Shows
The Quake City PortalQCP #033 | Christopher Renfro, Founder of the Two Eighty Project|The Way of Natural Winemaking and Re-imagining a Thriving SocietyGUEST 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
Schweinfurt Military Base
"White Washed"
SEG 2 - Finan...2022-11-011h 41
The Quake City PortalQCP #032 | Pam Baker, Founder of the Women’s Coaching Alliance | How Women Can Mind the Gap in Leadership, and the Foundations of great Organizations
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Pam Baker (womenscoachingalliance.org) is dedicated to empowering, encouraging, and developing more young women to become examples of leadership, rather than the exception, through coaching youth sports and giving back to the community.
With her own unique leadership, she founded the Women's Coaching Alliance, inspired and built upon the memory of her late husband Doug Friedman, who made his transition in 2020.
Her aim for great leadership and work ethic brought her to places like Genentech and Johnson and Johnson, where she worked as district sales manager, pro...2022-10-061h 21
The Quake City PortalQCP #031 | Karen Nani Apana, Ph.D. | The Questions We Live With, Higher Worlds, and How to Find Stillness in Biography WorkGUEST 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 Sa...2022-09-281h 57
The Quake City PortalQCP #030 | Chefs Matt Levin + Michael Greuel of The Refuge Restaurants | The Pathos of Pastrami, Survival Mode in the Food Service Industry
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In 2008 Matt Levin, his wife Melanie, and his good friend Michael Greuel opened The Refuge Restaurant, home of some of the best pastrami sandwiches and burgers. At the time, The Refuge was a small restaurant focused on french wines, Belgian beers, and house-made, hand-sliced pastrami sandwiches. Since 2008 their popularity has exploded. Customers have waited up to four hours to sit and dine with them. Fifteen years later, they streamlined the process and opened up two more locations along the way, one in Menlo Park, and the other in San Mateo. They bo...2022-09-142h 30
The Quake City PortalQCP #029 | Dan Griffiths, founder of The Church of Clown | Praising Folly, A Peek into the Toolshed and The Life of a Performance Artist
SAY HELLO TO DAN!
Website: http://www.dangriffiths.us/
Kapoot Clown Theatre Skit Video
How Much - Created and Performed by Dan Griffiths
Donut Goat at the Barber Shop
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Dan Griffiths is a multi-talented, experimental performance artist, award-winning theatre director, teacher, and founder of the first Church of Clown in San Francisco. He founded the Clown Workshop, Clown Zero, and KAPOOT Clown theatre. Some of his recent gigs include teaching clown at The Wu Qiao International Circus Festival in Shijiazhuang, China. He also...2022-09-012h 33
The Quake City PortalQCP #028 | Sophia Cassella, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Athlete | The Inner Game of Training, How to Optimize Mat Time, and Life as a Student-Athlete
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Instagram | @sophiacassellabjj
Sophia Cassella is a 22-year-old brown belt from New Jersey, under Jason Rau. She's trained with some of the greatest minds that helped change the sport today in what some people call the renaissance of Jiu Jitsu.
She commutes hours and hours every day from New Jersey to New York to train with some coaches and grapplers in the sport who are considered to be the best to ever coach and compete - John Danaher, Gordon Ryan, Gary Tonon, Renzo Gracie...2022-08-1852 min
The Quake City PortalQCP 027 | Souhad A. Zaki, Food Economist | Understanding the State of Global Food Security
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Souhad Abou Zaki is a Curious Economist and a Rural Development Enthusiast. She is currently a Senior Admissions officer residing in Lebanon at Notre Dame University, Louaize. Souhad works as a Lecturer in Economics, teaching undergrad courses in Microeconomics, Managerial Economics, and International Economics. She is also a Research Consultant and Proposal Writer for Rural Entrepreneurs, helping conduct research on rural development-related topics, which include women's economic empowerment, food security, and social entrepreneurship. She holds a Degree in Economics from the American University of Beirut and a master's in Agricultural Economics and Development...2022-08-051h 52
The Quake City PortalQCP #026| Julie Rodgers, Buddhist Practitioner and Founder of TLC | Preparing for the End of Life, Working with Grief, and DharmaGUEST BIO
Julie Rogers is the Founder and Director of TLC Transitional Life Care, a Vajrayana Buddhist non-profit organization dedicated to the education and support of individuals and their families during the end-of-life transition. This program is centered in the SF Bay Area and southern Oregon, and is available online and via Zoom. She is a writer, author, mother, educator, and administrator, and has been a caregiver and hospice volunteer, as well as a Vajrayana (Tibetan) Buddhist for almost 40 years.
