Guerrilla History - Rev Left Radio 5 Year Retrospective

Episode Date: April 15, 2022

This bonus episode turns the focus onto Breht as we celebrate and take a look back for the 5 year anniversary of the Revolutionary Left Radio family of shows.  Why is a history podcast putting out an episode like this?  Tune in and find out, we think you will enjoy the conversation!  Guerrilla History- Intelligence Briefings will be roughly a twice monthly series of shorter, more informal discussions between the hosts about topics of their choice.  Patrons at the Comrade tier and above will have access to all Intelligence Briefings. Your hosts are immunobiologist Henry Hakamaki, Professor Adnan Husain, historian and Director of the School of Religion at Queens University, and Revolutionary Left Radio's Breht O'Shea. Follow us on social media!  Our podcast can be found on twitter @guerrilla_pod.  Your contributions make the show possible to continue and succeed!  Please encourage your comrades to join us, which will help our show grow. To follow the hosts, Henry can be found on twitter @huck1995, and also has a patreon to help support himself through the pandemic where he breaks down science and public health research and news at https://www.patreon.com/huck1995.  Adnan can be followed on twitter at @adnanahusain, and also runs The Majlis Podcast, which can be found at https://anchor.fm/the-majlis and the Muslim Societies-Global Perspectives group at Queens University, https://www.facebook.com/MSGPQU/.   Breht is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, which can be followed on twitter @RevLeftRadio cohost of The Red Menace Podcast, which can be followed on twitter at @Red_Menace_Pod.  You can find and support these shows by visiting https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/. Thanks to Ryan Hakamaki, who designed and created the podcast's artwork, and Kevin MacLeod, who creates royalty-free music.

You don't remember Dinn-Vin-Vin? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to guerrilla history. the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons

of history to analyze the present. I'm your host, Henry Huckimacki, joined by my co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing? Long time no C. Hi, Henry. Good to be back with you. I think we recorded pretty recently, though. Yeah, we recorded just yesterday, but, you know, it was a long gap before that. So I was feeling, I was missing you quite badly. So even though it's twice in two days, I'm very happy about this. Same. And also, we're joined by the man of the hour as you will see the audience. Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett.

Now, it has been a while since I have seen you. And I'm very, very happy to see you again. Yeah, same. Both of you, I think, has been a while for whatever reason. There's been a little gap in the work that we've done. We had a lot of back catalogs and stuff. So, yeah, it's been a while. It's glad to get back, see both of your beautiful faces and get back in the flow of things. Yeah, absolutely. I know, things have been very crazy for all of us. So it's really nice that we had the opportunity to all sit down together right now again. So the reason I called to the Man of the Hour Brett is because this episode is going to be very, very different than anything else that we've done before.

It's going to be a five year of Rev Left anniversary, like retrospective episode. And listeners might be thinking to themselves, why is this history podcast? talking about another podcast. But I think that there's a few reasons that we can talk about this, besides the obvious point that Brett is one of the co-hosts of the show. I think that Rev Left is and has been for the past five years, really a tremendous resource for people on the Left that have been wanting to get this kind of discussion,

both in terms of theory, in terms of current movements, as well as history. Rev. Left does and has covered a lot of history in its five years span of time, even well before guerrilla history was even a thought in the minds of us three. So Rev Left really was kind of like the forefather of this show in terms of looking at history from a proletarian perspective. And I think also that Rev Left has really cultivated a following of people on the genuine true left that we really do need these kind of linkages between people from different tendencies on the left in a way that Rev Left has really pulled people together

in. And I think that as time goes on, we may start to realize that these sorts of connections that your show has put together actually may cause historical change. Now, I'm not saying that the podcast itself is, you know, a history maker, but you never know what sorts of connections are created because of people that have common interests that listen to the show. And I know that there is a tremendous following of Rev Left. So I really am appreciative of you putting together the show and doing all of that for this period of time. And I'm looking forward to a lot more in the future from you as well. So that's just kind of my opening thoughts of why we decided to do this.

And yeah, I think that the way that I'm going to open it now is just by asking you, Brett, how did Rev Left come about? Like the show started around five years ago, but obviously before that period of time where you actually started the show, there had been conversations, there had been thoughts in your head about doing a media project like this for this sort of audience. So can you tell us a little bit about how that progenitor thoughts of Rev Left came about? Sure, yeah. First things first, to even go further back from the actual genesis of the show itself is my interest longstanding in the audio medium,

specifically in talk radio. So growing up, me and my dad were close. he lived in Montana. We'd have many times where we'd be in the vehicle for 12, 13 hours at a time. And he was a absurdly into right wing talk media. So I remember like Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh. And my dad is not a, you know, psycho right wing nut or anything like that, not a Qaeda guy or anything. But, you know, he came to his own financially in the in the 90s, was sort of a child of the Reagan era and, you know, internalized a lot of those values and that translated to, into to him is being like a pretty much a fiscal conservative.

He was never a social conservative, hadn't had no religion, wasn't atheist, all that. But, you know, his whole focus was economics, economic conservatism, blah, blah, blah. But the point is, I grew up listening to that stuff. And when I first started getting some semblance of a political imagination, I was working at a golf course as a maintenance guy and like a 15, 16 year old. And I would listen all day because I had these little headsets you wear on lawnmowers and stuff that would tune into AM radio frequencies. So I would continue to listen to AM talk radio. And I don't know why I was into it because it wasn't like I ever agreed to it or agreed with it. And as my political consciousness started blooming, I listened to it, but it was always in a sort of controversial way or like a confrontational way.

Like I know these people are wrong, but why are they wrong? You know, why are they wrong? What do I actually believe, et cetera, et cetera. And so that kind of started not only an interest in politics, but was like underground or sort of acted as the foundation for. my interest in perhaps doing a podcast. And of course, when podcast came out, I was an early adopter. At that time, I was delivering pizzas late teens, early 20s, and I had a lot of time in my vehicle. Obviously, I never liked FM radio or anything like that. AM radio was incredibly limited. I heard all the arguments they had. And when podcasts came out, it was like awesome. So I jumped

on that. And I was a very early adopter before most people even knew what podcast was. Like I I remember telling people I like this or that podcast and people are like a podcast. What is that? And so that that re-entrenched my love of at least the medium, right? And so then, you know, goes on. I get older. My politics are developing in various ways. And around the election of Trump and it was actually between when he won the election

and before he got inaugurated, you know, it was a chaotic time in the U.S., especially for people on the left. What is happening? where is this going after eight years of Obama. And with the Trump campaign and his eventual victory was also this resurgence of like explicit fascism. You know, people felt a lot more comfortable being outright fascist in a way that I've never experienced in America since I was born in the late 80s. It just seemed like a shift was happening and in the opposite direction of my politics. And so, you know, in those early heady days, we got together with some local people.

there were some Nazis and fascists rising in our in our local area and part of our thing was like we have to organize we have to fight back against at least this fascist presence if not the broader Trump paradigm and project whatever that may turn out to be so in those early days of organizing it was really centered around like local anti-fascism efforts but then you know broader discussions of politics would come up everybody involved is on the left far left you know anarchist Marxists probably some social Democrats mixed in there as well. And so those conversations were coming up and generating questions about where the organization goes from here. And so in that sort of in that sort of time and in that environment, one of the ideas is like, well, one thing very lacking is political education. Like, people don't know why Trump came about. They think it's some like, you know, some anathema weird aberration in American history that somebody like Trump could rise to power. And it was very clear to me and others, no, Trump is like the perfect representation of America. He is more American than, you know, anything else. And his rise to power has historical precedent and reason and causes.

