Chapo Trap House - Bonus: Will Interviews Kim Stanley Robinson with The Antifada

Episode Date: March 21, 2019

Will guest-hosts on The Antifada to interview legendary sci fi author Kim Stanley Robinson about: Fredric Jameson, Ursula Le Guin, Philip K Dick, post-capitalist futures, utopia, and psychedelic experiences Listen to The Antifada: https://podtail.com/en/podcast/the-antifada/ Subscribe to The Antifada on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theantifada Follow The Antifada: https://twitter.com/the_antifada

Hello, everybody. It's Will here to introduce some bonus chapeau content for you. True, this is a re-up of an interview I did on another podcast, but gosh darn it, it's one I liked so much, I hope you won't mind me sharing it with you again. This is up there with the Adam Curtis interview for me in terms of how much I admire the person I was talking to and how profound the things they said were. It comes courtesy of a guest spot I did on the Antifotta podcast with Jamie and Sean who were kind enough to let me sit in with them and interview one of my all-time favorite writers, Kim Stanley Robinson. Kim Stanley Robinson is a sci-fi author probably best known for his Red Mars trilogy, which follows the human colonization and terraforming

of Mars over several hundred years. His books are hard sci-fi, I would say, in that they take the science part seriously, but unlike so many other similar authors, he also takes political economy seriously as well. As the old saying goes, it's easier for us to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, and for Stan and his books, they certainly do not take that easy way out, and I think that's very important. As you will hear in the interview, his books do not simply assume that the future will inevitably end up as some kind of Mad Max scenario where we're all fucking killing each other for gas or a can of dog food. This focus on dystopia is something that's very prevalent in popular culture right now, and it's obviously something that I've used

as a comedic device on the show probably countless times, but I think the way that we imagine the future is important, and sometimes I think this focus on the apocalypse or just the end of human civilization just taken for granted can be a little myopic, and even though it's harder, I don't think we should sort of censor our imaginations when it comes to thinking about what our culture or what our political and economic system will look like after capitalism, and fiction and science fiction in particular is one of the most compelling vehicles for imagining that world and imagining what the future is going to be like. So I really appreciate Stan and his books and this interview for giving me and hopefully you now a glimpse of a different and better world, and if that doesn't

appeal to you, wait to the end because we talk about why doing psychedelics is good for you. So once again, thanks to Jamie and Sean and everyone should check out and like and subscribe to their podcast, The Antifota, and now without further ado, Kim Stanley Robinson. All right, we are here with author, award-winning author and science fiction hero of all of ours, Kim Stanley Robinson. Hi Stan, thanks for being with us. Hi Sean, it's good to be there. Jamie, I think, is going to start the round of questions. We are here with, of course, Will Menaker still. Hello. And yes, we're all extremely excited for this. So Stan, Jamie is going to start throwing some curveballs at you. Just kidding, they're going to be softballs. Okay, here's a

gotcha question. Just kidding. It's a nice question. So about two years ago, I think I pitched and got assigned an interview with the sci-fi author, Ursula Le Guin, who was very influential in my own life, in my own political awakening, shall we say, but unfortunately, she passed away before I had a chance to speak with her. And I know you studied under her at UC San Diego, and I'm sorry for your loss, as well as the world's loss. What can you tell us about Ursula Le Guin, about her influence on you, on your own work, and maybe the world in general? Well, thank you for that. I love to talk about Ursula Le Guin. She was indeed my teacher, which is a remarkable coincidence that I treasure. I had gone to UC San Diego as an undergraduate, gone off to graduate school in

Boston, freaked out at the wintertime in Boston, and retreated to San Diego, where I took up graduate school there instead of in Boston. And I felt like an idiot after I got back to San Diego. But right soon after I got back, UC San Diego's literature department announced they had gotten Le Guin to agree to come to teach for a spring quarter. And so then I thought, well, maybe it wasn't so stupid after all. And my going back to San Diego, it was at that point I had sold several science fiction short stories. I was completely committed to being a science fiction writer. I'd been to Clarion. I'd been reading intensively for about, at that point, no more than six or seven years, but very intense reading. And Le Guin had published in the same time that

I had gotten into science fiction. Well, she had already published The Left Hand of Darkness, but while I was into it, she published Laid of Heaven and the Dispossessed. And the Dispossessed was a mindboggler that I had read about two years before she showed up at UCSD. And so she was, even then, the preeminent American science fiction writer, it was pretty clear to everybody. And especially if you're on the left. I'm sorry, there's wind chimes in the background. Yeah, is that bad? It's kind of endearing, actually. It's kind of charming. I am, it's a windy day. I'm outdoors where I always work and it's sunny, it's cold but sunny. And I can put the kibosh on the wind chimes if you want. You know, we're recording in Brooklyn

now and we don't know where our listeners are in the world right now. They probably don't have access to wind chimes. And I don't think it's a problem. Let's just allow that ambient wind chime to go in the background. Let's just keep rolling. Okay. Well, I can say also that I'm taking part in Cornell University's great bird count. And so today is the last day of a bird count where you count and name all the birds that you see. And so I'm right next to my bird feeder. And while we're talking, I'm keeping a little tabulation on how many white crowned sparrows show up. Stan, can we get, can we get a count on how many birds you've seen today? Or any, any one in particular? You sure the heck can. I have seen, I don't know if I, you want as much

detail as I could give you, but you know about. Just the highlight reel. Within reason. The highlights. Two yellow-billed magpies. They are absolutely only local to this part of the valley. Birders come from all over the world to see these yellow-billed magpies. Lots of crows, lots of Canada geese, lots of, I call them little beige birds because I'm not a real birder. A red, a red-tailed hawk, a Swainsons hawk, a flicker, and a little bluebird that I've never seen before, so that the bird hunt seems to have called up for me and a lot of gold vinsces. Perhaps it's evolutionary psychology and our desire to be surrounded by wilderness and nature, but I'm feeling a little bit jealous right now I have to say. I've seen zero birds today,

unfortunately. You're saying? Yes, yes. Brooklyn, I know Brooklyn a little bit and I love Brooklyn, but it doesn't seem like a great bird or a spot. There's a standard pigeon, but then of course, you know, sparrows and starlings are about the most common. Occasionally I do see a hawk's in Brooklyn. Right, they have a thing with the skyscraper setbacks. I go to the, if you go over to the river up at, is it Astoria? At Hellgate, there's some. I did a quite extensive exploration of Brooklyn and of the New York area for when I was riding my New York 2140 and my best friend in New York lives in Brooklyn and took me to places that I wouldn't have known to go to that got into the book and I'm always looking for birds. Although I have to say I'm not a good

birder. I don't know what I'm seeing most of the time, but I've gotten really interested in them because of my work life here. I always ride in my front yard and that's what Davis gives me. Oh yeah, we saw a picture of that in I think the article that Wired did on you and it looks like a really delightful and lovely place to work. It is. It's a little bit freakish what I've done. About 10 years of sitting in this chair where I'm sitting right now looking at the bird feeder and at my gates and my fence and my Japanese maple and I know what season it is because of the tilt of the sun over to my left and on it goes like that. I see the sky, the clouds, the the wind and the trees right now. It's beautiful and it has put many years on to my riding life that might not