Over twenty-five years ago, Julie was surrounded by a string of deaths. These were...2022-07-282h 06
The Quake City PortalQCP #025 | Jairus Ferrer, Agricultural Entrepreneur | How the Youth are Taking on the Food Crisis in the Philippines
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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.
When Jairus was a boy, his family's shrimp farm was affected by red tide. It was a devastating blow from which it could never recover. Feeling insecure about not knowing what to...2022-07-122h 24
The Quake City PortalQCP #024 | Martin Jay Ruiz | Roll, Fall, Get Up: The Way of Wrestling and SkatingGUEST 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 hi...2022-06-223h 11
The Quake City PortalQCP #023 | Jake Luigi - Less Impressed, More Involved Youtube Channel | Leading with Curiosity and The Organized Meta Knowledge of Jiu-Jitsu
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 th...2022-06-081h 58
The Quake City PortalQCP #022 | Stephanie Crawford, Death Doula | Death is Not Taboo
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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.
In this conversation, you’ll hear both a heavy and light-hearted approach to talking about the transition of death. You’ll learn about what a death cafe is, what a “green” burial is, what some commonalities she has witnessed observing people weeks away from their last breath, and much more. It’s an...2022-04-272h 08
The Quake City PortalQCP #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. Barbecu...2022-04-211h 54
The Quake City PortalQCP #020 | Victor Thai, Tech Shaman and Conduit to the Psychedelic Realm
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Victor Thai is one of the most interesting people I know. He's the son of Vietnamese refugees growing 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 his mushrooms from home, stocks a wide variety of...2022-04-142h 22
The Quake City PortalQCP #019 | Connor McCann of the Brain Drain Podcast | How Can We Better Relate To Each Other?
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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 g...2022-04-062h 28
The Quake City PortalQCP #018 | Franco Soriano, Ultra Runner | The Hundred Mile High and Lucky Survival Stories
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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...2022-03-301h 28
The Quake City PortalQCP #017 | Tom Brown III | How Reconnecting with Nature Teaches Resilience, Self-Reliance, and Awareness
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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. As 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 n...2022-03-232h 16
The Quake City PortalQCP #16| Stephanie Balon, MA, AMFT |Decoding The Filipino American Experience"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...2022-03-162h 02
The Quake City PortalQCP #015 | New Filipino American Folk Tales of Daly City #002 | Tudor Atienza
A mushroom cloud - like the ones you 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.
Water - the lighter fluid in density based on the Earth's gravity will alw...2022-03-141h 26
The Quake City PortalQCP #014 | Ivan C Lopez - Painter, Ceramicist, and 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...2022-03-091h 47
The Quake City PortalQCP #012 | Why do we collect things? | Chino, Sneaker King of the North
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What is it about our collections that take up spaces in our lives?
Meet Chino - The owner of the largest sneaker collection I’ve ever seen.
He comes all the way to us from Edmonton, Canada by way of the Philippines. He’s a loving husband, father of two boys, a working man who does whatever it takes to make an honest living to care for his family.
A few years ago, I had the chance to see in p...2022-03-021h 38
The Quake City PortalQCP #011 | River Pember, Early Childhood Teacher | Finding Balance Through Embracing Feminine EnergyRiver has a passion for holistic teaching. Beginning with her experience with the Wilderness Youth Project, and now with her work teaching at a Waldorf Elementary School where I met her as a new addition to the after-care program.
While teaching early childhood students at the school, she also trains to officially become a Waldorf Education teacher. As a graduate from UC Santa Barbara, she earned a Bachelors's Degree in Feminist studies. Some of the many experiences that she graciously shares on this episode include traveling abroad to Thailand where she studied Buddhist Social Theory...2022-02-202h 35
The Quake City PortalQCP #010 | Ria and Raul Pelayo | Emerging Stronger from Pregnancy Loss
Meet our dear friends, Ria and Raul Pelayo. In their four years of marriage, they come forward with their struggles in starting a family due to recurring pregnancy loss.
We are also joined by my wife, my life partner - JoAnn. Both of us wanted to do an episode like this from the beginning, but couldn't conceptualize what, or how it could be done until Ria came forward with her forth miscarriage on social media. Together, we hope to provide a safe space to empower others to start their own conversations or seek...2022-02-031h 52
The Quake City PortalQCP #009 | A Trip Across the World and Into the Multiverse with JethroJethro is, what I like to call for fun, my younger brother from another mother. He’s the youngest son of my dad’s twin brother. Currently residing in Manila, by way of Cagayan de Oro Philippines. With his short stay in Manila, he immersed himself in his art within the underground hip-hop community. Through finding his artistic medium, he fixated his lens on the vibrant, unsung scene of the culture in Metro Manila.