And so, you know, we like, okay, let's, let's do media. Let's do something that can be politically educational for the local activist milieu. That was the original horizon of what we wanted to do. My friend Dave was already into music. We had been making music together. So he had all the recording equipment, the software, the computer, the know-how. And I, you know, kind of a good talker, like when we were doing protests and stuff, people would just begin defaulting to me as the media guy. So whenever anybody wanted to talk, it was me because I was quick on my feet and could speak extemporaneously. And so all those sort of things converged into like making the show. And we had some conversations and we launched it with very, you know, like I said,

local horizons and then just very quickly like you know very quickly in the in the first handful of episodes it became clear that this was breaking the bounds of that presumed horizon and was already a national audience and then you know you can look in the the data sets of podcast hosting sites and you can see actually there's an international audience obviously the anglos english speaking world was the bulk of the audience but you know you could get random you know all over the world you can see a country and see how many people listen to this stuff so kind of kind of blew me away. And that's how it started. And then, you know, since that, I've just kind of been writing, writing that wave a few years into it. I realized there was a lot of support. I was

incredibly depressed about my retail job that I was working at the time. I truly soul crushing stuff. And I just was revolting against it. I was feeling at the time that I was not living up to my potential. I had this degree in philosophy. I was doing nothing with. I had all these ideas. I've read all these books. People around me sort of respected my. my burgeoning intellect, but like, I wasn't doing anything with it. I was wasting it sitting in front of a computer at a fucking retail job. And that sucked. And so out of that desperation, I was like, I got to, you know, maybe there's something.

This is like a year or two, two years into Rev left. There's obviously an audience here. How big is it really? Could it be possible that it could support me? And I could quit my job. And at the time, it wasn't even anywhere close, Patreon wise or anything. Like, nothing even close to that. But I was like, if I can get a $10,000.

loan, I can quit my job, pay my bills for four to five months, and put everything I have into seeing if this thing has any potential. That's a big risk, because if it doesn't, if nobody shows up, I'm 10K in the hole and I'm not a never been a rich person, as you can tell from the jobs I've mentioned having. So, I mean, I'm always the sort of guy that for most of my life, the last week of a month, I have like $20 left, you know, like that was the norm. And how do I get gas? You know, I'd break down, like my car would run out of gas on the way to deliveries and I'd have to have friends come and throw some gas in my tank so I can get to the next delivery and maybe get a tip that I could then put back in the gas thing. So I was very, so I was, I was nervous, but I was like, anything's better than this, took out the 10K loan, announced it, and then the support flooded in. Really amazing amounts of support.

And right as that 10K was fading out, the support had matched it. And so I was able to continue paying my bills and keep at this thing. And that eventually spawned at first a separate show called the guillotine, which I did with an anarchist from Florida. And then when that fell apart, I started Red Menace and then eventually guerrilla history. So it's really been a process of growth and expansion since then. Yeah, that's awesome. Let me just ask one quick follow up before I let Adnan hop in, which is you mentioned when you first started, you were expecting that it would have a very limited scope. and it was mostly aimed for political education.

So what specifically were you trying to get out of this podcast when you first started it? Like you knew that there was going to be a limited scope, which, you know, did not end up being the case. But in your mind, you knew that there was going to be a limited scope in terms of the reach of the podcast. And you were aiming for political education. But political education to what end specifically? This is something that I've always been curious about when starting a media project. Like, what are you really trying to get out of it? Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, in the early days, again, the horizons were so limited. And there was a burgeoning milieu of different organizations. So, like, in this time, it's not just our organization popping up. Lots of people are looking, trying to get involved. What's happening? You know, the protests were wild. And then people from the protests were being funneled into a general assembly that we had set up.

So, like, after a big protest, we would just have people from the community come to, like, the local library and discuss things. And you can tell, like, different groups were burgeoning, et cetera. So the goal at first was like, let's just talk. talk about like basic political history, basic political concepts on the left, especially in a media environment and a cultural environment that has been rabidly anti-communist for so many years, we knew like with amongst ourselves, like this is what capitalism does, right? It produces these sorts of results and the underlying economic uncertainty and precarity

of the American people was a huge part in why Trump rose to power in the first place, et cetera, et cetera. So and then the fascism thing as well because, you know, so much of that early organizing was focused on fighting back against local, you know, fascist formations that were like, we need to understand the history of fascism. You know, you ask a random person, what is fascism? What is anti-fascism? Especially at that time, people didn't even know. Like, this is before people knew what Antifa meant. Like, I remember the first few times people, like, we were already considered ourselves Antifa at the time. And like MSNBC and Fox News and CNN would be like, there's a new group, anti-Fa, you know, they couldn't even pronounce it right. It's like, it's

amazing how much has shifted in just a handful of years. But yeah, the basic premise and the basic goal was just to help equip particularly local, maybe regional organizations involved in this fight against fascism and for, you know, some socialist politics, basic intellectual ammunition for them to understand their own ideology and then to better turn around and help communicate to their organizations and their communities, some of these ideas, and just kind of get the ball rolling in that direction knowing full well that the corporate media will never carve out any space for voices and narratives like that so i mean the goal it wasn't like a concrete like we had this very specific goal in this timeline it was just like let's just bring some education some basic facts

some interesting interviews some history of fascism and try to inform these emerging left movements a little bit more and make them more capable of you know pursuing their goals whatever they may be so yeah it was kind of it was more vague but it was kind of in that direction Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, I came to learn about to show a couple of years ago, and so I've started going back and looking at some earlier episodes to catch up because there's so much in the catalog that's really fantastic. And I see that that early kind of local organizing was a big factor in the early episodes and the basis for it. And so I was wondering a little bit how you saw. the development of the show, how it has changed, what kinds of other sorts of dimensions you've brought in and observations that you might have about how that has reflected your own political development ongoing over the course of the five years. And perhaps, I guess, maybe one question that specific question I've had is observing that there are a lot of episodes about anarchism

and anarchists. And I'm guessing from what you just mentioned, that perhaps that's because it is another major model from this era of organizing on the left and a way of engaging in activism. So thinking about, you know, what is the basis for it and what, what are the implications of it would be something that would be useful. So anyway, that's just a specific question within that kind of broader query for you. Yeah. So like initially, a lot of this stuff and, you know, the show has always been guided by my genuine curiosity. So like, I never came to the show being like, I know exactly what I believe. I'm on this exact side of the left wing political spectrum.

And my job is to prove why I am right and these other segments are wrong, et cetera. It was never like that. I still had a lot to learn as well. And I've always been a very curious person ever since I was a kid. And so I knew right away that just with my personality is like, is not a, I'm not a dogmatic, rigid, angry, confrontational human being first and foremost. And so I was never had a lot of interest in being like, all right, you know, drawing the hard lines between different people on the left and declaring them my enemies.

And I was in an organization with a lot of different left wing people and they were fucking close, good friends and comrades in mine that I love deeply and still due to this day. And so that also was like, because I came out of organizing, it was never like an abstract thing first. Like, you know, these are ideas and I'm a Marxist and they're an anarchist and fuck them. It was never like that. It was like, I'm getting into this organizing because I know my basic values. of egalitarianism and you know social justice and anti-fascism and i'm talking to a Maoist in my organization i'm talking to an anarchist in my organization and i is that spirit that i kind of wanted to bring onto the show especially because the left if you spend any time on the left you know

it's a very fractious sectarian dogmatic um environment that can be very off putting to a lot of people who are like i'm just here to learn i'm not here to like pick a side in this fucking insane war you've created for yourselves and so that was always my personality my perspective and my approach, and that lent itself to be me genuinely wanting to understand the anarchist perspective, the Marxist perspective, the anarcho-primitivist perspective, the Trotskyist perspective, right? I genuinely was learning along with my guest, and that was always kind of the point, and still is. I've never presented myself as an expert, never presented myself as somebody who has the answers, never presented myself as somebody who is right, you know? It's like, I have some

ideas. They're developing and evolving like everybody else's. I have certain influences like everybody else, but I'm genuinely trying to create an environment where people across the left can come and learn something. And even if, like, you don't agree with this sect or this person at all, and even if you walk away from a very in-depth conversation doubling down on your dislike of that sect or that, you know, whatever, the fact is you'll still understand it better. And if you understand other positions, you understand your own position better. So, you know, if you want to be a really good Marxist, you've got to understand anarchist theory and history, liberal theory and history, fascist theory and history. And that is to our advantage that we understand that.

