The Quake City Portal

QCP #023 | Jake Luigi – Less Impressed, More Involved Youtube Channel | Leading with Curiosity and The Organized Meta Knowledge of Jiu-Jitsu

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JAKE’S LINKS:
Less Impressed, More Involved on Youtube
Instagram Page @shorthairedjake

Jake Luigi is the mind behind the Less Impressed, More Involved video blog on youtube. In less than a year, I saw his channel grow from a few hundred to well over seven and a half thousand subscribers. Some of his most popular videos have amassed sixty thousand views and continues to grow due to his cerebral, detailed, and cataloged approach to learning the art, the language, and the endless evolution of Jiu-Jitsu.

In a time that has never seen more opportunity than today for creative exploration and exchange of ideas, I hope that conversations like this one can give some insight into those that want to invest in themselves, their life’s work, and the most authentic expression of themselves to what I believe will be the future of designing a flexible lifestyle – in creating content for an open, and shared information economy.

QCP #022 | Stephanie Crawford, Death Doula | Death is Not Taboo

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GUEST BIO

Our next guest, Stephanie Crawford, is a hospice care nurse and Death Doula. She recently founded Awakened Endings – an end of life service and community dedicated to helping others understand and prepare for a better death.

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

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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

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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?

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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

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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

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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

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“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

QCP #015 | The New Filipino American Folk Tales of Daly City Vol. 2 | Tudor Atienza

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A mushroom cloud – like the ones we would hopefully never have to see from a distance after a volcanic eruption or a nuclear explosion, is caused by the process scientifically described in the Rayleigh-Taylor Instability (RTI).

I don’t intend and am highly unqualified to describe in scientific detail what happens during an RTI. But my understanding (based on what I’ve found on the interwebs) uses the everyday example of what you see when trying to mix oil and water.

QCP #014 | Ivan C Lopez – Artist, Ceramicist + Muralist | Healing Through Creativity, Plant Medicine, And Listening To The Universe

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Ivan C Lopez is an artist from San Francisco by way of Columbia. He co-founded and helped build Artillery Art Gallery – a creative community space in the heart of the Mission. His passion to provide space for community inspires others to find what has been explorative and healing for him. Through ceramics and painting, Ivan hopes to bring balance; within a connection to the natural world alongside the concrete walls of the city.

I wanted to speak with Ivan because he connects this idea of the modern human being returning to our wild selves by communing with our indigenous selves. Not only through embracing creativity, but through encouraging and teaching others to pick up a brush to play with colors. Or taking a lump of clay and sitting at a table to be creative together. In this way, we embrace our childlike curiosity to explore and meditate upon the infinite ways of knowing ourselves, just in the same way we were created from virtually nothing.

In this conversation, Ivan shares his creative process, his journey in his lifetime exploration of art, self-discovery, and community.

Please enjoy this stream of consciousness conversation beneath a canopy of redwood trees in McClaren Park San Francisco, on Ohlone Rammaytus land – with the artist, the wild human, the mindfully grounded, Ivan Camilo Lopez.

Ivan’s Instagram: @ivanclopez
Artillery Art Gallery
Ivan’s Art here.

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