have happened because I was feeling so burned out 10 or 15 years ago when I moved out here and discovered that I wasn't burnt out on riding. I was burnt out on sitting indoors. I can sit outdoors all the time very happily but not indoors. That's amazing because I think that all of us here appreciate that burnout has passed and thank you to Davis California for allowing you to make all the great novels that you've done. You worked with Ursula Le Guin and I think I saw somewhere too that the famous Marxist cultural critic Frederick Jamison was also part of your studies and your inspiration. Between Ursula Le Guin and Frederick Jamison and your other experiences in life, how did you become radicalized? How did you become an anti-capitalist and how

has that affected your work? Yeah, I'm sorry I stopped you in the middle of talking about Ursula. It's better to have an organic conversation and it's good for me to kind of collect my thoughts as well. Jamison was crucial and the third of the great writers that I was lucky enough to have as teachers and I'm astonished at the luck involved with this. The third is Gary Snyder, the California poet and you might call him an eco, a Buddhist eco warrior, a leftist for sure and a hero of mine since the same time that I was beginning to read science fiction I was reading poetry and Zen Buddhist texts. This is all very California hippie 1972 type intellectual background and I discovered this year in Nevada and Fred Jamison was my first French professor beyond the conversational classes,

the first literature classes and he insisted on us all speaking French which was a bizarre constraint because I only had about a hundred words of French in me and he assigned the short plays of Camus and of Sartre and so we read those plays and we discussed them in French and Fred was very patient with us very slow in his speaking and very clear and also very existentialist and I didn't realize that at the time and very Marxist. So it was the 70s the Vietnam War was still going I had a draft number I was radicalized by that a very practical concern of not wanting to go to Vietnam and feeling like the war was a disaster and a crime so it's very situational to my generation and the time that I came around and I now think that that's true of everybody that you are that we're partly

are just expressions of our historical periods and the individual choices that we make are predicated on the opportunities of the time that you're in and for me the luck of running into Jamison who is a very persuasive very modest man a bookish guy he loves books and movies and that's really the way that he likes to talk about things is through literature but he's very committed Marxist and he was I guess what you would call the preeminent American Marxist critic and especially in Western Marxism trying to figure out what what did it mean to be a Marxist after the Soviet Union and through the 70s and 80s and so by reading him he is my guide to everything else in the world of political theory sometimes he'll make suggestions and I'll read the people that

he suggested to me and I'll understand them and it'll be wonderful people like Ernest Bloch or Raymond Williams and many other of the famous Western Marxists other times he'll recommend someone as being a good to read important and I'll read them and I won't understand them at all and it seems to me that Jamison's summary of them is better than their own original writing in terms of clarifying their thoughts and I don't need to specify who because I can barely remember but what I can say is that he was my political teacher and a lot of it was just reading him he moved away from UC San Diego before I was even done with my PhD he was directing it it was on Philip K. Dick I was in heaven he moved to Yale so luckily my undergraduate advisor Donald Westling

really good teacher very strong a literature professor and left us but not into science fiction at all so Donald took over my PhD dissertation at that time and Le Guin came when I was in graduate school early on and Snyder I was only a reader of but he was the one that explained for me how nature fit into all this that that nature culture political slash natural combination that I think is very important to me and to everybody Snyder was the the great teacher there for me and I rented him years later up here in Davis where he taught at UC Davis through the 90s and I got to know him and we become friends I love Gary and I probably know him the best of the three although I've stepped I've stayed in excellent contact with Fred and I was

in intermittent but warm contact with Ursula through the years well you sort of anticipated the question I was going to bring up to you speaking of being a product of a place in time in this case California in the 60s and 70s and you writing your thesis on Philip K. Dick I was just you know really interested in first of all like what the thesis was about and just you know what reading Dick for the first time like you responded to in his work sure I I love Phil Dick and his work although it's not my favorite he's not my favorite writer by any means and when Jameson said to me this is like 1972 or three he said if read Phil Dick he's the greatest living American writer bar none and I went out and I bought Galactic Pot Healer and I read Galactic Pot

Healer and I said what was he why would he say that this is just a ridiculous scrawny little short story very union very spacey very reality breakdown very Philip K. Dick and you know he said read on you got to read all of it you got to read huge loss of it the individual books don't matter it's the totality that matters which as usual with Fred was a very smart way to go at it and so then I read all of Dick under his direction and I began to see what he was talking about um he's Dick is a tremendous novelist without being a great stylist and the best of his books in terms of style is the man in the high castle oh yes but even there Ursula has an introduction to man in high castle that is very funny talking about how everybody even the Germans speak in

Japanese English which as Ursula says in their introduction must pause to consider yeah you mentioned like uh Jameson saying that you have to read him uh all of him to get a kind of total effect and his individual stories and novels do have kind of a shaggy dog quality but when you read them like as an entire body of work what do you think emerges for you um good question and uh I think the little man the ordinary person as hero of the novel so this was revolutionary in science fiction where you had the kind of John W Campbell a superman the Nietzschean uber mentioned the spaceship captain captain Kirk blah blah and with Phil Dick it's always the tire regrover the vase repair person right um and so ordinary people and then I also love the

structure of his novels which I've imitated many a time which is you right from third person limited point of view so that you're inside one character's mind the narrator speaking of them in third person but reading their thoughts and the other characters are outsiders and then in the next scene it's a different character looking back at the first character from inside the second character's mind and this roving point of view is an extremely powerful tool for shaping novels and giving you a sense of um three dimensionality to the characterizations so um in technical terms I think dick even though he was writing um you know on speed at a thousand miles an hour and several of his novels like one year there were five novels and there was a five year

period where there were 13 novels and this is the mid 60s and um he would write them in two weeks and so they're pretty slack and messy and rushed but on the other hand they're really powerful and strong and so he's a mixed bag and then also the political angle he's without being um intensely theoretical about it he's just instinctively anti-capitalist his his novels and this is something Jameson taught me to see they're all about the corrosive effects of capitalism on ordinary human relations how it instrumentalizes everybody and you turn into a calculator of value even if for other people um and and so dicks novels are keep coming back to that they're really about america in the 50s and 60s and how I always think of the uh in ubic uh were essentially

everything is coin operated like from your front door to your coffee machines everything in that book is about you know coins and then of course the coin comes back uh in terms of telling you whether you're really alive or dead at one point in the book yes I just had occasion to do an introduction to ubic I reread it for the first time in about 40 years and it's just a long short story it's a mess and yet that exactly right what you pointed out the the fight that Joe Chip has with his door a coin operated door to get out of his apartment and trying to bargain about credit to get out of his apartment I mean it's AI it's it's all the stuff that we're thinking about right now um and and and all done at this level it's probably one of the greatest scenes he ever

wrote because it's it's very funny and it's very penetrating um so more on this on these political aspects we noticed reading your work in both the mars trilogy which we've all consumed at least once in this room uh but also I cried several times while reading it I just want you to know that thank you in a good in a good way I'm sure she's not a bad way um yeah but also then in uh very very much a different novel which is uh years of rice and salt which is an alternative history um in both novels in both universes there are these specific moments where it seems like the kind of collective scientific knowledge and social awareness of human beings uh kind of combined together to create a sort of phase change in human affairs it's almost like in in both of these

