Rev Left Radio - Convincing Conservatives: Red States, Climate Change & Class Struggle

Episode Date: November 7, 2021

J.T. Chapman from Second Thought joins Breht to discuss their experiences living in deep red states, how to talk to and persuade conservatives and other non-socialists of our politics, major global trends that will shape this century, and much more! Follow JT on Twitter: https://twitter.com/_secondthought Subscribe to Second Thought: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJm2TgUqtK1_NLBrjNQ1P-w Outro Music: "Man in Black" by Johnny Cash ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody, welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have J.T. from the YouTube channel Second Thought on to talk about, well, his channel, how he navigated his leftward move on his channel, but mostly how to communicate to specifically conservatives, but broadly people who might not be on the left, but who we need to interact with, engage with, and on some level, convince in the face of certain issues like the decimation of the working class or the climate crisis, etc. So in this episode, me and JT go back and forth and just kind of give you some tips and advice and recommendations on how to approach different people in your life, friends, family,

co-workers who might be suspicious of the left or suspicious of the causes of climate change, but who you see as a fundamentally reasonable and good-hearted person that could benefit from an engagement with these ideas and these perspectives. So hopefully this is a little bit of a set of tips and pointers that you could listen to and then incorporate into your life and then meaningfully go out and engage with people in your life on these topics in a way that doesn't immediately alienate them and push them further into reaction. So really wide-ranging, fascinating conversation that I know you'll love.

And as I say in this episode throughout, definitely go subscribe to second. thought on YouTube. It's a wonderful resource for the left. Without further ado, here's my conversation with JT. Enjoy. My name is J.T. Chapman, and I run a YouTube channel called Second Thought, where I talk about socialist ideas at a 101 level. Yeah, welcome to the show. It's an honor to finally get to talk to you. I've been a fan of your YouTube channel. I really love how you make left politics digestible to a larger audience. And maybe we can start the conversation there. Obviously, we're going to get into questions about how to convince people, how to talk to people who might not already agree with us. I'd love to get your thoughts on some major trends that you see developing in the world and

where those things are heading. But first, let's just focus on the YouTube channel itself, because I think it's an interesting doorway into this conversation. So can you talk about why you started second thought, how it's sort of evolved since its creation and how your politics have evolved over that same time? Sure, yeah. My channel's kind of a bit of an oddball when it comes to YouTube. When I started Second Thought, I was working at Best Buy at the time selling cameras. I love cameras, and that was, you know, cool for that regard. But it wasn't a particularly pleasant experience working in a big box retail store,

you know, being on your feet for nine hours at a time. And I saw a friend of mine, Joseph from Real Life Lore. You might know his channel. Yeah, yeah. He started his channel around that time. and he had found some success and he had no experience with with video production at the time and I saw that and I'm like well I do have some experience so maybe I can maybe I can do the same thing and get out of Best Buy so I gave it a shot and at the time I worked you know the mid to late shift so I'd get home at like 8 or 9 p.m and then I'd stay up editing little videos for

probably about till three or four in the morning, which looking back was awful, was very unhealthy. But it was fun. It gave me a chance to do something that felt more interesting than standing around and selling cameras. And it gave me that little bit of hope that I could get out of that situation. And at the time, I was focused on kind of the infotainment niche, you know, general kind of quote, unquote sciencey stuff like one you may have seen is time travel really possible something like that which is one of my most popular videos i think it's got like seven million views something like that um so working at best buy i i really kind of felt useless it felt like i wasn't contributing anything and my like i wasn't appreciated by by management or or the the GM who would come in from time

time. And I was miserable. And I was really, really getting kind of depressed. And when I got the opportunity to transition to another job outside of Best Buy, I jumped at the chance. And it was, I should have been more wary at the time. It was inside sales for software. And I figured, you know, if I can sell cameras in person, I can sell software over the phone. And that was a huge mistake. Because that was, that was far worse than Best Buy. So during that period, I was there for maybe two months, something like that, and the guy who was training me was actually fired, so I was left without anyone to train me and just kind of floundering. But eventually, and very fortunately, I had a video get picked up by the YouTube algorithm,

which is notoriously fickle, and it launched me from like 8,000 subs to 75,000 over the course of a weekend, and that was huge for me. and to this day there are relatively few channels who are that fortunate. But I saw that. I'm like, okay, if this trend continues, if I can keep getting views, I should be okay to quit this job. And so I was that desperate that at that point one good video was enough for me to say, all right, I quit, I'm out of here, and I'm going to focus on YouTube, and that's what I did. And luckily, it worked out. I mean, I wouldn't recommend anyone follow a similar path because that could have very easily gone the other way.

but but yeah that's the rest is basically history i mean for the next couple of years i i just developed the channel i kept doing the you know general introscience stuff um eventually got up to around 750 000 subs and then i started to get bored um and that's a that's a character flaw of mine i tend to to lose interest in things um fairly often but because of that my channel performance kind of declined uh pretty severely actually and the channel was basically circling the drain. And I think people could tell that I just really didn't care about the content. Like my last video before I made the switch to political content was what would happen if we killed all the mosquitoes? It was just like, I don't know. Here's a topic. Here. Watch this video

or don't care. And that was truly terrible. Man, I was looking back, I'm surprised that I didn't start applying for jobs because it was not looking good. But then the pandemic rolled around. And that was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back. I had been following, you know, Bernie's campaigns, I had become disillusioned with electoral politics and all the usual American lefty stories. But the COVID response was really the thing that prompted me to try something new. Over the past few years, I had been learning about socialist theory, and I really wanted to turn my channel into something that felt more useful.

And so what I did was, I was like, all right, I was. I'm bored with this current content. I hate making it. Nobody seems to want to watch it anyway. I'm going to make a dramatic shift and turn this into a socialist channel. And if it torpedoes the channel, I'll go back to work at Best Buy. And if it works out, great. I'll be doing something that feels important.

And again, for the second time in my YouTube career, it worked out, and I got lucky, and my audience stuck around and not only stuck around, but continued to grow. It really picked up after that point. And so I've felt incredibly fortunate to have found a niche that I feel I can contribute to and that people seem genuinely interested in. Yeah, but that's pretty much it. I mean, my perspectives have evolved since that first video, and I've been trying to deepen my understanding of history and theory, and I try to boil it down to the essentials to

help share with other people what I've learned. Yeah, and you're incredibly effective at that. I have a similar, you know, similar situation. I was working in retail, absolutely miserable, on the verge of depression all the time. It felt like my life, you know, had no meaning, no direction. I felt like I was not putting into practice any of the few skills that I did manage to accrue over the years. And I actually, for me to start the podcast, I had to take out a 10K loan to quit my job to pay my bills for a few months and put everything I have into it. And, yeah, it did work out.

You know, on YouTube, it's a little different. podcasting is pretty free from algorithmic shaping and molding and the fickle nature of the YouTube algorithm in particular. So I haven't had to necessarily navigate that, but certainly with political content, I'm sure you have to. I'm just wondering before we move on just sort of like what the response was to the evolution of your channel. Like if you started with a general info, entertainment sort of approach, you're going to build a certain sort of audience. And And then especially in the U.S., you take a hard left turn. That's going to give some of those people whiplash.

