Part Two: The Common Ground Collective: The DIY Collective That Built Modern Mutual Aid

In part two, Margaret continues to talk with Andrew Ti about the anarchists and former Black Panthers that came together to set up mutual aid in post-Katrina New Orleans.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Whole Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
your weekly podcast about cool people who did cool stuff.
And sometimes we talk about t shirts like the really
good shirt that our guest Andrew is wearing that We're
not going to tell you what it is because you
have to go to the first episode.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
Listen to the first episode. Also, this is this is
I've been having more tech issues than I should considering.
This is not that hard, so we're at maximum efficiency.
We've already rehearsed this like a time, I know, like
the dress rehearsal went.

Speaker 3 (00:38):
Okay, we're doing this.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
Yeah, because we have a really hard job podcasting. I mean,
it's actually kind of exhausting, but that's because I don't sleep.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
You put quite a lot into this. Yeah, there are
ways to do this less fatiguingly.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
Yeah, okay, that's fair. But one of the reasons that
this job is doable at all is because of my
amazing producer, Sophie Hey. Sophie Hey, And another reason is
the audio engineer Daniel Hi. Daniel good job, danel Hi,
sweet sweet?

Speaker 1 (01:14):
Does he ever splice himself in responding to any of
these highs? Well, think about it should out there just
turn out there.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
Ian did that I think once. Yeah, Ian and Anmial
switch switch shows, so they both still were Yeah, so
so Vide and you said it the show and he
did that once and it was funny. It was good. Daniel.
You have to if you do it, you should do
it as like the voice of God. You know, I
had a lot of effects on your voice.

Speaker 4 (01:41):
Hello friends, it is I DJ Daniel. Your gratitude falls
on my ears like a lullaby, soothing and sweet. May
your episode be informative, researched and full of context. Goodbye now,
but no I am with you always. Goodbye.

Speaker 2 (02:07):
Our theme music was written for us by unwoman. And
this is part two and a two parter on the
common Ground Collective in New Orleans, and we spent the
whole We didn't even introduce the collective yet. The collective
hasn't even started yet, although some people are doing collective types.
A lot of mutual aid has already happened, and you
should go listen to part one.

Speaker 3 (02:28):
By necessity.

Speaker 2 (02:29):
Yeah, yeah, Now we're going to talk about one of
the other people that we've already mentioned who also chose
to write out the storm, Robert King. Robert King, I
decided to write out the storm. He'd written out the
storms as a kid, and he figured it would be fine.
He told his friends as much. Also, I have a
feeling that once you spend twenty nine years in a box,

(02:51):
shit doesn't phase you. That's just my assumption, right, yeah,
like literally, what could a storm do? Some storm? It's
not worse, right, you know, there's very few things that
are worse. An awful lot of people have declared solitary
confinement to be torture, and those people.

Speaker 3 (03:11):
Are right, yeah, Jesus.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
But then the storm hit and the levees broke and
the phones went dark, and his friends weren't so sure
that he was safe. But he spent that time sitting
on his front porch, hanging out with his dog, and basically,
rescuers would come by on boats every now and then
and be like, hey, you want to get out of here,
and he'd say, can I bring my dog? And they'd say, oh, right, no,

(03:37):
and so he'd say then no, I'm good. And because
he's a prepper, King, oh, his last name is King,
he had filled his bathtub with water, which is what
you should do if you don't have stored water, or
even if you do have stored water, and you know
that there's a good chance your water supply is going
to be disrupted. He had already filled his bathtub up

(03:59):
with water, and he had a little bit of food,
and basically he made sure that his dog ate better
than him and he just hung out and waited for
a week awn. His friends were worried about him. They
couldn't reach him. There's no phones working. You know. He'd
been a political prisoner for a long time, so he

(04:19):
had friends all over who had helped him get out
and then helped him after he got out. Right. He
A big part of doing political prisoner or any prisoner
support work is that you also take care of people
as they transition out into the world. Three of his
friends were these white anarchists living in Austin, Texas. Anne Harkness,
her partner, Scott Crow, and this other guy, Brandon Darby.

(04:40):
Don't get too attached to Brandon Darby. He's going to
turn out to be a real piece of shit. I
don't say that lightly, but it's a cutt and dry here. Basically,
Anne had made connections with Robert King, so she's an
important part of it in that sense, but she's not
a big part of the rest of the story. Wrote
an awful lot about common Ground and is one of

(05:02):
the founders of common Ground, so we're gonna include him
a lot in this story. And he is definitely cool.
People did cool stuff like Malik and Robert and Sharon.
Who will you know the other organizer who was there,
Brandon Darby starts off the story a misogynist and then
at the end of the story is an FBI and
informant who put several people in prison.

Speaker 1 (05:21):
Right, it's probably that's the typical arc for those fuckers.

Speaker 2 (05:27):
It kind of is. Yeah, Scott, he's the only person
in the story that I've met just from being in
the movement together. And then also his record label put
out a single of mine a few years back. Ironically,
the single was called the Flood Came Over Me. I
don't I don't know whether he picked the song because
of that or not. Anyway, we'll talk about Scott. Scott

(05:50):
was raised poor by a single mother, living literally on
the wrong side of the tracks in Dallas, and he
was one of the white kids in a neighborhood that
was mostly black and Chicano. But it was the seventies
and so we got to go to a free preschool
that was run by former members of the Black Panther Party,
the Brown Berets, and the Young Patriots, which is to say,
militant leftists representing black, brown, and poor white social movements.

(06:13):
He didn't know that at the time because it wasn't
like he didn't go and there weren't just like pictures
of AK forty seven's and like now's little Red Book
on the wall or whatever. It was the free preschool
that activists ran. He had what you might call a
troubled youth. He got arrested and did drugs and shit
like that throughout the eighties, and then music turned in political.