So bringing on those people, having them, you know, in a friendly environment, nobody's going to get attacked, nobody's going to get called out. I'm giving you plenty of time to talk. I'm not here to I'm not a journalist. I'm not trying to hold you accountable. I just genuinely want to have a discussion, get these ideas out and see what they can do, what people find useful in them. And I was the host as well as another audience member in that sense because I wanted to learn as well. And yeah, a lot of it was like, you know, I have a question about anarchism and I have this show now. So I can have on an anarchist and I can ask that question specifically, maybe to two or three different anarchists over several episodes and see what their takes are. And we did do that.

My, yeah, I don't know if political evolution, maybe we can, I don't know, did you ask about that? Did I miss anything on none? Yeah, no, sure. But you could also go on about how, you know, the show has paralleled or expressed your own, you know, political development and evolution, you know, over five years. That would be interesting to know. And especially since, as you mentioned, that the whole purpose of the show was to grow, to learn, to engage, you didn't come at it from, this is my position. And, you know, now we're just going to look at different topics. You were doing it as unfolding of dialectical engagement with the ideas and the, you know,

the movement. So that would be really interesting to hear a little bit more about too. Yeah. So yeah. So my political evolution, specifically with the show, um, I probably follows a relatively normal trajectory in that like before the show, I had for a long time, like I never had a libertarian phase, never had a reaction phase. Um, my, my forewain to politics, my first blossoming of political consciousness was,

as I said earlier in confrontation with right wing conservative media talking heads. And so, you know, I started off not just as a liberal, but as a progressive. As a young person, I was immediately a progressive person from the very first, you know, inklings of my political autonomy and maturity. And then as time went on, especially during the Obama administration, especially post-2008 economic collapse, I was 19 when the economy collapsed. So I'm just coming out of, you know, high school, the college age. I had not gotten to college yet at that point. But, you know, I'm basically entering the workforce. I was working at a

gas station at the time. And it was just, it was, it was something that I knew was going to shape like the next several years of my entire generation's life. And so seeing the response to that, where banks were bailed out, where big corporations were bailed out, and people were left to lose their homes left and right. And then the Occupy movement that came out of that, I was a part of that as well, marching here in Omaha with the Occupy movement as a young person. And so I had a lot of hope in the early Obama years. Like, okay, after the Bush years, Obama's here. Maybe we are. Maybe America's, you know, starting a new path, moving in a new direction. I was very hopeful. I had a daughter when I was 19. So I remember sitting in the like doctor's room as we're doing a

checkup, you know, third trimester checkup and seeing Obama's inauguration speech. And like I remember cutting out the newspaper. Like my daughter's being born after these Bush years and these fucking wars. Obama's coming in. He said he's going to end these wars. He's going to talk about equality, all this stuff. Like, I'm very hopeful. And my daughter's going to have a different society, you know. So that was my like Bernie moment. Everybody talks about like, yeah, I was a Bernie bro. And then that's what radicalized me. Obama radicalized me. And his failures radicalized me. And so at the end of the Obama administration, I was already calling myself a socialist. I had signed up for the DSA, actually. And this is before the big Bernie.

campaign. So this is before DSA was like known on known. It was still a small obscure fringe group, but I had joined it. I was a card carrying member. It didn't really organize a lot, but I was just trying to find something. It's like, okay, if liberalism and progressivism is this, I'm further to the left than that. Well, what's further to the left? I don't know. Social democracy, democratic socialism. And so I moved in that direction, kept reading books, kept reading books, still felt a little more militant, edgy side of my politics, you know, more revolutionary than this. And that pushed me in the direction of anarchism.

So I went from, you know, progressive to social democrat to democratic socialist to anarchism. And this is like, these aren't hard breaks, you know, these are like influences melding into the next phase, melding into the next phase. But even when I was calling myself an anarchist and this is before Rev left, it still didn't sit right with me. like there were so many questions I had about anarchism that nobody answered and I didn't perhaps the answers were out there but you know I felt there was something lacking I didn't

feel fully comfortable calling myself an anarchist even as I was doing it because I just knew like there's something here that is not sitting right with me it doesn't make sense fully etc so then isn't that also kind of the era of occupy and where there was a lot of like post WTO this was kind of like you know the trajectory if you're really a dissident you know again against neoliberal capitalism, you know, that was what was available at the time in terms of an ongoing activist movement, right? Absolutely. It was dominated by my anarchist. And, you know, the anti-communism had obviously, and the Reagan era had decimated the Marxist left. And so I was still very much victim to that anti-communist propaganda. Like, well, yeah, like Stalin and Mali, those are horrible dictators and stuff. So I don't even want to call myself a Marxist because I definitely don't support that.

well anarchism is revolutionary and it's bottom up and it's super democratic and that's what i want you know so that that was sort of my my naivete coming through but yeah so so that that happened and then i started reading more and started chipping away at the fear the anti-communism right um and i remember a book why marks was right by terry eagleton uh that i read and um at that point i was calling myself an anarchist still i read that text and it was right around the time when we started to have left. It must have been right before because it was that text. When I put that book down, I said, okay, I'm not scared to call myself a Marxist anymore. I still don't want to be an authoritarian. So I called myself a libertarian Marxist, you know, like an anarchist infused

Marxism. Because I clearly saw. And I had a long running interest in Marx himself and his critique of capitalism. And I always saw that as like, you know, of course, if you're an anarchist or anything, you basically take that on board. But it's all the stuff that happened after that. you know that in the name of Marxism that I wanted to separate myself from and that book really helped break yeah yeah that that book helped break down that at least that first door of like okay I can say that I'm in the Marxist tradition but I'm a libertarian Marxist and that's when I started the show so if you go back to those early shows you will you'll not hear me call myself an anarchist but you will hear me say libertarian Marxist and I think I even in an episode like in defense

of libertarian Marxism which is still rooted in my political confusion and a lot of anti-communist propaganda and it just felt more right than anarchism because the Marxism seemed more rigorous, more all-encompassing, more historically informed. And, you know, the materialist conception of history made a lot of sense, filled in a lot of the blanks that anarchism either doesn't address or, in my personal opinion, doesn't address sufficiently. And then so after that, you know, I'm continually reaching out to different trajectories or, I mean, you know, different sex, if you will, like the Trotskyist and anarchist and all of this. And eventually I have on a Marxist-Leninist episode.

You know, if you're in those, if you're in left-wing groups online and stuff, especially if you're saying you're libertarian Marxist or an anarchist, tank-y-this, tank-y-that. These are the bad guys. These are authoritarians. They're evils, red-brown, they're red fash, etc. Well, I'm like, okay, well, I'm still going to have them on because I want to talk to them. I want to hear their opinion.