So what was that? Oh, yeah. It was cool to see. I mean, I definitely got the very reactionary, you know, kind of spiteful comments from the Elon Musk crowd because I had. Unfortunately, I talked a lot about space travel and science fiction-y kind of stuff. And so naturally it attracted a lot of the SpaceX fans. And so those people were probably the most vocal, kind of anti-left voices, and they jumped ship pretty quickly. I still have a handful that stick around.

It's very interesting to see their comments. But for the most part, it was a very positive experience. People were saying, man, I've been feeling this same way. I'm so glad you talked about this. I never see any big channels talking about stuff like this, so it's really reassuring. So that kind of comment was really what gave me the fortitude to. to keep going. Because I said in that first video, this might be the only one I do like this. And I'm so glad that that wasn't the case because it's really, it feels good to be doing

something where I feel like I'm contributing. But, yeah, I mean, mixed experience where obviously some spiteful, nasty comments, but I would say on the whole, a lot more positive than I expected. That's really cool. That's really great to hear. And I found a similar thing with our platform is like people are very hungry for people to start articulating these ideas and once people can put some ideology or even just verbiage to their feelings and their experiences that have not been possible in America for you know forever people really react positively to it today like who would you say you make your your videos for exactly and how does that shape the way you present your material and in this question I'm basically

you know, for a general audience, do you view yourself as making videos for people that certainly don't automatically necessarily agree with you, or how do you kind of view your audience? Yeah, I think when I started out with the political stuff, it was very much a way to reach out to people who are not necessarily politically literate, who may not identify with any particular ideology or party or anything like that. I was just presenting ideas from a generally leftist perspective. I didn't use any of the jargon or anything like that. As time's gone on, I've inched more and more left and been more open about my own views. I still, you know, I still don't put a label on myself or anything. And I don't want to alienate people right off the bat. So I try to

keep my approach very general and I try to be welcoming to people of all perspectives, you know, for the most part. But I would say my target audience now is someone who, like I was back then is frustrated with the status quo, understands that the current system is not working and is looking for alternatives and may not be aware of some of the finer points of socialist theory. So that's my idea is to get the deeper ideas and philosophy of socialism across to people who may be skeptical who have yet to kind of get over that initial hurdle of socialism bad that is kind of drilled into us here in the U.S.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's really interesting starting point. I come from almost the opposite side where the first stuff I started doing, I was coming out of like already very far left organizing and online circles and like the first sort of series that we did on the show was like breaking down

different left tendencies, you know, from anarcho primitivism to Marxism, Leninism. So you're already starting in that hyper sort of So pretty obscure, relatively niche position and then expanding out from there. But I agree, like, on the left, there is like this tension of, do I completely collapse into a micro-tendency and speak only to that crowd? Do I keep it so wide open that you really can't know where I land on the left, or do I try to navigate somewhere in between? And for different people with different platforms and different audiences, they're going to come to different conclusions for sure. How would you describe your politics now with the idea in mind that it's always evolving and it's subject to change?

Would you feel comfortable even putting a label on, or are you just not at that point in it? Yeah, I definitely have a label I have for a while. And, I mean, if anyone comes and listens to this podcast, they'll finally have their answer. But I would consider myself a Marxist-Leninist. I've really appreciated the works of Lennon that I've read. I've read some Mao that I also found quite insightful. I wouldn't call myself a Maoist, but I appreciate, for example, on contradiction is excellent. But I think what really sells it for me is the fact that, historically speaking, in order to establish a true socialist experiment, in order to break with the capitalist order, revolution has been needed.

Like, reform has not been enough. And that is what I try to get across in my videos without scaring people off. But, yeah, I would say my tendency is definitely pretty staunchly ML. Yeah, super interesting. And then I think that's why, without knowing your politics, I just like, it's very principled stuff that's coming out under a broadly left or socialist umbrella from your channel. And I was like, almost everything that he says, I agree with. But, you know, I think we're speaking to slightly different audiences. And so I thought that was very interesting how that.

what forms those take. But all of that is very interesting, but it's meant to open up into this broader conversation about reaching people. And I thought, you know, I really like your channel. I like how you appeal to a more general audience. And I thought you'd be a great person to have on just to talk about some of these ideas, like how do we persuade people? How do we approach people in a way that doesn't automatically, you know, turn them off? And hopefully throughout this conversation we can generate a few points and tips and advice for people on the left listening to this conversation who no doubt have people that are not on the left and sometimes explicitly anti-left in their family or their friends group and you know how do you reach out to those people

and engage with them so with that all in mind let's go ahead and move in that direction what has your experience on youtube as well as just living in different places which i learned from our phone conversation as we were planning this episode, taught you about how best to engage with people on important issues that they don't necessarily already agree with you on. Yeah, that's a critical question that the left needs to grapple with. And just to give some perspective, I know I've told you this, but for the audience, I was born in Pennsylvania and I've lived in New York, Ohio, Connecticut, New Jersey, Texas, and Alabama. And right now I'm in Texas again. And I don't. think I'll be leaving, honestly. For as deeply reactionary as Texas is, I like it for the most part, and I think my fight is here. But in all of those places, I've found that people are more or less the same. There's different cultural baggage, but everyone wants to be respected and spoken to in a way that makes them feel like you are actually listening to their opinion.

And I think regardless of where you are, you need to meet people where they are. We shouldn't necessarily water down our beliefs, but I think it's important to couch them in language that the average person can understand and identify with. But equally important is to realize that you can't win everyone over. On my YouTube channel, I'll get a lot of comments of people who are just looking to fight. Like one of the more common ones is you don't put any citations in your videos. How am I supposed to know whether you're being truthful? And I always respond to those people, like, if you would just open the description box, you'll see I've got all of my citations listed there. So I'd love to hear your perspective once you've read them.

And without fail, those people will just delete their comments because they had no intention of engaging with the arguments. They just wanted to pick a fight and try to make you look bad. So you need to be able to try your best to be able to identify who is arguing in good faith and who is just a record. who's just trying to derail the conversation. But living in Texas specifically, there is a cultural conservatism here that even if you're speaking to a younger person who doesn't necessarily identify with the Republican Party, there's a lot of conservatism baked into everyday life here. So the best way I've found to deal with that is to speak in the language of populism. That tends to help. A lot of these people are primed to understand the stuff from, say, Tucker Carlson, for example, how he'll rail against the elites and they're trying to screw us over and all that.

And that, to me, is a good gateway to say, you know what, he's right there. The elites are screwing us over. But here's where my opinion differs. And then you just get into it a little bit without, you know, bogging him down with jargon and stuff. But you have to make clear your position and how it differs from what they have heard. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think the first thing you have to do, as you alluded to, was drawing the line regarding whether or not the person I'm engaging with is like, well, one, a fascist, right? Two, acting in bad faith. Three, having their mind so melted by conspiracy theories that any rational or any agreement on some basic facts isn't even possible, right? So obviously, it's not like you have to meet everybody they are. You don't go super far to the neo-Nazi right and try to get them where they are. But most people, and I live in Nebraska, right? The only two places I've ever lived is Nebraska and Montana.