(06:36):
But I'm really excited about this part. It wasn't. I mean,
these other ways are great. Usually when someone gets political
through music, it's hip hop or punk, right right, this
was industrial and goth. Scott Crowe read an essay by
al Jorgensen, the guy from Ministry, talking about the working class,
and he was in. He was drawn originally towards socialism

(06:59):
and communis, but he was wary of replicating problems with
the USSR. Soon as a teenager, he's marching in anti
apartheid marches and he's like playing in industrial bands that
tour with Skinny Puppy and nine inch nails and all
that shit, and he's helping raise his partner's kid and
starting a co op antiques business. Once from now into
the nineties, right, he's an adult at this point. Eventually

(07:21):
he gets into anarchism in the nineties through just to
check it off on your Free Space on cool Zone
and sure an IWW organizer from the Industrial Workers of
the World who had gotten out of prison, and an
awful lot of this anarchist stuff clicks with Scott. Then
in two thousand and one, Robert H. King gets out
of prison Scott's partner and was soon friends with him,

(07:43):
and they're all close as hell, and they refer to
each other as family. So they're like not going to
fucking let bad things happen to each other, right, because
the Texas Anarchists, we're doing support work for this released panther.
It's four years later, it's Katrina, and no one has
heard from Robert is the night of the twenty ninth,
about twelve hours after the storm it hit, So Brandon

(08:04):
Darby calls Scott Crow and it's like, hey, we should
get a boat and go find our friend, and so
they called the Red Cross, and the Red Cross is like, yes,
please come with a boat. We need people helping. And
the two of them pack up supplies and a handgun
and take off towards the unknown. As soon as they
got into Baton Rouge, they realized the government operation was

(08:26):
in shambles. It was arguing about who had jurisdiction. It
was turning away hundreds of boat owners ready to do
search and rescue, and so the pair were like, oh, okay,
we're not allowed to do it. So they went home
just kidding. The pair were like, all right, well fuck
you too, and they drove around to approach the city
from another angle. What they saw was a fucking apocalypse.

(08:47):
There is thirty foot tall mud drifts, there's cars smashed
into buildings, there's trash everywhere. There's natural gas leaking everywhere
right next to like down power lines that are sparking.
So everyone's just waiting for everything to explode. You know,
they're not even inside the city yet when they see
this stuff. They're not inside the flooded parts yet, right.
They helped where they could, and eventually they found a

(09:09):
father with his adult son who had their own boat
who were about to like go around into the Gulf
of Mexico and then up into the city in order
to get to their warehouse because they weren't you know,
there's the only way they could figure out to get
in there. And so they were like, yeah, all right,
you all have a boat, you can follow us. We'll
guide you through the city. And so they take off

(09:30):
into a stormy nightmare and a flat bottomed motor boat
designed for like lakes and shit. Oh god, yeah, that's so,
that's like a video game.

Speaker 3 (09:41):
Honestly, it's like, I know, terrifying.

Speaker 2 (09:43):
I know, everywhere they went as they went into the
city there was dead people and animals in the water.

Speaker 3 (09:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:50):
Some of those people were dead with bullet holes in them.
It's an apocalypse.

Speaker 3 (09:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:56):
They passed rescue boat after rescue boat leaving the city
and heard stories about gun battles. The media narrative around like, oh,
everyone's just running around shooting each other is absolutely overblown, right,
and that is a dangerous thing that is overblown. But
in this first person memoir, Scott talks about, for example,
how one would be rescuer with a boat would show

(10:19):
up and there'd be a bunch of people who need rescue,
and the rescue boat would be like, oh, we're doing
women and children first, and young men with guns would say,
fuck you, I'm going to shoot you unless you let
me into the boat. And so the rescuers were like
shooting the people that they're supposed to be rescuing. And
eventually a lot of these rescuers were fleeing empty handed
away from the violence that they were facing Jesus or

(10:41):
empty boated. Maybe, Yeah, law enforcement isn't helping. They're shooting
to kill anyone suspected of looting. Is this whole thing
I read about a while ago when I was like
first time I was researching all this stuff I was
getting into like disaster studies that now I'm off script.
Sophie loves when they go off script. There's this thing
thinking that the government talks about its priority is COG

(11:02):
continuance of governance, and this is more important than law
and order. It is more important that the cops are
in charge.

Speaker 1 (11:10):
Right, whoever it was in charge, stays in charge, as
opposed to like people be safe.

Speaker 2 (11:15):
Yeah, exactly, Oh, and I fundamentally disagree with that approach. Yeah,
helicopters full of guns are whizzing overhead quite noticeably, there
to shoot people and not rescue people. But they made
their way through the city and eventually they made it
to this warehouse, the Guide's warehouse. They spend the night there,
like taking turns, keeping watch with the one gun that

(11:37):
they have between the two of them, and the next
day they realize that they can't do this. As two
white people with a gun and a boat. They are
not going to make the situation any better. They are
not going to rescue their friend. They are going to
make some problems worse. Yeah, which has got to be

(11:57):
an interesting decision to have to reach, you know.

Speaker 3 (12:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (12:01):
Well it's also like a shadow of doubt is always there,
and you're like, but maybe we're different, but maybe we're
not different.

Speaker 2 (12:08):
Right, yeah totally, and will people perceive us as different? Right?

Speaker 3 (12:12):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (12:13):
Oh, like, don't worry, I'm an anti racist white person
in the middle of something that is starting to look
like a race war caused by white people.

Speaker 3 (12:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:20):
You know, yeah, I've had to deal with like really
minor versions of that tension, but I've never had to
deal with anything like this that they can't even really
wrap my head around, you know. So they spent hours
boating their way back out of the city, like clinging
to their gun as they pass under bridges, waiting for
people to like ambush them to take their boat. They
make it back to their truck and they drive back

(12:40):
to Austin in Texas, which I'm sure takes a long
fucking time.

Speaker 3 (12:44):
Yeah, ok.

Speaker 2 (12:47):
And they're fucking dejected, you know. They're like, oh, we
went to go do this noble thing and we can't
didn't work, you know. And meanwhile, during all this, King
is hanging out on his front porch and you know,
feeding his dog. But his friends didn't know how he
was doing. He's doing okay, He's not I'm sure he's
not great, right, He's doing okay. And then on September fifth,

(13:11):
less than a week after the storm, the Texas Anarchists
get a call from New Orleans from Malik. This time
his phone line still works kind of it's kind of staticky, right,
and he's like, hey, I heard you tried to reach King.
We could really use outside support. We need supplies and
we need volunteers over in Algiers, you know. Yeah, And

(13:33):
so Scott goes and he's in Austin. He gives a
talk to like you know, sixty anarchists or radicals or whatever,
and he's like, hey, everyone, we gotta go do this
dangerous shit in New Orleans. Who's with us? And the
answer is a resounding nobody.

