Culture Archives - The Quake City Portal

QCP #033 | Christopher Renfro, Founder of the Two Eighty Project|The Way of Natural Winemaking and Re-imagining a Thriving Society

LISTEN ON
Spotify
Apple Podcasts
Amazon Music
Google Podcasts
YouTube
and most Major Platforms

GUEST BIO
Christopher Renfro (instagram, additional links) is the founder of the Two Eighty Project, an organization “dedicated to building a sustainable food and wine community that nourishes every member of the local economy and ecosystem.” It began with his love and curiosity for learning about wine and implementing his knowledge into a community farm visible from the Highway 280 Freeway heading out of San Francisco.

SHOW NOTES | MENTIONS
SEG 1 – Castles and Finding True Freedom in the outdoors

SEG 2 – Financial Illiteracy, The Underlying Reality of Food Service, Ambitions for 280

the Food Service Industry and Humanity
Black Wallstreet
Tulsa Oaklahoma
Critical Race Theory
Think Tank

SEG 3 – Rethinking the Food Industry Models, Baselines of Comfort

Food Security in San Francisco
Feed the People Collective
Shared Cultures Miso
Co-op Businesses
Rethinking the Comfort Baseline
Homelessness, Youth, Elders

Contains a snippet from Good Morning America | Patagonia founder donates company to fight climate change, Sept. 15, 2022

QCP #031 | Karen Nani Apana, Ph.D. | The Questions We Live With, Higher Worlds, and How to Find Stillness in Biography Work

Prisma Coloring Courtesy of Edwin Hacking

LISTEN ON
Spotify
Apple Podcasts
Amazon Music
Google Podcasts
YouTube
and most Major Platforms

GUEST BIO
Dr. Karen Apana is one of the founding members of the San Francisco Waldorf School – first founded in 1978. She has been a lifetime teacher, mentor, and student of Anthroposophy for over 40 years. For over 25 years, she has been teaching biography work and has a private practice for biography counseling in San Francisco. She also holds frequent biography workshops all over the Bay Area, and although she is now retired as a Waldorf teacher, she still mentors and advises teachers in the Bay Area and all over the globe.

She was born and raised in San Francisco, and as you’ll find out in this conversation, she is a local, cosmic gem. In this conversation, you’ll learn about Anthroposophy and some of the philosophies behind Rudolph Steiner. She also offers a firsthand account of someone born into a generation of San Francisco coming into social consciousness during the 1960s, which eventually set the stage for many spiritual seekers, creators, activists, artists, and life enthusiasts today.

QCP #025 | Jairus Ferrer, Agricultural Entrepreneur | How the Youth are Taking on the Food Crisis in the Philippines

LISTEN ON:
Spotify
Apple Podcasts
Amazon Music
Google Podcasts
YouTube
and most Major Platforms

REACH OUT TO JAI

https://www.ifarms.ph/

GUEST BIO

Jairus Ferrer is a agricultural entreprenuer from Philippines. With family roots in Mindanao, the southernmost region of the Philippines, he decided to leave the congested, fast-paced city after thirteen years in favor of a more steady-paced, semi-rural, widely untapped area to get in touch with nature and get involved in economic development in rural communities.

QCP #024 | Martin Jay Ruiz | Roll, Fall, Get Up: The Way of Wrestling and Skating

LISTEN ON:
Spotify
Apple Podcasts
Amazon Music
Google Podcasts
YouTube
and most Major Platforms

GUEST BIO
Martin Jay Ruiz is someone that found his way on a skateboard and later on to the wrestling mat as a troubled youth. At an early age, he found the blank canvases of the skate deck and the wrestling mat to be the wide-open spaces that allowed his soul the room for infinite expansion. To this day, his heart never lost its passion for the two mediums.

He came from the streets of Santa Maria, California, pulled to the magnetic energy of San Francisco – a pilgrimage for skaters because of its steep, long, concrete hills that can send one bombing down a dance between weightlessness and death.

