Rev Left Radio - Dialectics & Psychedelics: Transformation and Social Struggles

Episode Date: April 16, 2021

In this first installment of our ongoing series "Dialectics and Psychedelics", Joshua Kahn Russell joins Breht to discuss his personal journey through organizing and movement building, his physical and mental burn-out, and his transformative healing process. This episode provides essential context for the rest of this series! Learn more about Joshua here: https://eviltwinbooking.org/speakers/joshua-kahn-russell/ Follow him on Insta: @JoshuaKahnRussell Check out and support The Wildfire Project: https://wildfireproject.org/ Joshua on The Michael Brooks Show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0SzW7-sIVQ&ab_channel=TheMichaelBrooksShow Outro Music: "Masters of War" by Bob Dylan ----- 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 and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode, I have Joshua Kahn Russell on to talk about his extensive organizing experience and really open an ongoing sub-series with Joshua on a plethora of issues from organizing the limits, the mental, emotional sort of pitfalls and limits of organizing. recognizing the promise and pitfalls of the use of psychedelics, spirituality, dialectics, a whole range of issues that we plan to have several episodes exploring. And this episode is going to be an extensive introduction into Joshua's life and his basic story so as to create a context in which future episodes will happen in the sub-series.

So just be aware that this is the open. salvo in an ongoing sub-series and it lays on the table a lot of the threads that will pick up and carry forward in the coming episodes. He did also want me to make a little caveat up front just to be very clear. When he expresses skepticism about scientific materialism, he wants to make sure that people know that he is delineating that from Marxist materialism. He's very much a Marxist and understands historical materialism to be the essential way. to understand the evolution of history, politics, and economics. So when he's talking about scientific materialism,

he is separating that. He's talking about the philosophy and the ontology of viewing the universe in a certain way as compared to the analysis that a Marxist would use that we would call materialism. And as a side note, before we get into the episode, I also wanted to just say that this was recorded during Yom Ha Shoa. Most of you will know that as Holocaust Remembrance Day. I just wanted to put that forward and memorialize all the folks that lost their lives in the Holocaust. And I had just recently finished Victor Frankel's Man's Search for Meaning,

which is a great book, and the first part of that book is him describing his experiences in the concentration camps. And I just finished it this week, so it makes this one a particularly visceral Holocaust remember. day. So yeah, this is, like I said, the opening salvo in an ongoing sub-series. I really hope you enjoy it. Joshua has an amazingly interesting story, and I hope to have many more very interesting episodes with him. And as always, if you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio, you can support us on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio. And in exchange for your support, you get access to multiple bonus monthly episodes on our Patreon. So without further ado, let's get into this with Joshua Con Russell on basically his life story and the opening of an ongoing sub-series.

Enjoy. primarily orbiting the climate justice movements and also working in indigenous solidarity and economic and racial justice movements. My work these days is that I am the executive director of an organization called the Wildfire Project, which supports frontline grassroots movement organizations in transforming their culture to build thriving groups, compelling visions of freedom, integrate study and practice, building power across difference, build bolder strategies. and cultivating a deeper rooting in spirit and faith.

So I'm really excited to be here. Yeah, and I'm very excited to have you on the show. The way that we came across one another's radar was actually, as is often the case lately with some of our episodes, through Michael Brooks. Would you want to talk a little bit about your relationship to Michael and sort of how what you were doing on that platform is in some ways being translated on this one going forward?

Yeah, Michael was a question. close friend of mine and I spoke frequently on his platform, the Michael Brooks show, which really introduced me to this whole medium and, you know, what's called the online left in general, which has been pretty, you know, was pretty outside of my reference point until then. And over years on his program, you know, I first went on to talk about organizing, to talk about strategy, to talk about the mechanics of building left infrastructure, everything from, you know, direct action coordination to workplace organizing. And over time, my relationship personally with Michael became primarily a spiritual relationship.

And more and more on the program, we talked about spirituality. And it was interesting to me because it was to an audience that was, you know, largely secular atheist, largely, you know, highly resistance to those kinds of conversations. And he was a doorway for that audience into thinking a little bit differently about, about, about, about faith. And after Michael died, one thing that really struck me was I was, I got hundreds and hundreds of messages in the like two days after he died from listeners to that program talking about how much our talk. impacted them. And it struck me that even though most of what I talked about on his show was movement building stuff, almost all of what people referenced was the talks about spirituality, about how hungry his audience was for a conversation about spirit that was grounded

in a politically materialist framework that was rooted in a social movement orientation, but was an antidote to some of the alienation and individuation of late-stage capitalism. And so after that, I've been really looking for a place to deepen those conversations where I can both sort of speak clearly about spirit as well as being grounded in a materialist analysis. And I'm really grateful to have built a connection with you, Brett, and want to continue that conversation here on this platform. Yeah, absolutely. and that's a huge thing that Michael and I both shared and as I've talked about in other episodes

like my humble contribution to carrying forward his legacy is to continue this trajectory and as you found with his audience and I continue to find with my own is this this latent thirst and interest that is definitely there but you wouldn't know it at first and before you start talking about this stuff there is a fear that it will be, you know, too weird or too alien or just not interesting to a left-wing audience, which, as you say, is usually framed as more secular, if not outright, atheist. But once you start having these conversations, the obvious interests that is there comes forward, and that has propelled me to continue down that road. And I'm happy to continue down that road with you, because as we've

talked on the phone a few times already, it's very clear that you and I have very similar interests and you have a lot of profound insight into the interconnections between things like spirituality, politics, movement building, the use of psychedelics, and much more, as we'll get into. And this is going to be the first episode in a sort of sub-series with you, Joshua, and that will take many different forms, I think, as it evolves and develops. But do you want to, before we get into your backstory and everything, do you want to say anything about what you want to accomplish broadly maybe with the sub-series and specifically with this episode in particular so people can sort of orient themselves to what we're trying to do here? Yeah. I mean, on a personal level, I'm just looking to be able to have a coherent conversation. What I mean by that is that I'm finding at this stage of my life as an organizer, I find it impossible to have, a conversation about the outer work without also talking about the inner work.

And I have seen so many social movements fail because leadership gets burnt out or, you know, the impacts, for example, almost all the organizers that I know, particularly frontline organizers that deal with extraction, where there's like a physical toll on the body, who've been in this work for 20 years or longer, all of them have autoimmune disorders. It is, unless we're able to talk about mental health, unless we're able to talk about how we build healthy movement practice, to me, we can't be talking about strategy either. And so my goal is, first and foremost, just to be able to have integrated conversation about that. But also, I'm interested in sharing some of the threads from my life, which are about, you know, existential decisions. spare around climate change and being grounded in this stage of history that we're in, locating ourselves within that and the mechanics of movement building, how we make change in that context, how we find meaning both in social movements and beyond social movements. And then, of course, talking about psychedelics specifically, which Michael always wanted

me to talk about explicitly on air. He was very patient with me getting ready. And I always told him that I wasn't ready, and now I am. And so, and partly because I think that they're useful tools to be able to access yourself. And so an important medicine for this period in history that we're in. So those are some of the threads that I want to follow. And I'm interested in sharing organizing lessons just as much as I'm interested in talking about spirituality just as much as I'm interested in talking about psychedelics specifically. And that's my hope.