And I had two people on for the Marxist-Lendonist episode, and there I felt a shift. after that episode, I walked away from that episode like, okay, a lot of the questions that I still had as a libertarian Marxist were at least attempting to be addressed in this way. Oh, look at these decolonization efforts that I really, you know, as I'm learning about it, I'm deeply respecting. Oh, they're all so deeply informed by Marxism. You know, and like, oh, who actually challenged capitalism and imperialism on a global stage, not just a local or territorial stage, but what movement has actually challenged it in that big way? Marxism, Marxism, Leninism, and then Marxism, Mowism. And so I think for a little time there, I dropped the libertarian. I was just saying I'm a Marxist, you know, and then eventually, you know, the cards fell where they may. I moved more into Marxist Leninism. And that shift, you know,

a few years into Rev left, that alienated a lot of that, a lot of older fans. So, you know, early on I had a lot of anarchist fans. A lot of my biggest episodes early on was like the philosophy and history of anarchism. And so I brought in a bunch of of like anarchists that were like the core audience for a long time and when I moved over more aggressive and they were okay with me being a libertarian Marxist. Okay. You know, you're still in the realm of acceptable politics. But when I moved towards Marxism and then Leninism, you know, a lot of those people, you know, probably quietly dropped off, but some of them loudly dropped off, you know, like, oh, he's a tankie, blah, blah, blah. You know, we're not

going to fuck with him anymore. And that was fine because at the same time I'm back filling that with a whole new audience, an audience of people that are interested. in Marxism are interested in these discussions or just I'm still learning and Rev. Left offers me a bunch of different things that I can learn about these different sex. So I'm not going to, you know, close close off that door or whatever. And so that happened. And then yeah, you know, shifts into eventually my, I would say my, a Maoism period where I was, you know, explicitly calling myself a Marxist Leninist Maoist. And now I don't know, like this probably happens a lot with people, but I just feel like there's and you know, maybe the people will not like

this, but there's less and less reason for me to try to necessarily pin down, oh, I am exactly a Marxist-Leninist, or no, I'm just a Marxist Leninist, and I have deep critiques of Maoism. As I've said elsewhere, like, I kind of like that tension, that room between ML and MLM and some of those disagreements. I find it interesting and productive and generating. And I'm not so much interested in like staking my claim in one thing and, you know, saying I'm this and not that. It's just, I don't know.

I'm just a person learning, growing, trying to avoid. I am a Marxist at my core. I love Leninism. I love Maoism. I get a lot out of it. They've taught me so much. And they're invaluable for analysis more broadly. And so, yeah, all of that.

And so, you know, I'm a Marxist. And nowadays, I'm just like, I'll let you place me. I'll say that I'm a Marxist all day. And if you think I'm an ML or you think I'm an MLM or whatever you think I'm a stupid tankie, I'll let you decide that. And I'm just going to try to be as true to myself and my project and my learning process as I can possibly be. You know, in your answer, you pretty much answered the question that I was going to ask, which is something Adon did yesterday to me, but I will adapt this question accordingly.

I know early on I had been a listener of the show since pretty darn early on. I remember one of the first episodes that I heard, and I didn't hear it right when it came up, but it was the Fidel Castro episode, which was like May of 2017. It was a long, long time ago. And I know I listened to it right around the time I moved to Germany, which was September of 2017, and then I listened to all of the other back catalog episodes. But around that time, kind of when I first started listening to the show, you had a bunch of episodes that were on these different tendencies, like what is Trotskyism? What is Marxism, Leninism? What is anarchism? And the entire episode was devoted to explaining what that tendency is and what sets it apart from other tendencies. And I

personally found those episodes very, very useful. I was already somewhat aware of some of the differences between those tendencies. And I already kind of had my own political orientation at that point. But I thought that some of those conversations were really useful for kind of disaggregating them from each other a little bit more explicitly. The question that I was going to ask was what episode or episodes that you were doing really were kind of foundational to your early development in in the direction that you currently are on which you that you pretty much answered but i guess the way that i'll adapt it is in addition to that episode on marxism leninism have there been any episodes since then that have really stood out in terms of shaping your politics

today because you know early on as you mentioned you started off as like uh well and another note that i had you said you took a normal trajectory a normal trajectory for a communist brat remember this is not the normal trajectory for most people. True. Yeah. So, you know, you had this phase where you were an anarchist and then this libertarian Marxist and then eventually, you know, you worked your way to Marxism, Leninism, and then Maoism and then kind of shifted in between.

Were there any specific episodes or perhaps guests that you've had on? Because some guests you've had on multiple times and had somewhat related conversations with that I thought have been very productive. they've gotten really deep on those subsequent episodes. Are there any episodes or guests that you've talked to that have really shaped your politics as they stand today? And this is something that Nan and I were talking about during our recording yesterday, which listeners check the previous episode that we dropped. It'll be that one where, you know, perhaps what you learned in that specific episode does not directly reflect your politics today,

but you took something out of that episode that really pushed you in a direction and then you built on that. Were there any episodes like that that really were foundational to your current political understanding? Yeah, so they definitely had popped up and, you know, that Marxist-Lendonist one was certainly one of them because I was so sort of brainwashed with the stereotypes of MLs as this tanky idea that that was like eye-opening to me. But then, you know, as opposed to like a specific episode, it was a book that became an episode that was very crucial, which is continuity and rupture by JMP. I read that book and that was like the beginning of my you know of like Maoism and my deep interest in the show definitely moved in the direction of Maoism after that specifically and you know the audience noticed that as well but when I read continuity and rupture it was one of those one of those texts that as you're reading it you feel the shift happening like you feel internally like oh shit this is a good point and that's right I have no argument against that and that's kind of what I already believed, but I never articulated it like that, right? And so that, that, that book, continuity and rupture by JMP, then became the episode of continuity and rupture and then started a long series that we've had, we've had JMP on the show multiple times. And I love his work still.

You know, I, of course, I love that book. That book is fascinating, especially if you want to understand the Maoist argument against the ML argument, continuity and rupture is like the single best text that I can offer. And people have asked me, you know, how do I understand more of these differences between ML and MLM or whatever. And I give him that book. It's so, it's so rigorous, but also so clear and accessible. However you walk away from that text, you will understand the Maoist position much, much better and you will understand the tensions between Marxism, Leninism, and Marxism,

Lennonism, Maoism. So that was definitely one. And there were, there were others, you know, there's lots of episodes where I walk away, every episode, I try to walk away and take a few nuggets of information to carry forward. That's something I try to consciously do. Like, you know, here's some things that I learned from this episode. I'm going to mention it two episodes from now and see how I can weave that in with this new guest. But also a big shift happened when we started Red Menace.

So when the guillotine fell apart, we immediately, I had already been talking to Allison. I met Allison in person at a conference. We've already done a couple episodes on Rev Left with Allison. And what Red Menace allowed me to do was like, go to the text. And it's not just like you're casually reading the text or even that you're reading the text to understand. a political theory but like red menace challenged me you have to understand the text and then you have to teach it so i don't know i'm sure you know both of you are aware especially odd and on the difference between reading a text and then reading it to teach it like there's a depth that

is required in the latter that might not always be present in the former and so we start off with socialism scientific and utopia boom reading that text shift in my politics we get to state and revolution by lenin shift in my politics oh i understand how how how the state is a mechanism of class rule and how it how it came to evolve historically through you know you know like wow that was huge and then wretched of the earth that was a three-part series on red menace where we taught that we taught that book in chunks so it was like a deep deep dive fine-tooth comb going through that text and those three texts in general not so much specific guests on rev left but those three texts on red menace were monumental shifts in

in my politics and my understanding, my analytic and methodological approach to history, to geopolitics, to decolonization. Wretched of the earth was huge for me because, yeah, exactly. Adnan's holding it up. But Retched of the earth was so fundamental for me because it opened up this whole arena of decolonization and the colonial struggles. And, you know, you saw after that text on Rev. Left and on Red Menace and obviously on guerrilla history, that being now a pillar.

a current that runs through all those episodes and this explosion of like episodes on you know indigenous struggles on decolonization the philosophy and the history of it um and so yeah you know those those books in particular really helped and again it wasn't so much one one even in the case of jmp it wasn't like i had him on and learned it was like i read his book and then i had him on to talk about his book and that was the that was the shift but yeah every i walk away from genuinely i walk away from every episode of so having learned something new and trying to see how then I can, you know, triangulate it with other things that I know. And I think that's what my real skill is. It's not that I'm an expert or I don't have a Ph.D. I, you know, I'm not like generating brand new theory or anything like that. But I have a way of articulating complex philosophical and theoretical ideas in the language that can be understand and can be accessible to regular people.