As a former collegiate wrestler for SF State, he became the wrestling coach for Lowell High School, one of the most prestigious public high schools in the United States. Under his tutelage, he’s coached both boys and girls to multiple state championships. Martin also coaches wrestling to adults at Fight Culture Gym in Daly City; he earned his Blue Belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and is still an active competitor at thirty-three.

QCP #021 | Garnet “G Stacks” Geoffroy, BBQ Pit Builder | The Arc of Fire and Iron

LISTEN ON:
Spotify
Apple Podcasts
Amazon Music
Google Podcasts
YouTube
and most Major Platforms

GUEST BIO

If you had BBQ in the Bay Area in the past ten years, there’s a good chance the meat was cooked on one of the units fabricated by our next guest – Garnet Geoffroy, also known as G Stacks – proud owner and welder of custom-made, handcrafted smokers and pits right here on the west coast of Northern California.

Barbecue pits are a great equalizer for entrepreneurs typically bogged down by the seemingly endless fees and regulations imparted on small business owners who have no resources or means of opening up a brick-and-mortar business. Barbecue pits and pitmasters are the embodiments of resilience. The techniques they’ve honed in and feel they’ve developed for cooking come from trial and error. Their cooks are subject to variables in time and weather, so they must be able to adapt and keep their techniques fluid and flexible to adjust as necessary to create consistency in their products.

QCP #020 | Victor Thai, Tech Shaman and Conduit to the Psychedelic Realm

LISTEN ON:
Spotify
Apple Podcasts
Amazon Music
Google Podcasts
YouTube
and most Major Platforms

GUEST BIO

Victor Thai is one of the most interesting people I know. He’s the son of Vietnamese refugees and grew up as one of the only Asian kids in Richmond, Virginia.

I met him five years ago, training Jiu-Jitsu at the same gym where we spent a lot of nights after class doing some extra rolls. He was a newcomer to San Francisco from Virginia, and he introduced me to my first few psychedelic experiences.

He grew mushrooms from home, stocks a variety of teas in his pantry, owns fancy teacups and tea sets, and is one of the most fluid and creative competitors I’ve ever had the chance to share the mat with.

QCP #019 | Connor McCann of the Brain Drain Podcast | How Can We Better Relate To Each Other?

LISTEN ON:
Spotify
Apple Podcasts
Amazon Music
Google Podcasts
YouTube
and most Major Platforms

GUEST BIO

Connor McCann is the host of the Brain Drain Podcast. I came across his video about San Francisco’s graffiti culture on YouTube, which was a topic that I was very interested in for so many reasons.

That led me to his other videos, topics about the far corners of the world, geopolitics, organized crime, interwoven between personal stories about growing up during the early to mid-90s as a son of Irish immigrants in the middle of the city of San Francisco at the cross streets of gang violence and cultural diversity.

QCP #018 | Franco Soriano, Ultra Runner | The Hundred Mile High and Lucky Survival Stories

LISTEN HERE
Spotify
Apple Podcasts
Amazon Music
Google Podcasts
And most major platforms

GUEST BIO

Franco Soriano is a Filipino American ultra runner. He started running ten years ago at the age of 40 and gravitated towards the adventure of ultra running. He runs for the love of it. As much as I wanted to uncover a story about grit and willpower, this conversation showed me that sometimes it just takes a stoic mindset, careful planning, and taking it easy to develop mental toughness. It’s all about the enjoyment and high you get when you cross the finish line. And then it’s on to the next.

I first met Franco searching for a community of Filipino Runners. As someone that loves to get out and run on the trail, I quickly saw that most trail runners are not people of color. For something so simple that brought beauty and self-actualization into my life, I couldn’t help but ask myself, why is that? Is it because we just haven’t been exposed? Is it conditioning to prioritize other things?