So I very much, you know, relate to the cultural conservatism, a small town in Montana, you know, and Nebraska is a red state. I completely understand that. But a lot of those people are not inherently terrible people. They're still rooted in reality. They have families. You know, they care about things that I care about, et cetera. And it's those people that could be brought over. And the apparatus of Fox News and talk radio and now Facebook and Newsmax and OAN, they are addressing those people and reaching them, oftentimes before anybody on the left can even make an intervention or reshape or reframe a certain conversation. And, you know, that's where we have to at least try to engage with these people. But just broadly, I think talking to people, when you're talking

about especially political ideas which can be very intense, you have to go into it, understanding that for a lot of people, in many cases ourselves included, our politics are, for better or worse, a part of our self-conception. And if you're going with guns blazing, trying to tear down mock and ridicule somebody's political beliefs, you have to understand that the way they're going to interpret that is as an attack on who the fuck they are, and they're going to shut down or get hostile in return. So I think going into that with that perspective, doing a little bit of an ego check, right?

Like, I'm not here to lecture you about what's right and wrong, but let's explore some ideas together. Let's lay some things on the table. And, you know, just like when you're talking to somebody, granting them some points, like if they go off for three minutes on their perspective, finding at least one thing in that three-minute rant that you can say, fair point.

Or, you know, on that point, I actually do agree with you, right? Because what that does is puts down their defense shields. It gives them a little bit of, you know, an ego, you know, credit. Like, good for you for that. I actually do agree. And then they'll be much more likely to listen when you go on to articulate, you know, your position or where you disagree.

So those little things generally, I think, can help a lot. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Totally agree. I think the left has a big problem, especially online with kind of moralizing. And I think that's that. is a very liberal tendency that we need to shake. But, yeah, we can't just rag on these people and make them hate us. That is incredibly counterproductive.

Exactly. And I love your point about moralizing, you know, and there is some truth to the claim. You often hear it from like right-wing cry babies or whatever, but to the claim that, like, in the past, it was the right who was always, you know, moralizing, 50s, 60, 70s, 80s, you know, trying to draw the lines of what's acceptable in society, et cetera. and this moralizing posture, this whiny moralizing posture, has been taken up on the left, and I do agree it is wholly liberal and undermines any goals that we want to achieve and obscures the structural reality of things. It can often melt it down to the moral choices of individuals, and now you're a bad person, and we are the good people,

and that entire approach, I think, is bound to fail, and it's one of the huge reasons that regular people are turned off from liberal or even more broadly left politics because they feel immediately that they're being judged by some asshole who doesn't even know them and that's always going to be a non-starter. Oh, yeah, absolutely. So what are some major ways in your opinion

that the left in general, and we were just kind of talking about a little bit of this, but maybe we can go a little deeper, that the left in general tends to turn regular people off with their rhetoric or their approach and what are some common pitfalls for socialists to avoid? Yeah, I think that the first thing that comes to mind for me is don't start off with dictatorship of the proletarian, right? Don't start off with the big,

scary words and terminology from, you know, old, dense tomes that will scare people off and make them think that you're a cultist or something. But, you know, those ideas are still incredibly relevant, but the terminology, the understanding that people have of that terminology is not there. I think image is very important when dealing with the average person. We don't want to drape ourselves in, you know, communist imagery. Just, just be normal. That's, I think, something that the online left really struggles with. It's this weird, um, aesthetic approach to, to communism where you have to very similar to American conservatives, you know, who draped themselves in the American flag. We put on all this, all the Ushankas and the, all of the

hammer and sickles all over you and stuff. Just don't, just don't worry about that. Like, you can be a communist and not come off like a larper, right? Now, of course, those symbols, like the hammer and sickle, for example, does need to be reclaimed from the American perception of it of being like a symbol of evil equivalent to the swastika. That is not the case because, you know, obviously it was the Soviets who defeated the Nazis. So I think the thing we need to keep in mind is we have all of these ideas. We've done the reading. We've done the research. We understand the theory, hopefully. But we can't just dump those years of learning onto the average person and expect them to accept it.

It'll scare them off. And we don't want to scare them off. We want to ease them in, help them understand in the way we were helped to understand things. And that, I think, is a much healthier approach. It boils down to don't be an asshole, right? You just use empathy. Capitalism sucks for all of us, and we can relate to people on that level. yeah i completely agree coupled with some of the things we said in the previous question

i think those are some obvious mistakes that that are often made and you're 100% right this balancing act right we're not trying to turn away from the symbols in our history and the aesthetics of of the tradition that we come out of but to over to front load it and to lead with that especially for people who aren't already where you're at is just going to be a huge a huge turnoff um and then eventually over time they could become more comfortable with the ideas and then the symbols and then rethink the history. But that is a process that we all had to go through as individuals. So you know they have to as well. So coming off too strong immediately out of the gate is always going to be a failure. Whether it's an

individual discussion or it's like an organizational attempt to bring people in as organizers on both fronts. It's a tricky balance. You have to strike there. Yeah. One important issue that obviously I care a lot about, you care a lot about, we've both done work on is the issue. of climate change. And when we're looking down the barrel of that particular problem on its face in a vacuum, it would be like, why doesn't everybody immediately understand that this is a problem? And even if we disagree on the solutions, we could at least have a reasonable conversation that starts with like, yeah, this is a fucking problem. It exists. Where do we go from here? But obviously, with the variables of American society, right-wing conspiratorialism, the funding of denialism from Exxon. and other fossil fuel industries, the bad faith of Republican and Democratic politicians who are beholden to the fossil fuel companies, it's much, much, much messier. And so this is an issue that is obviously clearly, deeply important, that we need to get pretty much everybody or at least a super majority of people to agree, at least it's a problem.

And we need to do it fucking quick because the time is running out. And I just wanted to say, again, you've done great work on your channel on this front in general. And I encourage people to check it out. But if you were to be in conversation with a regular working class conservative and your goal was to convince them and assume they're already kind of suspicious, but your goal is to convince them of the seriousness of the problem, how would you approach that in particular and maybe what forms would your argumentation take? Yeah, I think it depends on the person you're speaking to. It's a personal thing for me because I have a brother who actually works for Exxon and it just kills me. It's incredibly frustrating. And I think for him, he's very much the apathetic type.

Oh, you know, both sides are bad, and you just got to look out for yourself. And he might be a different example because he actually works in Exxon. My one option for him would probably just be to dig up those Exxon internal documents from the 70s and say, look, they did the research back in the 70s. They led the way. Here are their findings and then explain how they have just buried the evidence and launched the most expensive propaganda campaign in corporate history. But I think when you're speaking to someone in general, personal anecdotes can be very useful. Like this is how it affects me and it affects my life because that is more meaningful to someone when they're looking at you than citing a bunch of statistics.

for example, one that I use is I shoot some documentaries for other YouTube channels like Wendover Productions I did one for in the Marshall Islands. And the Marshall Islands are a series of low-lying atolls. And we went there specifically to cover how climate change is affecting their day-to-day life. And while we were there, I got so much footage of waves in people's front yards or literally knocking at their doors. You could see like pots and pans being carried out to sea because they were around

people's like kitchenware. It's shocking that we can go out and we can see these examples and show them to people and not have those people make some kind of connection. That to me has been the most effective approach when I say, look, I shot this documentary, would you like to watch it?