instance whether it's the past or or an imagined future um humanity is able to create something like historical materialism something like ways of grasping and the kind of interconnectedness of all people and uh being able to overcome tyranny and division and want this seems to be a theme in your work do you want to talk a little bit about that about how uh people are situated and how we collectively understand the world sure um it seems to me the basic problem or issue the it brings up just the question of history and is it a story of us pulling our act together and making a better civilization or is it just one set of power dynamics after another and so I it comes to a question of what is revolution can there be revolution anymore it are revolutions more

positive than negative when you consider the violence in the back lashes and could there be a peaceful um somewhat organized revolution what Raymond Williams calls the raw the long revolution or you might just say um social democracy type uh reform from within the legal systems instead of could you if you did enough of those and did them um smartly enough could that constitute a revolution instead of the the classic form of the french or the russian or the american revolution of armed revolt and violence and death and then subsequent reactionary backlash which especially in the french and uh russian was obvious and then the american one more subtle than strange um so i'm i keep trying to write stories where that could be the topic and um it it presents a problem for the novelist

it's a problem that historical novelists have had all along and science fiction is kind of the flip side of the historical novel in that you're trying to write both individual lives characters that you care about the kind of telepathy of being inside someone else's head and the novel is really a bourgeois form it's about the individual consciousness in a lot of ways and then small groups and then how does it encompass history how do you include also history itself well your characters have to go through something big and so in both the marist trilogy and in years of rice and salt i invented ways of having individual humans that lived longer than we usually live right right um the longevity treatment in the marist trilogy and reincarnation in the years of

rice and salt and the bardo that was fascinating yeah yes and so this gave me a chance to talk about history explicitly and keep it at the level of characters and in my other novels where i've tried to deal with both these elements at once but with ordinary human lifetimes i've struggled to make it work and the the novel that i think is best called green earth my washington dc trilogy and in several other books of 2312 or the one that i'm working on now i've been trying to continue to do that kind of project and write about moments of historical change that maybe they aren't revolutions but they might be revolutionary in their ultimate impacts speaking of your work and i think sort of a contrast in my mind with with your work and other more other forms of

science fiction it would seem to me that the the dominant mode in science fiction or really most of our popular culture right now is overwhelmingly dystopian and apocalyptic in that like everyone just sort of seems to assume that the mad max scenario is the future we're headed for uh how do your books consciously go against that like particularly and what do you think that's important particularly from a sort of leftist perspective well this brings me back to much that i have learned from jamison this is really kind of jamisonian to say it's dialectical dystopia is the flip side of utopia it's it's a a political response and that's therefore interesting but he's also commented from time to time that we're we're weirdly comforted by dystopia that it's a

way of assuring contemporary readers that as bad as things are for us it's not as bad as it's going to be for these poor characters in the future and so you can read dystopias badly or they can serve a bad function of just comforting you with kind of disaster porn that you read from a semi-comfortable spot in the precariat in this current year but there's another way of reading it and i know that jamison would agree with this too that it's an expression of how people are feeling and novels are very important for that how do young people feel today well they feel scared put upon hopeless and so dystopias have this immediate expression of a political feeling so the political unconscious as jamison would call it of dystopian text is a sense of entrapment

and despair and and they're and so they are an honest feeling but once you've expressed that feeling you have to turn it over and think about the utopian view that the reason that dystopias appeal to us is that there's a broad sense that things could be better and that the future could be made to be better by what we do now so i this is for me i think dystopias are easy and now it's a little complacent it's it's become a kind of a cliche or a marketing category and it's too easy that in fact after the they won't be mad max um although that's a kind of a worst-case scenario but it won't be an end there will still be humans this whole notion that it goes back to um a kind of hapsian war of all against all is a is a reading of human nature that flies in the

face of sociobiology itself and we're actually incredibly social incredibly altruistic and cooperative and it may be that we're only altruistic within tight circles of family or group or kin or even supposedly nation state or ethnic although those are mostly concoctions but um we we actually are team players so what's interesting is to say after a disaster what does ordinary feel like for people who only know the post apocalyptic state and so that was what i was trying to write about in new york 2140 after the sea levels rise and there's a half century of utter disaster and chaos then life goes on and the young people of that time that's all they know they just think of it as normal oh the past there were disasters here we are in this new normality and that's what dystopia misses

out on this this notion that it's going to be a boot in your face forever is is simplistic i guess i'd say yeah i really like the way you put that and i really like the way you put it in blue mars too when you write um it was a crisis which could have triggered a terminal disaster a descent into chaos and barbarity and instead it was being met head on by the greatest efflorescence of civilization in history a new renaissance and i feel like that's a theme in a lot of your work um which is both like sort of catastrophist because you know bad things happen and bad things probably are going to happen in real life but also very optimistic in that you know human nature it's a very difficult thing to define but it definitely contains at least the possibility for a kind of pulling together

that we see already you know amid disasters or what have you and people help each other out um it it's it's cool to think about especially because i have to deal with people on a day-to-day basis who think that um you know i'm not being practical by being utopian or being ideological and people whose horizon is like i don't know some kind of left liberalism are not being ideological um they're just being realistic about the possibilities of humanity right yes there's um what i call a fashionable cynicism or it's also a self-protective in that i don't want to seem naive i don't want to seem stupid and so very often being labeled optimistic which i often am this is code for the poor guy he's stupid he doesn't get it how bad things really are and

you know maybe it's biochemical maybe he's just fooled but it's um you put a you put yourself out there in a risky position when you say um things could be better or um that it actually is a remarkable achievement for nearly eight billion people to be alive on this planet without everybody already killing each other that it could be so much worse that you have to keep a balanced view of it uh and and and the balance is hard because you have to admit that a we're on the edge of a mass extinction event that could be really devastating that gets us to the true dystopia even to the mad max moment of ultimate devastation uh that's possible and so with that kept in mind it's so scary that when you say well but on the other hand we also could have inclusive prosperity

as this new economics group as has called it which is not a bad name especially if you include the whole biosphere in the inclusion that that's also possible well since it is you ought not to deny that either and what you come to is a completely bizarre moment which maybe every moment in human history has been the same but it feels more bizarre now i don't know why that we could from the moment we're in right in this moment it could be a terrible human future and biosphere future or it could be a pretty great human future and biosphere future both are equally physically possible and so then the political work becomes to try to shove it towards the good future and and on and on the most fundamental level just to dodge the bad future so yeah we're

back to the socialism or barbarism well yeah i think years back this moment it's becoming more and more clear because we have this historically unprecedented pressure of climate change and you know even people who used to pretend that it wasn't happening aren't pretending that anymore but you still hear people say things like oh uh you know we could have a green new deal and try to stave off climate disaster and like save the human race from dying out but it might be too expensive so maybe not like what's up with that it's um the the attacks on the green new deal have been revealing how shoddy and insufficient that ideology is at this point the old style republican capitalist business as usual that is leading us to the mass extinction event

just looks bad there is even old time right wingers who are used to sounding plausible with 50 years experience like george will their attacks on the green new deal are entirely empty of substance and usually they they toss the word they say oh but that's socialism as if if that is a QED on how why it can't be done at all and um one thing that jamison pointed out quite recently in a lecture at duke which i'm listening in on as if it's a podcast is that uh in the previous moments of american leftism that have been prominent and then crushed this is after world war one and then after world war two and then the third one would be in the 60s they all uh had a moment of left fluorescence and appeal and then they all got crushed by um political reversals and