Speaker 3 (13:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (13:47):
I mean I think at the time too, it's like
heading into New Orleans would have sounded like the most
like crazy thing you could do, basically.

Speaker 2 (13:55):
Yeah, totally.

Speaker 3 (13:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
I mean Scott Crow actually compares go up into the
city and the boat to feeling like reliving The Heart
of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, you know, which is like, oh,
that's complicated, Yeah, because that is a lot. I don't
have really positive race feelings about Joseph Conrad in the
book Heart of Darkness, you know.

Speaker 3 (14:18):
I yeah, I think it's just become a different thing.

Speaker 1 (14:21):
But yeah, yeah, like when you say it like that,
there's so many things that you can need.

Speaker 2 (14:28):
Yeah, no, absolutely.

Speaker 1 (14:29):
I think for a lot of people it's just like
that book just means took a boat to a violent place.

Speaker 2 (14:35):
Yeah, totally. I used to feel very strongly that Joseph
Conrad is piece of shit racist because he like has
this quote from when he's younger about seeing a black
person for the first time and being like terrified, and
like that image stayed in his mind as like an
object of terror for years or whatever. I've like since
I don't even remember the details. I've since complicated that

(14:59):
view of just corn red, but not in a way
where I'm like, what a good guy, but that is
not yeah, yeah, but is a really scary place. And
I understand why a bunch of people didn't want to
go show up with guns, you know. Yeah, Scott and
Brandon load up with supplies, including some rifles. This time

(15:21):
they forge a bunch of documents they forged. I think
it must be like press passes or something that they're like,
you know, in order to get through checkpoints. And they
drive to Algiers and along the way they stopped to
take advantage of sweet deals, just amazing products and services interwoven.

Speaker 1 (15:45):
Rat It's all unpleasant every time. It just not unpleasant.
But it gets me every time. I'm like, oh, never,
never once have I not been like, God, damn it,
you got me again.

Speaker 2 (16:02):
This is my one joy in life is cynically introducing
the interjections of capitalism into my anti capitalist podcast. Gotcha,
here they are and we're back. And so they've made

(16:26):
their way through the gauntlet of government checkpoints and advertisers
and which weren't there, but the government checkpoints were. And
they made it to Malik's house, which was the center
of local organizing, right, And this is a shotgun house
built in the nineteen thirties in the New Orleans style,
And there's food and supplies being distributed and plans were

(16:47):
being made. But the most pressing concern as soon as
they get there, after you know, handing out the supplies
they brought, is above food water first aid is the
fact that a white militia threatening to kill Malik, right, right,
that is.

Speaker 1 (17:01):
A problem pretty serious.

Speaker 3 (17:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:03):
Yeah, So Brandon Scott and three locals set armed on
Malik's front porch Jesus and the militia came by in
a pickup truck, you know, like a couple guys in
the back with rifles or whatever.

Speaker 3 (17:15):
Fuck. This is like so real.

Speaker 1 (17:18):
I also just like, I don't know why my YouTube
algorithm has been suggesting clips from gameplay of the Last
of Us, So.

Speaker 3 (17:26):
It's very cool.

Speaker 2 (17:28):
Yeah, basically, yeah, that's that shit. Yeah, well, and that's
like this is how we counterpoint that, you know, like
I do a whole podcast with preparedness and this is
how we counter it is we present organizing models that,
instead of rely on get guns and shoot everyone who's different, say,

(17:49):
distribute things and probably get guns to defend yourself from
the people trying to shoot everyone who's different, you know.

Speaker 3 (17:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:55):
So the militia showed up and they were like, oh shit,
I thought I was playing the video game one easy.
Now I'm not anymore because the other side is suddenly armed.
They realized they were outnumbered, they realized they were out gunned,
and they realized that the people facing them down were
both white and black. And the folks on the porch said, basically,
you won't be harassing people in this neighborhood anymore. Yeah,

(18:20):
And this last part, the fact that they're white and
black winds up mattering quite a lot in what happens
in New Orleans and Algiers in particular, in the near future,
there was a lot of racial tension in the city.
Scott writes about it very explicitly that it it felt
like it could have fallen into race war, right, or

(18:41):
I mean, in some ways it is race war, right,
the whole American project is race war.

Speaker 1 (18:45):
But however you want to describe, yeah, escalating that yeah,
I guess it's like like race cold war into race hot.

Speaker 2 (18:53):
War totally, or like race war war the other side
shooting too. Yeah, well right, yeah, so whatever that is.
The usual goal is to not have it turn into
race war.

Speaker 1 (19:08):
That's the yeah for now.

Speaker 2 (19:10):
Yeah is that Tony Hawk meme? Anyway, So it mattered
a lot that some white folks from Texas had shown
up with guns to protect black residents, and that helped
defuse certain tensions that were happening. So they started patrols
to keep militias out of the neighborhood. Armed patrols, And

(19:33):
this is one of the first instances of community defense
from the left in the twenty first century in the
US that I'm I'm aware of because community defense. Armed
community defense had largely gone out of style for decades,
with moments of there's exceptions, right, but it had largely
gone out of style for decades because we had a
lot of like non violence and stuff in the eighties

(19:55):
and nineties in terms of activism in the United States,
was not in style when this happened in two thousand
and five, I barely knew anyone who owned a gun.
It's twenty twenty four and for very similar reasons. White
militias directly and personally threatening my life. I'm armed, and

(20:16):
many people I know are Yeah, but yeah, not the style.
They're doing it anyway, because it needs doing so the
most pressing issue was being addressed, right. They had started
to stand up to the militias. And so then three
of them, Scott, Sharon, and Malik, sat around Malik's kitchen
table and hashed out how they would build a revolutionary

(20:38):
aid organization. They prioritize security, first aid, and food distribution,
and they built what would soon become the common Ground
collective all around them. The state was failing, the Red
Cross was raising billions of dollars but not helping. So
they were going to do something different. To quote Scott Crow,

(20:58):
we would begin relief work without reliance on or interference
from the state or professional aid agencies. We would prefigure
the civil society we would like to see in the future.
And they decided to build this organization. They would build
on what everyone knew. Malik, of course, had done direct
community aid and organizing with the Panthers and beyond, and
Scott was a veteran of the alter globalization movement. The

(21:20):
turn of the Millennium Right, which was the big protest
movement in the late nineties and early odds, Right, which
had taught how to build grassroots infrastructure everywhere. It went
a very like dynamic and responsive thing. At all these
street medics, you had all of these you know, direct
action participants, you had all these organizers who were good
at going places. Brandon Darby wasn't part of this initial

(21:47):
thing because and he's still i mean, he's doing good
things during this stage of it, right, But yeah, yeah,
he had gone off into the floodwaters to find Robert
King because they still hadn't found him, right, right, And
so he like drives as far as he can, and
then he parks his truck and he gets out and
he's just like fuck it, and he starts wading into
the dark flood waters. FEMA surrounds him while he's wading

(22:10):
waists deep through storm water, and eventually he persuades them.
He's like, look, let me go check on the following person,
the following address, and it was nearby, and so they
found King and his dog Kenya on the front porch
and basically, through sheer force of will or whatever, they
were like, King is coming and the dog is coming.