I'll show it to you and we can talk about it. We can figure out together what we need to do about this. this and what's important. But that, that, I mean, obviously not everyone has shot a documentary and can, you know, say, here, I did this myself. But if you live in, you know, Louisiana or Florida, you're on the coast somewhere, you can go out and see that, you know, things that were land, once dry land, are now progressively

becoming more underwater. This is stuff that it's not abstract anymore. You can see it happening. If you live on an island, if you live on the coast, you will see this in your lifetime. You're probably already seeing it. But I think another thing, I mentioned this before, that can be useful if you're talking to a conservative especially, is do take the Tucker Carlson approach. Like, look, these elites don't care about us, right? They're not, they don't care about our roads and our houses and our infrastructure.

Look, I tried to go to work the other day and I hit like six potholes because there was water over the road. and it's eroding our roads and and lapping up our shoreline, things like that, that resonates with people. They say, yeah, you know what, this, we do matter and these people don't care about us. But another thing I've found is that simple analogies really resonate with conservatives for some reason. I don't know why. One that I've used in my videos a couple times is if you're out for a walk and someone

is driving a car straight at you and they're clearly going to hit you, what should you do about that? you would do everything in your power to avoid being hit, right? So does it matter whether the driver was intentionally trying to hit you or his brakes were out? No, because the end result is undesirable either way. And that's the same thing with climate change. Whether it's man-made or not, why not just take like common sense precautions to help mitigate those effects, right? And when you frame it in that way, it's like, look, this is happening.

I mean, whether you think it's man-made or not, why not put some sandbags down? Why not shore up our roads? Why not make sure our docks and things are weatherproofed? So that, I think, can really hammer it home that this is not a political thing. Like, if you want our infrastructure to stand up to this, if you want a livable future, there are steps we can take, and it's not political. Like, do you want your business to flood? No? Okay.

Put down some sandbags. And let's talk about what we can do to further prevent these. changes that are happening. Right. Yeah, absolutely. That's really good. And I have some thoughts as well. I'll go through a few and, you know, I'd love to hear your response to some of them. So first and foremost, you know, I, like I said, Nebraska, Montana, all, like lots of my friends, my personal familial history, my current hobbies, very much center around, you know, the fishing, hunting, and great outdoors world. Particularly, I'm really interested in fishing, bass catfish ice fishing etc i've been on a few turkey hunts went on some deer hunting as a as a child

not particularly my thing but those worlds are very close together and enmeshed and people that fish and hunt love the fucking great outdoors like they love it they're fishing and hunting licenses literally fund conservation efforts they're often more knowledgeable on the conservation of their local public lands than most people on the left are and when you're you can start the conversation on that fair footing of discussing, you know, like, I love fishing. Oh, I love hunting. Yeah, you know, you know, and then just open up that conversation and like, it really matters that these, that these, you know, the water quality is high.

It really matters that we have a good balance and we're managing these, these resources well, et cetera. You know, the opposite side of that is to come in is like, everybody needs to stop eating meat right now where the world's going to go to shit. And like, okay, you're getting nowhere with that. that, and you're going to make them batten down the hatches and recoil from the entire fucking thing. So that's one point.

The other one that gets brought up a lot, at least in my experience, is this false dichotomy between having to choose to meaningfully address the climate crisis or care about the economy and jobs. And it's very clear to anybody, I think, who studied this problem that that is entirely a false choice and to not meaningfully address the climate crisis. is to guarantee increasing economic damage, you know, billions and billions, we're already seeing it,

billions and billions and costs of repair, and jobs in an industry that fundamentally undermines the stabilization of the planet isn't a job that's going to have long-term benefits for you and your family in the generational way that they often assume. So to try to collapse that false choice and to say, actually, if you care about, like,

fiscal conservatism and maintaining a healthy economy, You know, we can agree on those. We definitely have disagreements on like, you know, deep economic issues for sure. But just trying to convince a conservative that it actually makes economic sense to meaningfully begin to address the climate change crisis, ideally yesterday. But we can start tomorrow. And that will actually protect the economy and create new jobs, et cetera. That can often be helpful. Sometimes I would bring in the military point.

Like if they're very skeptical of the thing as a whole, you can tell. talk about how the military, something that many conservatives have like a knee-jerk love and respect for, has clearly come out and saying that climate change is like the number one threat to global destabilization, conflict, etc.

So it's like, okay, well, you might not trust these liberal politicians or, sadly, you might not trust scientific experts. But what about the military top brass? You know, do you trust them? You know, maybe you can make some inroads that way. And then when it comes to like shaking them out of their complacency,

and you know this this particular argument can go either way i think but it just is a fact that climate change is already and will continue to cause mass migrations and we saw what happened to european politics with the syrian refugee crisis it went hard right in many ways and we see what happens that even the often manufactured crisis at the southern border um it creates right wing backlash gives them energy etc um so you know you don't want to play into zi xenophobia on this front. So it's a little balancing act you have to do here. But to just say the fact that not addressing climate change will absolutely fucking guarantee that every border crisis will become many, many times worse. And in fact, mass migration in general will be worse than we have ever seen

in our lives, in American history, et cetera. And sometimes that could help. Again, it kind of depends on who you're talking about and what their base values already are. But those are some things that work for me in my experience. And do you have any thoughts on any of that? Yeah. Yeah, when you're talking about economics, that made me think of something that's very relevant here in Texas. All Texans, generally speaking, hate California. They hate that state so much. And part of the reason is because there are a lot of Californians here and the Texans are saying, oh, they're taking our jobs and all that stuff. And they can't, you know, they've polluted their state and now they're coming here. but I think a way to to sell green energy investment to Texans is to say like look we know that our economy is so much stronger than California's right they're just a bunch of failures over there all they care about is their paper straws but we have all this land and it's it's incredibly windy in Texas out in the boonies we could put up wind turbines and generate so much more electricity than California can if you couch it

in like this competition between this this hated bastion of liberalism and like beating them at their own game, I could see that making some some actual decent progress. But just basically just selling it as like, look, we've got all this space. We have a strong economy already and why not be the not only a national leader, but a world leader in this new energy source, right? If if these liberals are trying to take away our coal and oil and those profits, profits, we need to get on replacing them with something new. And the newest thing, the cutting-edge thing, is green energy, right? We could do wind, we could do solar. Both of those are great for Texas. So I think there is an economic argument that could be made that would resonate with people in my area. But another thing you mentioned with the conservation of wildlife and stuff is Texans are an interesting breed because they do like hunting. and fishing and stuff. But our natural land is not as idyllic, let's say, as elsewhere in the country. We have a lot of scrub land, a lot of rocky areas, not a whole lot of beautiful natural