by a deliberate suppression but none of them ever dared to say the word socialism in america mostly after world war one but this is jamison's point is that the idea would be that the socialist cause in the united states would do the good things without telling the general american public what they were in a kind of an avant-gardeism and then after the fact after we were in a better state say oh by the way that's actually socialism which was a silly way to go about it because the american populace isn't that easily fooled and we are the american populace and so what's different this time he pointed out is that people are unabashedly using the world socialism and claiming that it's okay to say that word and still be in the american political mainstream discourse it's a new moment

and i myself am stunned because i i've been paying attention to the situation ever since those early 70s moments and and this is a kind of a first and a new horizon and it might be a sign i think it's true what you said jamie that climate change is shoving this onto us it's a kind of an enormous pressure that is forcing us to reconsider the way that we think about politics yeah totally i think it's especially salient for young people right who look at uh i don't know some older more conservative voters who are probably going to die of old age and say hey i could die of climate change if we don't do something about this so what's up yeah well they might not die of old age if we get that life expansion pack destroy the logicals then we're gonna be dealing with these

people forever but i am really in favor of longevity treatments at my age but i can tell you from my perspective it's not gonna come fast enough and it looks to be way harder than people thought back in even in the 90s there's an asymptotic kind of resistance involved of physics and the difficulties of biology so no i think people in fact average lifetimes are going down because our health habits are so poor so i think we're stuck with what we've got and i think that young people do need to grab hold of the political discourse as fast as they can and to reject the ordinary business capitalism which is so amazingly destructive and now that everybody's in the precariat that there is no middle class that if you're not in the one percent you have reason to be scared um there's

there's um it's it's that impetus you know the reason there was a leftism in the 70s that i was part of as a young person was the vietnam war there's a physical practical danger to your life that forces your politics it's very materialist and now the same kind of thing is happening with the precariousness of the the gig economy which is it really just more exploitation yeah stan uh you mentioned uh the uh the gerontological treatment uh perhaps not being on the horizon um the immediate horizon but there is a group out in silicon valley the peter teals and the elon musts of the world uh who want to have that uh who want to be immortal uh to the extent that they are taking young people's blood and uh you know putting all sorts of money into research

to extend the billionaire's lives at the rest of us it it touches uh that vision of the world i think touches on this kind of duality between dystopia and utopia you were talking about because a lot of the thinking around um technology and science and the future is pretty dark right now especially coming out of silicon valley uh there are the fears of this sort of ai singularity um there are these ideologies of neo reactionism and uh the dark enlightenment or some sort of fascist accelerationism the endarken mint as i like to call it um yeah and these seem to be percolating you know in the same sort of way that you were talking about as a response to social and technological change uh do you think that this is a um science being divorced too much from the

humanities is it an edge educational problem or have we just not either face the problem correctly or are we letting the left is the left letting futurism be taken over by people whose interests are not our own there's a cut uh the future is a contested space like government is a contested space and like science is a contested space so they're all battlefields ideological battlefields uh discursive struggle is everywhere now the silicon valley i have a lot of contacts down there being one of the great space cadets of our time and um you know an aging white male science fiction writer gets invited to a lot of these things to speak so i take advantage of that and i've met a lot of these people and the um ilan musk is an interesting guy uh peter thiel is

not an interesting guy and there's there's a lot of fantasy going on and all of these people the billionaires of which i've met maybe a dozen now they're all gonna die in their 80s and none of this uh there's a fantasy response which is essentially a bad science fiction response and it's not confined to one political group everybody would like to be immortal or live longer and they're not going to and so you can either admit that and and persist with what lifetime you're given and accept that we're mortal creatures or else you can go into fantasy lands and talk about uploading yourself into an ai and all of the ai people who are actually working on it down at google and elsewhere in silicon valley will freely admit that that's ai is just a fundraising uh phrase there's nothing

to it it's just there isn't even machine learning to speak of and the opportunities there to help humanity are substantial in terms of crunching big data and doing the things that computers can do but it's not at all transcendent or transformative uh and we probably won't even help self-driving cars so you've got to understand that most talk now about technological um innovation it has to do with fundraising there's a an awful lot of ventral capital out there after the after the quantitative easing and the 2008 crash uh 15 trillion dollars were created and given to the banks who then gave it to the rich you know 90 percent of that money went to the 1 percent and then it's trickle down theory all over again what it means is there's more investment money than there

are good investment possibilities if you're trying to have a broad portfolio of future tech possibilities so a lot of bullshit is getting thrown around and a lot of money's getting invested in things that are going to be shown somewhere between five and 20 years later to be complete bullshit so that's just what silicone valley is and you don't want to get too distracted by that as a young leftist thinking about how do we change the whole political slash economic system um a silicone valley is kind of like a distraction like hollywood or something it's it's not the real story the real story is probably in washington or it's out in your garden um it's regenerative agriculture or it's some kind of a green new deal a support system and i and i actually think that

the billionaires are that there there's two things you could do you could say more and more often there shouldn't be any such thing as a billionaire the tax structure should cut billionaires off you should be able to make about 10 million dollars a year and beyond that the tax rate rises to nearly 100 and it goes back to the people who generated at the american society amen so strong progressive taxation a great and i don't even think that needs to be called socialist although it it's a way of tweaking us towards more leftist values for sure but you can remind people that during the eisenhower era that white eisenhower um um presided over a 91 top income tax rate and that was when people hit 400 000 which these days would be about four million dollars so you could even say let's just

do like eisenhower did which i find very funny uh to return to um uh your your own work and and some of the interesting contrasts that it makes with uh other more popular uh or other forms of science fiction in our popular culture uh usually in science fiction the author takes you know a piece of technology or a social trend that exists in the present and projects it into the future to you know spaceships robots computers etc and you imagine that evolution into our society like into the future but in your work you you of course do that with technology but you do the same thing for economic systems and social relationships and i was wondering if you could talk a little bit like how do you approach that process of imaginative speculation uh as it applies to let's say capitalism

is it different than the same than of just imagining what computers will be like in a hundred years it's a little the same and thanks for this question because it gets right to the heart of where i'm working and worrying um and i'm gonna talk to you whilst i move inside because there's somebody next to her with power tools first the wind chimes and then the power tools the bane of my outdoor existence here is how frequently power tools are employed in a neighborhood context but um throwing off the bird count oh that's right i should be out here can you can you hear the power tools i don't know i can't hear about i can't hear but if they're bothering you then then don't then uh no i'm staying here okay no i mean then let me get back to the point yes um

what i've found is that it's i what i usually do is try to get help from scientists and i and so in terms of technology like how do we get to mars what do we do when we get to mars scientists planetologists they're lovely helpers and they're willing to talk when i think of what's the next what's post capitalism what's the next uh political economy that we're going to live under the help is remarkably uh sparse the the written political economy in the last 50 years is i could practically name them on one hand and they're um they're they're great herman daily and uh bookchin and uh hazel henderson and um fritchoff capra and you know there's a variety but they're kind of um off the cutting edge at this point and at no point did they give me much help so when