Speaker 1 (22:30):
Right, that's fucking good at least Jesus and that one
silver well, no, it's it is silver linings. I get that.

Speaker 2 (22:37):
But yea, it's funny. It's like this whole this episode
is about the silver lining to this storm cloud. You know, yeah,
we have to get through the cloud. And King said simply,
I knew y'all would come, which is fucking cool.

Speaker 1 (22:53):
That's fair.

Speaker 3 (22:54):
Yeah, gotta have a line ready.

Speaker 1 (22:59):
When they came here.

Speaker 2 (23:00):
Yeah, day four he's like, fuck, he's a going back
and forth between took y'all long enough?

Speaker 1 (23:07):
Yeah, yeah, it's like okay, okay, all right, all right,
just trying it out on the dog totally.

Speaker 2 (23:15):
And it was King who named the organization, or it
was someone paraphrasing King. I've sort of read both. The
whole point of this organization was to come together to
help each other. So King said, the only thing we
need to find is common ground, and you know right,
they were like, yeah.

Speaker 3 (23:36):
That's good, nafe good knife yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:38):
No notes. And then I think it was Malik who
added a collective because wanted to indicate what that meant.
And it was interesting because it was actually a class,
not a clash, emerging of two ideological positions, where Malik
is coming more out of a hierarchical organizing model and
Scott Crow's coming out of a much more decentralized and
horizontal organizing model. But they started the way that all

(24:04):
smart organizations like this do. They don't decide what needs
doing and go around and like just do it for people.
They go around and they fucking canvas. They ask. They're like, right, hey,
but what yeah, what do you need? One woman was like,
the trash on the street, that is the problem. And

(24:24):
this is exactly how the Young Lords started. We did
a four parter about them. They were amazing Puerto Rican
radicals in New York City and Chicago. The Young Lord
started with a trash pickup, So they started doing trash
pickup and they're soon joined by a deacon named Reverend Powell.
Not the Young Lords the common Ground. Pretty soon thereafter

(24:45):
they evacuate King from the city because the state is
just like, the state does not like this man, you know,
right right right, and he's like this, this is not
the place for me. And Brandon Darby, the later informant,
he also leaves at this point. He's not around for
the setting up of the organization. Besides, this initial moment
basically says I don't like organizing anyhow.

Speaker 3 (25:06):
Which I guess is true.

Speaker 2 (25:08):
Yeah, fair enough, Yeah, yeah, it's much more destroying these organizations.
And so then they just organized their asses off. They
relied on decades of experience in networking. Someone from Greenpeace
sent the first two way radios, not green Peace, the organization.
Someone from Greenpeace sent their first two way radios, and
then a whole ass food not Bombs chapter made its
way down from Hartford, Connecticut, just like they're like, all right, oh,

(25:31):
well more than Hartford does, right now. You know, I
actually almost went down during this, but then I got
into an argument with the person I was going to
go with, and so they went and then I didn't.

Speaker 1 (25:39):
Pretty classic.

Speaker 2 (25:40):
Also, I know, exactly, like God, the.

Speaker 3 (25:44):
Thing that happens, it's understandable.

Speaker 2 (25:46):
Yeah, and the powers that be were trying hard to
keep AID out of the city.

Speaker 1 (25:52):
Yeah, if it wasn't, I mean, good, it's such like
a common tale. But I was just like, I just
I'm sort of curious, not I guess that curious, like
what these people actually tell themselves at night, Like the
fuck is wrong with you?

Speaker 2 (26:08):
I know, I think that they're like, well, what's interesting
later in this story, a lot of the powers that
be who work for all these organizations are just going
to start giving stuff to common Ground against their own
like guidelines.

Speaker 3 (26:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:20):
That was actually the story that like I kind of
heard first about Common Ground was like, oh, the National
Guard is like, hey, y'all are better distributing this stuff
than us. Here you go, yeah, you know, yeah, but yeah,
at the start of it, they're like, oh, we got
to keep everyone safe by making sure these people don't
go into the city, and so people had to smuggle
supplies in with like media and then also official aid

(26:43):
personnel would help them smuggle through the official aid boundary.

Speaker 1 (26:47):
Right, you can at least like write, even if your
fucking organization is to whatever, we can at least like
slap a badge on something.

Speaker 2 (26:55):
Totally. But the first doctor they tried to get through
was black and he got denied at every checkpoint, and
white volunteers were just like slipping through, no problem. Yeah,
which is probably a coincidence. Right, Racism has been gone
for decades at this point, you.

Speaker 1 (27:14):
Know, Oh man, it really yeah, it's so fucking it's
so like depressing, how like frequently it just that, you know,
there's no situation where that shit doesn't just crop up. Yeah,
totally fuck.