Yeah. And the mental health issues and the suffering, it's certainly acute on front line, you know, activists, water defenders, organizers, anti-extractionists, etc. But it's also the sort of tone and tenor of our time. The pandemic is really broad. the mental health problems and the deep suffering inherent in our sick, sick societies to the forefront. But it's always, it's been there for the last several years and it's growing in the face of climate change and the increasing realization on the part of many people that the

institutions of economic, political, and social life are seemingly less and less equipped to do anything really, but much less rise to the challenge. of our times. And that is an inherently anxiety-producing environment that we all have to live in, activists or not. But as I've said, it's particularly acute for those engaged in the struggle on the front lines. And that's incredibly important to think about because none of us are going to be able to sit on the sidelines in the coming years and decades. And we should learn everything we can from as many different traditions and elements of life as we can as well as from you know veteran organizers like yourself so i'm excited to begin this sub-series and you know the

the interview this one and this will be like the opening salvo in this sub-series with you as a guest covering a lot of different topics and themes but i think the way to start off not just this episode, but this entire sub-series is to dive into an extended backstory, your extended backstory, particularly to put everything out on the table that will become the sort of pieces we run with down the line. And so that will take, I think, much longer than a normal intro would take, but I think it is the only place to start. So with all of that in mind, let's kind of start with that. And after the full sweep of your experience, we'll zoom in on certain details and set up conversations that we can have have down the road.

So, yeah, I guess the place to start is just to start talking about your story and we'll take it from there. Great. Thanks so much. So I'm going to start in childhood, which was in Connecticut. So I grew up in a middle class suburb that was, you know, the range was, you know, the class background was such that we were being raised to be what for a lot of my life, we called coordinator class. Now the term PMC is in vogue. But so we went to, for example, public schools, but there are public schools that really trained us to be managers. So it was a suburb of Manhattan in Connecticut.

And when I was in middle school, I experienced kind of the typical bullying that a lot of kids experience and profound alienation from that sense of rejection, which for me was also located in getting gay-bashed for being too effeminate, things like that. And so I quickly looked for belonging outside of the town that I grew up in. And I found that through subculture. I found that through punk rock. And I found that through reggae music.

And so most of my friends, you know, by the time I was in seventh grade, weren't living in the same, you know, material conditions that I was living in. I was, you know, hopping on trains going to the city, New York City, the Lower East Side, and parts of Brooklyn, listening to punk songs about ecological collapse and reggae songs about revolution. And it radicalized me at a pretty early age just from the standpoint of, you know, I was living an experience that was so different than the way that I was taught to view the world that just in order to make sense of my friend's lives, I had to reject the. kind of, you know, conditioning that I was going through in high school because in high school I was learning, you know, they were laying on all the dominant myths of U.S. society pretty thick, you know, so we were doing plays about Christopher Columbus and stuff like that. And, you know, most of my friends were, you know, working class children of Jamaican immigrants or, you know, white kids

from broken homes and stuff like that. And so that was kind of the social milieu that I grew up in And it was very, you know, anti-authoritarian. It was very activating. So, you know, at the end of middle school, I started, I joined my first organization, which was called anti-racist action, which is, you know, basically in the, in the milieu of what's now known as Antifa. So this is in the mid to late 1990s. And at that time in Connecticut, there was a lot of wealth right next to a lot of poverty, which meant that there were kids that, you know, would be growing up super poor white kids

who would go to school with kids who would be like getting BMWs for their 16th birthday. And that created the conditions that made a lot of young white kids very vulnerable to neo-Nazi recruitment. And so in the late 90s, there was a lot of kind of skinhead gang kind of organizing. They didn't call themselves gangs, but, you know, and so what we did was fought them. We confronted them, so they would have demonstrations in places like Hartford, Connecticut. They would, you know, we'd go to, you know, the concerts that they had at, you know, bars in Meriden, Connecticut and whatever, confront each other. And, you know, it was like fighting other kids. It was, you know, like, we weren't like fighting adult Nazis.

But what we were doing had, you know, we didn't even. the word strategy never crossed our lips. We had no analysis that we were working from. We were just like, and can I, I can curse on this program, right? We incurred. You know, so we, it was like, you know, fuck the Nazis was our politics, right? But pretty quickly, I learned that this was not in fact reducing the amount of violence in my community. And what we were doing, you know, if we had thought about it, we, it would have amounted to think,

that we could defeat racism by physically fist-fighting Nazis one by one. And it just seemed so dumb to me at the time, which isn't a commentary on the social conditions now of people who engage in that form of activism. But in the context that I was in, what we were doing was really dumb. It was self-expression, you know, more than anything else, or perhaps exclusively. And this, I was also one of the only Jews in my community. And so I, and I was never religious. I grew up, you know, having a scientific materialist worldview, kind of secular, agnostic. But I started going to synagogue to kind of make meaning of my Jewishness, which, you know, I had a vague sense of a cultural identity. I got bar mitzvahed and all of that. I was associated Judaism with kind of social liberalism. But that's where I started to learn about kind of the history. Jewish people in this country engaging in anti-racist movements. And so that's when I started

learning about the history of the freedom riders. And I got really interested in the idea of social movements, as opposed to what I learned from punk rock, which was sort of individualistic, self-expressive activism that was more about signaling your alienation from society rather than taking seriously the project of trying to change society. It was also just to ground us in a larger political milieu, both at that time in this country, the dominant one, which is what I came into, which was kind of, you know, so this was right around the, what we called a global justice moment, or, you know, at the time was also called the anti-globalization movement. So this was right on the heels of the Green Scare, where sort of environmental direct action was very kind of popular.

And it was, you know, in the same kind of bigger moment as the Battle of Seattle with the, with the shutdown of the World Trade Organization. And it was at that point where, you know, I was sort of right below a generation of organizers who really rejected socialism as an ideological framework. The basic thought was all these socialist projects have turned into authoritarian nightmares. So, you know, that book, How to Change the World Without Taking Power was very popular. And so it was kind of an anarcho sort of milieu. that was much more about, you know, confrontation with institutions of capital.

So, you know, I was going to demonstrations against the, you know, the IMF and the WTO and, you know, was fascinated by these alliances between labor and the environments that were somewhat fictitious and somewhat real. But also coming into kind of a global sense of, you know, in the United States, that movement was really led by movements in the global South, particularly in place, you know, farm workers and Korea and Brazil and things like that. And it was also, you know, a moment when there was a lot of romanticizing of his Apatistas. So that was the larger kind of political milieu. And by the time I got to high school, I was, you know, I was still doing the kind of self-expressant stuff. I was in political bands. But I was interested in campaigning and measuring impact. And I'll give one

example just to share one of the earlier lessons that I learned in high school, which was that so I founded a gay straight alliance in my high school, which, you know, these days perhaps sounds quite tame, but in the, you know, in the 1990s in Connecticut, the level of homophobia was pretty deafening. There was no one else in my high school who was out of the closet. And so it was a big deal to try to form a gay straight alliance that had the simple request of being able to meet as a club of, you know, a semi-safe space to gather after school. And I was putting up flyers for for Gay Strait Alliance meeting and got pulled into the principal's office and got threatened with suspension if I continued to put up flyers. And the principal basically said, well, you

understand this is deeply offensive. And, you know, we wouldn't be able to allow a K. KK Club to exist either because that's also offensive you know so you get it right so I don't know so of course you know being a punk I was like fuck you

and you know at that time I'll also just say like the way that punk rock taught me to view the world was you know we viewed authority as a monolith right so like the Republic were the same as the Democrats, were the same as that principle,

were the same as mom and dad. I mean, I actually had a great relationship with my parents, but, you know, of the vibe. For sure. And the thing that I was grateful for is it didn't lead me down a trap of liberalism, but it also really meant that I had to work hard to be able to see nuance. You know, we, we politically, you got political capital by not seeing nuance. You got political capital by collapsing everything into the enemy, into the, you know, not seeing distinctions between, you know, cops and the literal Nazis that we were fighting, for example. And, and part of that was because, like I said, the sort of subcultural projects of, of, you know, those musical subcultures.

wasn't to make change. It was to be self-righteous and correct and alienated. And if you want to be alienated, then it's very helpful to collapse your opposition all into one thing. And, you know, that's obviously I'm mentioning it now because it's a problem. I think the broader left in this country still has. But I, when I started actually campaigning and doing organizing work, this was not satisfying to me. And so I continued to put up, you know, flyers for the Gay Strait Alliance. I got threatened with suspension again. And so I started organizing a little kind of mini campaign in my high school.

