Welcome to ThinkTech. I'm Jay Fidel. American issues take two. Understanding the move to global autocracy is happening. Understanding the causes and factors in play. And we have my co-host, Tim Epicella. We have our regular contributor, Stephanie Stull Dalton. And we have a special esteemed guest, Alexander Marawa. Alexander is a teacher in American University in Washington, D.C. So we want to examine the remarkable growth in autocrats and autocratic governments around the world, including just a touch of few China, Russia, Hungary, so many other places in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, especially Southeast Asia, and the rise of autocratic right wing movements in other countries that tend toward autocracy and the takeover by military hunters in so many countries. And what that means to the United States, which has its own issues, what it means to Europe in general, and the liberal world order. We are at a global inflection point. That is my suggestion to you all. Tim, let me ask you, what is going on? Is this the water, the air? Is it climate change? Is it a change in the human species? Why are we at this point in our global history? Well, yesterday we tackled the subject of social media and how that now is more efficient to spread ideas, falsehoods, misinformation, and conspiracy theories. And these are the, you know, this is a ripe fertile playground for would-be dictators. The fact that I could get access to everyone's mind with a simple, you know, simple phone in their hands.  It's an opportune time to discuss how inefficient governments and democracy is and try to fill that void with your solution, and your solution is autocracy, dictatorship. And again, it's to point out how government is horrible, they're corrupt, and they have little ability to improve the lives of the people around them in the country. And they're the solution. Donald Trump says, only I can fix it. Vladimir Putin says, only you can trust me. These are classic words from a would-be dictator, a fascist, that promote themselves as the solution to a nation of people who would have grievances. And that's what's going on today. You know, we have a correspondent in Varanasi, India, which is 350 kilometers from the northeastern border of India, and he's in school, and his school is right near the Ganges River. And he's a graduate student there in business. So I asked him a couple years ago, do you like Donald Trump? And he said, this is apropos to your comments. And he said, yeah, I do. I said, why? Why in the world would you like Donald Trump? You're educating yourself. What's your analysis? And he said, I quote, because he is strong. So I think we're at a time somehow where people, maybe it's because of social media. I'm interested in the other members of the panel on this feel that they need to have quote, strong and quote, leaders. And it's that whole search for strength, whether you've been recognized, realized it or not. Another question. Stephanie, what are your thoughts about this? Are we at a time where we need quote, strong leaders? What makes us, what puts us at that time? I think we're in a major default process here, which I first noticed when I was in Baghdad, and having wonderful Iraqi women friends and colleagues there. And when things would get really crazy, I would hear from these highly educated Iraqi women, oh, we need a strong man, a strong man, which is of course, as you know, what they had. So there's some sort of default here to, I guess, what was good for us for a millennium, as we came out of the cave and had to face, you know, the mammoths or the lions. So that has been the formula, right? That's been the algorithm for mankind. For centuries, got to have the strongest guy that could carry the biggest stick and do the most damage to those we perceive as dangerous. So it bewilders me. And the same thing when those women would say that. And now we just stopped it in my tracks and look at them. And then finally, they kind of, oh, yeah, well, okay. So these ego maniacal, mostly men who raise themselves up to fulfill these atomistic or ancient needs are still out there thinking that they, that's appropriate, that that's what they're supposed to do. And there are many people that go along with that and think that, you know, that's the way we're supposed to be organized. So back to the monarchy or back to, you know. Well, was it always, was it always us, Stephanie? You know, maybe we just didn't realize the need of the people everywhere to have a strong leader. We just didn't realize it. And we only realizing it now in contradiction to the enlightened, you know, enlightened view that there should be diversity. There should be democracy representation representation government and all that civil rights human rights. Maybe we didn't have those things before we didn't realize that we was suffering under this kind of a autocratic leadership. Now we see the difference. And it is stark. Am I am I hitting a point there that you can you can respond to? Thank you. I do think you are. You've made me realize that I think we need to get to strength to point out what is strong? What is strong? What was strong? We know what that was and it got us to where we are. Now we need strong. Yes. And what is it? We could redefine it as the way that we approach problem solving and conflict resolution and, you know, living together on the planet. What are the strengths that help us in that circumstance? It's not just the guy would stick, you know, so we just need to recognize the fabulous strengths that are out there that have gotten us, you know, beyond the need for the strong man. So anyway, you're Alexander, you're you can help us with the nuance on this. When you start talking about autocracy and hunters around the world, you have to realize that it's different in different places. And we look to you to fix all this, Alexander.  Well, my background is in law and I can assure you that lawyers are not the best people to fix everything. I would think that's really in the hands of others, better placed there. But let me say something that probably helps a little bit. I always love to look at it through the lens of history. Back at a time when the world was kind of comprehensible for people, generally speaking, because it was simpler, we wrote books. Now it's so complex that nobody knows anything anymore and we write tweets. And in tweets, everybody's an expert, right? So I think that is one of the biggest problems that we have simplified our communication to a level where the complexity is absolutely lost. And that leads to simple answers. I mean, that's where people say we need a simple answer because simple answer is a good thing. Another thing history teaches us democracy was not primarily something that did regular elections. Democracy as the Greeks envisioned it 500 years ago was that strong leaders would actually lead society, but strong meant quality, not the stick, it meant the intellect, the abilities to actually make the right decisions. And those leaders would also have the quality of finding that their role as leader is an honor. It's part of an honor structure and the Roman Republic was built on that. People were, of course, also earning money on the side and sometimes ripping off the places they went to, but it was an honor system where people would do it as part of their life cycle. And they would know that stepping down and passing it on to other people was a crucial element of being a strong leader. When we look at history, I think democracy had a meaning that goes way beyond just one person, one vote. It means that the leadership would be strong because of quality, it would be strong because of a knowing that they need to also step aside and let things pass into different hands. And those autocratic leaders we have today do not understand that. I mean, if you start with Xi and you move on to any other autocratic leader, they think they're there for eternity and they need to be there as the leader. They can be the honored past leader. It's an impossibility. Let me ask you about one thing.  But I have felt that the revelation that we experience in this country shows you a couple of things. One is that social media creates chaos. It is the very opposite of the rule of law. As you said, everyone is an expert and the chaos visits our institutions. It means that you can tear an institution down. You can create institutional chaos. On the other hand, lawyers, most of whom are trained to practice the law rather than to use the law to solidify our rule of law and our institutions don't take that burden. They do not take that burden, except in rare circumstances. When they get into office, there's so many in Congress, it doesn't help that they have legal training, or at least it doesn't help positively that they have legal training. They make a few perversions of the law, as we have seen in Congress. My question to you is, they seem to be diametrically opposed. The notion of social media and chaos in the public conversation versus the idea of the rule of law. Who is best prepared to advance and protect and preserve the rule of law, but lawyers? What I'm saying is, does this reflect a kind of failure of that profession? Does this suggest that going forward one solution to the chaos is to redefine the role of the lawyer in society here and elsewhere? I wouldn't blame the legal profession as such for failing in this respect. I think the law is far and large and reactive in response to societal changes. It's usually with delay and the delay can be from an hour to more usually 10, 20 years. We're just moving at our usual pace and society moves a lot faster. Maybe one word of caution, we shouldn't demonize social media either. If you look at Iran, that's probably the only way for the society to communicate against the government and to bring up new ideas, which ultimately hopefully will lead to a democratic change here and opening it up, of course. Then the question is, of course, if you want to regulate social media, good luck. I mean, herding cats becomes a favorite pastime of me if that would be an option. I cannot possibly imagine how to regulate social media, even with the best of intentions, because it is constantly changing. While we draft the law, people already draft tweets to say we will not have tweets anymore. We will have tweets and then the law will not apply to tweets because it's something different. So I think we will not be able to regulate that. Call me a heretic here, but maybe that's a good idea. I think society should regulate itself as much as possible. Alexander Michael John said free speech is a marketplace of ideas.  