waterways and stuff. There's not a lot that could be preserved in the same sense that it could elsewhere in the country. So you have these people who are super into this stuff, and that argument may work elsewhere, but here not so much. I think here, what may resonate a bit more is leaning into the kind of the prepper mindset because Texas is very dry, or, you know, a lot of it's very dry. And as you were talking about with the military, they've admitted that conflict is going to be sparked and is already being fomented over water rights, over, you know, who has access to certain rivers, like in the Middle East and Africa, for example, like the Nile,

that is a huge powder keg. So I think if you were to say, like, look, the military knows this is coming. We need to also acknowledge this is coming. Climate change is drastically affecting water. So we need to be aware of that and react accordingly and prepare ourselves for this. And I think that kind of prepper thing, because it's very, very popular. not even just among conservatives, but just average people that they like the idea of being prepared. And some people take it way, way, way too far. But I think you can make some inroads with people

by selling them climate change in a way that is more in line with their preferred lifestyle. and it doesn't seem nearly as liberal shock and concern. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's really important. That's a very interesting dynamic of like how Texans and the natural environment that surrounds them is different from obviously a place like Montana or, you know, I visit the Pacific Northwest quite often. And like the conservatives up there, they do have an environmentalist streak because they have these absolutely fucking gorgeous. mountains and rivers and crystal clear lakes you can see all the way to the bottom you know 20 30 feet and so like you know even the conservatives have this the strain that can

be played on but perhaps in other places it's not as as pronounced and the idea that everybody is kind of a prepper I mean it's hard to be an American and see like go through COVID and not be I mean you had those crazy lines around gun stores the supply chain issues that we're already facing people fist-fighting over fucking toilet paper at the very beginning. One thing is for sure, crises will continue, the American government will continue to suck ass at addressing them, and people will do highly irrational things in the moments of crisis and chaos. And so to have even just, you know, like we have, we rented a house here in Nebraska, and

it came with like a stand-up, a deep freezer that was unplugged, and it just sort of in this little nook in our basement, and it's quite big. and so what we've done is we've just used that as like our storage after COVID it like you know we need food and water and basic supplies and so we've been stocking that over the last year and it's packed to the to the brim at this point and when we're continuing to expand to that it can't hurt yeah certainly and most crises they're not going to be like an asteroid hitting and then we're like on the the road or something you know some apocalyptic scenario most of the time it's going to be something like

what we saw in Texas with the deep freeze or in other places, this temporary one to three week sort of breakdown in basic services and social cohesion and a lot of the prepping and the storing of food and water is like, can you make it three weeks without having to go to the grocery store? You know, and that's like the most that most people are probably going to face. It could always be worse, but usually they get shit back up and running at a certain time,

if it's hyper localized and you can kind of bring in outside resources to help. Yeah, exactly. I mean, we've got water purifiers here. We've got like a little survival backpack with a bunch of essentials like crank radio, all that stuff. And it's, I think, very important to be prepared for this stuff. And like you said, it is going to to continue and it's probably going to get worse. So it's, you don't need to prepare for like a zombie apocalypse or anything or whatever the, you know, the hyperpreppers like to do. But, Learning how to make the most of your environment, how to prepare for a month of problems, make sure you have access to clean water, good food, that's going to be very important going forward. Yeah.

And the stupidest prepar iteration for me is the guy that, you know, just hordes a thousand guns. It's like, dude, you have two arms and you're going to need ammo for all those guns. What's much more important is like skills, can you go out and harvest food from nature? Where can you get clean water? Can you communicate effectively with your neighbors? Like, those are much more in demand than, like, do you have 1,700 guns? But anyways, I do want to mention before we move on, two quick points and get your thoughts on them. One is, and I fall into this as well sometimes, apocalyptic rhetoric around climate change.

It seems like, you know, maybe if we crank up the urgency on this shit, and it's, like, rational to do so, given the fact that we are doing almost nothing on it globally or nationally, you know, to make it seem very dire in some ways it very much so is, you know, sometimes it's like strategic, like we want to scare people into like taking this shit seriously. On the other hand, though, I have seen it have the opposite effect where if you make it seem too insurmountable, it can deactivate people. If you make it seem too fucking horrific, it can make people want to look away. to, you know, kind of keep their head comfortably in the sand. And so, yeah, the apocalyptic rhetoric is something that probably has a place strategically in a broader toolbox, but is often overused in a way that for particularly people that might already be a little suspicious or hesitant to embrace can just be the thing that turns them completely off. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I totally agree. I actually made a video recently on revolutionary optimism and the importance of not giving into the doomer mindset because that is it's completely counterproductive right if you if you believe nothing's going to get better then you're disinclined to work to make things get better so i think it's while it is useful like you said to have that in our toolbox to say like look this is you know extinction level uh challenge we're facing it's also important to be able to dial that back and say look i mean we're not going to wake up and the entirety of florida is going to be submerged, right? This is a gradual process. We don't have a lot of time to act to completely

mitigate the worst effects, but we do have time to do our best, to help prevent the catastrophic fallout of these things. We can shore up our defenses and things like that. There is stuff we can do. There's always stuff we can do. It is never hopeless. So I think it's super important to have both perspectives. Totally. Yeah, and one more point I just wanted to make, and This actually came from a comment. I was talking to Hakeem, actually, who I know you know. We mentioned this. We talked about the climate crisis a little bit, and somebody in the comments was like, you know, I like the way that you actually turned Pascal's Wager into an argument for climate. And I was like, I didn't really think of it in that way. But just for those that don't know, Pascal's Wager is basically the idea of, you know, debating whether God exists or not. If God does exist and you don't believe in him, right, the consequences are terrible. You go to hell. If God doesn't exist and you don't exist and you don't. do believe in him, nothing really bad happens. If God does exist and you do believe in him, well, then you're going to heaven, right? So it's like just strategically thinking it's best

to believe in God because blah, blah, blah. And so in climate crisis, it's not a one-for-one perfect fit, but it's kind of similar. And the way I would break it down is like, you know, if climate change is not real and we do something about it, all we're doing is building a better world with better energy, cheaper, more efficient, greener, less pollution. if climate change is not real and we do nothing about it well maybe the worst terrible consequences won't you know be on the horizon for us but we still have dirty oil we have air pollution which fossil fuels contribute to enormously we have these wars and conflicts over oil because it's a strategic resource you often have you know less than ideal governments being propped up by oil like in saudi arabia

etc so it's still worth doing something about right if climate change is real and we do nothing well then we are completely fucked the consequences are terrible we're looking three four degrees by the end of the century possibly even more of the feedback loops and then we're really in total civilizational collapse territory and finally if climate change is real and we do something well then we meaningfully address a absolutely huge issue and we make life better for for future humanity so whatever the actual thing you know falls out to be it still makes logical sense to shift our energy to more efficient cleaner forms of doing it and to do that as soon as possible, build new, better jobs in the meantime, et cetera. And that, I think, could be a worthwhile argument for somebody who might be suspicious of the whole thing. Yeah, I think that's very compelling. I mean, like you said, if we pursue this stuff, worst case scenario, we made a better future for our children. I mean, how could anyone fight against that? I think that's great. Totally. All right, let's go ahead and move on to the next issue, which is the issues of like straight up socialism or working class

politics more broadly. We're currently seeing strikes break out around America and among those striking there is a diversity of backgrounds, opinions, political commitments, etc. A picket line is one of those places where normal culture war divisions tend to melt away and the reality of class conflict becomes primary. So with all of that in mind, what arguments would you employ to try to convince a working class conservative in particular of the merits of socialism or at the very least of multiracial working class solidarity? Yeah. Well, to start, I think it's so promising that we're seeing the number of strikes and labor

actions that we are. It's incredible. I mean, the warrior met coal miners. I used to, when I was in Alabama, I was very near Brookwood. So it's cool to see. So I've said this a couple of times already this episode. And I want to preface this by saying, I hate Tucker Carlson. He is an abysmal, disgusting human being and exemplifies the worst of what we are fighting against.