And, you know, what I could have done was the typical activist thing, which would have been very satisfying, to just rage against our homophobic principle, right? You know? And instead, I did, you know, I didn't have the words for this at the time, but I didn't did the power analysis and was like, well, why is the principal behaving this way? What are the levers of power acting on the principal? What is the principal's self-interest in making this statement, right, in doing this? And after doing a little bit of digging, I realized there was a PTA of, you know, to characterize it kind of crassly, you know, like sort of bored suburban

housewives who were freaked out when they heard that there was gay shit happening in the high school that might convert their kids. And so the PTA was, you know, vehemently against this. And the principal was, you know, being beholden to the PTA. And so by following where I thought the power was, we did just like a little mini campaign shaming the PTA in our public newspaper and stuff like that. And the PTA backed off. And once the PTA backed off, principal didn't care if we at a club, you know, like it, and it was, the issue wasn't that the principle was individually a bad person and was there for our enemy and we needed to fight them personally and or change the conscience of this individual powerholder. No, it was about, it was about shifting, you know,

what at the time, you know, again, I didn't have this language, but the PTA became what we call a secondary target where you identify, um, what are the forces acting on the person or institution that has the power to give you what you want, and then how do you change the chess board, so to speak, so that those forces are not acting on them? And lo and behold, principle was chill after that. And so that taught me much more about what it meant to focus on having a clear goal and identifying how to achieve it, then about the self-expressiveness that much of the U.S. left had been consumed in that was exemplified by sort of these, you know, music subcultures. So anyway, I'm going to fast forward. By the time I got to college, you know, still in the same political milieu, still sort

of secular atheist in my sort of non-spiritual orientation, or I guess secular agnostic, I, in 2003, bombs started dropping on Iraq again from George W. Bush Jr. And so I got deeply involved in student anti-war organizing, which was my first taste of kind of mass stuff and national level stuff. And so on a, on a what you could call a local level, I coordinated a student strike. We shut down our university, which was Brandeis University. it was the only, still is the only historically Jewish college in the country. And that's where I kind of started getting interested in the mechanics of direct action. And, you know, so being able to get a critical mass of students at this university to do a walkout,

shutting down the whole university, doing these sort of mass teach-ins that were kind of 1960s style, you know, inspired by that. And then going into Boston, which is the city that was adjacent to where the college was, and being part of these mass mobilizations against the war, which until the recent George Floyd uprisings were historically worldwide, the largest popular demonstrations that had ever happened in human history. And that was the first time I was like, oh, my God, like our politics can be popular. I was like, well, look how many of us there are. It was amazing to me to begin to conceive of becoming the mainstream, not just critiquing the mainstream, was in itself a revolutionary moments that shifted my political orientation a little bit more away from the kind of subcultural trappings that much of the left had been stuck in. And I was proud of the way. work. I was proud of how many people we turned out. And also, one of my friends at that time was like, yeah, this is, you know, this feels good. But what did we really accomplish today?

You know, after there were hundreds of thousands of people in the streets of Boston. And I was like, what do you mean? What did we accomplish? Like, we, we dominated the news cycle all day. We, we shut down all of these institutions for the day. We built community. We built networks. like we're building out our infrastructure, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And she was like, yeah, that's all well and good, but how does walking, how does a bunch of students walking out of classes for a day put pressure on the Bush administration or the Pentagon to make any kind of different decisions about the war? And I was pretty stumped.

And that's when I started thinking about national level strategy. and, you know, was still in a direct action milieu, so, you know, eventually we moved to what we call, you know, so there was direct action at the point of distribution, so then we were doing things like blockading the ports where weapons were being deployed to Iraq, which did have a measurable economic impact on our target, you know, things like that. We liked some things that we could measure. But just as much about strategy, it also taught me about organizing, because people frequently go to demonstration. and then afterwards ask, well, what did that really accomplish? And I came to believe that if participants in a street moment ask that question, it's a failure of the organizers to be clearly articulating the goals. Because when you are doing some kind of mobilization, there's a lot of different ways that mobilizing can help you, that are different from each other. So maybe you're already well organized, right? Maybe you've already built enough infrastructure.

Maybe you already have enough people. And what you're doing by mobilizing is flexing that muscle, right, to threaten your target, to demonstrate how much power you have to say, you know, if you don't give us our demands, we are going to, you know, stop working or whatever. Or maybe you don't have that power yet. and mobilization is instead a movement-building tool to build things like networks, to enliven your base, to make people feel good, to get attention as part of a strategy that is actually helping you organize, right?

It's keeping the bicycle in motion. But if your goals are internal to your movement, if they're about movement building rather than your movement leveraging its power, you need to be able to articulate that to the people coming or else it's a recipe for burnout because people, you know, hoot and holler in the streets and expect that to, you know, the law to change or whatever the next day. And of course, that's not how direct action works anyway. But it really then both got me on these twin tracks of thinking about organizing in a moment where I also just want to, especially if there's younger,

listeners from, you know, the mid-1980s until, you know, 10 years ago, the electoral arena really did not feel open to the left. So a lot of that kind of anarchist milieu that I was describing, it was also a logical reaction to the idea that, you know, I mean, neoliberalism was so dominant in the electoral arena. There was very little, if any, space at all for even moderate social democratic policies to be in the mainstream debate. It was unheard of. And so and also the labor movement have been, have been so thoroughly weakened that, especially for a younger generation, unless you came from a union family or were entering a profession that was already organized. You know, in college I did learn, I was grateful to get some training from

SCIU. We were doing custodial worker organizing for parity on my campus. And that was when I first got a taste of the way that labor had their approach to organizing. And I was very grateful for that. But overall, we, my generation, politically, we had almost no mentors. We felt like we were, you know, in the wilderness from the gap between the late 60s to the, you know, late 90s that in terms of accessible, we didn't have elders who were accessible to us in general. Not that there were not movement elders around, we just, as a younger generation, didn't know where they were. And so we were largely reinventing the wheel and learning things through trial and error on our own. I didn't even know that you could get trained to be an organizer until I went to that SEIU training. But even that,

it was so specific to the mechanics of workplace organizing that, you know, I just didn't even know movements existed like that. And so that's when I really in this anti-war moment started doing national level infrastructure building. So I helped launch an organization that was called the new SDS, SDS standing for students for a democratic society, which was an organization in the 1960s that fought the Vietnam War and was also rooted in participatory direct democracy. And we made a gamble Basically, I connected with another young person who had met some of the early leaders of SDS in the 60s who were talking about wanting to revive SDS amongst their peers. And together, we were like, well, what if we relaunched this thing that would be, you know, basically a magnet for your older generation of people, you know, thrown up the flag for being like, hey, if you were a part of this, come back. we need you and also something compelling that would get us some media attention so young people

because this was also before the internet was really built out you know this was before facebook uh really existed beyond you know harvard's campus um and social media was was in its infancy and so even just the idea of getting the word out itself you know needed to be a strategy that looked a little different so we launched this thing the new sDS it immediately filled a vacuum Because there was no national formation for student anti-war organizing. And within half a year, we had about 6,000 members, which made us the largest explicitly anti-capitalist organization in the country basically overnight because it speaks more to, you know, the state of the left than anything else. But to us, I mean, that we were huge all of a sudden. And, you know, there's a lot we could talk about in the future.