That's because we're writing short things and not books anymore. My sarcastic comments. I apologize for using yes when it was published. Before I let you go on that, I want to offer the thought that you can use social media to organize the most negative possible events, events that undermine democracy, that move to autocracy and destroy civil rights and the rule of law. So my question is if it's like herding cats and then certainly you could make that argument very effectively. It's also very destructive and it is being used by people who are destructive, such as autocrats, as a tool to gain control. I suppose when I say social media, I'm also talking about the internet in general, because that's part of it. It's part of it for Vladimir Putin for sure. So my question is if we let it go free, if we let it have its way and not try to regulate it or do anything to put guardrails around it, aren't we risking our society? Absolutely. I mean, you could say the First Amendment is something very American. I'm not sure whether it's fully appropriate anymore at this point in time. In other societies, the approach to what you can say and what you can't say has been used differently. Look at Germany as an example. They make a differentiation between expression of facts and expression of opinion. Vinyon is free. You can have any opinion you want, but a court can step in and look into what are the facts you present are actually fact-based or manufactured out of thin air like we see sometimes. And then you can be sanctioned for that. I would think in the global context that might be a very useful tool of distinguishing between the marketplace of ideas versus the non-marketplace of facts to a certain extent. And some facts are just to be taken as a foundation for your ideas but not manipulated as well. Oh, wow. Tim, he's offering so many thoughts that you have expressed. I feel like you have to weigh in now. Well, thank you, Alexander, because, Jay's right, I've expressed a hundred times on this show and other shows that the media is guilty of this, is the blending of facts and opinion at the same news desk, whereas media used to be in the 60s and 70s a separate desk. And it was clearly delineated as a news desk versus the editorial desk or the opinion desk. So, yeah, thank you, Alexander. To hit your point about not blaming the attorneys for the rule of law or in the diminishment of the rule of law, I agree. In the 1980s and 90s, we had enough attorney jokes that bash the attorneys quite well and we don't need any more of that. However, I will bash the education system. No offense, Stephanie, and we talked about this. Civics 101, the importance of democracy, the comparative governments in the world and how that system of government in Iran or China or Russia is vastly different than the United States or in Europe. Comparative government studies. We don't see those classes anymore in high school. And how do you know if you're losing democracy if you don't know what democracy is in the first place? And I've seen many times, in fact, even with the athlete case, I can't remember a name, where people take for granted their bill of rights and their freedoms. And they transfer that assumption and that privilege to other countries that don't honor the bill of rights. And then when they get in trouble, they go, what's wrong? I'm an American. You can't do this to me. Well, guess what? They can. And in case of, what's her last name? Greiner? She found out the very hard way that what you get away from going from Alabama down to North Carolina is quite different than from her place in the United States to Moscow. And I see it all the time when I travel internationally, this real naivete from Americans about their rights and the expression of their rights. Well, Stephanie, I think in large part, we've been talking, Tim, just now, I've been talking about the experience here, the American experience. But I'm still interested in trying to figure out why we have so many autocracies around the world. More than I noticed before, maybe I wasn't noticing. But I listed them before when we opened the show. And I wonder if it's education or social media in the same way we see it here in the United States. That's happening in Hungary. That's happening in Russia. That's happening in China, North Korea, for example, in so many places where it's moving to the right, moving to the right, moving away from representative government. So I'm looking to you to try to find whether the phenomena that we see in the United States are happening everywhere. Or is it just coincidence? Well, there are some rising, there's some evidence that it is happening everywhere. In fact, is it not in Germany, Alex? I mean, we've had that recent coup effort, which said that they were inspired by or they were mimicking what they had seen in the United States. But this is the age-old accompaniment to the strong man leading. I mean, Mount Assam. I mean, Cambodia. All of these, the education system has to line up with all of that and does in these countries. And maybe that's one of the problems is the education system, well, why does remain fairly traditional, traditional approach? On the early 30s, when Hitler took over, the first thing he looked to was the education system. And he created Hitler youth and he gave them a whole new life in school. And he made them into a different generation from what they might have been. And that was a big strategy for him. And so if I'm an autocrat or I'm a would-be autocrat, first thing I do is attack the education system. Also I attack the lawyers, by the way. And I attack the media. But the education system can have lots of toys in it. And the flags and the marching and the uniforms and all the fun things. And then you also develop these ideals, which is something that needs to be done, the development of the ideal man for whatever country and who's the ideal woman. And what are these roles supposed to be? So all of this has to emerge from the effort of education. And it does emerge that way. So yeah, you're right. It would come right in and start taking over education. And that's what they're doing. And I think COVID didn't help us with that either, since it locked everybody up and took us back now two years ago, trying to build back these systems and certainly the pedagogy that we've been trying to change and use that is more about people fulfilling their potential and being expressive and doing things in a more democratic manner than the traditional approach of just being... Yeah, Alexander, I think we struck on something. It's education. But it's not the kind of education about kids in school. It's education of one would-be autocrat from reading about, thinking about and educating himself or herself about autocrats elsewhere, finding out what the playbook is and using the same, very same playbook. And that's one way you can spread autocracy around the world. Do you agree? Yeah, I think the example that Stephanie gave with the German incident with the so-called Reichsburg, I think is a good example. They certainly looked at January 6th as a playbook and learned from it. I mean, they did the good old German thing. I mean, they tried to figure out what was not organized well and trying to organize it better. And their attempt certainly was at exactly those target groups that we're talking about. The media, the administration, not to call it the lawyers, but high-level administration, the education system, and they organized themselves in a better way when you're talking about how autocrats learn from the mistakes of others. So there's no doubt about an international flow of information back and forth when it comes to autocrats and how they act. I think we also have to bear in mind, autocrats come to power in a certain way and then they want to stay in power in a certain way. We've seen in many European examples, now Erdogan being an example, and of course, Wurpoen in Hungary, they are now in a stage of their life and their autocracy in a way where it's about survival in the future. Most of those have one thing in common, namely no successor. They also have no transformation of ideology in case they themselves are not there anymore. So if you have a Xi autocratic ideology in China, imagine a heart attack it would quite literally decapitate the entire system that he built. The same would probably go for Erdogan and certain others. So I think it's a very complex topic in itself to look at, how to prevent autocracies and how to learn from the ends of autocracies. Very last comment, education is the one thing that lingers. If you look at the Germans after World War II, if you're being educated in March of 1945 as a Hitler follower, you're not going to be all of a sudden uneducated in May of 1945 and be a follower of a new democracy that somebody else imposes on you, which many of the Germans probably felt that at that time. So if you wrongly educate the children, that's going to be something that will keep pushing society in the wrong direction for time. You know, education is only good for the generation that you're educating. They don't necessarily pass it on. There's a movie called The Reader which examines, it's a very interesting movie, it examines the generational disaffection between the generation in Germany that was there in the war doing whatever they were doing, sometimes horrible things and the generation that followed. The generation that followed was asking, where did you do in the war? And the war generation didn't answer them because they were embarrassed and ashamed. And so there was a gap between the generations. This is very interesting. But the other point, you know, that Alexander mentioned is what happens if the autocrat dies, if she dies, if Kim Jong-un dies, it leaves a huge vacuum. And that vacuum is not really in the playbook because by definition, with an autocrat, there is no successor. And that's why some such great concern that a guy like Trump doesn't want to talk about a successor, he wants to stay in office forever, forever. And Putin, he wants to stay in office forever for life. But built into that model is a horrendous crash after he's no longer there. What are your thoughts about what happens in that crash? What happens when the autocracy crashes for the lack of a successor?  