Speaker 2 (27:30):
An anarchist collective of street medics from DC called may
Day d C showed up in an old van and
then they worked to set up the first first aid station,
which was at Malik's mosque, and it was first staff
by these street medics, and soon doctors coming from as
far away as California. A bike shop in Austin donated
two hundred bicycles, and once the bikes get in, medics

(27:52):
go door to door by bike to check in on everyone. Right,
they're just like, oh, damn, yeah, how's everyone in the
neighborhood doing? You know which I mean considering the number
of like dead bodies that they're finding, right that, yeah,
must have been an interesting job. Yeah, Jesus Malik's house
is soon a distro center and a tent city of
people sleeping in the yards sets up. I think this
is mostly the volunteers. It takes neighbors a minute to

(28:14):
trust all the white folks are suddenly in their neighborhood.
Most of the volunteers who are now pouring in from
outside or white but not all right. But once they
realize that they've been invited and that a lot of
the core organizing is coming from black people who live
in the neighborhood and grew up there, you know. And
they're also like, okay, and you're not the Red Cross
and you're not vigilantes. Yeah, and so they start building trust.
Veterans for Peace started coordinating supply drops. And there's this

(28:37):
French organization Secur Popular Francis that starts helping out too.
Because the Red Cross and FEMA told them to kick rocks.
They're like, right, oh, you don't pronounce enough of the
letters in your words, you can't help, or like we
remember the yeah French Indians, but no, yeah, I know, right,

(28:59):
And so they had fiftyvolunteers like pretty soon then goes
up to like seventy and a couple hundred and stuff,
you know, And they have fifty volunteers of patrolling to
keep out militias. They're running a medical clinic and a distro,
and they're heading out in a rescue boat and they're
heading out just to check on everyone and pass out
what needs passing out. They get generators and extension cords

(29:19):
that are snaking through the neighborhood. This is the only
power in this neighborhood for months, or gas power generators
that they're bringing in, right, tech and media collectives. This
is like the same era that like there's this whole
weird one day, I'll probably cover this. Do you know
that there's like a weird anarchist connection to social media
and Twitter and all that shit.

Speaker 1 (29:41):
I mean, just I mean, I guess I think of
it more of just the general Internet, like the you know,
the kind of like hippies, no no tech hippies, like
no no borders, no boundaries kind of hacker people.

Speaker 2 (29:58):
Yeah, and you have a lot of it, a lot
of the infrastructure that they learned how to build during
these anti globalization ault globalization protests. Oh sure, we're like,
and they would set up these like indie media nodes
where like it's like everyone's a journalist, which prefigures both
the good things and the bad things about the monitoring that.
And so it's like all of those people start coming

(30:19):
to right, these tech and media collectives show up and
they do weird tech stuff involving vans and radios to
get phone and internet service going through all the Sure. Yeah,
and they set up a pirate radio station just fucking cool.
Like pirate radio is like always cool, but especially in
this situation.

Speaker 3 (30:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (30:37):
Well it's also like more useful than usual.

Speaker 2 (30:40):
Too, Yeah exactly, Like usually, yeah it's cool because it's
pirate radio. In this case, it's like, yeah, we need this.

Speaker 1 (30:47):
Yeah, we need to like yeah, coordinate and inform people.

Speaker 2 (30:52):
Yeah, And Malik starts leaving for you weeks at a
time to go across the country to raise awareness and
funds and bring in volunteers to bring people to help
rebuild New Orleans from the bottom up. Common Ground starts
crossing the river in order to help it out in
the flooded seventh and ninth wards. They start with hot

(31:12):
food served by food not bombs. There's other groups doing this, right.
They hook up with a group called Soul Patrol, which
is a mutual aid group started by a woman named
Mama Dee who is fighting Homeland security that was trying
to force everyone out of their homes because the whole time,
it's like no one's really supposed to be in New Orleans,
but you like kind of can't round everyone up and

(31:33):
kick them out, but you can kind of.

Speaker 3 (31:34):
Try, right, or you just harassed people who are there.

Speaker 2 (31:38):
Yeah, Yeah, exactly. And so the Soul Patrol is fighting
against Homeland Security all the while trying to you know,
get generators going and stuff like that. Common ground gets
them to generators and other supplies. Eventually, the National Guard
shows up in Algiers, and they kind of didn't do much.

(31:59):
They around in hum v's and they were like, Hey,
we're gonna like and they would like announce from loud speakers,
be like two days from now we're going to tarp houses.
Everyone tell us if we need your house tarped, like
they'd go put tarps over roofs in order to you know,
keep the rain water from In the end, they spent
after like announcing this for days, they spent a couple

(32:19):
hours putting tarps on about five houses out of one
hundred plus people who requested it.

Speaker 3 (32:25):
That feels about right.

Speaker 2 (32:28):
But so the organization itself, the National Guard, noth looking great, right,
But individuals kind of shine even, you know, people do
what needs doing a lot of times, so units that
were like leaving, they were like, oh, we're cycling out
or whatever. We'd be like, whoops, we're totally just going
to leave these supplies here right with you. And so

(32:51):
with the people are supposed to get them, you know.

Speaker 3 (32:53):
To the extent that there is much help on any
of this stuff.

Speaker 1 (32:56):
It is like, ultimately it's still human beings, you know,
running these organized you know, like National Guard units and whatever,
and like we'll see, but hopefully some of them sometimes
can do good.

Speaker 2 (33:12):
Yeah exactly. Pastors for Peace soon starts donating, and soon
there's also a common Ground clinic at a church as
well as the one at the mosque. It's a church
called Saint Mary's. Rather, what happened was that the National
Guard was running one there for two hours a day,
two days a week, and then basically was like y'all

(33:33):
want to do this, you'll do it better and common
Grounds yeah we do and we will, you know. And
so at this point that means you have Marxist anarchists, Muslims,
and Christians all working together with the help from sympathetic
National guardsmen who are sneaking them supplies. At one point
you have a truck from Islamic Relief showing up with

(33:53):
supplies from Mormon and Catholic charities. Like fuck yeah, common Ground,
you know, like literally the name fine common guy.

Speaker 3 (34:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:03):
It was all organized horizontally, and it was organized on
anarchist principles. It wasn't an anarchist organization, but anarchist principles
work really well for different groups of different ideologies working
together because the principles say that everyone is equal, so
one position can't dominate the group. You know, it can't
become a Christian organization or a Muslim organization or even

(34:23):
an anarchist organization. They had a big meeting every morning
at seven am. They they just worked their asses off
and burned themselves out. But we'll get to that. Yeah,
every morning seven am they did check ins and help
people figure out what needed doing on that day. And
they use a spokes council model, so like someone would
speak up for like one of the clinics, and someone
would be like, oh, trash Duty says this, and you know,
food nott bums, and then seventh Ward says they need

(34:46):
this and stuff like that. Then they would work all
fucking day and then they would meet again in the
evening and then they would sleep for like three hours
or whatever.