but the thing I'll just say about SDS is that it really taught me about the cultural barriers within the left. SDS, we were a really beautiful entryway for several years for thousands of young people to come into left movements. And SDS was a precursor to a number of different things that were more impactful. So, for example, almost all of the people who were founders of occupants, came through SDS, and the new SDS, I mean, and brought with them both the cultural traits of the good and the bad of the Occupy movement. So both the sort of addiction to endless process came from us as well as some of the bold kind of new framing around reinvigorating a class analysis in a society that, you know, none of us had grown up with language about class being in the pot. popular discourse, et cetera. So that's a really quick, just to make this point, because I made it before, but, you know,

especially for like the younger folks coming up and their political consciousness being, you know, lit up in the last several years, before Occupy, and we've had many critiques of Occupy on the show, but like it really is hard to overstate the complete lack of any discussion of class in politics or the mainstream media. It was really a, it was considered. like a fringe topic to even use a word like class. It just wasn't talked about. Inequality wasn't talked about. And that Occupy's existence marks a stark and noticeable transition from the 80s, 90s and early odds to the post period of Occupy where now class

is something that both mainstream political parties and the mainstream media have to constantly grapple with and cannot ignore anymore. And you know, you have to give Occupy, it's credit for really bringing that class discussion back to the center of in a lot of ways American politics. Yeah, that's right. That's right. And until then, the subcultural left, the analytical framework was intersectionality. And so, which, which meant at that time, as it tends to me now, exclusive focus on race and gender. And the, a lot of the challenges that, you know, a lot of the critiques that I see leveraged about identitarianism in the left now, you know, we were incubating in the 90s and then, you know, like the new SDS imploded from

typical stuff that was connected to only having an analysis of identity that was disconnected from a grounded analysis of capitalism. And that's part of why a clear analysis of capital emerged through the new SDS that then was a seed for Occupy. Because the new SDS imploded from exhaustion of process, from chronic criticism, from purity politics, from, you know, anti-leadership politics, from the self-marginalizing circular firing squads of sectarianism. It also, you know, one thing that I'll mention before moving on, so we don't get too far down this tangent, but I was so grateful to and benefited so much from, from the connection to an older generation through the new SDS. It did, it was successful in that it brought, it brought us mentors.

What I didn't realize is how much of a fucking mixed bag it would be because they also brought with them all of their trauma, all of their scars, all of their old tired debates that were no longer relevant, and people came back into it with mixed motivation. So there were some people who came and in their eldership were deeply wise and really saw their role as mentors, saw themselves within a deeper movement ecology that needs mentorship, that needs elders, and really were helping guide us. And then there were plenty of other people who wanted to relive their glory days, or they wanted to settle old scores. or who, you know, they came from a generation that did not pay attention to the spirit,

that did not pay attention to the inner work. And as a result, they sprinted and sprinted and sprinted. They literally thought, you know, from 1967 to 1969, they were all telling me, we never slept because we thought we were on the brink of a revolution in this country. And then when we smashed against the wall of Reaganism, we were devastated. And we were devastated because we were completely depleted. We had attacked each other relentlessly. We had attacked ourselves.

We pushed ourselves way too hard. It was not sustainable. We were being sprinters, not long distance runners. We didn't have a long view. We were not grounded in, you know, ritual or connection to land or anything bigger than our smallness of our political project, which we thought was big. And that was very instructive for me. And they, you know, I realized, you know, like, oh, I don't. want you know I was lucky in the beginning to have some mentors of people who um did amazing things

and I won't name them because I feel like you put them on blast but there were people who I would like read about in history books and I was like this is amazing I'm taught you know like I'm getting mentored by blah blah blah and then I realized like this person's miserable this person is bitter this person is not engaging movements now in a way that's generative or constructive I don't want to actually follow that path. I want to follow the path of people who are older and are in balance with themselves and are humble and are thoughtful and have the long view and are still a part of movements who don't think of themselves as passing the torch, but holding the torch along with us in a way that has a coherent movement ecology. And so I really started to shift my priorities from gravitating away from sort of the sexy explosive stuff that, you know, the books that I read followed, you know, like the way that academics traced the growth of social movements were mostly through charismatic leaders who had a role, of course, but there was a lot of other people doing a lot of other

work who had a lot more, you know, deeper lessons to share, let's say, by virtue of not being in the spotlight, I think. So anyway, that was that experience. And let me fast forward to, you know, there's a lot of other stories of that period I can tell, but you know, when I left college, up until that point, I had been connected to racial and economic justice movements, the anti-war movements, I had been connected to queer liberation movements. I've been connected to movements around Palestine. But the environmental movement sort of felt like it was on an island of its own. I had stereotypes about the environmental movement that it was like white middle class people trying to save owls and stuff

like that and um and so i i didn't really and yet i was deeply i felt ecological collapse in my bones since i was a child you know when i was in punk bands in the 90s i was screaming about climate change um and uh i just didn't feel like there was there was a left expression that that that spoke to me. But one thing that the environmental movement does have is organizing jobs. And I needed a job. And so I got a job in the environmental movement for a group called Reinforced Action Network, which is my first time being like, oh my God, like activists have desks. Like you can do this professionally. And, you know, came a little bit with my sort of self-righteous anarcho-critique of that, right, thinking that that was somehow a contradiction in terms.

and blah, blah, blah. But I feel very grateful to that organization because it taught me how to do what's called corporate campaigning. And so we spent a long time fighting banks for their funding of extraction. So banks for funding all kinds of extractive industries, fighting individual pipelines, fighting fracking, fighting fracking at a time when the environmental movement was pro-fraking, the mainstream environmental movement. And being in an organization, like RAN, RAN is the acronym for Reinforce Action Network, was beautiful for me at that time because it straddled the world of the mainstream environmental movements and grassroots radical movements that were, that I got introduced to, primarily what's called the environmental justice movements,

which is poor people and people of color fighting point source extraction. So, you know, where does the refinery go? It goes in, you know, the black community in the city and who chokes on asthma or where do we get our energy from in this country, it gets extracted from indigenous reservations. And so I learned from those frontline movements, as well as indigenous land defense and indigenous sovereignty movements at that time. And that began to shift my worldview, which I'll talk about more in a second. But I also learned about the mechanics of like, we won a lot. We won tons of campaigns against Chase Bank, against Bank of America, one major policies moving billions of dollars, we defeated pipelines, we canceled coal plants,

we navigated complicated coalitions with labor and the environment, and where I started to like get a deeper labor politic in the context of understanding the fault lines between those two different movements. I'm really, really grateful for that period of experience. It also was when I got involved in global land defense fights and serving indigenous communities. as a community organizer and sort of learning my politics of how to walk. As someone who both, because I was a staff organizer, I had access to be able to leverage some resources from a nonprofit, but I was also part of all of these grassroots milieus that did not have, and so that wasn't the role that I was playing.