And you have alliances, unholy alliances to support a would-be autocrat. And it goes from there. So everyone is strategizing, trying to gain control. And you have basically the society parked in neutral. It's not advancing. Basic needs are not being met because all the energy and synergy is focusing around retainment of power or the quest for power. So it's detrimental to the society wholeheartedly, not to have a line of succession or a system in which a new government will be brought in. Simple as that. You know, Alexander, one point that I would like to ask you about came up at a dinner party I was at last night. And it's the story of Tito in Yugoslavia, who kept the lid on things for as long as he was in office. And he was in office essentially for life, wasn't he? And he was an autocrat. Some people felt he was the best autocrat they could have had. But the benefit was that he kept the lid on a society that might be killing each other. And ultimately, they proved that they could be killing each other. So I guess the question I put to you is, when you have autocracy, when you have a successor problem like this, aren't you really skirting violence, skirting the possibility of a coup d'état, which is violent most of the time, skirting the possibility of a junta, which, you know, is likewise violent? If we, you know, with representative government and the peaceful transfer of power, the possibility of violence is limited. But in any other system that we can see around the world, these autocracies, for example, violence is always at the doorstep. Am I right? Yeah, actually, you know, when Tim was talking, and when you mentioned, of course, Marshall, you'll see Prostito came to my mind because he is the prototypical example of what happens when the lid blows up. And the war in former Yugoslavia was the classical example of the conflict between ethnicities and religions and tribal structures that were in place still was just covered up by force essentially. And once that lid fell away, it all exploded and exploded big time, right? The same for the Soviet Union. So it's not necessarily always a person. The system of Soviet Union kept the lid on many things as well. And the moment that fell away, people started saying, we want our liberty. And one person's liberty is the other one's slavery. So we of course had these kinds of problems too. And then give it 10, 15, 20 years, people look back and say, well, you know, Tito actually wasn't that bad, right? When he was there, he actually kept this, he kept law and order, right? He kept this under control. He made sure that we would not kill ourselves. The same goes for the Soviet Union. Communist parties came back into power about 15, 20 years after the wall broke down, Poland, Hungary and so on became independent. All these countries had resurgencies of communist parties. Just as they said in the back then, we paid one whatever currency it is for right now, we're paying 10,000, right? And it's not even there necessarily. Plus we have conflict, we have social security has fallen away, all the things we were just taking for granted are gone. Why don't we look back at these dictators or tyrants and save us so bad they were not? Well, is that what's happening now? Is that the common denominator? People are looking back in history and saying, you know, back in the old day when we had a tyrant running us, things were more orderly. Can we say that that is happening in a number of these autocratic states right now? Probably, and quite frankly also aren't we sometimes saying that? I mean, one of the foreign policy concerns of China is not only what if it does something that is a threat to our national interests in the South Pacific, or something like that. It's also what happens if she actually does die and the system collapses, would that create something even worse for our US interests? The same goes for Iran. You know, we all say that demonstrators have a cause. They're fighting for their rights, but there's also the concern, well, who comes after them, right? Who would replace the regime that's currently there? I think in foreign policy, it's a given that we try to deal with the beast that we know, then create a new one and then have to figure out how that works. So are we, in a way, tacitly, and not even 11 when it comes to that, are we kind of encouraging dictatorships to a certain extent? I wouldn't say it that way, but we should ask the questioners.  And it also, it occurs to me, and Stephanie, I like your thoughts about this, is that when you look at autocracy, when you look at military hunters, in tyrants, and what have you, and chaos for that matter, we've covered all of those possibilities. Representative government and democracy with the transfer of power, allowing people to speak on it every interval is the best system, because it presumptively values truth, it values openness, it values diversity, and so forth, and change, and peaceful change. So it would seem to me that what we may have learned today is the best antidote for all this autocracy and violations of human rights that we see in the world today is to preserve, really work hard at finding democracy as the way to preserve our public safety, at least. What do you think? Well, I think such a good point that we're talking here about the difference between having the rule of law and not. And that's what I believe was happening on January 6th, as they wanted to dispense with the rule of law. And one way to do that, but try to dispense, make it go away, but one way to do that is to evoke chaos. And I think that one of the reasons we came through it is because the chaos that was evoked was handled by the people that were in it to the point where they stayed in place and they had the strong, now the strong, thoughtful leaders like Pelosi and Schumer, who didn't go away. And also the vice president didn't go away. They didn't go and submit to the chaos and go running wild. They stayed in place, and the first thing you hear from Pelosi is when and Schumer, when are we getting back in their finch fist? We're not, we're not stopping. And the expectation was to have so much chaos, I believe, and the Trump coming up there then would need to call in the Marshall M.A.R.T.I.A.L. law so that then he would be in power again. So I just see that as a cycle at whatever level. And that cycle would have been made huge and would have evoked more chaos across the state and the whole country. So that's really interesting to me that some, the people who planned that, knew where to insert the difficulties so that they would cause the most. It's a playbook thing. It's a playbook thing. The end of the day, you know, you have chaos and somebody surfaces as the powerful leader. Let me go to you where we're about out of time, Tim, but I wanted to ask you a question and also ask you to summarize your thoughts. And so if I made you ruler of the world, how about Secretary General of the United Nations? And we reorganize the Security Council so the United Nations is free to do righteous things. What would you do to a world which seems to be falling prey to autocracy and military hunters and war crimes and the like? What would you do? And violations of sovereignty? Let's not forget that. You always save the easy questions for me, Jay. Thank you. Yes, I do.  We're all in the same kettle of stew together. And we only have one Earth and one environment. And we better start working together or as Ben Franklin said, we better hang together before we hang separately. And the bottom line is I would start saying, look, there's certain people and entities that want to persuade you, influence you by these techniques, a propaganda by the techniques of words that lead to populism or techniques and words that lead to nationalism, recognize these words, recognize these strategies so that we could fight and guard against it and try to work together as a cooperative democratic society or republic and solve the world's problems cooperatively, not through military strength and the comings and goings of an egomaniac sociopath dictator.  