And, yeah, I kind of lost my train of thought there. but you know that that's kind of what i see myself doing and yeah and the coordinating right is like a mass of information that i can then draw parallels to and lines across and show how you know remember that the thing we talked about three episodes back that's deeply related to this incident or you know look what america did in chile see how it does it over here and it uses a similar playbook so it's this like bringing together of of seemingly disparate information and cohering it into you know a worldview and and helping that worldview become digestible and understandable to other people and that's still a huge part of this project and red left and red menace and everything we do yeah one other area that um i think is not that typical uh on the left left media left podcasts and so on that of course i've been very attracted by and interested in engaging with you on are a set of episodes you have that are about religion or spirituality mysticism and you know, how that fits into your, you know, kind of politics and the project of Rev. Left, like some people might have thought, oh, you know, that could be some other kind of project, you know,

on Buddhism, mysticism, spirituality. But, you know, early on there was like an episode on Christian socialism. And so it's clear that you were thinking about some way in which inner spiritual development and the traditions of religions and spiritual, and mystical orientations could have some relationship with the process of, you know, social liberation and transformation. So I just wanted to first say that that is, I think, a very unique feature of Rev Left, very uncommon to find that nexus and intersection. But also, you know, it would be interesting to hear you talk about how that has developed as part of the podcast project on the left. Yeah. Well, first thing is like to the idea of,

you know that should be a separate project i i rested with that for a long time you know should i just do this wholly separate from where i've left because of those tensions and those things and like the audience won't be here for it it'll be too fringe and weird for most people but i came to the realization was like no because a human life is is complex in these ways and so if i try to segregate like politics from religion and mysticism from mental health and addiction you know it gives the illusion that these are separate categories when the fact act is we're Marxists. We also have to worry about our own death. We also wonder about our relationship to the cosmos. We also struggle with addiction and mental illness. And so part of the

project has always been humanizing what has been dehumanized, namely communism, Marxist, anarchists, anybody on the left. There's been a systematic dehumanization of us through the anti-communist movement, through, you know, American propaganda. And one of the ways that we re-humanize ourselves is, is to talk about our politics in the context of the fullness of our existence, that these are not separate spheres of concern, but they all represent different aspects of being a human being, of caring about where this world is going, caring about where it's been, caring about your place in that development and, you know, where you come from, and, you know, fear of death and all the big questions of life. Like I said, I come out of philosophy. I've

been a curious child. I remember having like existential anxiety as like an eight year old thinking about when I believed in Christianity, thinking about the eternity of heaven. I remember like laying in bed in my stomach just churning like eternity. What does it mean to be alive forever? Right. That's always been a part of who I am. And after some reticence about introducing it to a political podcast, I was like, no, this is who I am. This is what I'm curious about. I'm willing to bet there are people out there that are also curious about the stuff. Not everybody. buddy you know i'm sure when these episodes come up there's a fraction of the audience it's like no thank you um but it also brings in people so that's another another strategy that's i've sort of developed which is i've said this before like if you have episodes on i don't know stoicism dostoyevsky mysticism buddhism you know sufism all these different things okay you some random person searching i'm really interested in like sufism right like i want to learn more oh this rev left episode comes up listens to it holy shit that was really informative really deep, really interesting.

What else do they have to offer? Maybe you go to the St. Francis episode next or whatever. But eventually, maybe you check out the, God forbid, the Stalin episode or, you know, one of the other hardcore, straight up communist episodes. And I've known people have reached out and told me that's how they got in. Somebody specifically told me your actual, actually your episode on Dostoevsky. I was just learning about him. I had a project.

I listened to the podcast, found it very helpful. I liked your style. listen to a few others and wow I feel myself moving to the left you know and so that's why I didn't want to ever necessarily separate that and and I wanted to kind of bring it in full force and let the chips fall where they may and and I also have to say that having red menace and gorilla history I think created space for me to do that because I know that okay if you're really into like the hardcore proletarian decolonial anti-imperialist history. there is a platform that we have connected with this one that dives deep into that stuff.

You know, if you're into the philosophy and the theory, Red Menace, go listen to it, dive into those texts, right? Those are more demanding sometimes. And so I think there's smaller audiences willing to go that deep in general. But that allowed me to clear out some space and rev left. Like I'm doing that theory stuff over there. I'm doing that history stuff consistently over there. I'll still do those things here.

But I also now have a little breathing room to kind of like experiment with this platform. throw out stuff that I'm genuinely interested in. And that's going to be all, I'm genuinely interested in everything. Like, you know, I want to have, I want to have like a somebody who just studies the oceans on to talk about oceans, right? Like, that would be fascinating. And that's what I'm into. And I want to learn more about that. And I, I bet and I think it's proven to be true that a lot of, if you're intellectual enough to like wonder about politics and history and philosophy, you've probably also asked yourself a few times about like, what does my fucking life me and you know why am i depressed right now and you know what does buddhism have to offer etc

and i also last thing it would be like i had that new atheist phase in my early 20s well before the show and as i i matured politically i left all marxism i've said this before displaced by new atheism because around specifically the wars in the middle east um there was that the period of time where like the tensions of the new atheist arguments well islam is just full of inherently bad retrograde ideas and it's a clash of civilizations, right? That was bumping up against my already existing sort of progressive politics. I was kind of suspicious of that stuff, even though it was liberating to hear this stuff about Christianity because I needed that at that time of my life. But Marxism displaced

it. Marxism like, no, not the ideas inherent in Islam, Sam Harris. Here is an actual methodology for understanding the development of these conflicts, U.S. involvement in the area for the last several centuries, European colonialism, all down the line. Oh, this actually explains it. This actually explains it. And that blew to pieces my new atheism. And then so after that the void that new atheism left, I still, I was always into like meditation and stuff, still always had an interest in it. And that started to deepen. And I had some existential crises that deepened my spirituality and my practices as well. And so eventually it was just like, I'm going to weave this into the show. And I'm going to, I'm going to just see what happens.

And I think so far the response has been really good. People, always say like, I cannot find this sort of spectrum of discussions almost anywhere else, at least not with the depth. You can go on Joe Rogan to hear a spectrum of different topics. There's going to be a little bit of shallowness in there. You know, it's not going to be as deep as as you could take a lot of those topics. And I try to do that. So sometimes I fail, sometimes I succeed, but I'm going to keep doing it. And I'm not going to stop. And I think you and I have talked about a roomy episode coming up soon that we're going to try to put together so and i you know i met you too at a very interesting time where i was wrestling with these questions of whether or not to bring

this onto the show or do something wholly separate and uh kind of colliding with you through guerrilla history and then through the the michael brooks thing that we did together um that was a huge impetus to be like no there's an audience for this you can combine these things go ahead and do it so it kind of aligned with me meeting you as well yeah well i mean i think Just a quick follow up on that, as I know you recently had a very interesting episode on Alexander Dugin and like the traditionalist and Sophia Parenis, I think an episode on that kind of thing would be kind of interesting because in fact, actually in the episode we did together on Sufism, when I was talking about how often mysticism has this kind of more withdrawal from the world and right-wing orientation, I was thinking actually in mind of that kind of, of turn, but it's interesting that both you and I encountered these traditions and that kind of exploration, not as something taking you out of engagement with transformation for egalitarian social projects, you know, but it reinforced those. And that's, you know, not always the case.