i was writing my novels especially the mars books i was scrambling and moondragone spain has been a perpetual um comfort to me as a functioning um town that is nothing but co-ops as a transitional stick i'm sorry we can definitely hear the power tools now whatever they did they must just turn them up you know what the birds are it drives the birds away too so it's a it's kind of a doubling here why don't uh why don't you i'm gonna keep talking while i move as long as it doesn't bother you we're i'm headed in all right sounds good so um i i do my research i try to find what examples there are around the world of strong leftist communities i think hard about um what happened in the whole uh soviet experiment i i really tried hard to understand china

and i have to admit china is not easy to understand um yeah red nothing red moon you did you did struggle with that um i did uh but it came out great at the end i'm sorry go on well i'm glad that you brought that up because that's my most recent effort that in the new york novel i'm trying to imagine some uh what would come next well maybe nobody at this point can imagine that very well and even using the word socialist as much as i am willing to call myself that and i just love it that there's a democratic socialist of america doing so well i'm happy to join that i still think oh hell yeah i'm uh i'm a part of the democratic socialists of america by the way so oh you both are oh heck oh you did join right isn't everybody i mean everybody should be will

are you at dsa i'm a card carrying member but uh i don't go much further than that unfortunately yeah me too i pay my dues and i read the things and i try to help we'll take it yeah but but what i'm saying is maybe what the political economy that's going to come in the if we get a good one in the 21st century and maybe uh maybe it'll need a new name maybe it'll look like the older socialist attempts i what i would love to have everybody doing is de stranding the the what you might call the toolkit what the defining characteristics of socialism which ones are crucial and uh necessary which ones are accidental and historical and how do we apply them the ones that are crucial and necessary to the current moment that we're already in because we don't get to

have a fresh start so these i think are the ongoing questions uh you well you brought up a mon drug in spain and i and then previously we were talking about silicon valley like you this sort of you talked about some of the the great potential that technology could be used to aid humanity and i i wanted to ask you about in uh one of your novels uh 2312 uh you talk about something called the the mondrag the mondragon uh chords which is sort of a uh can you describe this like an economic system that is sort of replaced capitalism through the use of quantum computing to sort of create a centrally a planned economy like that could like that gets over the hump of the problems of having a centrally planned economy through quantum computing

yeah sure and that brings in all kinds of things of course but there was an old question that um if frances spofford's novel red plenty brings up the historical moment where the soviet union um uh computer scientists were trying to invent a computer system that was strong enough to run a command economy um without the market and that failed because of corruption in the soviet system and because it wasn't clear you know now we've got computers so immensely powerful the things that they can do are amazing and if you get quantum computers even more so and quantum computing is another big if but it might it might happen and even classical computers are enormously strong why couldn't we um put into our our economy um what everybody needs

and then send out to the to the factories and to the fields and then create what everybody needs and then distribute it back out to what everybody needs without a market since the prices in the market are systemically wrong and and the market uh systemically devalues people and the environment so that's two big things that are being destroyed by underpricing of the market and when you say the market system is is a failure well this is completely terrifying because we are in a global market system and we don't have an alternative so in 2312 i was suggesting in 300 years from now we might have all these things worked out and that um the trade would still exist people would still make different things they would still need to exchange the stuff that they make or that they

do for the stuff that they don't have or that they want so um china has market socialism well what does market socialism mean and what are markets really and these are questions that i'm trying to explore where um the responses especially when you bring up the words markets is extremely ideological but but on the other hand that's not a bad thing um everything is extremely ideological it's just that markets are a huge force right now they're one name for global capitalism the market yeah that's one thing that i really object to when people treat the market as this like neutral objective almost naturally existing thing that is not heavily mediated by ideology and created by humans ostensibly to serve humans right yeah and it's a lot

assisted legal system so the legal system could change and you could have something that was what would you call it the post market or the pseudo market or the um the rationally contained and survivable market or whatever but the when people say the market like you say that is if it's as if it's nature itself well this is a terrible category error and i think part of the work of the left is to is to clarify that issue that free markets are a legal regime that actually are not free for most of humanity suffers in the free market system not to mention the ecology right because like this is something that i often have trouble explaining to people who maybe aren't familiar with marxist economics the idea that we can solve the problem of climate

change under the current political and economic formation of capitalism is it's a fantasy it's at least as much a fantasy as building socialism within our lifetimes right because under i mean if you believe in marxist marxist concept of value um the environment and the ecology around us it has no value it's just this infinite free gift that capital can use to extract value and in that sense it's i just cannot see us solving this problem while continuing um capitalist accumulation on this planet unless we expand to other planets right but that's like just kind of moving the problem around well but you can't explain to the other planets that's that's definitive so so really the problem has to be solved here so yeah count ballast accumulation is physically

impossible at a certain point and we've reached that point what's interesting though is that i mean i would agree with you completely and then what's the next how do you alter markets in a rapid step in other words if you had a hundred reforms in a row that you could write up as legislation and enact one law after the next to get from where we are now to a um uh a perpetual mobile of of uh ecological circulation where humans fitted into this biosphere on this one and only planet what would those hundred steps be that's the that's the interesting question and i would say this right away the the proclamation of the green new deal is a fabulous start on this it was an impressive document it wasn't over near as content free as as i was fearing um and and yet

the hundred steps the laws that you might introduce as bills in congress and then if you had a majority you passed them they became the law people began to act according to these laws what would those laws be it's interesting um we'll mention the the madrigan collective uh that exists in the real world today and uh you know you you um pushing that on to the future and imagining a way that that could be a kind of overgrowth and overcoming of capitalism in uh red moon your most recent work you do the same thing with the technology of blockchain and cryptocurrency which i found to be really fascinating because a you tied it into the uh fundamental contradictions of capitalism we're speaking about but also tied it to a way of accounting for uh ecology uh you know when it

comes to uh creating a uh you know socialism or something beyond capitalism uh blockchain and cryptocurrency is typically a right libertarian thing uh can you tell us a bit about how you came up with the idea of imagining a kind of financial revolution that was based on a new type of uh currency arrangement i can try although i will immediately fall into the deep waters beyond my understanding um there are radical economists that are trying to create new uh cryptocurrency platforms that would be based on um socially useful actions as the creation of value so that carbon coin solar coin um these exist and and blockchain is at the basis of all the cryptocurrency as a technology but blockchain is also a way of distributing information that can't be altered

after the fact amongst a large population that's that's its very definition so these things could be a great populist socialist tools and um money itself you create more money like say in this quantitative easing after the 2008 crash uh more money means more expenditure means more exploitation of nature means more running out of finite resources means more climate change more more co2 burned into the atmosphere so uh money itself as a measure of value and as a generator of of human energies if there was a a currency that was based on doing good things and the currency didn't exist without them there is now a plan and if you google it i hope the right papers will come out it's called carbon quantitative easing where the central banks of the world

create new money as they did after 2008 and they don't instead of giving it to the banks they they created and give it out based on how much carbon you have sequestered uh in a reliable certified blockchain manner and so this their carbon coin is like you save 100 tons of carbon or you bury 100 tons of carbon or somehow fix it to rocks and then you've got one carbon coin which would then trade on the currency exchanges with other forms of currency like the franc the dollar etc and if the carbon coin was supported by the central banks of the world with a like 100 year bond so that investors in the normal capitalist financialized world would say well uh we could we could uh fool around with the dollar um um rem nim the exchange or we could