Well, I wouldn't be the first one to be shown the door. Shown the door. A new kind of sanction. Alexander, your thoughts here summarize your view of this and what you would leave with our listeners. I very much agree with him. I think we have to fall back to the rational logical question. What are we actually doing here? And does it make any sense? Isn't there more important stuff to do? And I think the preservation of the environment and making sure that we have a planet left would probably be number one, because every other question depends on it. So if we answer all the other questions, write beautiful books about it, but then we have no atmosphere to live in, to breathe them, and to exist, or we destroy all life except us, and we exist in a virtual world only, then the end is there anyway. So it doesn't matter. So definitely that, I believe, still strongly in the rule of law, I believe in the purpose and value of the law, but it must never become a tool for the dictators. Bear in mind, dictators use the law very creatively. Hitler certainly would be a good example for that. When that happens, I think everything that the law stands for crumbles and disappears, and we as lawyers do the same. Would you support global government and enhance the United Nations? I think an enhanced international organization in the broader sense doesn't have to be the United Nations is always a good idea, because there's so much to go in it that we certainly need more structure and infrastructure in place. I would not think that world government would be a better solution than non-world government, quite frankly. If you ask me honestly, I think the global community is better placed to resolve major issues. The local community is more better placed to resolve major issues. The ones that actually we've always turned to, namely states, are actually the least likely to resolve those issues, because there you have nationalism, conflict, territorial disputes, historical disputes that go back hundreds of years make no sense. So the higher level and the lower level, I think are more rational than the government level would be, look to most of the time, namely the federal government in wherever you look. Bethany, I have one interesting question for you, for your summary, so to speak. Is humankind perfectible or not? Or are we in some sort of biblical trajectory where it all ends in an apocalypse? Well, the biblical trajectory is probably something that is here, but not the main road. In other words, mankind, all of us in these nations, you have to understand that it's us. What is that comic strip? We looked out the enemy was us, but who's responsible for everything is all of us. So that there is no, God's not coming down, even though he's on our side and making it right. And the angels aren't coming and the whoever else is. So it's all on us. And that when we come to understand that, instead of trying to consolidate power and become that crazy dictator or egomaniacal single source thing, that the power has to be distributed and shared. And all the people have to take their responsibility and just distribute it throughout. How to do this, I don't know, but I think we can see that there are paths to go forward here to think about power and how to do the work we need to do to live here peaceably and happily. There are ways that we know to do it. It's a matter of how we're going to move forward in that. I'm sure that if we shut ourselves in a room and brought in the pizza for meals, we could figure this out in some period of time. Thank you so much for this very interesting conversation. And we haven't solved all the problems in the world. We've identified a few. Aloha. Donate to us at thinktecawaii.com. Mahalo.


Good afternoon to all of you and welcome back to this post lunch session. As we had mentioned earlier, we will spend about 1 hour, maybe a little more, 1 hour, 15 minutes or so in the classroom. We will do a walkthrough of how you can upload your resource creation assignments to make your own portfolio that you and your colleagues can use when you are teaching.  We will do a flow transfer as well as look at questions that appeared in the chat and the questions window throughout the morning. So right now Jay Krishnan will take over for the next few minutes and we will look at how to use the course portfolio and test wiki in Moodle. So before I start off with the session, I will first have a view poll set up for you. It is all about how many of you have actually accessed the wikis that have been set up in the Moodle. So remote center coordinators, make sure that you just ask the question how many of the participants from the remote center have accessed the wiki, both the test wiki and course portfolio. And I have just released this question for a view poll. We just need to know how many participants across centers have used it. The typical answers are all of the participants, maybe around more than 75 percentage of the participants, around 50 to 75 percentage of the participants or 25 to 50 percentage of the participants or less than 25 percentage of the participants. So we just need to see how many are familiar with this particular wikis that are there in Moodle. So I see that around 30 centers have responded and out of that, 12 of them are saying that all of the participants in the RC have accessed the Moodle wiki. With almost 90 centers responding, we have more than 50 percentage of the people saying that around 50 to 75 percentage of the participants in that remote centers have accessed wiki. So for all the people who are saying that less than 50 percentage people have accessed, so for all these people, this session is a walkthrough of what is expected of them and for all those people who have accessed the wiki, this is just a refresher as to what you are expected to do in this wiki activity. So you would be familiar with this document, with this companion resource that we have already shared. I've just made some modifications. First of all, let me highlight that this is again under Creative Commons license. So you are free to use, distribute and modify it including for commercial purpose provided you acknowledge the source. So this is the Creative Commons license that we are giving you. So the wikis that we have used, so we have given the name course portfolio. So what is a course portfolio? A course portfolio is from a learner's perspective, it has an organized presentation of a student's education throughout the course. It displays coursework samples, for example assignments, mini projects, reflections, etc. and it is a synthesis of what they learnt from the course. So this is from a learner's perspective. From a teacher's perspective, again it is an organized collection of what happened in the course. So you have a course portfolio where all students contribute what they did. So the teacher has an understanding as to how active the course participants were, how engaging the assignments are. It also displays coursework artifacts, those assignments and mini projects. It also provides a summative assessment at the end of the course about students understanding and knowledge. And why we have used wiki inside Moodle for this course portfolio? Wiki is bringing an effective way of collaboration within online learning settings. There is a direct transfer of ownership to the participant. So we have put up a community wiki. Since the purpose of this workshop is to create community resources, we have purposefully given a community wiki so that people can falter and the community will be able to correct, provide constructive feedback and correct all those mistakes. There is ability to revise and edit and it is available within your learning management system that is Moodle. There are two wikis in this FDP. One is a test wiki, the other one is a course portfolio wiki. The test wiki is a sample wiki which participants are instructed to use for practice. Suppose they want to try out some new functionality they think they have discovered. You can directly first do that in the test wiki and later you can go on and do it in the main course portfolio wiki. The wiki's test wiki is ungraded but your participation in the course portfolio wiki will be considered for certification. So the course portfolio wiki requires participants to contribute meaningfully and everyone each and every participant is a direct honor of the entire wiki. So it is a public wiki where just like how wikipedia or the other open education open resources work. This wiki is completely open so anybody who has access can go and edit any page. So you have to be careful. So as a community you have to keep watch of what is happening and ensure that proper monitoring mechanisms are kept in your page. So a little about basic wiki operations. First for accessing the wiki you have to log into Moodle. So give your username that has come to you and then your password. Then you log into it. So then you have to locate the wiki. The test wiki is on top and the course portfolio wiki is in the under the week 2 May to 8 May. So that is the first activity in that particular week. The description of these wiki's are also given along with it. So working with test wiki as I already told you it is used for practice. Do not worry even if you make any mistakes. It is recommended that you work with the test wiki first because this is the sandbox that we are giving you to experiment. Now about course portfolio wiki. The course portfolio wiki has a 3 level hierarchy. Level 1 pages that is the top set of pages which are created by the course team at IIT Bombay. You will not be typically given edit permissions for this page. So we have enabled that feature. We have locked the main page and we will ensure that nobody else gets permission to edit this wiki. Level 2 pages are the RC pages. They will be created by the IIT Bombay Hub but it has to be monitored by the remote center coordinators remote center or the workshop coordinators who are handling it. You will have to ensure that your remote center page does not get affected by any participant action. And level 3 are the participant pages, the pages that you create. This is your own portfolio that we are looking at. So this portfolio page it is completely under your ownership and we will not be doing any changes from our side. So you are responsible for your own page. You should continuously monitor this page so as to see that nobody else has made any changes in your page. And people who have already done it, we request the participants to help the others who are not yet familiar with this wiki interface. We want a lot of community hand holding. We want the community to come up and help each other because this is what is the larger purpose of this workshop to generate a collaborative community. Now first instruction, the start page you are not supposed to edit this page. So over the past two weeks the IIT Bombay team had daily monitored who made the changes. They were all reverted back to the original settings. All you have to do is click on this particular contributing RCS page link that