And so I was also constantly a bridge and navigating kind of inside-outside strategies And a lot of the outside strategies were, so for the last, you know, almost 17 years, I've been part of an organization called the Ruckus Society, which is a direct action training organization, serving frontline communities who were at a point in their campaigns where they needed to escalate to doing things like blockades, doing things like banner drops, doing things like shutting down jails, doing, you know, all kinds of technical, physical, embodied, you know, putting your body on the line. I got arrested dozens of times, you know, doing things like, you know, after, for example, in Phoenix, Arizona, they passed the show me your paper's law, the SB 1070 that basically said that if you were brown at any point in time, the cops could ask you to show your immigration status. And if you didn't happen to have it on you, you ended up in jail and through a deportation hearing, we shut down the whole city of Phoenix with direct action. We were following the front line leadership. of groups like Puente and tona tierra and i got personally arrested by sheriff joe arpaio who you know spat on me and like he used they try to emasculate their male prisoners by using pink handcuffs and putting us in pink underwear and letting us kind of cook on the sidewalk forever so i learned a lot from those kinds of experiences and also learning about again like left infrastructure what's the relationship between nonprofits and as flawed as they are and

labor unions as flawed as they are, community-based organizations as flawed as they are, and then kind of grassroots volunteer left formations. I was up in coordinating coalitions between all of those different kinds of groups and trying to figure out, like, how do we build a movement ecology that makes sense in this context where so much of the left at that time was concentrated on into nonprofits for various historical reasons. And I really became a student of groups, meaning a student of how people behave in groups, how are decisions made, how our goals set, how our strategies built. And that's what really led me to become a facilitator, which is, you know, so my main roles in my life have been as an organizer, as someone who

trains activists and is a practitioner in direct action. But as a facilitator, it's much more about supporting groups, being groups well. Right. So how, do we make collective decisions about goals or strategy? How do we debrief our lessons and have a culture of praxis where we're learning on purpose and becoming a student of our context? How do we navigate internal conflicts, particularly around identity? How do we build meaningful multiracial movements across power differences? What does that look like and mean? So that ended up becoming a big, a big thread. And, you know, also at the same time learning from doing campaigning. So one of my biggest campaigns that I helped organize from Jump and was a main strategist for was

the campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline, which we finally won this year after 10 years, which was a campaign that was a mixture of, you know, it was led by really the indigenous sovereignty movement, but then also brought together a complicated unlikely alliance of ranchers, of farmers, of environmental kind of advocates, of scientists. And that was a major part of my life, was organizing that. And through all of the work, doing work both in this country and abroad, which I'll get to you in a second. We were really at that time in the early 2000, shaping and trying to define what we called the climate justice movement, which now is a movement. At the time, it did not exist.

So there was a mainstream environmental movement that was focused mostly on like protection of nature. Then there was frontline environmental justice, which was poor people and people of color, fighting point source extraction, dealing with everything. from poisoned water to poison lands to poison air to refineries to you know mountain top removal coal mining etc and and that was also a movement that was associated with labor and then indigenous sovereignty movements which was you know land defense mostly and water protection that was connected to to sovereignty fights legislatively from from you know from national levels all the way up to the United Nations. And those, we were trying to build, basically take the logic of the environmental justice movement and the indigenous sovereignty movements and scale it for climate

change. We were like, okay, these movements have mostly been born to fight like point source extraction. They have all of these insights. And climate change is so big that the environmental movement is not a useful container to hold a movement. We need to be building a, a new orientation. So we called it climate justice. So I was part of kind of laying the foundations for some of that, which were full of contradictions. It was a global effort that on a global level was connected. I spent a lot of years at the United Nations, the UNF, Triple C, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is what eventually led to what's now known as the Paris Accords. But there's kind of a through line,

which we could do a whole episode about that, obviously. But that was a neoliberal project that started with the Kyoto Accords, where basically corporations realized, you know, in the same way that they were using institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in the 1990s to say that, okay, trade is everything, we're going to dominate these, you know, anti-democratic institutions. They realized corporations, I mean, realized early on, oh, climate change isn't an issue. Climate change is everything. Climate change is going to affect immigration.

It's going to affect health care. affect trade. It's going to affect literally the drawing of borders. It's going to affect war and conflict. It's going to affect resource extraction. It's everything. So therefore, we need to build this international architecture of these legal frameworks ostensibly to fight climate change and make them use neoliberal market-based mechanisms. And so I was part of a movement that was engaging that, both because we did believe we needed global treaties, but to be using mechanisms that weren't based in the market in order to, in order to deal with climate change. And that's when I got to learn from movements in the global south.

So I was in everywhere from Bangkok to, you know, Brazil. And then also, you know, we were gathering in Poland and Barcelona and Copenhagen. And I at that point was working with an international arm of 350.org, which is different than the U.S. arm of 350.org, if you're familiar with that. group that kind of operate differently internationally and was coordinating our global training program. So I got to learn from all of these poor people's movements in the global south. And between that and what I was mentioning earlier, it slowly had shifted my worldview. And so into, you know, what's now talked about is decolonization, where it deepened my politics, much deeper

from just sort of having an analysis of capital or the state or whatever. And, um, I began to see the trajectory of the paradigm of Western thoughts, not as the center of the world, but as one historical thread of a dominator culture that was dissimilar to the indigenous ways of being that exist all around the world, almost all of whom had a worldview of reciprocity, of belonging to a global ecosystem, of respecting the sovereignty of all living beings, of viewing everything as conscious. you know, and that's when I also was introduced to indigenous medicine and psychedelic plant medicines. But at the time, it was from a restricted kind of perspective, which was mostly I learned from North American native activist friends who were very activist-y in their orientation, which was

basically a perspective, mostly related to medicines like peyote, you know, youth. the Native American Church, as it's known, but as well as other plant medicines saying, this is our medicine, not your medicine. This medicine has been demonized. It's been criminalized. It's been beaten out of us violently through residential schooling, through forced Christianization and worse. And now, in this new era, it's becoming attractive to white people who are commercializing it with companies that are over-harvesting the medicine, which is a problem with you know, white sage, for example, um, right now, um, taking these medicines without respect, uh, without context. So therefore, we need to defend this medicine from you in the same way

that we have to defend our land and defend basically everything that you're trying to steal from us. Um, and that was my understanding of cultural appropriation, right, which is now that term has sort of expanded to mean kind of anything anyone wants it to mean. It's now used to, like, interpersonally police people's private behavior or their fashion choices, but, you know, the way that I came into that was much more of an understanding of capital of things like, you know, the way Vendanashiva talks about biopiracy and the patenting of seeds or the ways that, you know, certain kinds of medicines then become, you know, taken over by big pharma and, you know, or, you know, whole like plant species that are, you know, pushed to extinction from commercial uses. So I,

I was interested, but I was like very clear, like, okay, I'm not allowed to engage in any of this. And so that was, you know, for a long time, for like a decade, I was sort of aware of various kinds of indigenous ceremony that a lot of my friends, it was a deep part of their life, a deep part of their healing. I deeply respected the power of those medicines. but I also was, you know, almost afraid to get too curious about it. And I'll just sort of end this stage because I'm about to move into how everything I just describes really fucked me up, which is that, you know, at that point, I was really proud of the work that I had done. So I'm now, like, in my late 20s, and by the time I hit my late 20s, I had written a bunch

of organizing manuals, focusing on the mechanics of how to make change, and, you know, had done a lot of big work that I was proud of. But I was alienated and isolated. And first I'll say, I had chronic illnesses my whole life. So I was born with severe eczema, severe allergies, severe asthma. And I charted a course of my life based in this sort of Western scientific materialist framework that our bodies are basically machines that carry around our brains and that we are our brains and that the self, aka consciousness, is located in the brain. And that, yeah, you got to take care of your body, but that's just, you know, like maintaining a car. And I was then, I was also taught on the left that my main contribution was strategy, was thinking through things, right? And I was part of movements where there were a lot of people

who were doing, you know, what are called cultural organizers, but those were mostly not white people. And in general, I had been a part of movements where I was, you know, one of the only white people. I'll actually talk more about that in a second. But because my body was always in pain, I learned to tune it out. And to think my way through everything. And the left rewarded me for being overly analytical. I had been sprinting through life. I had lost access to my body's wisdom. I had lost access to my heart's wisdom. I had lost access to my spirit's wisdom. And I had gone through burnout many times. That's not what I'm talking about. I hit a wall with chronic illness that was entirely profoundly dangerous.