invest in carbon coins and know that we'll get a payoff on a regular basis that in other words doing the right thing could compete financially with doing the wrong thing so if you if you google carbon quantitative exchange you'll hopefully you'll get a paper called by uh by uh economist named Chen uh i think it's D Chen C H E N and it's an interesting paper it's getting some traction it's getting some discussion um there's another new group called the economists for an inclusive prosperity um E FIP and uh they're brand new like uh their announcement came out day before yesterday um mainstream economists with a leftist uh bent or a desire for survivability or a desire to make economics work again for the good of humanity and that's a pretty big and vibrant group

of mainstream economists so in other words the front is broad but but the problems are pretty clear that have to be solved and i myself am just a storyteller i i'm trying to learn about this stuff but what i really would love is for um a lot of academic economists and whole economics departments to become political economy departments instead of economics departments and to propose new changes that that's such a good idea i mean like we've talked a lot on this show about how economics uh it was richard wolf who said that the function of economics departments right now in universities is primarily ideological right and it's like an old joke about how at every university the economics department and business school are like on completely different campuses

because they you know one they teach you the bullshit then the other one they teach you how to actually how to be the right exactly yeah so like this stuff is certainly ideological these changes that we're talking about but like it's not unideological the way we do things now and that's something i'm always trying to call people's attention to well i hope it's generally understood i think things are getting contentious enough and dangerous enough that that is more and more understood now that there is no such thing as as news now that there's no such thing as objectivity i think it's really becoming understood and that's a good understanding because it was always true that everything was ideological and now that everybody realizes

that what you want is an ideology that explains the most and gives you the most positive ways forward i didn't understand for a long time that economics doesn't mean anything but the quantitative analysis of capitalism that economics is not in the business of doing political economy that they're two different fields of human thought and i was like most people i think and that i was thinking that economics and political economy were the same thing but it's not true economics's job is just to analyze capitalism and then the currently existing set of laws and see what their effects are and maybe suggest some tweaks but never basic and fundamental reforms and then political economy is a 19th century thing that went away when

capitalism basically took over the world so you have political economy back and you know you could be like Fourier you could be like prudone you could be like marks and angles you know there was political economy and now there's just economics but i think political economy is coming back out of necessity i hope you're right yeah me too so to switch gears a little bit uh uh you know the sun's gone down this is anti fought after dark now there are a lot of cool drugs in the mars books all of which seem to be legal in this utopian future society there are also other pleasures like the bath houses where young people go to get each other off and basically invent new ways to come uh are you trying to turn young people socialist by

promising them sins of the flesh well that's a good idea maybe that was it all along that is the mindset one of the things about being a leftist and i must say that a lot of this comes out of the the 70s the 70s were extremely radical uh in ways that are probably hard to um um i can barely remember them and especially the feel of them and for young people it says you did it right yeah well done for young people like yourselves it's um it's a the 70s is like what for me would have been like the 1930s you just can't recover times 40 years ago and and capture how they really felt while you were living in them so a lot of my writing comes out of a couple of core beliefs that the pleasure is good that puritanism is bad that um fiction and especially american popular

fiction was all about sex and violence and i didn't want to write about violence so i decided to compensate for that lack by writing more about sex and trying to go away yeah try to be honest about it and and and have some fun with it and it's actually very hard to write about intelligently and and with a sense of fun and and and that's there's so many human activities that are hard to write down that there's no reason to pick on that one but um i think it's important to insist that our good life includes a sense of young people having a sense of the pursuit of happiness of the potential and that your your 20s in particular ought to be a gigantic adventure and not a period of anxiety and dread i mean it's fairly simplistic

on my part i'm not a complicated thinker no i totally agree and it's it's especially salient looking at what's happening to young people right now right like kids are having fewer adventures basically they're having less sex they're not experimenting with drugs they don't even want to get their driver's licenses which i find like kind of alarming and i think part of it has got to be that you know their futures are looking more and more uncertain that you know their parents really want to protect them and just like train them to be as productive as possible at all times sure and they and they themselves have to worry will i have health insurance and a pension will i have a place to live well can i make enough money to have a a decent life have adequacy

these are when these are worries then you're going to see political change i think but to um i i i feel like um how can i say it the when the situation is as bad as it is now then there should be a push and i'm seeing the push this is why you get the young people declaring that they're socialist there's a rebellion against the the trap that they see themselves in and there are other things i know the other thing i wanted to mention is the is the internet and screens that you all are the first generation to have grown up with screens and it's easy especially with the minds of young men to get trapped into the screens as an alternative reality and it's easier than a real reality and you get a whole bunch of dopamine rewards speaking of drugs for small accomplishments

in the games that you play in the interactions that you have and in short it's a virtual reality already that is replacing real reality in a bad way and so some of these like i don't need a driver's license i don't need to go outdoors i still have a full life because i have world of warcraft or whatever something newer than that i'm sure this is yeah yeah i'm going to resist the urge to call shawn out right now for all the nights he's ignored me while playing fortnight yeah well let's see this is a category error and what i want to suggest is there you're on brooklyn and think well i'm in a city what can i do about it you can just walk down to the east river and sit there underneath in dumbo underneath the brooklyn bridge and just watch the river flow by

and you will have had a better gaming experience than anything you can do online and we are living in a simulation from your mouth to god's ears though yeah but um i realized that but on the other hand as a as a you know an aging public intellectual and and also an aging hippie if i can call out to the younger generation that anything you do outdoors including like throwing pebbles at a bottle on a on a post is like a way better video game than any video game ever invented has more pixels it has more texture it has better problems it has better dopamine results that's sitting down across from someone and brewing up some coffee and drinking tea and having a face-to-face conversation is just way better than anything that can be done on a screen well i realized that this is a little

bit um swimming upstream in the current culture and i i mean i have i have two sons who are young men who just laugh at me when i say things like this but i'm convinced that it's true and also i point to a historical example in london when telephones were first introduced into common around the turn of the century say 1904 everybody spent two or three hours in the day talking on the telephone to somebody across town because it was so remarkable that they could do so rather than crossing town or talking to somebody in the same room with them i feel we're in that moment with the internet and a time's gonna come when a lot of people are gonna unhook unplug kill their facebook account and walk outdoors and and go to the local park or go to the local coffee shop and sit there looking

at somebody's actual living face and realizing they're having more fun i'm more dope i think will as somebody who would never be uh described as extremely online uh had a question i mean this is uh uh going more back to the uh the the fun uh sex and drug stuff but or perhaps yeah something that you don't necessarily have to swim as hard upstream in our cultures particularly among young people um another theme in your books uh in addition to imagining a post capitalist economy or or society uh you definitely also imagine a post gender society and i'm speaking specifically in 2312 uh the two main characters of the book and the book kind of is a love story between them or both sort of uh a gender i don't know quite like the main character swan they're capable of i think

if i'm remembering this right both male and female sexual reproduction but you also talk about sort of post nuclear family and different sort of ways of raising children that are outside of this this current paradigm which again i think more and more young people like we learn more and more about this every day and i was just you know again like how is that process of uh that imaginative process work or like you know what are you drawing from and where do you see yeah what's with all this cultural marxism what's with all this yeah let's fight gender it's um it's really don't you know the working class is socially reactionary come on well i would i don't know about that anymore i'm not sure there's any working class anymore that isn't in china and they've got their own problems