has been highlighted over here. So as a participant, once you log in just find this contributing RCS page link, click on it. Then you will see a list of contributing. There is another page. This link leads to another page which has a list of all the RCS who are participating in this workshop. Over here you locate your RCS. So the remote center number and the remote center name will be given over here. You find out your RC, click on it. Once you click, so this is a sample example page of IIT Bombay RC. First you will see a description. This description will be filled in by the remote center coordinator or the workshop coordinator. So in case your remote center page does not have this description, kindly ensure that the remote center coordinator or workshop coordinator is alerted and they provide information about the remote center. It will also have a list of participants from that remote center. Our IIT Bombay team has ensured that most of the participants who registered during the first week have also been put in this. You will find their names in blue which corresponds to a link. You click on your name. So your name will be given by your RCID underscore your first name underscore your last name. So all you have to do is click on your name. This will lead you to your page. So you will see this edit window. In case your page has not been created yet, it will ask should I create the page or cancel. To create the page over there then you will see an edit window. So that is this edit window. Every page will be open for 30 minutes for making edits. So within this time you have to perform some operations and regularly check, click save. If you don't click save this timer when it becomes zero, whatever content you have typed till that time, it becomes saved. You will have to again go and edit it. So if you repeatedly save it, this timer will get reset to 30 minutes. So typically 30 minutes is the time window that you have for making edits and saving your page. So you will have to either click on save or cancel before the timer reach zero. All participants are expected to populate this page. It will have some basic information about you, the courses that you handle, the domain from which you teach and any other things that you think are important for others to see. It also has something called a teaching learning mission statement. It is about what you want as a teacher. So what is your mission as a teacher? And in the later weeks, you have to populate your flip classroom activity. You have to provide links to your flip classroom activity in this particular page. We'll tell you how it has been done. So this is for viewing the page. All you have to do is click on this view tab. You'll be able to view the page. So this is how others will be able to see the page. So if you can closely look all the headings, there is something called edit. So at each heading level, you can edit it. So that is one feature of a biki. And what is expected in your course portfolio, details about you, your domain, courses that you handle, your teaching learning mission statement. And we also want for weeks 2, 3 and 4, we want the flip classroom design that you did as part of this workshop. So it should have the out of class design, which include the learning objective, links to the videos, either the selected ones or the created ones. And also the assessment strategies for the out of class activities. And the in class design, which will include learning objectives, the active learning strategy that you have designed. It could be TPS. It could be something else that you have tried to implement. And finally an assessment strategy, basically what this informs us is what you have learned through weeks 2, 3 and 4 of this FDP. We provide videos, we provided activities for design of flip classroom. Now we need to see evidence of this learning transferring into your practice. So this is an intermediary. The lesson design is an intermediary for us to know that yes, participants in this FDP have actually designed a flip classroom for their own course. So each of you will have a flip classroom design. So at the end of this weeks 2, 3 and 4, if we go RC wise, you can actually see all the flip classroom designs from a particular RC. So this is what you loosely understand by creation of open education resource. And all these resources, you should put it under creative commons so that people from your domain, people from other RCs within your domain who are taking a same course as you will also get benefited from your design. Then they may be able to give you feedback, the other, they may actually use the same design that you have provided if it is good in their own course. And thus it becomes, you become a collaborative community, each one helping the other either through feedbacks or through practice and then providing feedback. So one important thing is making sure that all these things come into a single repository and this course portfolio wiki is the repository within Moodle. We have given you for this purpose. And the next part is the peer review of the activities that you will be doing across weeks 2, 3 and 4 through various assignments in the Moodle. You will actually be doing these peer reviews. So at the end of week 4, the week 4 deadline, we expect the course portfolio to have all these things. So I hope all of you understood the process.


I was actually living a very normal average Westerner life. I was very focused on material possessions, financial wealth. I actually had a goal of being a millionaire by the time I was 30 years old. I'm 34 and I have $6,000, so obviously that isn't the case. There was a change of plans about 10 years ago. I realized through watching some documentaries that many of you have seen and reading books and hanging out with different people. I was in San Diego, California, when that Chrissy was over here and we were starting to wake up at the same time. And what happened is I realized that basically I was destroying the earth in every single action that I took. The food that I was eating, the calling I was driving, the gas that I was pumping into the car, the house that I was living in, the water that I was drinking that was being sucked across the desert where half of it evaporates into the air and the ground. Even every drop of water that I was drinking was causing destruction. My money was in IRAs that were supporting fossil fuels and cigarette companies and all of these things I didn't stand for. I was supporting the military industrial complex, the police industrial complex, the pharmaceutical industries, the prison industrial complex is what I meant to say about police. I was part of all of that. Everything that I was doing was causing suffering to humans, to other species and to this earth. And I just said, no way am I going to keep doing that. I was 25 years all the time in 34 now and I just said to myself, dude if I live to be 75 that's another 50 years on this earth.  Like I realized that I was living a complete hypocrisy of my belief system because I didn't believe in destroying the earth but I was doing it. So I decided that I was going to just radically transform my life starting then in 2011. But what I decided I was going to do was taking one step at a time because radical transformation doesn't happen with one little thing. You got to have stepping stones. So I made a list of all the changes that I wanted to make in my life. Over 100 changes that I wanted to make and I put it up in my kitchen in San Diego on a piece of paper where I had a pen taped next to it so I could check them off one at a time. And it was in my kitchen right through the front door. So everybody saw it. So it was my way of like keeping myself accountable by having it like right there for everybody to see. So over a period of two years I just started changing my life one little bit at a time. And at the time most of my food was coming from walmarts. Plastic packaged food, factory farmed food. Then I put it in two more plastic bags.  So I started to change the food I was eating. You know first I went to Trader Joe's because I thought that was better but when Trader Joe's isn't better it looks better but it's maybe not really better. I'm not exactly sure but it's not living off the land that's for sure. So I started changing my life you know what I was putting in my body stopped getting wasted drunk and putting all my resources into that and started to ride a bike and drive the car less and started to change the ways that I was interacting with other people and from little things to bigger things eventually after about a year and a half I got rid of my car and had no car to pump fossil fuels in and continuously made these changes and at the center of so much of this was food because what I realized is there's a lot of things that we do that cause destruction but pretty much every human being eats every single day like that form of destruction is at the center of almost every human's life and I realized that I thought food was one of the greatest gateways to completely transforming our life it is our life it is the food that nourishes our body it's our medicine that keeps us alive it's our social circle it's what we do with our friends with our family we have emotional attachments to it without it we perish and it's at the center of every single human being's life and at the same time it's one of the most destructive ways that we interact with the earth so that was a big part of my wake up and what I was shifting and I had this idea at the time like wow you know could you maybe like not go to the grocery store anymore like could you actually grow and you know collect all your food from the land and at that time it was an idea I mean I was still going to Walmart and then Trader Joe's then the farmers' market you know got that over time but I wasn't ready to go there yet I grew a little bit of my own food I had a couple of raised beds and I was making these changes so fast forward to about 2016 I've been transforming my life for five