Speaker 1 (34:53):
You know, God.

Speaker 2 (34:55):
Totally sustainable, but Jesus, sometimes sometimes people should try not
to burn themselves out and find ways to be sustainable.
But like you know what, sometimes there's a crisis.

Speaker 1 (35:08):
Yeah, and sometimes the energy or the necessity and the
energy just have to find themselves.

Speaker 2 (35:14):
Like yeah. At one point, the ISO, the International Socialist Organization,
they tried their usual tactic called entryism, which is where
they join a group that is not ideologically committed to
their Marxist whatever and then take it over. Right, it's
enough of a tactic that they have a name for it. Right,

(35:35):
this didn't work. People were like, you know, you can
stay and participate in the democratic process, or you can go.
And they were like where we don't want to go.
And then they're like, we have these guns, you gotta lead,
and you know, fuck yeah. The cops we're not excited

(35:56):
about common Ground. You know, the National Guard and all
these places are so treating them like kind of neutral.
You know, we'll talk about that in a second. But
the cops they treat it like there's an insurgency in
their neighborhood called common Ground. Cops are pulling guns on volunteers. Soon,
no one is traveling alone or at night, because cops
kept saying shit like well, we could drop you right now,

(36:17):
or I'm gonna throw your body in the river, right
and you'll be absolutely shocked. Andrew to know that this
happened more often and more intensely to black volunteers than
white ones.

Speaker 1 (36:30):
Yeah, that's obviously, like the tricky bit of this whole
thing is like it's just like sometimes the white folks
like have a real purpose in those situations.

Speaker 2 (36:39):
Totally, totally, you know. And so white organizers still end
up with guns in their faces often enough, but it's
like not as often. Eventually the cops raid the place
with hum v's and rifles and they show up, and
the volunteers form a human chain and like tell them
that they have no right to be there, and like

(37:00):
the cops kind of pushed through, and there's all this stuff,
and slowly the police end up retreating. It easily could
have turned into a gunfight both sides. Like common Ground
was armed and ready in case if the cops started
shooting it. I'm glad they didn't. Yeah, But the military

(37:23):
once they arrived, was more neutral and generally had kind
of a sort of a truce with Common Ground and
actually prevented the police from doing the worst of their
racism because there was like dads around, you know.

Speaker 1 (37:35):
Yeah, God, And so once again it's also like, yeah,
sometimes like the fucking National Guard. I guess it's like
the lesser of several evils.

Speaker 2 (37:45):
Yeah, absolutely, which is not a natural transition into advertising.
But yet here we are, there's still a transition to ads.
That's happening. It's happening, right, No, and we're back. Yes,

(38:13):
we survived, We did, Sophie, did you survive? Mm hmm, excellent.

Speaker 3 (38:20):
Fair.

Speaker 2 (38:21):
So a second fucking hurricane hit the Gulf Coast, Hurricane Rita.
Oh yeah, that asshole the like Yeah.

Speaker 1 (38:29):
Also, yeah, completely forgot the double tap.

Speaker 2 (38:32):
It didn't hit New Orleans as directly as Katrina had,
but it was bad and the place is a hit.
It's bad for those places too, you know. Yeah, most
of Common Ground evacuated. A skeleton crew stayed on and
kept the clinics open and shit. One of the first
rules of disaster relief, and this is okay, you asked
how earlier, how like the people could sleep at night?

Speaker 1 (38:52):
Right?

Speaker 3 (38:53):
Right?

Speaker 2 (38:54):
One of the primary rules of disaster relief is that
you can't make yourself another person who needs help. Yes,
so you should not go into a disaster zone if
you yourself are going to need rescuing, right, that makes
everything worse, and so one it made sense for common
Ground to evacuate. And two that's probably how those people,

(39:16):
the gatekeepers in this case, sleep at night. Now, the
ones who only let in white doctors not black doctors,
should walk into the pick up a really large rock
and walk into the Gulf of Mexico. Hold on, prove
your tenacity, right.

Speaker 3 (39:32):
You can do it?

Speaker 2 (39:33):
Yeah, believe this. Yeah yeah. Anyone who doesn't, As cooked
Biden tells you not to pick up a big rock
and walk into the ocean, you're wrong, yeah, yeah, buster.

Speaker 1 (39:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:45):
The trans agenda is that I want all the conservatives
to stay on the land and not pick up large
rocks and walk into the Yeah.

Speaker 1 (39:53):
Yeah, keep the rocks. No, no rock walking. That's what
we think.

Speaker 2 (39:58):
Yeah, it's right. Yeah, you're not strong enough too.

Speaker 3 (40:04):
We don't want you to hurt yourself. Yeah yeah, we're.

Speaker 2 (40:06):
Just worried about you anyway. So they come back, and
then common Ground stretches itself even further because they started
working with the areas that were hit by RITA, and
in particular, they start working with indigenous groups and churches
in the areas outside the city that were affected. But
since they weren't there to like save the day or

(40:28):
take charge they were there to coordinate with people on
the ground and figure out what help should be offered.

Speaker 1 (40:33):
Right.

Speaker 2 (40:35):
So soon the Four Directions Network split off from common
Ground to make sure that the regional autonomy like stayed
real regional autonomy. Yes autonomys yeah yeah that big Yeah.
Common Ground keeps going in Algiers. When the Red Cross
finally shows up in Algiers like a month after Katrina,

(40:58):
because they were like, oh, whatever, I don't care about
those starving people because they're currently underwater or whatever.

Speaker 1 (41:04):
You know.

Speaker 2 (41:05):
Yeah, the Red Cross shows up with three huge box
trucks full of supplies and they're like, everyone's like, yeah, finally,
like some get some fucking good food and shit. And
they gather around, you know, and the volunteers open up
one box truck. It is entirely full of plastic utensils.
So they open up the next box truck, all napkins,

(41:25):
third box truck handy wipes.

Speaker 1 (41:28):
Oh my god, I guess that's at least they're not.
I mean they are, but they're not actively doing anything
I do. Like.

Speaker 2 (41:37):
It's funny. Is then there's all this whole I didn't
end up concluding it, but there's this whole thing where
the handy wipes. They're like, fine, we'll take the fucking
handy wipes and will distribute them. But then the cops
later are like, you stole those from the Red Cross.
You stole the handy wipes and you're selling them. And
they're like and they're like holding people at gunpoint accusing
them of selling handy wipes from the Red Cross.