but for us i'm basically reflecting san francisco um that's the capital of california and that is a very much of a gender fluid place and i love it i love i i adore san francisco it's really the capital of my heart i go down there i essentially i'm a guy that lives in the provinces of san francisco and i drive down there it takes about an hour and a half i get there and i'm having a blast and then i come back to my boring little university town and and it's exceptionally boring and san francisco is exceptionally exciting and i have friends there who've taught me all kinds of things uh trans friends gay friends whatever also just straight friends who are a part of that community and uh one young person and i i can't even remember their gender gender identity which

could be anything said to me once well it's all skin stan it's all skin and i that was like a little uh a switch turning on in my mind this is when i was doing 2312 i thought well yeah that's true i mean what's the big deal and of course there are the social rules the the of course there's patriarchy and and there's um there's all kinds of cultural determinants but when you get down to bodies and individuals well it's all skin so you know as an aging straight male this was like a mind boggler but i did have one experience that was transformative i brought up my two boys as the mr mom figure as the daily work of taking care of infants and toddlers because my wife is a chemist she worked you know 12 hours a day and from the very moment our first kid was 10 weeks old

i was the the cultural role of mom of of a 1950s housewife except of course i was writing these novels during nap time well i spent a lot of time with women it was women doing that work and in fact women still do all the work uh the work of social reproduction um taking care of infants and toddlers teaching young people in schools nursing the sick and taking care of the dying these are all 90 percent women's work occupations and they're poorly paid when they're paid at all sometimes they're unpaid and social reproduction is the is the real work that capitalism is a parasite on so uh paying attention to all that stuff when i was hanging out because sometimes there would be groups of 20 moms or au pair young women and their kids their their infant toddlers and me the

and that is not a wonderful harem like oh my god i've got all these women around me that's actually uncomfortable and i knew i was screwing up the discourse in that room by being there type of uh experience it was you wrote um specifically about that in your in the capital series right when you're talking about um being in the gym jimboree or whatever it was yes yes that was very autobiographical okay but yeah in uh in 2312 you described like uh a kind of crash model for uh childbearing and and instead of kind of sort of a communal family uh group yes what are the like sort of genesis for that idea come from oh there's a lot of it in the mars books too yeah yeah that's right the idea zygote the one of the secret yeah bases yeah and like it reminds me

of a lot of stuff i've read by uh alexandra colin tie claire zekin and other uh soviet era thinkers because they were really wrestling with this idea because they knew right that one thing keeping us from having gender equality was the work of social reproduction which was so much more often being done by women but then then there were people who kind of bent the stick too far in the other direction who were like well you know parents are just incubators they shouldn't have any contact with their kids at all they're like too emotional to like handle such an important task and that seems kind of unhuman to me too and i feel like you kind of come down in the middle where like you know what maybe it should be a personal choice how much

or how little involvement you have in the work of social reproduction or raising your kids or like um maybe there should be a balance between um you know the familial biological bonds or whatever and the community yeah i would like that balance i would go with what jamie just said about a balance between because you can go too far both ways the the 1950s nuclear households suburban castle the two parents two kids is um bad it's bad for you um it's normed in america but it was it's not historically normal usually you'd have a big old house with three or four generations kind of banging around in there so there's the big house model there's the village model and there's the paleolithic um pack model i called it the mini tribe of uh four or five

families and multiple generations and then of course you still have your parents the biologically and i am pretty confident that that will persist despite all the gender fluidity in terms of making babies um the bulk of them when you don't have technological help involved etc etc it's going to be one man one woman a zygote and on it comes to be a baby so there's parents and who knows what the gender identity of this man woman i've used them with quotes around them but on the other hand there's biology going on here then you got kids but they could be brought up by a group with the acknowledgement of their parents and their parents basically getting help that balance i think is is the best way again i was lucky when my wife and i moved out back to davis where we had met

and we had been in washington dc which was um as greener shows poor charlie's experiences nuclear isolation going crazy with a kid um doing your best and actually it's a lovely bonding experience to be spending every day with an infant toddler it's one of the most beautiful human experiences of all i would you don't want to miss out on that on the other hand when we moved back to davis we moved into village homes which is a kind of a hippie version of suburbia tried to imitate the english village model uh my my little front yard is a courtyard but mainly there's no fences here it's all agricultural uh the landscaping i've got my garden plot and i've got a preschool center that i took my kids to where i they met all their friends and then

their parents became my friends and so uh the what what that taught me was that design and urban design and and what you might call civic design it can shape social relations intensively because i have lived a kind of english village life of the year 1600 simply because of the way they designed this particular utopian i mean and the best friends in my life are the are the parents of my kids friends and my my kids and their friends aren't even friends anymore but i'm totally friends with their parents still because we still live here so i've lived i've seen one version of the balance and the crash model i think is a good name for it uh you can't go too far the other way because then you get to the boarding school model which is it's actually a syndrome in in british

psychological pathology you know if you got sent away to a boarding school when you were six years old or nine years old like so many middle-class brits did you end up crazy um or are you like the british ruling class we're all you know they're all their boarding schools it's like a lot of buggering you're ritually abuse so you learn to you learn that teaches you to do it to other people like that's how you view other people is just you know sadistically basically yes yes and i have several friends of british friends who went through this system and they just shake their heads and say that's definitely not the right way right so what are you going to do except try to try to find the balance between us as social primates that have a really deep i i believe

that culture i believe in sociobiology i'm just saying that as sociobiology actually leads you to leftism this is something i would suggest to all young leftists that like you were saying that um cryptocurrency looks like a right-wing libertarian thing and it sort of does when it's bitcoin and uh sociobiology was immediately tagged as being a right-wing right makes might makes right type you know wilson yeah oh yeah i've heard a lot of people be very uh highly suspicious of anything to do with sociobiology just because it's been used for you know really reactionary purposes in the past yes but i would say this that they're mistaking it for social Darwinism and it's not that il wilson is great i love him and his students sarah hurdy wrote a book

called mother nature that um puts the feminist slant on sociobiology in a way that il wilson would thoroughly approve the the primates since we are a primate the primates that were most closely related to some of them are gangsters like chimps some of them are hippies like bonobos um there's no uh determinism there's no biological determinism all sociobiology is trying to do is say well let's see what we can learn from the fact that we are animals no matter what our brains and our internet screens tell us yeah totally we're primates we contain the savannah yeah sidebar sorry well i just want to i just want to continue to say that if you follow that lesson very far it leads you to a good life you begin to think i got to spend more time outdoors i should really walk a little

bit every day i should maybe try dancing having a lot of sex throwing rocks at things um you know altering my consciousness on a regular but controlled basis i all these things are payly lifting and good for you yeah that is the mindset swan the main character in 2312 one of my favorite little conceits in that book is that uh there is even some question about whether she remains uh or i should say they remain uh human because as part of some ritual or just party she ingests uh an alien hallucinogenic alien bacteria that continues yeah sort of multiply inside them as kind of the internal flora of their body yeah i'd like to i was a head of the curve i was a head of the curve on this gut microbiome and how much the my i because in 2011 when i was writing this stuff