years I've got a lot of activism around food and other issues and I finally said by the way is this thing working well? yeah we can hear you it's possible none of you are here unlikely but and let's see I got myself off track here five years yeah and so then it's I finally am feeling like okay maybe I can do maybe I can try this can I try to go a year with no grocery stores or restaurants nothing package or process remove myself so deeply from what is so entrenched into our lives in a destructive way so I decided that I was going to do it probably in around 2016 I don't remember how the you know where exactly it came from so I had a couple problems first though one I didn't live anywhere and I didn't own any land so you know I had to figure out where I was going to put this garden that I had in mind and didn't really have much money I had a backpack with 111 possessions at the time and that was everything that I owned maybe five thousand bucks or something like that so I didn't really have that going for me so I decided Florida because well you know it's got the ability to grow food year-round I had grown almost nothing as close to nothing in my life a few raised beds and I had experience like I would plant a lot of things at community gardens or fruit trees but I was never really around to see them actually grow to the point I could eat them and my permaculture design certificates more theoretical you don't actually really learn how to grow food so I was starting there like kind of square one so what I decided to do I arrived in Orlando after visiting there one time and what I decided to do was ask people how would you like your front yard to be turned into a garden and in exchange for returning you on into a garden you get to have a garden and you get to eat all the food you want from it and when I leave it's yours all the work is yours you just need to not like lawns enough to let me experiment down in this place basically and pretty soon I had a wait list of people that wanted me to turn their yard into a garden so I did end up turning six yards into gardens and that's where I was based in just two miles from downtown Orlando and I chose Orlando because I wanted to be in with the people it's like the project I did where I was in New York City and I wore all my trash for a month while living like the average American I was I wanted to be in front of people so that they would see consumerism in their face so I put my gardens right on the streets right along the sidewalk I foraged from people's front yards I helped people to immerse in this idea that food is growing freely and abundantly all around us and that's why I chose being in the city plus I met the Orlando permaculture group which is an ironically Orlando has a really nice group of people who grow a lot of food there's a lot of plant people there so I ended up there didn't know how to forage so I started going to foraging classes and basically what I at the beginning when I started I was going to the web you know thing they call Google and I would type in how much sun does a KLC need and how much water do you put on the carrots and like just the basics and I was googling it for every plant and trying to make a spreadsheet and after a few months I realized holy crap there's all sorts of spreadsheets that have done this for me already even in this area they exist and so what I did is I opened myself up to the local resources what I learned very quickly is that we know how to do all of it there's just not many of us who are doing all of it but we all have the skills between us to accomplish almost everything that we want to accomplish so what I started to do is just gather all the local knowledge and put it together into a way where I could step away completely from the consumeristic globalized industrialized food system and so I gave myself six months from when I arrived in Orlando to the point where I would be growing and foraging a hundred percent of my food so zero to a hundred and six months was my goal so I got to work kind of I also got distracted doing quite a few other things and so six months turned into ten months but still ten months never having grown anything in that state having done very little foraging recently just googling how to grow a carrot I launched into the year on November 11, 2018 and the first day was the well the first meal was the first meal that I ever ate in my entire life that I had completely grown and foraged so I was jumping into the deep end what happens is I started a bunch of other community projects planting community fruit trees building gardens for single moms sending out free project seeds and I just got busy doing a bunch of other things but I think it could have been started in six months anyway that's not important at all so ten months later I ate the first meal and um that's it so any questions okay what was the meal the meal is actually a smoothie it was three years ago I don't remember exactly but I'm sure there's a picture on mine if you want to go back to November 11, 2018 on your social media it'll be there with a picture I know it was a smoothie of all things from my garden if you're new to growing food remember perennials they are exquisite when you plant a perennial you know an apple tree is a perennial you plant that apple tree and you could be eating apples from that for decades by 50 50 years even or potentially longer you plant an acorn tree and you could be eating from that for 400 years so planting perennials you know pushes shrubs like raspberries, limes, raspberries, come back every year so I focused on perennial greens and then even better yet now it's easy to be here like Eric Joseph Lewis where's T.X I guess he's off playing with the plants we did a plant walk earlier and there's dozens of species of food going all around here but would you most people wouldn't expect this but food is growing freely and abundantly almost everywhere in all of the cities even you know actually New York City has some great foraging with their huge parks Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles the small towns the megatropolis is if that's a word everywhere there is food growing all around us and when you tune into that you start to see it you start to see that food is growing freely and abundantly all around us and that in itself is extremely radical because that's saying we don't need you corporations in order to have a happy healthy meaningful existence we can work with the plants and attain that freedom from the monetary system but the plants are one of the most amazing ways to do that one of my earliest lessons was the seminal pumpkin which is this beautiful de-tolerant pumpkin that grows in mostly in semi-tropical areas it's been grown in Florida for hundreds of years rather than the seminal indigenous people and and I learned about this plant and started to grow it and what I realized the beautiful lesson that I got is I was at a friend's house and he had the seminal pumpkin and he took the seeds out and what most people do with the seeds well some people eat them the cool people eat them a lot of people throw them in the garbage can some people compost them but most people throw the seeds in the garbage can in the pumpkin and I said hey can I have those seeds? and he was like yeah of course yes so I took those the seeds from those two pumpkins home and that turned into 169 pumpkins each of those pumpkins has a hundred seeds in it so that's like a lot somebody 17,000 pumpkin seeds you know what I could do with that I could give one seed to 17,000 people and the next generation every human being in the city of Orlando could have been pumpkin self-sufficient that's the power of the seed you know you might have heard of Ron Finley one of the things he says is throw in your own food he's like printing your own money he's one of my heroes and it is the power of the seed one little seed can hold but can turn into the health and abundance of an entire community it's truly powerful what is in those seeds so they also taste good the pumpkin seeds are also good for eating you don't have to give them all the way you can also just eat them that's a lot so this the year started off pretty well and I continued on eating lots of fruits foraging for lots of fruits I harvested myself from the ocean I did make my own coconut oil but only a little bit because it turned out to be a lot harder than I thought so I went nine months without oil that was one of the big struggles also ironically the greatest skill set that I had going into this as far as being a forager a gatherer was fishing I've been fishing since I was eight years old pretty much for my happy place and weirdly enough I couldn't catch any fish I was just like flabbergasted I was like what is going on I went out with all my friends who are the best best fisher people all of them got scumped when I was on their boat it was like I was cursed for fish man but so about halfway through the year I started to become I thought that fishing is fat and protein that's what I was having the hardest time living in Orlando I didn't have a car I didn't have a gun I couldn't easily get to like the coast it was an hour and a half drive so that was part of it I didn't it was you know not easy to access so much because a lot of people have said like dude fishing in Florida I mean come on that's like some of the easiest fishing in the world but I had my reasons that I didn't do good fishing there also was cursed so about halfway through the year I started to become kind of deficient in fat and protein I thought I can't say for certain that that's what it was but that's what it felt like a little bit of foggy brain a little bit of just like you know achiness and so I ended up going up to northern Wisconsin for three months and a lot of people said oh you know you quit like you went up there and ate pizza with your family no I brought 120,000 calories with me because 2000 calories a day at 60 days it means that I could survive at least for 60 days up there off the