different. So my autoimmune disorders then bloomed. And I realized I learned, you know, for many years, it was undiagnosed. But at that point, I had had Lyme disease chronically for five years. And it was getting worse and worse. The fatigue, the brain fog, the memory loss, the joint pain, all accelerated to the point where I became bedridden for about three years. And I was experiencing literal dementia. But even when I wasn't experiencing that physiologically, I, once I stop, well, actually, let me describe another thread before I come back to that, which is that, which is the thread around identitarianism, which is that when I was young, I came into a left learning that as a white

man in a white supremacist and patriarchal society, I was caused. harm just by existing, right? Because by existing, I was, I was as a default participating in these systems that I was benefiting from. And so therefore, I needed to pay my rent for living on the planet by doing good work, right? And therefore, I didn't have an inherent sense of dignity. I got myself worth by defining myself, not based on who I am, but on what I do, right? And so that was what the left taught me to define myself based on what I do, which is why I did a lot, which is why I was sprinting, doing, doing, doing, doing, doing, doing, right? Ironically, this is a colonized way of thinking. And, you know, because I was working in movements

where I was often the only white person, I also learned that there was a rulebook that I had to follow in order to have legitimacy. So I had a level of hypervigilance at all times of being aware of needing to walk in a very specific kind of way in order to, you know, do the things I was doing and it really tuned my political compass, not from a broader analytical framework, but from like, does the most marginalized organization in this coalition approve of the way that I'm coordinating the coalition? If yes, then it must be going well, right? That was kind of how I was constantly tracking the legitimacy of my work, right? And so when I got sick, once I stopped being able to do anything, I was like, who the

fuck am I? Right. And also, I had this huge crash of having built all of these wonderful relationships with all these people all over the world that I thought was community, because the left talks about community a lot. But I didn't have community at all. What I had was a social network of people that I had various trauma bonds with that that was mostly I stayed in touch with remotely. And so when I got sick, the almost none of the activists in my life showed up for me. And to be clear, I, you know, and I don't say that bitterly. Like, I didn't know how to ask for help. I didn't think I was worthy of asking for help. And I forgot what it felt like to be functional. I had spent so long in the fog and in the haze of not just being physiologically

in a cycle of extreme fatigue, but also depression. So I was also navigating the other thread was climate despair. You know, during that time that I described, that whole arc, I became intimately aware of how all of the systems that support life on the planets are in free fall or collapse. And I spent a lot of time at the United Nations hanging out with climate scientists in their silent despair and with indigenous communities who are dealing with the routine genocide of carbon colonialism. You know, like I have friends who have lost like 15 or 16 different blood relatives from like 10 different rare cancers that are mostly only found on their reservation because of everything from fracking to

uranium mining. And being a strategist, that was constantly frustrated with how the environmental movement, the climate justice movement, the global community, whatever, was not picking strategies anywhere near to scale commensurate with the crisis. And my sort of, you know, agnostic, secular, scientific materialist worldview didn't give me anything deeper than ideology to draw on for hope. And if all you have is your announcement, of the current material conditions, there isn't actually a lot of cause that I could find at that time for hope. And so I moved into a deep alienated sense of depression, of despair, that sort of dovetailed with my chronic illness and my lack of a sense of, you know, that kind of hole in

my heart that the left gave me. And so that that whole experience, of nearly dying a few times, that was the best gift I've ever gotten in my life because it forced me to change everything. And so, you know, at that point, I had some other indigenous friends say to me, oh, you're really sick. Come to ceremony with us. Come to ceremony with us. And it was the first time in my life that I had prayed.

I didn't know what prayer was. I thought prayer was like asking for things that you want from like a magical being, you know. That's not what prayer. I mean, some people might call that prayer. But prayer is a technology that gives you a moment of intention setting, of reflection, of gratitude, of humility, where you can, you can surrender to something bigger. It can give clarity. And some of my friends who were doing, you know, anti-pipeline work in the Amazon invited me to go down to the Amazon. And so I went to Peru, and that's when I first encountered ayahuasca.

And I sat with that medicine, which is in a Shephebo lineage, and I was transformed by it. And in future episodes, we can talk more specifically about the details of that experience. It wasn't through one ceremony. it actually led me to what is now my spiritual practice. So for the last seven years, I've been sitting in that tradition. I've sat in hundreds and hundreds of ayahuasca ceremonies. I organize my life financially so that I can go down to the jungle, you know, as frequently as I can, which is every year and a half or so, where I spend a month fasting. It's not just about, you know, the ayahuasca ceremony.

there's a there's a whole rigorous spiritual practice connected to it and um but through the that those first experiences which was basically for me two weeks in the jungle where i sat in um eight eight ceremonies that were basically back to back um through that i began to understand on a deeper level um the consciousness of all things and had a you know like part of the way that the shepievo worldview is i mean it was it's just so different than than the scientific materialist worldview. It's, it's, you know, they, they don't locate, they don't have any stock in anything that humans can tell you.

It's all about your direct contact, contact with the sacred. It's your direct contact with the plants. Your subjective experience is what is real for you. And anything that, that human beings try to institutionalize or mediate or mediate your access between you and the universe, that is all some dominator bullshit. That's all colonialism. That's the worldview. And I began to shift my perspective and see, you know, to develop a perspective that was, you know, we live in a multidimensional universe that our human brains, the human ego, has only evolved to perceive some little bits of.

And, you know, the tools of science are great. I believe in them. They've evolved to only be able to describe one tiny fraction of that, you know. Although recently, you know, things like quantum mechanics and strings theory are beginning to start to dig more into the realms that many of these practitioners, shamanic practitioners, you know, have known for time immemorial that, you know, these plant medicines lift the doors of perception so that you can experience more of reality and, and give you some context. extend through that, I learned that my body, I had a totally different conception of self. I didn't think, I was no longer identified with my ego, that that is myself. I saw myself as a constellation of intelligences, that I have neurons in my stomach that give me wisdom, that trauma lives in the body and that different organs in my body carry different wisdom if I learn how to listen to them, that my, you know, that I have a different larger self that is not

my ego that you could call the spirit. I use that word. But I also want to be clear, you know, with the audience that I'm going to use words like, you know, spirit and spirituality. Nothing that I'm saying requires theism. You don't need to believe in God in order to, you know, relate to the, to the words that I'm using. These are just words that make sense for me. But, but that also, you know, not only are we a constellation of intelligences that I come from a society that trains my ego to dominate all of the other wisdoms that I bring, right? And that that is the center of of capitalism. That's the center of patriarchy. That's the center of white supremacy, that ego, that, you know, patriarchal ego drive. But even just physiologically, the idea that I'm one