uh that wasn't quite as uh known as it is now it's funny how quickly things have changed and we may indeed find alien bacteria on enceladus or on europa now eating it would be a bold move that's all i can say but swan is a bold person well i gotta read that one um the scene in the end of blue mars uh you know spoiler alert when they all take uh sax's memory pill treatment uh really reminds me of descriptions i've heard of what it's like to trip on ibogaine uh are you familiar with ibogaine or ibogaine or iboga i've only i've only heard of it i've never tried it and i'm i'm like too old to try new drugs so they have to confess to you but um when i was young the what i'm really loving this rehabilitation of psychedelics because for about 40 years i've

just felt embarrassed at the stupidities of my youth and now it's turning out that it wasn't so stupid after all except that we didn't actually know what we were taking but if we were taking what we thought we were taking psychedelics are now being seen to be a very powerful and profound changer of consciousness not just while you're tripping and in fact that's almost the not the most important part but afterwards somehow absolutely the michael paulin book has been a revelation and um it's brought all that stuff back onto the table and then again for people in their 20s or in their 30s who are still uh young and semi-immortal and can stand the psychic shock of an event that big um i think it's good for you i learned i've learned some important things

i gotta say about myself and the world from taking psychedelics so i co-signed that same ibogaine was famously the drug that uh hunter s thompson uh completely made up that democratic presidential candidate ed muskie was on and attributed to his bizarre behavior but he made that out of old cloth but actually got that involved in this 1972 presidential election oh my god well thompson wow the road of excess leads to wisdom he was a very excessive guy i was never that excessive i have to say it was all for me rather um uh mountain oriented a sort of seara uh seara and surfing oriented i was very much of a nature hippie and um yeah i'd very much recommend uh if you're gonna do them combining psychedelics with the outdoors in some sort of

calm controlled way are you saying you shouldn't take psychedelics and go see hillary clinton speak at a technocratic health festival jimmy you and i can do that i'm just saying for the kids at home yeah don't try this at home this is this is the thing that we did to ourselves because we're 10th level trippers but you came out the other side did you end up a jelly of laughter on the floor because that would be the best uh trip i was laughing but mainly i would just underscore laughing and crying just it mainly underscored for me how fucking boring everything is how much you didn't want to be watching hillary clinton yeah i didn't match compared to one of those like hollow to bet and bell like perfect nothingness when we when we were hearing tom pares speak oh my god

speaking of spirituality yeah to continue to continue on this um especially in the mars books in the mars trilogy um you riff on something that i think is kind of bedeviled um the left or socialists or communists um through the ages or at least through the centuries which is what is the role of um spirituality you know um if we are these these primates uh the spiritual experience seems to be something that's somewhat universal uh for folks but yet there's been a lot of leftists who've taken a very hard line against uh religion in the mars book uh hiroko comes up with an entire religious system essentially based around uh mars and this and the spread of life so how do you envision uh for yourself you know spiritual spirituality fitting into some sort of post

capitalist society good question if i've revert to a kind of a existentialist stance that um the universe exists humanity came to being by accident um there is no meaning to anything so that if you take that as the base situation then you have to make up your own meaning it's a it's a human creative act to make up meaning and so a religio from the latin is to bind together so you can the meaning comes from solidarity with other people and trying to reduce suffering and so i get led towards buddhism as a good um binding together but then there's also just this kind of cosmic consciousness of why are what is consciousness how what is this universe a big a gigantic why kind of shouted in your face um with no no obvious answer but but um

it is kind of amazing miraculous and and mystical that we're here at all uh having our thoughts so it's a combination of those things that i think will never go away i the brain scientists are finding you know the religious center of the brain is in the temporal lobe near the near the site of hypergraphia and epilepsy and babbling it's kind of funny um the the part of your brain that trips on that when you get these moments of cosmic consciousness or of solidarity with all people are one kind of thing or all living creatures are one which is a better this kind of biofilia biosphere consciousness of the biosphere being a single earthly body it's it's it's quite beautiful and um if it strikes you as as real enough to believe in or affirm then that becomes the

meaning so that never goes away and i and all the political work then is to clear the decks so that you don't have the unnatural suffering and the the the various human badnesses of greed and violence that those get cleared away by an organization of society so that you can just feel better the the deeper meanings the the cosmic meanings so i think that's how it works and i keep trying to write that out i i the lessons to me from gary snider are crucial and and my life in the sierra is my life as a kind of a california hippie buddhist or they they mean a lot to me well i have to say that um for the listeners out there who have never read a kim stanley robinson book now is the time to go to your nearest bookseller

in person not go on amazon.com in order from a screen but actually walk down to a bookstore and interact with human beings and uh pick up one of uh stands excellent works um it's it's really helpful i think in like at least for me i think for a lot of people who maybe are new to these kinds of ideas and maybe don't want to like spend hours reading some dense theoretical text like i love science fiction because it's it's fun to read uh the good the good stuff it's very human and it helps you think through these things and wrap your mind around them in a really really cool and unique way that i don't think you can get from anything else uh yeah i mean i mean for me uh science fiction is great because it's sort of like ideology it's

it's a story we tell ourselves about the future and the the stories we tell about the future tells us you know uh what you know what we really believe and what we what we want for ourselves and uh you know stan your your works have been hugely influential on me and uh along with a you know many other great uh science fiction authors or just fiction in general i think teaches us so much about politics and ourselves really and i can imagine living without it well thank you for that i am a patriot of science fiction as a as a way of thinking and it's kind of my hometown uh it's a it's a small community it's scattered all over the earth but if you when we gather all in one place there's only just a few to several thousand of us and uh i love that hometown uh although i

think that everybody in that hometown would hope to also exist in the big city of the of the larger world but yeah science fiction is a beautiful a way of a lens to put on to current life it's most especially for savvy political people um it's an easily transcodeable so you read a science fiction text and you can tag the year it was written you can tag the political angle of the writer there it's a kind of game that you can play that is not a very hard game because it's inevitable that the writer is going to reveal aspects of their personality big aspects of their politics and also the time that they're writing it in you can't escape that just by pretending to be futuristic um you can make efforts to be mind boggling by by uh like i did in 2312 and that's

a kind of a a craft trick but you can never really escape the moment that you're writing in so um it's it's i would agree with uh jayme the heavy texts i read them i try to strip mine them and read them as fast as i can it's not that much fun but when i read a novel boy i am immersed in some other reality and i'm enjoying it even as i'm analyzing it it's just like telepathy or time travel combined into one package it's it's a it's my favorite thing in a way literature is my religion and then the reason i'm so involved in politics is that i think that that political engagement makes better literature so my ultimate allegiance is to is to literature itself as a meaning system so i'm glad that you guys are reading it i'm glad i very much appreciate it sean jayme will

it's been it's been a big pleasure i i hope you'll censor this so that i haven't completely blown my cover but i actually feel like my complete works have blown my cover so completely there's nothing i can say that will be shocking at this point all the cards are on the table thank you so much it's been a real pleasure speaking with one of our our literary heroes so your cards are on the table but they're safe with us thank you so much yeah pleasure all right stan thanks a lot ah it does not feel it does not die space is not good

ah the secret lies without tomorrow in each of us is ahead in sorrow but those are the ones through the night beyond the realms of ancient life is this the reason you