But a lot of the people on these picket lines are primed to accept his brand of populism. The elites are out to get you and so on. So I would start there. I would agree with those people that the elites are screwing us, but then inform them that Tucker Carlson made like $13 million last. year and he is part of the elite, right? So just start working on them that where you're getting your information matters. Like a lot of these people are part of the very elite that they claim are making our lives miserable. And if they are part of that elite that's making our lives miserable, then we cannot trust what they're saying. But another thing I think is important

to bring up with strikers is that the the history of strikes and labor movements has historically been a very left-wing thing. Like a lot of the things that we take for granted today were won by socialist strikers. I mean, we've got the weekend, the 40-hour work week, five-hour workday, child labor laws, all those things that were considered, you know, communist back then, we now take for granted and could not imagine life without today. So I think if you bring those things up and you say, say, look, how great is it that we have, you know, a weekend that children don't have to work in

minds anymore and say, those were all socialist initiatives. These are positive things, historically speaking, if you were transported back in time and you were striking, all of your fellow strikers or the vast majority would be some flavor of socialist. It's only since, you know, the Cold War and Reagan that it's become a bad word. Like all of these things that we love and take for granted and want more of all these things that we that we're fighting for the socialists are the ones that have your back the conservatives are the ones driving by and hitting you with cars like we just saw on at the the john deer strike some guy drove by and just just killed someone it's yeah so it's i think the more intense the conflict gets between the strikers and capital i think

the more will see uh american strikers becoming more agreeable to the socialists who show up and bring them food or stand in solidarity with them. It's just a matter of empathy and history and being a decent human being. Yeah. Well said. I just had an interview with my friend and labor journalist and podcaster, Mel, Mel, who we talked about this exact issue and we talked about the contradictions between like revolutionary left-wing organizations going to the picket line in a disrespectful way, like handing out their pamphlets with hammers and sickles or circle a's on it and uh in fact she was in contact with uh the one of the leaders of this you know were out of omaha and the kelogue strike

one of the major plants is here in omaha and so there's been a lot of left activity on the picket line and uh you know she was reaching out and saying like this this left wing organization that was this particular one is anarchist uh wants to come and join the picket line and the guy automatically was like, whoa, well, we're not at all about, we don't want anything to do with, like, you know, brick throwing or fighting the, you know, like, it was very concerned because of the images that are associated with that political ideology on cable news. And she had to say, well, actually, they just, like, help homeless people and want to do mutual aid and want to bring some food, right? And then after it was, like, settled out, he's like, okay, sure, fine. And we talked, so if you want to hear more about how to approach a picket line in a respectful way and not in a shitty way, check out that episode. But you make great points about the elites and how that critique is already in the minds of conservatives,

but what it actually means most of the time implicitly is not like capitalists, but is like liberal capitalists or liberal politicians or liberal big tech companies or liberal academics. You know, those are the elites. The fossil fuel CEO is never really conceptualized as an elite, much less Trump and Tucker Carlson who as you said are both not only very very very rich but we're also rich kids and I don't care what your politics are if you're a working class kid and we all we all have a certain feeling toward the concept of rich kids entitled brady you know don't have to go through the shit that we have to do don't have to work the shitty

jobs we have to work so to be to kind of reframe them because Trump and Tucker they're two of the biggest, absolute biggest figures on the, on the conservative right, even on the fascist right, everywhere in between. So you have to address those figures, and that could be one way of doing precisely that. So I think that's important. A couple other points I want to add to yours. I also love your point about left history, showing how like all these unions and shit came out of radical left organizing and how all these victories that people take for granted that union members are quick to point out you know you love your weekends you love your time off

you love these benefits that all came from unions and they're right but they often don't have the background of like well what kind of unions they were hyper militant communist and anarchist unions and then we had the first red scare and McCarthyism which systematically dismantled the radical leadership of those unions etc etc

there's a whole story to tell there but certainly is a good place especially in places like Appalachia for example where that history is explicit even conservatives know it and it's very obvious who the left was and who the right was in those particular disputes

but a couple other things that I think are really helpful here and just in general is I really do think that the left has to draw the line between itself and Democratic Party the Democratic Party is branding fucking sucks people rightfully absolutely hate them

they are the epitome of everything that people across the spectrum dislike about smug coastal liberals. And we have to abandon the rhetoric, the posturing, the branding, and the cross-class compromises of Democratic Party liberalism and position our left politics in confrontation to both parties, including the Democratic Party. And you could really open up a pretty radical conversation with the working class conservative by opening up the conversation agreeing that, like, yeah, Joe Biden sucks, Obama fucked over workers, you know, Pelosi is obviously a corrupt millionaire,

air, et cetera, but it's also true for your people, right? I'll admit it for the Democrats, but you're going to admit that Trump is a rich boy. Tucker Carlson is the air of a, I don't know, I forget, like a food magnet, frozen chicken magnet, right? All these politicians on the Republican side are no better. And so you can often make some progress on that front. And then I'd also focus on like shared core values as opposed to parties and politicians, the Democrat versus Republican parties and their various politicians, you know, sort of opening up with the critique of both parties and all politicians is fine, but not to like emphasize the dividing line as being between Democrats and Republicans, but rather like, actually I agree with you on these core beliefs and here's where we, our politics can actually come together and it's not about Democrat versus Republican, but it is, you know, in so many words, about working class people versus the rich in general and those who own.

capital. That can be helpful. And then the final thing, and I'll love to hear your response to some of these, but I also notice that there's this anti-war sentiment that exists across the political spectrum. Like, you know, the average conservative kind of also sees the absurdity and the neo-conservative worldview and like nation building and the extreme waste of body and money and lives that come with these absurd wars that get average Americans absolutely nothing. But it's often presented as like, we're anti-war, you know, anti-militarism, and to be able to turn that into anti-imperialism, which is to say, to show how that is connected to capitalism, as you point out in one of your videos really well, how, you know, Northup Grumman and Raytheon and

these huge corporations benefit and profit immensely from constant never-ending war. It's not just, you know, some like free-floating idea of neoconservative ideology where we need to go a nation build. No, there's an economic powerhouse incentive behind maintaining this constant war footing and being the police of the world. It is profitable to some people, and those people do not include you and I. And that can be helpful linking up the general disdain that working class Americans have for American empire and turning it into a critique of capitalism as well. Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. I think across all of these topics is the the importance of the word we when we're talking to people across the you know cultural divide

as it were that you know they do this like the those people the elites those in power the republicans the democrats they do these things they start the wars and we are the ones who suffer we are the ones who have to go and fight and die and they never have to do it you know they they pass down these dictates to us and we are just expected to comply and take what little they give us and accept whatever stripping of labor rights we already had. They are comfortable. We are not. And that, I think, is a good, unifying way to start an understanding or to start a conversation

about the divide between the owner class and the working class. And that is at the base of what's critical when we're talking about labor rights. It's not, you know, conservative versus progressive. It's top versus bottom. It's those with wealth and power at the controls and those who are essentially the cogs in the machine that keep everything running. Like, we are the ones who do the work. They are the ones who benefit. And that's something that everybody needs to understand.