SOME OF FRANCO’S NOTABLE RACES

Tahoe Rim Trail 100
Hurt 100
Western States 100
Bad Water 135 miler
Leadville
Mt Whitney Summit (14k Elevation)
SF Northface Endurance Challenge – 50 miles

QCP #017 | Tom Brown III | How Reconnecting with Nature Teaches Resilience, Self-Reliance, and Awareness

LISTEN HERE
Spotify
Apple Podcasts
Amazon Music
Google Podcasts
And most major platforms

YOUTUBE STREAM here.

GUEST BIO

Tom Brown III is the founder of FutureNature and T3Photography. He is a lifelong practitioner and living guide of ancestral skills, a frequent contributor, and a consultant to the Anchored Outdoors network. He is a lifelong practitioner of ancestral skills under his father Tom Brown Jr. – prolific author and Founder of Tracker Wilderness Survival School.

Tom has devoted his life to passing on his knowledge of these skills. He works diligently as an educator, a steward of the land, to help return the connection to the natural world and awareness back to our wild selves.

He joins us from his homestead in Oregon by Mount Hood – his home base for sharing his knowledge and experience through teaching, writing, and photography. He hopes to, in his words, “help people see Nature through his eyes, leading them to understand that spectacular natural beauty can be found anywhere, no matter where you may be.”

I believe that our ability to be resilient is not gone; it’s simply re-awakening what we already have innately in us through the examples of how our ancestors lived and what people like Tom bring to light. To recognize our abundance, that we do have it all, and that there is always much to learn about our home here on earth and how to undo our distractions, even if only a little bit, to become better stewards of the land.

It was an honor to sit with Tom III and listen intently as he shared his passion for learning and sharing some of the knowledge passed on to him by his father, Tom Brown Jr., and his grandfather, Stalking Wolf, who taught his father. And it was also great to hear some perspective from someone who, through his lifetime devotion to a life outdoors and educating others to find their own way in life, figures out ways of balancing both modern and primitive aspects of our human experience.

NOTES | MENTIONS

TOM BROWN III LINKS AND MORE INFORMATION

Find Tom’s work and class schedules here https://www.tombrown3.com/
Tom demos the Proper way to walk in Nature
The Tracker School
Tom’s Trusted Organizations for Further Education

QCP #16| Stephanie Balon, MA, AMFT |Decoding The Filipino American Experience

Listen Here
Apple Podcasts
Amazon Music
Google Podcasts

“No history, no self.
Know history, know self.”
-Jose Rizal

Many of us don’t know about the trauma that our parents harbor. As children of parents that immigrated to the United States, the same trauma they harbor could be passed on to us, and manifested in different ways.

Some of us might have these questions like –

Who am I?

Why do we speak this way?

Why do I not know anything about you, our grandparents, or relatives?

Why is it hard to approach my parents with these questions?

GUEST BIO

Our next guest, Stephanie Balon has taken the first giant steps to help answer these questions, and the countless others we have faced for generations. The idea of providing space, even if only for conversation, might provide a way to heal our forgotten, indigenous, colonialized ways of living – of being together in community. Or as we say in our native language – in Kapwa.

Stephanie Balon is a mental health clinician, an expressive arts therapist with a focus on trauma-informed care, narrative and cultural therapeutic approaches. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Sociology from the University of Washington and a Master’s in Counseling Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

With over 15 years in the non-profit sector, and her work as an activist, she helped raise awareness for the Filipina/o/x Community. As a co-chair for the Filipino Mental Health Initiative of San Mateo County, she has received recognition for her community activism from District 5 supervisor, David Canepa. For congresswoman Jackie Speier, she served on the Asian American Advisory Committee to devise strategies for community engagement. Stephanie also helped raise over two and a half million dollars with the intention to co-found the first Filipino Cultural Center in San Mateo county that aims to provide mental health and wellness services for the Filipino Community.

NOTES | MENTIONS | ADDITIONAL RESOURCES