being seemed crazy to me, you know? Like before that, I thought I was like had a sweet tooth that I was a sugar addict. And I was like, oh, I'm not a sugar addict. I have a colony of bacteria in my gut that's sending signals to my brain to eat sugar so that it can eat the sugar like i i'm a whole ass ecosystem and um that really shifted you know you'd think i would have had some form of that perspective by learning from ecology uh for so long but there's it's it's different knowing something intellectually versus feeling it and so many of those amazonian plant medicines, not just the psychedelics, that are, that are like purgatives that, you know, that part of what they do is they, they pull all the toxins in your system, whether they're physiological or

energetic, bacterial, whatever, into your gut. And then you release them, whether you're, you know, puking or crying or, um, or, or burping or shitting. Like, it's very messy. But you basically, it's about cleaning out your system from all the toxins of the world that we live in. And the basic assumption is that the body is a self-healing ecosystem that can heal from almost anything on its own if you remove the blockages. And this is, there's versions of this philosophy that that are in many healing traditions, non-Western ones the world over from yoga to Ayurveda to acupuncture that that are, you know, all kinds of breath work, energy work, meditation, whatever it is. It's about, you know, helping the ecosystem of your body function properly.

And that is what ultimately healed my autoimmune disorders was that. And a couple of things I'll just share sort of politically was that, you know, one thing that really struck me early on as I started to build relationships with Shepivo people was their critiques of capitalism were so profound. to me. They would say things like, you know, and they would use words like the West, but they'd be like, you know, you people in the West, you look at indigenous communities, like you look at maybe like the Bushmen in Africa or, you know, a tribe that is, you know, has material technology

that you consider in the Stone Age, you know, maybe they're like using Flint to make fire. and you consider, when you consider your society's technological arc over the last 2,000 years, but especially, you know, last 500, you have built a society that has championed a certain mode of being where you then lean into the material world and you now have the scale difference between using Flint's to make fire and rocket ships that go. to the moon, right? We've been on that same trajectory with the development of spiritual technology. And when we look at your society, we see you as in the fucking stone age. We see you as deeply backwards. And you need to understand that the tools that we've built,

the rituals that we've built, the alchemy of even making, you know, like ayahuasca, the way that we listen to plants, you know, like we have been on thousands of years trajectory of advancing spiritual technologies that that are every bit as dramatic as a difference between the invent, from the invention of the wheel to the invention of the internet. But you guys still can't even see that. And, you know, we, we understand that this universe is full of consciousness, that we are humble in our place in the universe. There are tons of more, you know, that we believe that evolution is the purpose of life,

that there are tons of other consciousnesses that are multidimensional that have evolved, you know, beyond our perception of it. And cultures around the world, you use lots of different words for it. You could call them aliens. You could call them ghosts. You could call them spirits.

You could call them angels, whatever you want to call it. There are, inhabit a full universe that is alive, full of different kinds of beings, and you've built a society where you're shut off from learning how to listen to anything other than yourselves, and you've brought the planet to the brink because of it. And that is why they had a perspective that was almost the opposite of what I mentioned earlier when I was talking about cultural appropriation, where, and to be clear, I'm not speaking for anyone's perspective

other than my own learning. And that's going to be the case through all of this, that I'm not, I'm only speaking for getting to share what I've learned. So I'm not claiming to speak for indigenous perspectives. But what my teachers down in the Amazon would say about sharing their medicines was that they would be like, we're good. like we you think we live in poverty and yeah we have tons of problems down here and those problems are increasing due to extraction and your fucking oil companies um and and we need to to you know fight repression um shit ain't easy but we know we have community that like when the lights go out when when this shit collapses we will be taking care of each other it's y'all who are a fucking mess it's you guys who come down here full of depression full of alienation full of trauma that you don't even understand as trauma and you need the medicine and that this medicine wants to spread right now

because the world is on the brink and the people who need it most are the people who come out of the culture that has taught them to dominate the planet because that's the culture that needs to shift and that's why these medicines are wanting to spread right now and and so I still walk in a way that holds both of you know my north I have still a lot of North American indigenous friends who are deeply skeptical of me talking publicly about psychedelics as a white man, which is one of the reasons why I mentioned earlier that I was very cautious to do it on the Michael Brooks show. I'm still trying to learn how to do it appropriately because you know, there's a lot of different ways of working with psychedelics. It doesn't always have to

be in a traditional indigenous community. However, there are communities around the world who have worked with varying kinds of spiritual technologies where the customs and rituals that they've built around it are part of those technologies about how you enter into relationship with a plant, with humility and care that is not extractive. And we come from a culture that doesn't know how to engage resources without moving into the modes of extraction.

And so that's also why I locate myself in these traditions while I also am a practitioner, you know, with other psychedelics that aren't attached to a specific lineage where I think there are certain plant medicines that are much more forgiving and allow you to just explore, you know, like you can just take mushrooms alone in your bedroom and have an experience and you don't need to have a practitioner who comes from a lineage of, you know, 10 healers down of thousands of years. or hundreds of years to hold you in that space. And also, you know, there's a level of political complexity with the way these medicines spread because they're mediated by capital. So there's also now, in this country, tons of, like, hippies who think that if you play guitar, you can, you're equipped to hold an ayahuasca ceremony, and I think that's dangerous. And there are, you know, there's, there's a messiness.

There's a, there's a real problem when things spread in a globally capitalist, uh, world and they still need to spread and things don't need to be perfect. And these things are full of contradictions and there's a lot more I can say about psychedelics specifically, but I'll just kind of end this sort of long extended intro by saying that, you know, the antidote to my climate despair, I found that through working with psychedelics where, you know, my personal experience of getting sick was the universe telling me like look homey like you you have been ignoring all you've been out of right relationship with yourself right um and and you've been ignoring all the different signs that your body has been sending you and so now uh i'm going to give you it's going to accelerate to something

so debilitating that it's going to force you to have to transform everything from the inside out in order to survive and that was the gifts that i got and i realized that's you know that's basically scale that upwards to understand climate change that, you know, however you want to locate, you know, whatever Mother Earth is saying to us, y'all human beings have been out of right relationship with each other for a really long-ass time, especially the last 500 years that's put you out of right relationship with me. There's consequences to that that you're not listening to and they're accelerating because you're not listening to them. And they're going to keep accelerating to the point where you, they're going to be so debilitating that it's going to force

you to, as a species, transform everything if you want to survive. And, you know, once I could locate myself and kind of surrender to those bigger cycles, I could then find a greater sense of agency in my work as an activist and in the role of social movements and see us as part of a multi-generational project moving through an ecological moment, not just a historical moment in the development of, you know, whatever, nation, states, and economies, but as something bigger that I have a small role in. And it's it both, you know, the humility of that also gives one a lot of sense of empowerment to, you know, it's that contradiction of being like, I'm totally not important, which is what gives me a lot of importance and meaning. And it's how I felt

connected to the world. And, um, and I think those are just some examples of the kinds of contradictions that spirit offers, whether your access to it is through psychedelics or whether it's meditation or whether it's yoga or whatever it is, whether it's farming, whether it's singing and being in bands, whatever your access is to that, the ability to sit with contradiction and the ability to sit in a nuance is something that the lefts lacked so deeply that it created those conditions that got me sick. And that's also why in the last three and a half years, you know, I thought I was going to stop doing movement work. And I had been part of the Wildfire Project for many years. I was part of the founding team. I know I haven't spoken much about that. Maybe we can do a different episode on it. But I was asked to become the executive director of the Wildfire Project. And I didn't think I was going to go back to what I was doing. But part of what I realized was that, oh, this is a vehicle where, you know, so wildfires made intervention is the idea that there's a lot of barriers to winning that are outside of our control on the left. But the biggest barrier to winning that's within our control is the culture of the left itself.

which is often self-righteous, self-marginalizing, reductive, trapped in binary, either-or, good or bad, thinking, obsessed with purity, disconnected from spirit, you know, like disconnected from gratitude, connection to land, to song, to ritual, to sitting in contradiction, to sitting in awe, existential surrender, all the things that I was just talking about. And so I realized that, oh, my next stage was going to be to help heal the culture of the left that got me so sick so that we don't keep burning through all of our leadership. Because, like, I began this talk saying, like, I just know so many leaders who are like zombies right now because of what the struggle did to them. And I learned that on an even deeper level in those early SDS days from seeing the way that some of those elders behaved. And if we don't find a way to get powerful in a long-haul context, there's no way that we're going to be able to navigate the chronic crisis that is part of moving into a century that is defined by climate change and the way that's putting pressure on our social, political, and economic systems. So that's, I'll stop my little monologue there. That's, that's kind of how I came to what I do.