However, his passion was only realized during a difficult time. At six foot four, he was a highly scouted youth basketball player...2022-01-281h 43The Quake City PortalQCP #008 | Toño Ramirez | Finding The River of Our Authentic Self
Toño Ramirez is a free spirit, a truth-seeker, an explorer. I'll stop there because he, in my opinion, is only bogged down by more labels. I first met him on a trash cleanup organized by Vince of RefuseRefuseSF.org (our first guest on the podcast).
Toño (alias used for privacy purposes) earned a bachelor's degree from The Ohio State University, a master's degree from UC Berkley, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. All degrees in his background are in the field of Mechanical Engineering.
I was ho...2022-01-212h 28
The Quake City PortalQCP #007 | The New Filipino American Folk Tales of Daly CityDaly City is one of the closest suburbs in the outer borders of San Francisco, located directly to the South. It's home to one of the densest populations of Filipinos, anywhere outside of the Philippines, comprising 33% of the total population in a 2010 census.
From the late ’80s to the early 2000s, Daly City helped to raise some of the world's most famous DJs, and dance groups. It was a big part of the history here on the west coast for the Filipino and Hip-Hop communities.
Most of the Filipino youth here in Da...2022-01-042h 17The Quake City PortalQCP #006 | Personal Essay | Does Eye Contact Matter Anymore?What is the purpose of life?
The Egg, a flash fiction story written by Andy Weir, offers a profound perspective on this age old question. If there is anything that can describe what The Quake City Portal is about, it can be found in this episode, and in stories just like The Egg.
I was deeply moved by this piece, seeing it first in video form, and then reading the story here. With so many aspects of life that fuel a divide among individuals, we need to share more stories that br...2021-12-2325 min
The Quake City PortalQCP #005 | Ernesto Pineda | How to Awaken Our Curiosity and Engage in New Ways with our Surroundings
Ernesto Pineda has over 20 years of experience in the Real Estate and Real Estate Tech industry. He is an entrepreneur, a business advisor, and an artist at heart. With his life-long love for books, art and travel, he uses his experience to merge his professional and creative endeavors. He has a passion for learning through experience, conversation and interacting with his environment.
Notes | Mentions:
Correction: Japanese Joinery (sorry, at a loss for words in that moment)
El Salvador Civil War Documentary
What we learn through traveling alone
Architecture
Arturo Perez-Reverte | C...2021-12-172h 38
The Quake City PortalQCP #004 | A Family Trip to Lake Tahoe | Rethinking The Language Of Our Identity, Our Given Names, And Kinship
We are joined by some family and friends in a place near and dear to all from far and wide, especially those of us from the Bay Area - Lake Tahoe! This was a fun one to do. Join us around the table for an after dinner discussion about modern sexuality, identity preferences, and more!
Please note there is some explicit content about sexuality, nothing graphic, but listener discretion is advised. Thank you for listening!
Tahoe Spiral Podcast Notes:
BDSM
F2M
pronouns/ LGBTQ (etc)
Impact of calling...2021-12-122h 46
The Quake City PortalQCP #003 | Marlon S Payumo, Sr. | Marlon S Payumo, Sr. | Life in San Francisco’s Most Famous Ice Cream ShopMarlon S Payumo, Sr. is the general manager of Mitchell's Ice Cream Shop in San Francisco, CA. He arrived in the United States when he was twenty years old, and has been working there since 1988. Among the many things we touch upon in this conversation, he shares his hardships as a child growing up in the Philippines, his experiences in dealing with the transition of moving to another country, speaking a new language, hard work, and resilience.
NOTES | Mentions:
SFGate Article - Mitchell's Ice Cream and Filipino Flavors
Buckskin Revolution, Woniya Thibeault...2021-11-291h 36
The Quake City PortalQCP #002 | Teenage Life in the Bay Area Before the Tech BoomIn this episode of the QCP, Jon is joined by his best friend, Mico. They reminisce about a time right before the dawn of the internet age. They also reflect on embarrassing moments in their short lived hip-hop careers. He shares his experience in sales, dealing with difficult family situations, and how he overcame alcoholism/ addiction without support groups or rehab.
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The Quake City PortalQCP #001 | Vincent Yuen | Taking Ownership of Our Public SpacesVincent Yuen is the founder and head organizer of the Refuse Refuse SF campaign.
During the pandemic, Vince went on long neighborhood walks with his family and noticed the trash that was littered around his neighborhood. He decided to take action by picking up trash along the way, and later found his neighbors also inspired to join in.
His love for community and the city inspired him to take action and found the Refuse Refuse SF campaign. They help organize group cleanups throughout San Francisco in partnership with other local organizations.
...2021-11-071h 51