eagles. It has vultures, it has marmots, it has like.... **Sam ** 34:35 A lot of marmots. Everywhere. [Laughing] **Amadeo ** 34:38 And some protected bogs, some plants that are really like really rare, like at the brink of extinction. And I know, I stood there and I saw this, I don't know, this beauty and I know in 50 years from now it will be gone. Probably. It's very, very likely. Because.... I mean, some species can move.... Like, seen on a global level, they move north because it's getting warm. But on the on fucking mountain, there is an end. There is no moving more up. Because at 4000 meters or something, it's....stops, you know? Like there's nothing there. And all the farmers there, for example, if you ask them, they see these changes. They witness it. They say, "Yes, it's so much different than it was when I was a kid." And the glaciers, for example, in Switzerland--I read about it--there were since the 70s, 800 glaciers are gone. And there is still 1400 glaciers in Switzerland. And they say 2100 [year], they will be probably most of them, like 95%, will be gone. And it's so sad. But still, if you say something like, "Climate change," even those farmers there, that witness it every fucking day, they say like, "Well, you know, I don't know if you can call it that." It's ridiculous. And it's because the discourse, the political discourse, is framed by conservatives mostly. And they say, "Your problem is the wolf. We can shoot the wolf." So.... [Margaret starts talking and apologizes] No, no, it's, I'm, I'm done with ranting. **Margaret ** 36:40 No, this is so interesting for a thousand reasons. And one of them is that we always.... It goes back hundreds of years that leftists will be like, "Oh, the countryside are all right-wing. Fuck them." And this is not true, right? This is like.... The most interesting leftist revolutions have generally involved also the rural folks, right? I mean, like, famously, the fucking Russian Revolution was all rural people. And to be fair, Marx was.... I think he owned up to getting that wrong, because he was one of the people who started this myth that "The peasant is not the revolutionary subject, only the proletarian worker in the city is," right? "And the peasants are always reactionary." And I think he owned up to, when he looked at Russia, he was like, "Oh, I got that one wrong. Okay, cool." You know. It's true if we let it be true, because you have this thing where.... I think it is actually a flaw that we have to be careful with in democracy--and majority rule in general--is if people in the cities make the rules for the people in the countryside, and they don't understand the people in the countryside and they don't understand their way of life. And so it's like, really easy--even though I'm still on the wolf's side--I see it as complicated. Whereas it's like really easy to live in a city and be like, "Whatever. Fuck it," you know, because it's not their livelihood, or dog that is being threatened, right? And so I feel like, to me, it's this thing where we can't cede that ground to the right-wing, you know? And I really, I think it's cool that you all.... And that's one reason I want to talk to you about it is that there's like all of these.... It doesn't have to be this inherently conservative space to be in the countryside, to be in a rural area. And then the other thing that I was thinking about with what you're talking about, about mountains and how things retreat, is that mountains are so interesting to me because they're always where people run to, right? And you look at.... I mean, you look at Switzerland as a country and as the history of the country is people fleeing there in order to--well, I don't know enough about how Switzerland was formed--but in World War II, every time I'm like reading about Dutch revolutionaries, or whatever, they're like, "Fuck!" and they all run over to Switzerland and climb up the glaciers with their bare hands, or whatever the fuck. I don't know. I clearly know what I'm talking about. And in the United States, you have. where I live in Appalachia, that is the place that people would retreat to. That is the place where people losing wars against the conquest of the United States would go to. And it is. It's that weird thing where you're always free in the mountains, but there's only so far you can run. And that's just so heartbreaking to think about, you know? There's only so far up the mountain that these plants can migrate. On the other hand, I have a feeling that's what we're all going to be living. We're all gonna be in Antarctica. Antarctica bloomed this year, I think. I think we're being on Antarctica and on the mountains. So...  **Sam ** 39:39 Yeah, but it's interesting how it's idolized and romanticized. I mean, we had like...and how extreme, actually, the weather really changes. I really didn't know. I had never lived for three months so high up. And yeah, but also, they're so romanticized. There's this huge hype around survivalist shows, at the moment on TV, which is also really interesting and comes with this. And on the opposite for me the...Yeah, the question was how does being there in the Alps, what does this really change with me and what does it do to experience this? And yeah....  **Amadeo ** 40:20 Yeah, what does it do?  **Margaret ** 40:23 We're asking.   **Sam ** 40:23 It's still settling in. And it's about reconnecting and really realizing what it takes to do this work. And I have a lot of respect.... Also, to be in a very patriarchal space where the shepherds were only older men. Yeah, they have their ways of acting. They have their ways of being. And for me, this was really difficult. Yeah. And still, somehow to not say, "Hey, I won't enter this space," but to go there and.... Yeah, also see what community they have, you know. Yeah, to also go beyond this, I think, that they have their tradition and they have to face this, but yeah, it was also.... [Interrupted] **Amadeo ** 41:11 Maybe you can maybe explain a little bit this, I don't know, this group of people we worked for, because it was actually pretty interesting because it's a conservative area, but they were very working class and very, very nice to us. I think. They treated us really respectfully. And I know, in my other place where I worked as a shepherd, it wasn't like that. I was treated, actually, a little bad. And that's...I don't know. **Sam ** 41:45 Yeah. And to see how they are with the animals. I mean, for them, that's...they are their life. And it's this encounter.  **Amadeo ** 41:50 They love them. **Sam ** 41:51 And for us, to get to know every sheep personally, it's really interesting what connection you get. You watch them all the time. You learn, hey, they are totally different. They have totally different characters.  **Margaret ** 42:09 Yeah. Okay, my question to you is how do you, when you're working with people who are seeing this climate change happen, how do you--but but can't acknowledge it--do you have any insight or thoughts about how to connect with people about that, about how to talk to people, you know, who want to focus on the wolf instead of the bigger wolf, the climate wolf? What's the name of that wolf that's gonna eat the sun and Germanic paganism? Wow, how do I not remember that.  Anyway, whatever, at the start of Ragnarok. Someone's gonna get really mad at me for not knowing this. Fenrir! **Amadeo ** 42:51 I think we had some very good discussions at times. Right? With the guys.... Sorry? [Margaret interrupting] **Margaret ** 43:01 No, no, no, I was just...I remembered the name of the wolf that eats the sun and starts Ragnarok. It's Fenrir. Anyway, or Fenris? Oh, God, no people gonna get mad at me. Anyway, please continue. Tell you something.  **Amadeo ** 43:13 I think also, even though some of them were a little bit panicky about wolves, and so on, I think the system with the night pens and with having shepherds like us, since a few years, to look after the sheep, day and night, basically, it works pretty well. I mean, they told us they have one to five, maybe, sheep per year that are getting killed by the wolf. But that's okay. I mean, they're realistic about it, right? And when we talked about climate change, of course, it was--I mean, for me, it's not much different--I mean, they acknowledged that things are changing. They didn't use the, I don't know, scientific vocabulary or whatever. And they acknowledged in a way--or some of them at least--that there are new problems that we have to face. For example, it's too dry, and so on. Water issues.  Dying out of certain plants, animals in certain areas, and so on. They all see this. More avalanches in the winter. All of this. But, I mean, they were a little helpless. And I mean, we are also often a little helpless, because it's getting individualized. How should you react? Not drive a car? Great. I mean, we have to, you know, rise up and change all of the economy, you know, and this is hard to do. **Sam ** 44:53 But I guess, I mean, I also came there with my artistic background and as an artist and I also was filming a lot--more some of the sheeps but also us--and I think for me to show as someone coming there with a city background, but also with our backgrounds as biologists and artists, and showing how this encounter happens maybe from us as city people with also another perspective in encountering this world. I think I find this really interesting. Also showing some part of this being not exactly in this. I think that's an interesting perspective, also, for other people to see. And yeah, I'm probably cutting a bit of a movie out of this. And I think it can.... Yeah, it's good to go to this place and to show our perspective.  **Amadeo ** 45:53 I mean, I'm so grateful for what these people taught us, right, and that we were accepted and we did this job. And I think we did a good job. But also they trust us, right? **Sam ** 46:06 And what the sheep teach us.  **Amadeo ** 46:08 Yeah, the human and non-human individuals that trusted us. And it was, I think.... I'm very, very grateful. But on the other hand, also, for them, I think it was kind of interesting to have unorthodox people there, people who didn't grow up around the corner with animals, and sheep, and so on. Because for them, they all grew up with this. They inherited this from their parents and grandparents. And we came.... Actually it was a meeting of different worlds, right? We came....  **Sam ** 46:45 And I want to show this, also, this discrepancy that there is some dialog or some encounter that needs to happen. And I mean, many people are so disconnected to this world and don't know. They have lived in Switzerland all their life and they don't have so much connection to this work. Yeah. And it's cool to....  **Amadeo ** 47:05 I think, yeah, it was really...like we came from 1000 kilometers away. But even what made more of a difference was that we live in a city of 2 million people and they live in tiny mountain villages. But we came. We had a good time together, right? They were like helping us. We were helping them. It worked out. And I mean a lot of prejudicism, I had also, as a young radical from the city, dogmatic, and so on, about people back in the days. I mean, it changed over the years, but more and more when I encountered these, I don't know, social places, I have to say, yeah, they were very social with us and very helpful and very, I don't know, cool. Very cool also. Even though they have like strange habits like drinking coffee that isn't coffee but.... [Laughing] **Margaret ** 48:04 Wait, what do they drink that isn't coffee? **Amadeo ** 48:07 It's called Lupinion. It's made out of Lupin, I think. I don't know the English word, like some grain. And it has no caffeine at all. And they always say, "Let's have a coffee and then they drink this." **Sam ** 48:21 But with a lot of schnapps.  **Margaret ** 48:24 I don't drink caffeine. So I'm like, I want to drink that shit. That sounds great. **Sam ** 48:28 That would be the place for you to go.  **Amadeo ** 48:32 They put Apple booze inside like apple schnapps instead.  **Margaret ** 48:38 Okay, well, are there any last things that we didn't cover that you wish we had? Or things that you're really excited to say about sheep and climate change? Oh, does it make you want sheep? That's my...that was like the question. Like, are y'all gonna get sheep? Do you have a yard? I don't know where you live. **Amadeo ** 49:00 We live in the city. But we are planning to move in the coming years. And actually, I would love to have some sheep.  **Sam ** 49:10 Maybe not 400. **Amadeo ** 49:16 Some 20 or something? 15. **Sam ** 49:18 Or we will continue doing this work. It's cool to also work with them and then for a long time be with them. I guess we're.... And then also say, "Hey, gratz [congratulations], that was the summer." . And give them back. **Amadeo ** 49:35 Yeah, like sometimes it's nice to play with kids but having your own kids it's kind of a different cup of tea. **Sam ** 49:42 Like co-parenting. [Laughing] **Amadeo ** 49:45 Maybe some sheep co-parenting? Yeah. Right. **Margaret ** 49:51 Alright, well, is there anything that you want to plug, that you want to direct people towards, either your work or something else that's going on that you want to draw attention to.  **Amadeo ** 50:01 I wanted to say, because I always said while I was there, that it needs more people to help the little farmers deal with the wolves, because if we don't help them then they will always tend to the parties that say, "Oh, let's just get rid of the wolves." And I found out that there are some NGOs to do that, that come from an environmental side. There's one group called Au Pair. I think they're in the French speaking part of the country, mostly. And they actually sent volunteers to alpine pastures where there are wolves nearby, to help, to guard, and also monitor the wolf activities. So it's for research and also to help the farmers. And if I can't go next year to work as a shepherd, I will volunteer there. And I think it's a great, great thing and somehow a solution for how ordinary people can get in touch with the small farmers and help with maintaining the alpine pastures that are also so important for biodiversity. Yeah. And to help save the wolf from people. **Margaret ** 51:22 Yeah. No, that's so good. Because instead of just abandoning people to being like, "Whatever, the wolf is good and you suck," just being like, "Hey, what will it actually take? Like what resources do you actually need in order to be able to continue to do your work in a world full of wolves?" That's cool. **Amadeo ** 51:40 Yeah, I think it needs a lot of growing together, the countryside and the cities, in understanding and talking and like supporting each other. **Sam ** 51:51 Hey, thanks for having us, Margaret.  **Margaret ** 51:54 Yeah, thanks so much. And good luck next year with the sheep season. And I'll talk to y'all at some point soon I hope. Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, go try to convince sheep and wolves to be friends. No, that's not going to work. Hang out with sheep and then separately hang out with wolves. Actually, you probably just shouldn't even hang out with the wolves. You should probably leave them alone. That's pretty much what we want. But that's what you can do. You can also support this podcast. You can support this podcast happening by helping us pay our transcribers and our audio editors. I say this is if there's a plural of each, but there's actually one of each. And thanks to those editors. And thanks to everyone who helps us do that. And the way we do that is through Patreon. This podcast is published by Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. We have several other podcasts, including one called Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, as well as one called Anarcho Geek Power Hour. And if you support us on Patreon, we'll send you a monthly feature that we put out. We'll send it anywhere in the world. And if you pay us $20 a month, I'll read your name out right now. In particular, I'd like to thank Eric, Perceval, Buck, Julia, Catgut, Marm, Carson, Lord Harken, Trixter, Princess Miranda, BenBen, Anonymous, Funder, Janice & O'dell, Aly, paparouna, Milaca, Boise Mutual Aid, theo, Hunter, S.J., Paige, Nicole, David, Dana Chelsea, Staro, Jenipher, Kirk, Chris, Machaiah, and of course, Hoss the Dog. I hope everyone is doing as well as you can and don't let the people divide us along cultural lines because we just shouldn't let that happen. Talk to you all soon.

We're back to cover all the latest, greatest, and weirdest happenings in the rock world with Geekwire! Here's a look at what we're covering this week: Live Nation ends artist merchandise cuts at clubs around the country. Steve Brown says Trixter will "never" reunite with Mark "Gus" Scott. Ace Frehley completes mixing eight songs for his next solo album. Ozzy Osbourne wants to record a new studio album in 2024. Dave Mustaine speaks out about his acrimonious relationship with some of his former Megadeth bandmates. Mike Muir falls off stage while singing "You Can't Bring Me Down" at Suicidal Tendencies concert in California. Vince Neil's concert at the Oklahoma State Fair was cut short after a shooting in the crowd. Gavin Rossdale explains why it's taken Bush three decades to release greatest-hits album. Don Dokken speaks out about his relationship with his former bandmate, George Lynch. Stryper plans to return to their "pop metal" sound on a "few" songs on their next studio album. Jann Wenner ousted from Rock and Roll Hall of Fame board amid controversial comments. All that and album anniversaries, rock stars we've lost, and albums we're excited about in the future. We hope you enjoy Geekwire for the week of 09.29.23 and SHARE with a friend! Decibel Geek is a proud member of the Pantheon Podcasts network of shows. Contact Us! Rate, Review, and Subscribe in iTunes Join the Facebook Fan Page Follow on Twitter Follow on Instagram E-mail Us Subscribe to our Youtube channel! Support Us! Buy a T-Shirt! Donate to the show! Stream Us! Stitcher Radio Spreaker TuneIn Become a VIP Subscriber! Click HERE for more info! Comment Below Direct Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this very special episode of The Eddie Trunk Podcast, you're getting a taste of what goes on during Eddie's daily live show - when he's not conducting news-breaking interviews - where he was recently joined by PJ Farley and Steve Brown from Trixter for a conversation with the Trunk Nation audience about great rock records that got lost and ignored after the grunge scene hit with the arrival of Nirvana's Nevermind. Catch Eddie Trunk every M-F from 3:00-5:00pm ET on Trunk Nation on SiriusXM Faction Talk Channel 103.And don't forget to follow Eddie on Twitter  and Instagram!Follow the link to get your free 3-month trial of SiriusXM: http://siriusxm.com/eddietrunk