So it's worth, you know, thinking about these issues. And that's been a very exciting part of Rev Left in recent times. So, yeah, I really appreciate it. And really quickly, you know, that that's also something that I kind of had to come to terms with over the last few years is like as we're exploring the spirituality stuff, you know, for me is like almost like a prerequisite, a priority position that like these things are open to everybody. It's egalitarian. You know, anybody can can engage in these spiritual practices. It's for everybody. And then getting into like, oh shit, there's a long history of right wing spiritualism that is deeply hierarchical. And right now actually speaking of the Dugan episode.

I'm reading Julius Ivola's Ride the Tiger for Red Menace coming up on Red Menace kind of tracking the trajectory from Nietzsche to some of these right-wing thinkers through Dugan going back to one of his major influences, which is Evola. And yeah, this shit is like he talks about being an aristocrat of the soul and like, you know, these deeply hierarchical things and traditionalism, which is like it completely rejects the idea of progress for any like civil rights or identity groups or. anything is like this is a blip on the radar we're going to go back to a time of like yeah closed down basically monarchical aristocratic forms of being and this is the spiritual dimension to that so it's like the marriage of hardcore right wing fascist violent politics with mysticism and spirituality uh that was something that that i had to grapple with and i'm still sort of grappling with and trying to find a way through so well let me tell you brett i've got some suggestions for you uh based on this last little uh conversation that you were having between the two of you talking about far right politics and mysticism

you need to have an episode on savitri devi who was uh i believe she was greek but from france uh but she was a uh moved to india and was a proponent of combining hinduism with fascism and was a like very prominent nazi supporter uh wow like during both during world war two where she was active with like collaborating with the Nazis themselves, as well as leading neo-Nazi movements after World War II. And she was, you know, she had like a PhD in, I think, philosophy or history. I don't remember exactly. It's been a while since I read about her. But yeah, she was really working on this fusion of fascism and Hinduism, which was something that, you know, based on your interests, I know you would really be interested in.

And then also before, yeah, before I get into this next question, and I can, I can remind you about that later, if you're interested. You also talked about wanting to talk about the oceans. Well, boy, have I got a couple of books that I can recommend for you. This is like my role on this show is to recommend books for people. There's a book that I have at my house in the U.S. So if I was there, I'd just lend it to you. But unfortunately, I'm not.

It's called Private Oceans, the enclosure and marketization of the seas by Fiona McCormack. It came out a few years ago, I think. And there's another one that I also have at my house called Fisher's and, plunderers, theft, slavery, and violence at sea, which is kind of tangentially related to oceans. And I know that Adnan, you and I had talked about doing an episode on guerrilla history about piracy off the horn of Africa, which is also ocean related, although not like ocean specific. It's stuff that happens on the ocean rather than in the ocean. But anyway, those are just some asides figured I figured I throw them out there. What I do want to talk about, though,

and this is somewhat related to the ocean point, is that Rev left as well. as your other shows, Gorilla History, Red Menace, have been covering eco-politics quite a lot recently, which is something that, I mean, I'm definitely grateful for. Obviously, it's something that I care a lot about as well.

That's why we talk about it on the show. You, me and Adnan, I'll care quite a bit about eco-politics and what a true left, decolonial, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist vision for left eco-politics should look like. And that's why you have guests like, my friend Max I'll go on to your show to talk about these things.

My question is, when did you really know and understand that eco-politics is something that you wanted to become so invested in with the show? Because, you know, you cover a lot of different things on Rev. Left, like you said, you have Dostoyevsky, you have St. Francis with Adnan, you have, you know, all kinds of stuff, but you've had many episodes, especially recently on eco-politics. when did that light bulb moment hit you that eco-politics is really something that I have to invest heavily in and is something that we have to continue to hit over and over again on this show from left wing but you know slightly disparate perspectives from many of the many of the guests that you've had on like holly jean buck and max aisle and um uh how to blow a pipeline so am i drawing a blank on his name uh andrew's mom mom that's mom that's right uh so yeah that's the question yeah so like with the with the different guests and stuff it kind of goes back to that early days of rev left where i was having on different political sex on the left and just like kind of learning along with them there's like you know i go through phases and there's like a little bit of that with the religious stuff exploring different stuff and then here with the eco stuff like exploring some different positions on that because i'm genuinely curious about different ideas and ways to make sense of it now it's always been true um that i've had a deep love of nature uh you know i've always seen my spiritual practices as as as intimately related with nature.

I used to actually, you know, early in my meditation stuff, I would go out alone into the woods and onto the shores of the river here, the Missouri River, and meditate outside specifically. And then with politics, I've always been pro-environmentalist, have always been repulsed at the degradation of the natural world around me. And as my spiritual practices grew and or actually probably deepened is a better word to say, my my felt um connection with the with nature with the the natural world it it got deeper so it wasn't like an intellectual political position like it was that too but it's like you know we should do these policies to save these things also felt in my heart and in my soul like the the degradation

of the natural world and you know like it's like nature is screaming through us to do something to stop this nonsense, you know, to cut this shit out. And so I started feeling that at a deeper level. And then you just start seeing the actual impact. So climate change every year. You know, every summer now is just like the skies are fucking red and you're coughing and your eyes are irritated because there's wildfires happening across the goddamn continent. You know, oceans are dying.

The plastic thing in the ocean is getting bigger every day. Wars are being fought over oil. Even now there's a doubling down on fossil fuel. oil even though it's causing conflict, destroying the planet, making life unsustainable, even for those of us sort of in the West who now have to pay inflated gas prices to stick it to Putin, all this nonsense. So it's a mixture of those things. And like, I also, I don't know, I guess I'm just a person that has fucking crises a lot. But, you know, when I think it's also around when my kids are born, I go through these phases. So when my son, when my girl was

pregnant with my son the first time I had that existential crisis around death that I had to work through and radically reorient my relationship to death through that suffering. And then like with my my newest son was just born. He's five months old now. It was during the pregnancy with him that, you know, last summer where you're seeing the skies red and the climate change going out of the IPCC reports getting released. And I had a crisis last summer, you know, where it's like for several weeks, uh, I'm just my. in the anxiety and the grief and the depression of what goddamn world are my kids going to hand you get handed you know where is this whole thing going like it is becoming very very dark

and bleak and and so that that spurred me to to kind of do this creative outburst of addressing the eco question and making sure that it's infused to our left politics because it absolutely has to be infused with our with our politics and I always say the climate crisis is one thing. It's not the whole thing. There's a much broader eco crisis. So even if tomorrow, the climate crisis was magically solved by some brand new innovation or technology that allows us to totally cut off fossil fuel overnight, that would be great. That would be amazing. But it would not address the underlying cause of the broader eco crisis and the ecosystem as a whole, the biosphere as a whole, would still be under immense pressure. And so I really want to point that out because it's

much bigger than simply the climate crisis, although that is the biggest sort of inflection of the broader eco crisis. And then just like tracing that back to like colonialism and the ideas of colonialism and alienation are our sense, our felt sense of being alienated from the natural world, from one another, treating the natural world as something outside of myself that I can plunder with no consequences. This goes down to like human psychology, human, you know, relations, how the human beings experience themselves. And so, yeah, whether it's political or spiritual or whatever, the eco crisis and trying to address it is crucial.