Absolutely. And also, I would definitely add the use of race and culture war ephemera on both sides of the major political party divide and how they use that to split the working class. That can be very helpful. My stepfather is like this white military veteran from a red state, you know, and he like has every cultural predisposition to lean right, but it is precisely him spearheading the unionization of his dairy factory workplace in a very multiracial workplace that has pushed his politics radically to the anti-capitalist left. And he sees how races is used to divide people,

how a two-tier system is used to divide newer workers from older workers and how these splits in the working class benefit the owners of capital. And that has been hugely impactful on moving his politics economically and racially well to the left of where it otherwise could have ended up being. And so I think that is important to point out as well because you do not ever want to compromise in these conversations on particularly that racial front because that's precisely a divide between the Tucker Carlson right and the left is like racialized scapegoats to get your eyes off of the real owners of capital and power and that is a classic classic tactic from the fascist right and we have to we have to actively work against

that and dismantle that and that's I think one way to do that exactly that's super important totally okay now I have like a fun question and this I thought would be a great question for for you and I'm really interested to hear your answer just a couple more questions here and this one is you know just what are three trends generally globally politically culturally technologically that you personally see as being of particular importance for how the rest of this century pans out the one that comes to mind first is great power conflict with China that is is such an important trend that we're seeing develop. It's coming with a new red scare. It's coming with accelerated economic tension, some military tension, and how that is resolved will have dramatic impacts on the rest of the century and going forward. Because right now, China is poised to economically surpass the United States very shortly. And as it makes trade agreements with the rest of the world and basically allows other developing nations to cut ties with the exploitative United States, we're going to see the U.S. lash out in very dangerous

ways. And while I don't foresee outright war with China, how the conflict had developed I think will be super important for the rest of the century for just in terms of the global balance of power. So that I'm very interested to see develop. The second thing, the second trend, I would say we've already talked about the global response to climate change, how we handle that. Because if we don't, we are going to see a massive shift in how people live and where people live. If we're going to see a lot of refugees migrating, there are going to be whole swaths of the world that become uninhabitable, and that is going to lead to severe political and societal unrest. So how we deal with that, I think, will be of critical importance to the rest of the century. And I would say the third one, the third one for me would be the sharpening of contradictions in the imperial core, particularly.

in the U.S. As we've talked about with the labor movement that we've seen, it's growing, seems exponentially in ways we haven't seen in probably 100 years. We're seeing a resurgence of class consciousness that while it still desperately needs to develop and reach the mainstream, there's a spark there that could become quite the fire. and that that I think is very important for us on the left to help shield that fire from being blown out but that if we can keep it building that will be immensely important to the future of the working class in the United States

and by extension the rest of the world so those are the three that come to my mind yeah those are all great and they overlap with some that that I had as well the rise of China and the fate of the United States and I say fate because we're clearly right now in a moment of decline. But there are possible trajectories, you know, that the U.S. could take to its advantage, right? I mean, there's like failures in China or destabilizations within China or a real coming to Jesus moment in the U.S. where they meaningfully address climate change and open up for more political parties to act as a release valve, et cetera. but I think what's more likely, especially given the capriciousness and the intensity and the stupidity of the American ruling class, is that the U.S. will probably continue to decline, but still be a huge juggernaut in a more than likely multipolar world with the rise of China.

And just how those two different political systems will play off one another, like China right now is just showing the immense superiority of its ability to, to handle the pandemic, to do long-term planning, to solve social issues that exist within their country. And the U.S. and its flippy floppy, hypermedia, political context can't even pass a fucking infrastructure bill. So, you know, how will that play out? I completely agree is absolutely essential. Climate change is obviously the sort of, you know, the shadow of the news hanging over all of our neck. So that's going to be absolutely huge. And there's a great book called Climate Leviathan that talks about the four major forms that global politics could take in the face of increasing climate crises. And I encourage people to check that out.

But just for a few of mine that, you know, no particular order are not in competition for a top three spot, but just things that I think about that are very important. One is the globalization of everything. And when we talk about globalization, we usually mean it in these very narrow economic. terms neoliberal globalization nafta etc but the truth is everything is being globalized now through our global technologies our global ability to communicate and the problems are becoming increasingly global not only with pandemics but climate change itself absolutely demands that the world come together more and more as a singular body and I think the nationalist recoil that we're seeing all across the world from Modi to

Bolsonaro to Trump and beyond could be either a last gasp of hypernationalism in an inevitably more globalized world, or it could continue to be an entrenched problem where as globalization continues inevitably to heighten in every respect, it will also increase the nationalist impulses within people. And we all know that this nationalist impulse, these nationalist movements are simply unable to offer a vision or meaningfully contend. with the problems that are increasingly global. It's like a refusal to even acknowledge them, much less solve them. There is no real vision there.

There's no real way forward. I'm not saying it's going to be the end of nation states, but a certain sort of nationalism is going to have to die. And so that processes and those interrelated reactions to one another, I think is one huge thing. The other one is like the increase in biotech and gene editing in particular, CRISPR, right and how that is going to impact inequality or exacerbate inequality we already see in the u.s with the hyper stratified health care system along class lines that you know i can't even go and get a tooth pulled

out but you know the richest of the rich can have a team of doctors making sure they don't die from covid even if they're 80 years old right so those inequalities are going to be hyper intensified under the possibility which is emerging is only going to continue to emerge there's no rolling back the dial on this of the ability to to edit genes already initially to take out like you know terrific diseases or whatever but it's going to quickly go into like well i have the money why can't i you know help my child in utero be more intelligent or more likely to be athletic or attractive or whatever it may be and what that says for the overall society i think is is very important and i think underlooked at on the left we should do more engaging with that topic in particular and then the

final one that i wanted to point out obviously automation which is one you and i agree on but i wanted to kind of think of a little bit more of a creative one which is agroecology and the development of like regenerative farming uh vertical gardens the greening of cities it's becoming very clear that these things are utterly essential to face the climate crisis and the broader eco crisis and they're already beginning to develop and I'm very interesting to see how those trends in particular play out over the next several decades