Speaker 3 (41:58):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (42:00):
So and FEMA shows up. They basically just end up
a referral service for common Ground because the people show
up and are like, what do we do and they're like,
I don't know. I go to common Ground. They know
what they're doing, right, And the regional head of FEMA,
at some point she needs medical attention and she doesn't
go to like the official government clinics. She goes to

(42:21):
one of the common Ground clinics. She shows up and
there's a sign on the door that says basically like
no firearms allowed, no exceptions, and her guards have to
stay outside, and like are really confused by the whole thing,
but yeah, So common Ground just does amazing and hard
work for months. As the floodwaters received In the weeks

(42:43):
and months after the storm, New Orleans was transformed by
gentrification right, and we don't. We're not going to go
into all of the many ills that face New Orleans
still presently because of this, all the displacement that happened.
But Landlord check to b Rens speculation ruled the day
landlard Search just illegally evicting people. Will talk more in

(43:05):
a second, and then one of the things that we
have to address is that Common Ground did some of
that gentrification, right because Common Ground brought a fucking lot
of white people to New Orleans, right, right, right. I
want to quote Scott Crow again. Our missives were bringing
masses of volunteers into New Orleans with words spreading like

(43:26):
wildfire across white radical subcultures. From train hopping hoboes, street
and circus performers, DIY punks to squatters, burners and forest hippies.
Most joined the efforts to relieve and rebuild the city,
offering music and other creative endeavors as well as labor.
But disconcertingly, some within these subcultures came to live out

(43:46):
a fantasy of living in a burned out, post apocalyptic city.
They gave little credence to the tragedies of the people
who lived there or to the ongoing relief work. Some
of them were self described anarchists, but they acted like assholes,
giving an anarchism and radical subculture a bad name. They
were narcissists whose personal liberty meant more to them than
being respectful or alleviating the suffering around them.

Speaker 3 (44:09):
Right, it's sort of a common byproduct.

Speaker 2 (44:12):
I feel like, yeah, totally, uh one day. Yeah, one
of the hardest conversations that it would have. We would
have a lot, right, Like I remember like squatting a
building in the South Bronx, like being like, yeah, is
this gentrification and like not not.

Speaker 3 (44:31):
I mean it's something I.

Speaker 2 (44:32):
Think landlords raising the rents or the you know, it's
not uncomplicated. Yeah, Soon there was a broader network that
common Ground became part of, which is cool, like a
citywide network called the People's Hurricane Relief Fund, and they
started working on these long term issues like the right
to return. The government was keeping residents out of the city,

(44:53):
which is like, of course helps all the real estate
speculators and all the like, right fuckers, The most gentrifying
thing was to red things out and fuck over whatever
it evict everyone and shit, you know, right, and the
immediate crisis is waning. At this point, the white militias
were no longer out in force, a few stores are reopening,
water has begun to recede, but the larger problems remain.

(45:17):
Common Ground did a lot of behind the scenes work
for PHRF rather than taking any kind of directing role.
But overall PHRF and Common Ground kept on. They started
work remediating houses and doing like mold clean up as
well as soil remediation. So they would like come up
with all of these kind of new and interesting ideas

(45:37):
that were starting to come up in disaster relief around
this time, of like using weird microbes to fight mold
and houses, and like growing certain plants in order to
pull the toxins from the floodwater out of the soil
and all this stuff, you know, right, oh cool, Yeah,
this is cool stuff.

Speaker 3 (45:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:57):
They also, alongside PHRF started fighting the legal evictions that
are happening throughout the city, and sometimes they would unevict people,
like people would get evicted illegally, and so then like
PHRF and Common Ground would just like show up and
put everyone's furniture back into their houses. And then like
and the landlords don't live in the fucking city, so
they don't like notice for a long ass time, so

(46:17):
people get like months extra. You know, they did what
needed to be done. Slowly, they became less necessary, or
rather it was less about direct intervention and crisis that
became lessness. That is what became less necessary, right common ground.
It continued for years. It morphed into and split off

(46:37):
into a lot of different groups who did an awful
lot of good. By two thousand and eight it was
a traditional nonprofit which with all of the upsides and
downsides that that has to offer. And I want to
quote Scott Crow one more time about what they accomplished.
We had established the largest functioning organization based on anarchist

(46:58):
ideals in the United States since the IWT. We were
participating in direct democracy at every turn with local residents,
community leaders, and volunteers. Everyone was in the streets. Community
organized revolution was in the air, not a seizure of
state power, but a revolution of a different kind, the
revolution of exercising grassroots power to make changes we all
wanted to see. Our revolution challenged the standard pessimism about

(47:22):
people's limited agency in their own lives. He also said
we had created a crack in history. We had revealed
the lies, corruption and failures of the state, and without hesitating,
we had done something about it.

Speaker 3 (47:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:36):
It's as someone who approaches the small amount of things
that I do from almost like a fear defensive standpoint,
I do appreciate being able to call on the show
and just be like, right, yeah, you can also do
this optimistically, yeah, totally, yeah, okay, okay.

Speaker 2 (47:55):
Yeah, And it's like, I mean, do they win, like no, Like,
New Orleans is not run by the people of New
Orleans in a direct democratic way, right, Mutual aid is
not the primary economic method by which people meet their needs.
They showed the failure of the state, and they showed

(48:16):
that people can have agency and they did amazing fucking work.
And then also just like literally directly saved lots of
people's lives, you know, and like. And so Scott goes
back to Austin. He starts a co op thrift historical
treasure city thrift where a few years later, my boyfriend
pressured me into buying some leather pants for five dollars.
I did look good in them, Okay, hell yeah. Brandon

(48:39):
Darby went on to go do some stuff while he
was in New Orleans. He became friends with the cops
who introduced him to the FBI, and by two thousand
and six he was a paid informant. He was kicked
out of common Ground around that time for his misogyny
and overall flakiness he had, Like he left during the
origin of it, but then he came back later at
the end of the year, once everything was all set up,
you know, and then he just used it to be

(49:00):
a sexual predator and a piece of shit. So he
was kicked out. He came back a year later and
he became interim director. He basically was able to like
leverage the social capital of having been there at the
beginning and all that shit, you know, right, and then
he fucked the thing up. He like fucked up common Ground.
He probably on purpose that is not provable, but it

(49:22):
sure meet was provable. He was working for the FBI
at this point, and it sure meets what they do.
He like, let funds get on accounted for. He started
introducing a lot more authoritarians into the organization. He started
firing everyone, like kicking everyone out who disagreed with him
and shit, you know. And then eventually he lasts like
three months before finally like the common Ground like shakes

(49:43):
him off right, kicks him.