And I'll continue to do that. And I think we'll see like, I actually think we'll see this sort of this back and forth between summers and winters because I think winters kind of give us a false sense. Like everything's okay. You know, like how the cycle of news is so fast. Like we memory whole thing so quickly now. like with rapid, rapid pace, it seems like now, like in the summer, everybody's talking about climate change.

Wildfires are right in your face. Heat waves are right in your face. It's so obvious. Floods, everything. Then the northern hemisphere goes into fall and goes into winter. And then people start talking about other stuff. And then like we refine the problem during spring and summer. And I'm kind of worried about that cycle.

I'm worried about what it portends. And the inability for people to keep their minds focused on a problem long. than a new cycle, you know? Yeah, I think that's a, for sure, that's a broader problem than just in eco-politics, though. Like, the news cycle and collective memories being short is a very big problem. That's what prevents us from having any sort of historical understanding of anything. People don't remember yesterday, much less what happened last year and much less was happened a decade ago, much less what happened five decades ago.

So, yeah, I mean, it's a big problem. And that's why I think talking about the things that you talk about on Rev. as well as the things that we do on guerrilla history, shameless plug, are important for people to take on board, like remembering history and getting that kind of broader scope, not just focusing on what is happening this moment is very important for us to make those connections and really understand what's happening in the world. So we're getting close to the end. I know I have one quick question and then Adnan has another question. And feel free to take this as short as you want. I know that this is not going to be fun to dwell on for you. But has there been any

negatives associated with having Rev left? Like the show is quite successful. Like, you know, you don't have a gig at MSNBC or anything. Like you're not making a million dollars or anything along those lines. But you have a fairly dedicated and fairly sizable listenership. And, you know, it's helped you find yourself politically. It's helped you connect with comrades and people that you really appreciate talking to like looking from the outside people might think like wow this show really has given him exactly what he wants like relatively relatively stable income you know as much as the people on patreon are willing to keep supporting you i guess um relatively stable income like political finding a political home finding people that you enjoy interfacing with it sounds

like all roses right sunshine and rose what is it rainbows and roses sunshine and roses i don't remember how the expression goes Whatever. It doesn't matter. I'm not very eloquent. It really makes no difference. The point is, has there been any negatives associated with having the show? Because I know, you know, through our conversations, I have heard about some of the negatives. But I think perhaps the listeners might be interested in hearing that side of things, at least briefly. Sure. Yeah. Let's do three points on this. So really quickly the income. I kind of want to talk about this because I don't know. It's kind of awkward to talk about this. But at the same time, it's obviously very important for my life.

And like, I think if you go and look at Rev. Left's Patreon, you'll see like, wow. they have a lot this many supporters this much money he must be living like he must be getting like 10k a month or whatever absolutely not first of all we split everything 50 50 with dave there's fees and i paid i've never made more than like 35k in my entire life last year with all three shows i made 50k but then 10k of that goes away in taxes i was like holy shit i'm about to be a libertarian but uh i wish it was going to like health care or something but of course it's like going to like give nazi i these fucking better weapons in Ukraine. But so all of a sudden done, I earned 40K last year and that's with three kids. That's with a wife who lost her job at COVID. And, you know, I'm very thankful for that.

But, you know, it's certainly not like living high on the hog. But I'm glad because I don't care about that at all. If I can comfortably provide for my family, that's all I care about. But I just have seen some people be like, he must be living like fucking, it's like chopo money or something,

not even close. So that's just worth saying. Secondly, the negative fallout of the podcast, specifically around being doxed, targeted by fascist and the state, I go into that in detail with an episode I released recently with the D program. So if you want to go check out that episode, it's on my, it's on the Rev. Left feed as well as the D programs feed is I was the first guest on their show too, so you can find it pretty easily. And I talk a lot about, I go into details about all the doxing, all the harassment, having to have a bunch of guns and dogs. and, you know, take my security incredibly seriously. So that's part of it. But the big thing that I don't talk about a lot and it might sound a little indulgent,

but I think it's just worth mentioning is as a working class person who has always had to work shitty jobs and struggle to get by, you know, having this ability to do what I love, to learn as I'm doing it, to actually have a positive impact on people, absolutely my dream. If you would have asked me, like, before I quit my job, like, if you, you could do anything for a living like what would you do i'd be like if i could just like talk politics and have on experts and like learn about different stuff about the world and have an audience and get paid to do that that would be my dream job and then i'm giving it you know i mean

i risked some shit and i went all out and tried to find it and got it and then this is like where the buddhism and shit comes in oh you got the thing that you thought you that would make you happy like the external thing like you know you're you have all these problems like the mental health issues you're sad or whatever meaning etc here's the thing you don't have to go to your shitty job anymore you can do exactly what you want how do you feel now oh like the same that i've always felt and it's not because the show doesn't do it for me or whatever but it's just like an existential lesson you will never ever find happiness by searching externally for it it will have to come from inward work inward practice and so basically since i've had this since i've been

able to make a living off this, I've been racked daily with the doubt and the fear and the insecurity and the anxiety that it's going to go away tomorrow. And I'm going to have to go back and get a shitty job. Having tasted what it's like to do something I actually fucking care about and actually has an impact and I can be my own boss, now I live under the sort of the noose of that going away. Like literally Patreon could just be like, communists are not allowed on our platform. Like, you know, you're talking about America and war and violence. You're done. You know, even like this crackdown on Nazis.

It's eventually going to call back on the left, censorship and shit. It's focused right now on like the worst people in society, but it's going to come for all of us eventually if we don't fit into that narrow middle spectrum. So that is like a fear now that I have to live with is like when is it going to go away, you know, when is it all going to collapse? And so I don't know.

That just speaks to the human psychology. You get what you want and you're still not satisfied. And now you're just worried about losing the thing. And I don't want to sound ungrateful or anything like that because I'm so many fucking ways i'm deeply deeply blessed and i'm i'm very happy with it but it does speak to a certain human condition and a certain psychological impulse that buddhism talks about very explicitly you know like you are clinging to things you're attached to things your sense of self-worth is wrapped up in this thing if it goes away you're you're scared that you know your your entire

conception of self will go away you'll be working a shitty job that makes you super depressed again and like so i don't know um that's always hanging over my head now too. So I don't know. It just goes to show like you everything you think you want when you get it. It's still you. You know, you still got to deal with your mind. You still got to deal with your fears. Your insecurities, your anxieties. And that doesn't go away no matter how your outward situation shifts and changes. Well, Brett, I guess one way you could say that is also is that you can't find happiness ultimately under capitalism as well. You know, there's also that outer. is like, well, everything is still very contingent because people don't have what they need

to just live dignified, equal, you know, lives as equal, you know, members of society. And that's, you know, that's the reason for the show is to try and change that inwardly and outwardly. So I noticed that, you know, you've been putting out quite a few, as we look back over five years, you've been putting out best of episodes this month. And I was just wondering if you had any thoughts you wanted to share about what were some of those great episodes, why you chose them, how you decided to choose these and to encourage people to go back and listen to the best of that are coming out here in April. Yeah. So the idea came basically because I haven't had any sort of break since we started the show, not that it's a full break.

I mean, I'm still doing plenty of stuff for other shows and for the Patreon and everything. But, you know, kind of wanted a little time, a little breathing room, specifically after a very hard year that I went through personally last year, just having a little time to step back was much needed. And so, like, here's one way we could do it. And then the other, the big idea, though, was like, we've got a lot of audience members that have come in the last year, maybe the last two years.