and I hope that that's a spot for optimism that this horrific corporate agriculture monocrop monstrosity that we've created in industrialized capitalist societies although it has had its benefits is clearly played out and we need to rethink our entire relationship with the natural world and farming

is obviously at the forefront of that. So those are some that I would toss out. Yeah, I agree. I think that's all super important. As you were saying with CRISPR and gene editing, I think it's very important that the left keep a close eye on how technology develops because it could very easily go, you know, the way of Elysium or Blade Runner or Altered Carbon or whatever you want, where the ultra-wealthy have access to these new technologies that dramatically increase health and

wellness or extend lifespans. And the masses are left, you know, in their hovels to die and, you know, have a shorter lifespan as the environment gets more and more polluted and all that stuff. So I'm overall, I'm fairly optimistic, but we need to keep a close eye on how technology trends develop and how they are used because we need to push back on on things becoming more dystopian than they already are. Yeah. Yeah. And for your optimism point, like, you know, one of the bright sides, I think, of this pandemic. Ultimately, when we look back as we're going to see, you know, a lot of this, like, medical science research on steroids and, like, these breakthroughs

are going to come as, like, a medium-term downstream effect of the entire world for two years now, being hyper-focused on a problem and pouring funding into it. I think we're going to see some interesting breakthroughs on that front, which is cause for optimism. But, again, we need a health care system that is equitable to make sure that those, advances are applied to everybody and not just a certain class. And then I also think like prediction wise optimistically, like I think based on where the trends are that like cancer is going to be more or less solved in our lifetime. That's kind of a wild claim and a lot of people think it's an intractable problem, but there's been lots of progress made on it. And we could

very much see by the time, you know, especially when we're, you know, late in life, that cancer is no longer the death sentence that it has been for our lives and our parents' lives and our grandparents' lives. And it becomes eminently and more and more treatable. And that's another reason for optimism, but also another reason to fight on the health care front as well, particularly in the U.S., where we have this clearly corrupt, radically unequal health care system that stands out in the world for being particularly terrible. Yeah, totally agree. All right. Well, final question here before I let you go, and this has been a wonderful conversation. Always a pleasure to watch your videos and a pleasure to talk to you. I love to have you.

back on. But are you optimistic, pessimistic, or something else entirely in terms of how humanity will handle the climate crisis in the coming decades? This is an issue that we both care about. We both do work on. And I like to ask people about their pessimism, optimism spectrum. So where are you at on that? I think it's a mix of both. And that may be overly optimistic. It may just be me not wanting to engage with the severity of the problem. But I genuinely I am, I'd say optimistic, but I think things will have to get a bit worse before any real action is taken. Other countries, like China, for example, seems to be doing a pretty good job, but the U.S., as of right now, is kind of a basket case. I don't want to say that

certain acts of eco-defense, shall we say, will be entirely necessary, but I don't see the American leadership taking meaningful action until we've experienced a lot of unnecessary deaths. I think that's, as we're seeing with this spending bill, every meaningful change will be stripped away and we will get nothing that we were promised. So I think while humans are resilient and we are problem solvers, I think we're also very resistant to making sweeping necessary changes. I don't see the United States leading the way on climate change, but I do see humanity overcoming it as an existential threat. But we shall see. Yeah, I pretty much aligned with that completely. I think I'm very pessimistic in the short term. I think there will be incredible amounts

of inevitable baked in suffering and death and destabilization in the medium term. But I do think long term, you know, because of the global nature of the problem and because of, like, with the pandemic, we see a bunch of money and thinking being poured into vaccines and treatments, et cetera, and in a similar way as the crisis intensifies, we'll also see much more people taking it seriously, whole societies, experimenting. So, like, you know, what they do in Denmark is going to be different than what they do in South Africa is going to be different than what they do in Japan, and there's going to be like a little, you know, laboratory effect there of like what works on what fronts and every

country is kind of trying out a different thing. There is going to be more of a need for global institutions that can sort of coordinate these effects, which I think is part of the globalization trend that I was talking about. And that can obviously take dystopian or, you know, more not utopian, but more in that direction forms. So I think that's something that is going to be on a lookout. So yeah, I'm pessimistic in the short term. I don't think the U.S. is going to be a leader, which it easily could be. And of like all the people that are pearl-clutching about China and saber-rattling about China, the fact is that China and the U.S. are going to have to work together on this problem.

And if you care about like the place that the U.S. has in the world, specifically in relation to China and you want the U.S. to edge out the competition, then this should be a central focus of yours. because the U.S. has the resources and the capacity to really lead the world on this new era of humanity and face down the crisis in a real way and win back the reputation and the appreciation of elements of the world that has been lost over the last several years because of American imperial decline and lashing out in the stupidities of the Trump years, et cetera. But it seems that there is just this anti-China sentiment all along the political spectrum in the U.S. that is much more likely to win out than like cooperationism and like the U.S. can lead this fight. So I'm not particularly optimistic about that.

But yeah, I think ultimately humanity will get its shit together and figure it out. But I think in the short and medium term it's going to be lots of unnecessary suffering and destruction in the process. And that's horrifying because we're all going to live through it. Yeah. Yeah, it's going to be a bumpy road. But I do hold out hope that we'll get there. Absolutely. All right. Well, again, thank you so much for coming on. Love talking with you. Before I let you go, can you please let listeners know where they can find you and your work online.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm on YouTube as Second Thought. All my videos are also on Nebula. If you're familiar, it's another streaming site where I put my stuff without ads, which is nice. On Twitter as at underscore Second Thought. And I'm currently working on starting a podcast with Hakeem and Ugopnik, which is called the D-Program. so stay tuned for that awesome yeah i'm excited for that uh would love to help boost it when it's ready to go i've had now you and hekeem on i need to have you gopnik on now i think that's the that's that's the hat trick i'm going for so nice but uh yeah good luck to everything you do i'll link to all of that in the show notes and definitely if you're listening to this um definitely go subscribe to second thought and particularly if you have people in your life who may be leaning in that direction or you need some good engageable accessible um resources to help push somebody

a little left in your life, very few things are better than second thought. So I would highly, highly recommend. Thank you again, J.T. Let's do it again sometime. Hey, thanks so much. there's a reason for the things that I have on I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down living in the hopeless

hungry side of town I wear it for the prisoner who is long paid for his crime but is there because he's a victim of the time I wear the black for those who've never

read Or listen to the words that Jesus said About the road to happiness through love and charity Why you think he's talking straight to you and me Well, we're doing mighty fine, I do suppose In our streak of lightning cars and fancy clothes But just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back Up front there ought to be a man in black

I wear it for the sick and lonely old For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold I wear the black in mourning For the lives that could have been Each week we lose a hundred fine young men And I wear it for the thousands who have died Believing that the Lord was on their side I wear it for another hundred thousand who have died

Believing that we all were on their side Well there's things that never will be right I know And things need changing everywhere you go But till we start to make a move to make a few things right you'll never see me wear a suit of white oh i'd love to wear a rainbow every day and tell the world that everything's okay but i'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back till things are brighter i'm the man in black