Speaker 3 (49:44):
Out for good.

Speaker 1 (49:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:45):
He then spent years trying to talk people into arson
and violence, finally succeeding at setting two young anarchists to
go to prison for Molotov cocktails in two thousand and eight.
There's an essay worth reading about him. You actually you
hinted at the title of this earlier. The essay is
called why Misogynists make Great Informants.

Speaker 3 (50:05):
Yeah, and.

Speaker 2 (50:08):
After putting some people in prison, his cover was blown
and he kind of just became a right wing grifter.
He was like very like, we all miss Bush. This
is you know, it's a while ago now, right, Yeah,
there's not a lot of information available about him currently.
I hope it's because he's dead.

Speaker 3 (50:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (50:24):
It's a depressing I will say, it's not the culture,
but it is the like, I don't know what it
is about these like white dudes, mostly in this area
where it's just I guess it's just like punk can
really go either way totally, and I guess that is

(50:44):
basically the heart of the vibe. It's just like absolutely
your anti authority and what you view as authority is
very very malleable. Totally.

Speaker 2 (50:56):
All my friends telling me what to do, like, don't
work with the FBI. Yeah, bluck Man, Yeah, no, absolutely, like.

Speaker 3 (51:06):
Yeah, Paul Ryan tells himself he's a punk.

Speaker 2 (51:08):
Yeah. Oh god yeah. Watching the Republican Party rebrand itself
as anti anti establishment has just been it's.

Speaker 1 (51:19):
Yeah, it's pathetic, but it is probably more effective than
we want to want to think about.

Speaker 3 (51:26):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (51:27):
Yeah, And so of the other founders. Sharon worked with
Common Ground until twenty ten. Malik does environmental work now
around coastal land cleanup. Robert King moved to Austin and
does organizing work around political prisoners. Common Ground Collective has
direct successors like common Ground Relief, which works to restore

(51:48):
the coastal wetlands as well as provide free food to
about two hundred families in New Orleans. And Common Ground
also led to the proliferation of mutual aid organizations around
the mid twenty tens, culminating in the truly amazing number
of groups as the government failed to addequately respond to
the COVID crisis in twenty twenty. That is the legacy
of Common Ground, not just these organizations with specific names

(52:10):
that are in New Orleans that but the like if
there's a problem we can come together. I mean, obviously
it's a natural human instinct, but like the way in
which people do it and talk about it is is there.

Speaker 1 (52:24):
Like a framework and you just got to like and
that's so it's like, fuck, all right, well someone's got.

Speaker 3 (52:30):
To do it. Just do it.

Speaker 2 (52:31):
Yeah totally.

Speaker 1 (52:32):
It's also like, at the end of the day, you know,
there are obviously significant logistics and you know, cooperation and
teamwork and all that, but it also the other way
to think about it is it's just getting stuff that
people have or the stuff that exists, to the people
who need it. And like there's like complicated ways to
do that and simple ways to do that, and like.

Speaker 3 (52:55):
Do it.

Speaker 2 (52:55):
Yeah, no, totally, yeah, I really like that. At the
end of the day, that's what it is. You find
the people who have the stuff and the people who
need the stuff, and you're like, all right, yeah, let's
move the stuff from one person or another.

Speaker 1 (53:08):
Sometimes it's hard, sometimes it's easy, but it's not like
a difficult concept totally.

Speaker 3 (53:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (53:15):
And so if there's a spiritual successor to common Ground,
I would guess it's a group called Mutual Aid Disaster
relief who work to coordinate is going to shock you
disaster relief in in a mutual aid format. Yeah, they're
pretty literal namers. And I just like that. The modern
mutual aid movement in the US got its start because

(53:37):
panthers and anarchists, Muslims and Christians, black and white people
just got together to just fucking make it happen. Yeah,
because all here's my catchy ending, because all we need
to do is find our common ground.

Speaker 3 (53:50):
Yes, yes, you got there? Hell yeah?

Speaker 2 (53:54):
Hell yeah thanks now that Yeah, that's that's the story.
You got anything that you want to plug here at
the end, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (54:04):
Just yoss racist. That's my podcast.

Speaker 2 (54:07):
Who's your co host? And would we recognize her from
Margaret's current favorite show, Lower Decks.

Speaker 1 (54:14):
Yeah, my co host is Toddy Dows. She's the She
plays Mariner on Lower X and a wonderful show. I
guess watch Lower X two now that we're past strike times.
Watch watch TV that you'd like, and I guess don't
watch TV that you don't like. But whatever.

Speaker 2 (54:33):
Also whatever, Well I want to plug. I want to
plug mutual a disaster relief. They're great people, yeah, and
they do really amazing work and you can probably support
them somehow. I didn't ask or look how people can
support them, but if you look it up, usually pretty straightforward.

Speaker 1 (54:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:51):
I feel like they've been around long enough that they
probably know how to have on the website somewhere says
how to help them, and I I want to plug
the don't become misogynist and then an FBI agent.

Speaker 3 (55:08):
Yeah. And if you're one of those things, you can
you can stop.

Speaker 2 (55:12):
Yeah, you have two choices. Stop or take the Margaret
rock challenge, in which you pick up a really heavy
rock and you walk into the nearest large body of
water and don't just see Yeah, just see how long
you can make If you can't hold the rock underwater
long enough, Yeah, you're weak.

Speaker 3 (55:33):
You're weak. That's right.

Speaker 2 (55:35):
Sophie guiding Plug at cool Zone Media.

Speaker 1 (55:40):
On the social medes, look out for our newest show,
Better Offline.

Speaker 3 (55:45):
Whoo ya all right?

Speaker 2 (55:48):
Speaking of offline, That's where I'm going to be now.

Speaker 3 (55:51):
That's cool.

Speaker 2 (55:56):
People who did Cool Stop is a production of cool
Zone Media.

Speaker 1 (56:00):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.