And they like our stuff, but they've never heard our back catalog, because now we're past five years of being on the air. So there's, like, lots of people out there, like, I love Rev left, but you've never heard some of our, like, crucial earlier episodes you know it's a very rare person that would go that listens to it and then goes back and listens to hundreds of episodes before that to get the full catalog a lot of people will jump in and then just start listening to future episodes on their feed so this is a really cool way to introduce our newer audience to our classic episodes and I probably should have

named it classic where I've left episodes instead of best of because then there's this normative value judgment of like what is the best episode and one way to like sort of parse that out is like to look at the most downloaded. And I did that and certainly you want to pull some out of the most downloaded ever, but not necessarily all of them. And then and then the question is like, what do I focus on? Because I have all these episodes, for example, like I could do a series like classic Rev Left episodes on religion and mysticism and have like a full slate or like, you know, mental health, addiction, anything like that and focus on that. But I'm like, you know, Rev Left came to to be in terms of hardcore left wing politics and that's that's our flagship that's where we that's

the door we walked in on and so the best of is going to emphasize those but it's also going to be a little diverse i want to sprinkle in i just don't want it to be all of our best specifically marxist londonist and malice episodes i want to mix in some like one of the episodes going to come out soon is the episode i did on murray bookchin but i was able to interview his daughter and so you get this really fascinating personal experience as well as she carries on his intellectual legacy and his political trajectory as well. So you get this political stuff. She obviously deeply understands her dad's politics,

but also the personal side of it, which is very fascinating, you know. And so like that episode will be coming out, one on Rosa Luxembourg, the one on Malcolm X, the one on Mao and the Chinese Revolution. Those are going to come out. And again,

I think it's not so much the best of that I'm going for here. It's the classics, the classic Rev Left episodes. And I wanted to do it before the last year or so. So anything that came out, post 2020. I'm going to save that for a future classic or best of version because I kind of wanted to hit these 2017, 2018, 2018, 2019 episodes. But even then it was incredibly difficult to narrow it down to just a handful of episodes for one month. We're releasing one episode

every other day for the entirety of April. And that leaves out like literally like I had 20 episodes that didn't make the cut that I was copying, pasting and shifting around, trying to figure out what to add and what to exclude and what that just showed me is like maybe there's going to be needed in the future to do this to do this again to kind of have a retrospective where you look back at some of the episodes from years past introducing the new audience to it so that's what kind of what we're hoping for and and then after that we can kind of you know start a whole new five year cycle maybe hopefully if we're lucky enough to keep these things going and and yeah do it again but you know I could definitely see myself in the future doing another month where it's just like

classic Rev Left episodes specifically on like psychology and religion and or even just like another best of where all the all the honorable mentions that didn't make the cut this time get put on in a year or so and maybe you know present that to the to the audience and stuff so so yeah that's that's the idea and yeah I'm very interested to see the feedback when when all the dust settles and see how many people actually went back and listened to these episodes again because you can see how many people downloaded it I'm sure some people like, oh, I've already heard those episodes, but I think most people have not heard all of them. And so, yeah, I'm very curious to see what the feedback will ultimately be on that.

And again, it was, it was an honor. It was an honor of five years. So the five year cycle, it felt like, you, this is a good temporal, chronological point to kind of do with this retrospective and look back. And I love your method of curation for it. That's something that is very interesting because, like you said, a lot of people might just be tempted to sort it by most downloaded and then just put those in there. or perhaps their favorite episodes. But, you know, it sounds like there was a lot of a lot of thought into how to curate this so that it would make for a diverse listening experience for the, for the

listeners. And I also think that, like you said, you've covered a lot of different topics at some depth. It would be, you know, interesting in the future to have, like, many collections of best of or, you know, classics, like one week. This is just an idea that hit me in the top of the head. So maybe we'll even cut this out from here. but like one week just every day have like or every day of the the work week like five episodes relating to psychology and it'll be like psychology week or something like that of the old

episode something like that or like eco-politics week something like that i don't know just something that hit me in the head anyway i know that we've been talking for quite some time about a show that listeners should just go over and listen to now instead of listening about it so i think it's about time to wrap up brett why don't we turn to you first since you are the man of the hour. Can you tell the listeners how they can find Revolutionary Left Radio if they inexplicably are listening to this show, but do not already know how to find Rev Left Radio? Sure, yeah. And thank you for coming up with this idea and giving me a chance to kind of talk

about some of this stuff. You know, it's always kind of awkward for me to talk too much about me and the show and stuff, but hopefully there's something useful in there for people listening if for nothing else, then like the history of how even this show came to be. because I very much see guerrilla history as this outgrowth of what we created with Rev Left and I'm very happy to see

that we've been able to take Rev. Left and turn it into like Red Menace and turn it into guerrilla history and expand out from there and like, you know, having a conversation like, you know, being asked to do a show with you guys,

it opens up a whole new set of guests, you know, specifically perhaps like guests that I might not even be aware of or guests that I wouldn't be able to contact in academia with Odin's connections and Henry's reading and his connections. It just allows,

It just allows me to really strike out, talk to new people, et cetera. So I'm very grateful for guerrilla history as well. But yeah, you can find everything I do at Revolutionary LeftRadio.com. There you can find all of our shows. We also have merch that we've done with Goods for the People. People can find if you go to Goods for the People.com and go to season two. They have like a little season tab. You can find the Rev Left gear.

And it's awesome. And I was part of the design and stuff. And it's cool. Hopefully we can work out some merch for Gorilla History. but yeah all that is to say everything is at rev revolutionary left radio dot com yeah for sure and i do hope that we get merch in the future i think that it looked pretty darn slick uh adnan how can the listeners find you and your excellent podcast which they really should be also listening to if they're not already sure people can listen if they're interested in the middle east islamic world muslim diaspora

um check out the mudgeless m a j l i s and you can find it on uh all sort of of platforms. And as Henry has reminded, don't get the sort of radio-free Europe or whatever version. There's one that's like... Radio-free Central Asia. Yeah, so basically it's a U.S. State Department kind of thing. Don't go to that one. Come to the other one that's produced by the Muslim Society's Global Perspectives Project at Queens University, so MSGPQU. And, you know, follow me on Twitter at Adnan-A-Husain, H-U-S-A-I-N. Yeah, absolutely. And it was really funny when I found that there was another podcast named the Mudge List. I was like looking for the Mudge List to send the link off to some people that

were interested in in that kind of content. And I thought would listen to the show. When I typed in the Mudge List podcast, there was two things that came up. There was your show and Radio Free Central Asian. I just about spit out what I was drinking. It was so funny that you would have this dichotomy of like the listeners who listen to the show, no Adnan's politics. and then we have, you know, like I said, CIA State Department radio. It was really hilarious to me, just totally funny. Listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck-1995, H-U-C-K-1-995. You can follow the show on Twitter at Gorilla-U-E-R-I-L-A-U-E-R-I-L-A-U-Score pod.

I'll pitch the last episode that we did because I know what it's going to be at this point. Adnan and I recorded an episode about Ibn Khaldun, which was a very interesting episode about this kind of historic figure and historian of sorts from the 15th century, Adnan. Am I remembering correctly? Yeah, 14th. He died 14.06. Okay. So I'm not technically wrong.

He died in the early 15th century. Okay. I'll take that. And folks, you can listen to, or you can support the show, rather, by going to Patreon.com. forward slash guerrilla history, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. So until next time, Solidarity. I'm going to be able to be.