calories I brought I did sit at the table and watch my family eat pizza but I wasn't not eating that pizza well I went up there and I started to catch some lake trout and then one of the biggest places to go through is is this thing still on? not not me not me but you can still hear me right? not me yeah all right I might just don't want to switch things up too much right in the middle oh I don't know about that though that's like a little intense go hold it further away wear out though like hey man I don't like that I don't like that I don't like that guys treat it like an ice cream coin do you need a little ice cream by the way how's this? it's good it's good all right I gotta be honest about one thing this is the first time I have ever given a talk after having a little meeting with my plant friend marijuana I wanted to see how it would go and I thought it was the truth or not you're a natural all right I'm saying I'm sure I'm sure all right I'm sure and I'm going to say it is a great friend it's all about all these friends it's about how you work with them you can choose to turn them into something negative or they can be a wonderful friend in medicine and they all are in one way shape or form for another whatever something like that you got it okay so okay the big savior was it started to cool off up there I gotta be honest Florida summers were brutal and I did flee I did flee from them and then what happened was up there the deer were flexible not because I had a gun but because a lot of people hit deer with cars and so some people call them roadkill deer but what I call them is deer that are hit by cars because roadkill comes first and then you're you're moving the identity of that deer and saying it is something it's still a deer it was deer before it was a hit it was a deer after it but it was hit by a car so it's still a deer and depending on how it's hit it can be a really good deer still for example if it's hit in the head and none of its body is the whole body is still edible so I started to eat a lot of deer while I was up there especially because I still was pretty cursed for the fishing thing so the end was I ended in the fall and I actually ended up at UW La Crosse where I went to University and they actually they actually about a month after I had the fat and efficiency I stopped there and I happened to be staying with like the physical duty who does like dunk tanks where you learn your body fat percentage and stuff so he put me in that thing and my body fat percentage was up to 50% 15, 15% so I managed to work it back with the deer and some of the fish that I was catching went back to Florida my garden was just a jungle because that's how food forestry works not that it was a food forest it was too young but the idea of permaculture one of the sayings is maximizing hammock time you design the garden in the way where it's less work where you can spend more time in the hammock I actually don't like hammocks but a lot of people do so if you like hammocks that's a good thing for you but it's not for me it's not that I don't like them I just don't enjoy spending time with them no problem with them themselves so anyway I get back to Florida and I'm in great health I finish off the year in I end feeling honestly the best that I've felt in my adult life I've felt great the best physical condition I've been in my adult life and this for me the biggest lesson was you know I don't know who said it maybe hypocrisies let that food be that medicine you're allowed to let those things slide you don't have to laugh if that person says hypocrisies? hypocrisies hypocrisies if you get it you don't need all the words to get the start so um so where was I going the first time? let that food be that medicine I absolutely that's the thing all foods are medicine and everything that you put in your body that's toxic to you is the opposite of that and the more things that you put into your body that harm you the more medicine that you actually need what we do is we pump ourselves with pharmaceuticals but simply by not putting the bad stuff in our body in the first place and filling our body with good stuff we don't need those pharmaceutical medicines the plants are our medicine every single one Chrissy over here got stung by a wasp and she she learned to put a little plantago on the eyebrow there when you're stung by a wasp it reduces swelling it's one of my favorite plant medicines and they're all around us these are a lot of these are weaves you know things that people despise they hate them they're stabbing them they're poisoning them and they are medicines they're such wonderful plants the family lion all of these so I finish off the year feeling really good and uh I was the end though I honestly I was pretty anxious at the end and I was pretty stressed because for the last month or two everybody asked the same question what's the first thing you're going to eat when you're done and I'm like man that's so that creates so much anxiety if you haven't tried to figure out what the first thing was going to be but uh first thing ended up being a friend of mine uh Pete Canaris maybe some of you have seen his youtube channel he brought me a coconut that he had forged I hadn't forged it so it was a good way to like work anything but uh and through that I've it's been what two years now and I've held on to uh everywhere I go I find food and I and I eat it and I don't even remember that I'm eating a lot of times it's just food is everywhere and but with that being said I also do that at Ben and Jerry's in Asheville as well I eat a lot and I you know most of my diet right now is not grown and forged I'm amazed how quickly I reverted back to being okay with putting things in my body that I didn't want to but sugar's a real thing man and it's hard to avoid it a lot of the times so um it was a wonderful year and two things I want to say one the only reason I could do this was because of community first the community has existed for thousands of years prior to us who have gotten so disconnected from our community only reason that any permaculturists are able to share anything with me or the current gardeners or the foreigners is because people have been doing this for thousands of years prior to that so in the greatest sense possible the only reason that I was able to do this at all of us community like technically I was the only person that I was growing and foraging all my food but even beyond that when you come to the local people I was only able to do it because of the gardeners and the foragers and the books and the books and the internet information the only reason I was able to do it was because of community and even building my gardens people came together and they volunteered not altruistically they got to learn how to you know start gardening by helping me build my garden it was all about bringing community together as much as possible and the other big part about it is it wasn't just about growing and foraging all of my own food it was about empowering others to do it as well the reason I do these things so publicly like I could totally do this like quiet in the woods by myself but I do it because I'm trying to penetrate the minds of mainstream society and I go to extremes to do that because our media is extreme and sometimes we need a message that really can get in there and get to people and get them to question things so but the community like came together and the only reason I was able to do was because of community that's the beauty of life so yeah thank you all so much for being here and for spending this time together and I'd love to answer any questions that you have they could be wacky or they could be pretty normal either one is totally fine Eric what's your favorite wild food of all of the like I guess favorite in calories and favorite in flavor so this is Eric Joseph Lewis right here he's a well we call him master forager definitely if you get a chance to do a plant walk with him if you get plant opportunities do plant walks in general there's a lot of plant walkers around here people who walk and show you plants take that opportunity it's amazing my favorite food is whatever is growing me growing abundantly around me I have such an affinity for whatever there's so much of that it's just there and I know that it's nutritious I don't know the nutritional factoids of almost any foods I just eat lots of foods from the land and I believe that will pretty much work so far so good could be a horrible experiment who knows but I'm pretty sure we existed before nutritionists existed not exactly sure but pretty sure so that's my favorite food and then favorite as far as taste goes whoo can't do it can't do it next question but those of us who aren't great fisher people are you going to add more animals to like your farming like circles and yes and I also just realized that I will answer the question with the question in case you don't hear it the question was for those of us that aren't fisher people are you going to add animals when you do it here if I do it here hopefully but we'll see and the answer is if I have animals for that year I also had to grow over 400% of their food so if I had chickens I couldn't be buying feed to feed to them so that's why I didn't have any animals because that would just be still getting food from the system and just converting into something else so probably for me the most likely scenario is for me personally I like my interaction with the animal to do one where they spend their whole life wild and then we meet for a short period of time that's what calls to me so that's probably more likely what I'll be doing so I'll take the same question but you've been here for a month so it's July in Asheville what's your favorite food? okay so I've been here for a month it's July in Asheville I was here for June what's my favorite right now okay well service berries or june berries those are just mustard all over in the city like fruit trees everywhere love that I thought I was eating chicory