That was a profound monologue story. And I think it speaks to so much of the problems that I I also identify on the left and in culture broadly and so many of the threads that I've been trying to pull together on Rev Left. It's as if your experience is a microcosm of the broader crisis that we're in, the specificities of how it manifests on the left and gesturing toward a solution, a form of transformation that is much deeper than merely. a political one. And this dictate that nature is giving us from the inside out and from the outside in to evolve or perish. We are all sick. And you might have been sick in a particularly extreme way. But that sickness, that physiological, spiritual, existential, mental sickness that you experience so viscerally and intensely, is the sickness of our societies, is the sickness of Western civilization is the sickness produced by centuries of colonialism and capitalism

and it's the sickness that is bringing our species and our planet to the absolute brink and the deep connection between the ongoing genocide of indigenous peoples it is a synonymous process with the ongoing destruction of the natural world and it is within these indigenous communities and indigenous struggles that have always been at the forefront of the fight against colonialism, but also at the forefront of the protection of the natural world and the protection of these medicinal and spiritual technologies that are now becoming crucial, essential, and more and more widespread. There is, for instance, a renaissance within medical science right now of finally seeing the promises.

of some of these natural substances like psilocybin mushrooms and I think that speaks to this reality that there is this sort of very we're at the very cutting edge of an integration process happening that I think needs to happen and is part and parcel with this evolve or perish dictate that nature is giving us between some of the advancements of science and technology and medicine with these deeper, profound understandings and wisdom and knowledge about these medicines, these sacraments, the natural world, how to live in harmony and balance with it, et cetera. And that is synonymous as well with the dictate to transcend and destroy colonial capitalism, extractive capitalism. as an outgrowth of the worst elements of the ego-dominated mind, as well as a perpetuator of it.

And so, you know, I think there's so many threads that you just laid down right there that is going to make up this series going forward. And that is why this story had to be laid out in this extended way, because we're going to now move forward with this series picking up on multiple threads that were laid down in this conversation as their entire own episodes. And I'm really, really looking forward to that. There's so much that I could say right now, but I think I will save those discussions and those things for the subsequent episodes

in which they're going to be the focus of our conversation. Is there anything you want to say as a way to wrap up this first episode, any lessons you want to make sure that you reemphasize, and any things maybe you want to gesture toward that we're going to tackle it in upcoming episodes. Yeah, I mean, I guess I just want to say, like, I'm still sick and fucked up. Like, I don't want the story that I just told to make it seem like, you know, I once was lost, but now I'm found or something like that. This is a nonlinear ongoing process of healing. And I am, I mean, certainly, I did have an experience of transformative.

forming Lyme disease specifically and moving from being bedridden to being functional. However, you know, I'm in process with all of this stuff. And so one of the things that I'm excited about this series for is to be, you know, working through certain things kind of in real time with you because also the world's changing so quickly. And so I don't want to present myself as, you know, like I've figured out the secrets to this kind of healing and, you know, now I'm sharing it with the world. It's much more like, you know, here's a path I've been on.

I, like, went into a deep ditch. I dug myself out and I'm still figuring it out and still struggling with a lot of things. And there's, you know, but it is the reason why I think that healing and organizing have to be interconnected and trauma work specifically. needs to be part of how our movements function. And I'm really grateful to be part of a community of extended practitioners who are trying to figure it out as we go. Because at the end of the day, you know, the world's changing really rapidly

and nobody really knows what the fuck is going on. And we can learn from history. We can use different frameworks. We can lean into some of these deeper resources of knowledge and wisdom. But all of it is just a way to, to do our best to make meaning of what's going on. And so I just want to be really clear that I'm not presenting myself as an expert in anything, but instead as someone who is, you know, a student of context and is students of these things and trying to learn out loud. And I'm

really excited that I've connected with you, Brett, because you seem like someone who's just a really good person to learn out loud with. And so that's my hope with the rest of the series. Yeah, absolutely. The feeling is entirely mutual. I know that my audience is going to be interested in this and follow this series. And as I said, there's so much that we will talk about. And I really look forward to that as well. Is there anything before we end up this first episode that you would like to plug, perhaps your Wildfire Project or anything you'd want to say before we wrap this up?

Oh, thanks. Yeah. If you want to check out wildfireprojects.org is our website. you know, we mostly serve and support organizations, but if you, there's a lot of interesting stuff in there that you might want to check out, including there's a, you know, a tab called how we do it. And there's a thing underneath that says our six elements, which talk about, you know, the six elements that we think are, help movements thrive. And so that might be a good place to start if you want to check out some of our work. And of course, you know, if you want

to sign up on our newsletter, we'd love it if you'd become a sustainable. which is, you know, our version of Patreon, that kind of thing, because we are trying to fund the work through grassroots supporters, obviously, instead of, you know, grants and things like that. We serve, you know, organizations of poor people who, you know, can't afford, like, these fancy consultants. And so one of the things that's different about wildfire is that our whole team is not like this disconnected class of facilitator consultant types, but they're all organizers themselves who come out of the movement. we serve and and so that's that's what we do and and please check it out wonderful i will link to that

in the show notes thank you so much again for this a wonderful discussion joshua and i look so forward to continuing this subseries with you going forward thanks so much for having me on come your masters of war hear that build the big guns have planes that build all the bombs is it hide behind walls yeah that hide behind desks I just don't want you to know

I can see through your masks you that never have done nothing but built to destroy You play with my world Like it's your little toy You put a gurney in my hand And you hide from my eyes And you turn and run farther when the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old You lie and deceive A world war can be one You want me to believe But I see through your eyes And I see through your brain Like I see through the water that runs down my drain You fasten all the triggers

For the others to fire And then you sat back and watch When the death count gets higher You hide in your mansion Well the young people's blood flows out of their bodies And it's buried in the mud He's thrown the worst fear

They can ever be hurled Fair to bring children Into the world Before threatening my baby Unborn and unnamed You ain't worth the blood that runs in your veins How much do I know But to talk out of turn

You must say that I'm young You might say I'm unlearned But there's the one thing I know I'm younger than you that even Jesus would never forgive what you do Let me ask you one question Is your money that good Will it buy your forgiveness

Do you think that it could? I think you will find When your death takes its toll All the money you made will never buy back your soul And I hope that you die And your death will come soon I follow your casket By the pale afternoon

And I watch while your lord Down to your deathbed And I stand over your grave Till I'm sure that you're dead Thank you.