but according to Eric it's mostly wild lettuce which I believe this guy he knows what he's talking about lots of greens lots of pokeweed plantago, dandelion some chicory wild lettuces lots of stinging metal I love stinging metal I've been stinging it from the tree down there lots of meat I love it and hopefully tomorrow we're going to go out for some mushrooms some melky caps maybe maybe some chanterelles maybe some lobster mushrooms so yeah those are some of my favorites at the moment so like that's what I really want in life is truth and consumerism is the opposite of truth that's all that I feel like a lot of the times that I'm resisting is sort of the lies that are put out for our society and I find truth in this I find a lot of truth in this and so as much as I'd love to do that for me like we all have our place in life we all have our ability to find our purpose and our passion and our mission and you know when I was in fifth grade I like basically started to make people laugh and I became sort of a class clown and when I was about 10 years old I realized I'm an entertainer like that's actually what I do it's what I love it's one of my passions so I gotta be around people for that I mean I like talking to myself but not nearly as much as being around people and so and society is what needs society is what I'm hoping will change so that we stop destroying this earth that we live on so what I have to do is look at each situation not as a black and white scenario but as a as a shade of gray and say what is the best thing for me to do in this scenario in order to walk lightly but at the same time be able to shift society and I found that the best way that I can do that is to be a part of it I remove myself to large you know large degrees as I can but what I don't do is remove myself in ways that actually wouldn't create the change that I feel is needed so there's you know the idea of transitional ethics you know we have to be in a time where we have our ideals but we can't necessarily have them right now and so we have to work towards that and that means critical thinking that means problem solving it's not having labels and saying okay this is vegan therefore it's safe it's good for animals no some vegan food is the worst thing for animals and some of it's great but some you know working with animals is regenerating our earth and some of it's destroying our earth so it's all about critical thinking and problem solving and looking you know deeply at the scenario so for me I actually have very little trouble it's like walking in society because I'm like comfortable with that that's the reality that I'm in and I truly believe that that's the best way of going about it so yeah what kind of amendments did I use to build the soil and then who paid for it I paid for it because I used almost all waste products that cost next to nothing so first I layered the ground with cardboard free from the dumpsters then you layer it with mulch which is the byproduct of tree cutting down companies they don't make money off mulch they'll dump it for free you layer your whole yard with mulch as much as like a foot of it and then that starts to retain moisture that starts to break down and turn into soil that starts to bring in microorganisms and actually create life that is beneficial to plants it creates the soil itself if you do that and you walk away for a year and you come back you have soil basically so if you have land and you want to do that and you want to be growing food in the future but not aren't ready do that throw the cardboard down throw a foot of mulch down and then come back in a year and you can start growing food there now with that being said I got another waste product because mushroom compost which is the the the material the medium they grow mushrooms factory farmed mushrooms if you're buying mushrooms you should be grocery store there you know probably factory farmed so I would get the waste product from that which was super nutrient dense and in a way actually almost cheating because this was a byproduct of the globalized industrialized food system but for me it was I just couldn't eat from it and you could use utilize wasted resources but not dumpster diet some people call that urban foraging but for the year it was no eating food from dumpsters but I was using waste products from the industrial system in order to be able to establish fertility in a short period of time to grow food so and within a few months of that first garden the first garden that I created cost $550 ish and within a few months it was producing that amount of food every month so it pays for itself very quickly once you start to invest in your food and think you know forward well so there's the people that I worked with directly which is a very small number of people in comparison to the number of people that just like watch my videos and see that it's possible I mean walking downtown Asheville the other day a guy looks up to me and he's like I turned my whole front yard into a garden from watching your youtube video man I get that hundreds of times a month you know so people see it and they're like I didn't know you could do that and then they do it because now they know it's as simple as putting other options out there that's the idea of showing people another way it's possible and then as far as the people we built gardens for you know for many for some of them it was you know a nice benefit it was you know adding a little beauty to their lives but you know one person actually told me that the garden saved their life that looking out the window at the garden was the reason that they were still alive because they were dealing with depression issues and this garden brought this life to them and kept them going through so some of the gardens were you know pretty powerful and plants are powerful and some of them were some of them were more neglected and people didn't really get into it as well all right I think we have time for about two questions and I will say afterwards I am totally here to hang out that's totally why I'm here so definitely don't be shy come up I've got the food risk band on and I'm open for hugs and just you know I'm elated to be here with you all and yeah so let's go with one more question yes so any work with gray water black water rain catchment so I don't do black water because I do compost toilets I try not to poop in our water because it's not an efficient usage of our water and it causes you would be surprised I'll give you one little tidbit I was in Bureau Beach Florida and there was a headline that said I think it was three million gallons of raw sewage spilled into the river and like dang three million gallons and it says one of that fourth largest in two years and I was like this is happening all the time our poop is going to that water a lot so what I do is you know compost toilet a dry toilet it's one of the simplest things for me it was kind of the holy grail it took me five years to get to it because you know that's a big part about this is social stigmas if you think about it what am I doing oh I poop in a bucket and deal with my own poop like really the coolest thing for most people in society and ultimately that's the most important lesson that I've got probably through all of this so I'm saying most important there's a lot of good ones but one of the most important lessons I've gotten through all of this is just to stop worrying about other people think about you because if you think about it if you spend one hour a day basing your life off what other people think you know you know just doing ourselves up and one hour a day of just like what would they think about that so should I do it or should I not that adds up to three years of your life now if you take into account sleeping it's five years of your waking life imagine you just got five years of life because you decided that you're going to spend time thinking about things way more important so what I decided to do is I would start thinking about like not through the lens of what other people will think but the lens of is this beneficial to the earth is this beneficial to my community and is this beneficial to myself basically that's absolutely what set myself free to be able to do any of this was removing that unnecessary lens so that I could actually just you know immerse as a human being that is able to freely think for the betterment of the bigger picture rather than you know our own little gag sauce so yeah this was fun this is the one that I wrote and uh this is one of my favorites from that chapter it's called golden victory I hope that you enjoyed that talk and that you enjoyed the music of Leah from rising Appalachia this was kind of a spur of the moment as far as putting this video together we had planned this event and our friend Charlie ended up filming it and so we got to take you along for part of my talk and just one of the many beautiful songs that Leah sang so I'm so glad that we captured it and we're able to to share part of the evening with you it was just for me just a complete pleasure and honor to be able to host this night with Leah from rising Appalachia she's been one of my favorite musicians for about five years now she has brought me so much joy and contentment so much motivation to to be the change that I wish to see you know to be an activist she's not just an incredible musician but she is an incredible activist and all around human being so highly recommend checking out her and Rising Appalachia's music on their website they have a YouTube channel as well and social media and if you can catch them at a concert in person it's a really great crowd of people to spend time with and just I mean all very very good vibes around Rising Appalachia so I hope that you enjoyed it I hope that you will take some of this inspiration away to gain food freedom and gain food sovereignty in your community and enjoy the beautiful music and the beautiful life while you're doing it so love you all very much and see you again soon