Rev Left Radio - Look for the Helpers: A Collaboration with Srsly Wrong and Mexie

Episode Date: June 13, 2021

In this collaboration with Shawn and Aaron from Srsly Wrong and Mexie from the Vegan Vanguard, we have a wide ranging and experimental conversation about helping each other, solidarity, loving compassion, self and other, what it means to be human, and much more.  ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. Today's episode is a collaboration that Rev Left did with Seriously Wrong, Sean and Aaron from Seriously Wrong, and Mexie. This is a great sort of experimental conversation where it was perhaps less structured than other conversations that we've had, but it's really trying to get at the human condition, what motivates us to help one another, sort of the cosmic, unity that is expressed through solidarity and radical loving compassion and we just bounce off each other talking about a bunch of different topics but through the lens of like can we have a

wholesome meaningful conversation about our shared humanity and how that manifests in the world broadly so it's sort of filtered through like the mr rogers quote about the helpers right always look for the helpers and any tragedy. And then the gates are sort of open for us to just go back and forth with our thoughts in a really organic, and I would say, again, experimental way. So I'm really happy with this. I think it's meaningful. I think it has something profound to say.

And I think that some people will get a lot out of it. At least we hope so. I really love Sean and Aaron and Maxi. Couldn't ask for a better group of people to do such a conversation with. And I really hope that you all enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed making it. Hello, these wrong, she is wrong, they're wrong so wrong, they're wronged And welcome back to the Seriously Wrong podcast. We are joined today by Brett O'Shea from Revolutionary Left Radio and Red Menace,

as well as Mexie from Vegan Vanguard and Positive Leftist News. How's it going? It's going great. Yeah, happy to be here. So happy to have this conversation with you all. I am very stoked to have this conversation as well. And also, of course, should mention Sean and Aaron, wrong voice, host of the Seriously Wrong Podcast.

We're here as well. Hey, how are you doing, Aaron? I'm doing great. Yeah, thanks for being on the show. both of you, it's exciting to have this kind of conversation and to be able to do this with you. I'm excited. Hell yeah. So the topic that we've come together today to discuss is, I guess, broadly speaking, help.

Mr. Rogers in an interview talks about how his mother had this advice. You know, my mother used to say, a long time ago, whenever there would be any really catastrophe that was in the movie, or on the air, she would say, always look for the helpers. There will always be helpers, you know, just on the sidelines. That's why I think that if news programs could make a conscious effort of showing rescue teams, of showing who medical people, anybody who is coming into a place where there's a tragedy, to be sure that they include that. Because if you look for the helpers,

you'll know that there's hope. And I've always been really touched by this. I can give you hope to focus on where people are taking corrective, positive action. And there's lots of different angles on that feeling of seeing help being needed and giving help. It's such like a human deep thing and so wholesome. And I sort of feel like it's sort of feel like it's. the point of life. So we wanted to invite Brett and Maxion to talk about this subject of help and what it really means, the meaning of help. I loved that you shared the Mr. Rogers quote in our

Google Doc before recording this. I was so touched by that. I had not heard it before. And it made me really, really happy not to plug my own channel right now, but because I feel like that's kind of what I'm doing with positive leftist news is trying to find the helpers, right? Because all we ever see on leftist media is the negative, right? And we all know, we all know the horrors of capitalism and imperialism and all the rest and patriarchy and white supremacy. But we don't spend enough time, even as leftists who need the hope and who need the motivation, looking for the helpers and celebrating them, right? So I feel like that's kind of what I try to do on positive leftist news. And then just seeing that quote just made me feel super warm inside. I just love that.

I thought it was just so wonderful. Yeah, absolutely. I completely. agree. And I think just outside of like the economic incentives to focus on the sensational and the negative, there's also just an implicit, I think, negativity bias in the individual human mind that tends in that direction, particularly when we live in such rough and scary and uncertain times that is really amplified. And so I really love what Mexie does with that focus on the positive aspects of the news. And I think with Rev Left and seriously wrong, there's an attempt at least to inject humanity, inject decency, inject humility, and those things can often also be lacking on the left broadly. There's sometimes this idea that like left-wing people are like, you know,

good-hearted, bleeding hard people that just want to like cooperate and come together. But in reality, they're humans. And if you spent even a millisecond in leftist spaces, particularly online, you can see just as much cruelty and egoism and negativity as you would anywhere else in the political spectrum. And so I think it is the part, it's a duty, it's a revolutionary obligation to try and at least emphasize the positive, the wholesome, the cooperative, the good things about life as well as critique the bad. And so hopefully we can do something like that in this episode. I think to especially sometimes for people who are on the left and very aware of all of the ways in which society is messed up and like to be a political person and to be aware of

these critiques of what's going on in the world. And you start seeing symptoms of these problems everywhere because they are everywhere. And it's super important to have those critiques and to understand all of that. But I think sometimes like just socially, it can feel like if you're not talking about that if you are talking about positive leftist news or if you're talking about something good in the world like a small win or whatever it happens to be that that it can feel like you're distracting from what's important and what's important is the problems and what's important is we have to fix things and what's important is it's not good enough yet but i don't there's something wrong with that framing of this like essential competition

between the two. And I think we do have to be aware that you don't want to present some overly rosy picture and like it's all just going to be better and we don't have to do anything and everything's fine. I think that's the worry is that it's going to demotivate people if you talk about positive things because then we don't have to do anything. Positive things are already happening. But like Mexie said, there's also the aspect of if you don't look at those things, if you don't see that there are real good things happening in the world, then you're not going to have hope because if all you see is the way things are messed up and wrong and getting worse, it also is demotivating in the opposite way of just like there's no point in trying

because there's nothing good happening. Yeah, you almost buy the capitalist propaganda that human nature is inherently greedy and, you know, the revolution isn't going to be born from that kind of cynicism. You actually have to believe in people. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, on that note to praise positive leftist news is something that I've thought about for a really long time is like how we don't do it enough, just keeping track of all the things that are happening that are good and worth celebrating. We know from like motivational neuroscience stuff. You need markers on the road. Like if you're going to run a mile for the first time, you need to keep track of the progress you're making along that mile. Otherwise, it's just going to seem like insurmountably large. And

what happens like in a neurochemical sense is you have all these unresolved dopamine loops and your stress becomes overwhelming and you reach the point where you need to give up and it's a rational thing that our brain does and it comes from you know thousands of years of evolutionary history both as humans and before that there's a certain point where the stress is too great and what you have to do is leave and what you have to do is like get away give up on whatever you're trying to do and so I think when we don't keep track of those markers on the road and we don't see oh wow actually some really good stuff, some really cool stuff just happened. Obviously, there's a lot that is unresolved at this point. There's like a lot of problems that are unresolved. But like people come

together and they back each other up and they get things done by coming together and fighting for each other, fighting for other people as hard as they would fight for themselves. And that's always happening. And I felt for a long time we need. And maybe this is something that May Day could be in the future. I feel like there should be like a yearly event where we can just look at the last year and be like, hey guys, let's not lose sight of the fact that, like, five years ago, it seemed impossible that the drug war or the cannabis would be legalized in places or whatever, and now it's just accepted as common sense happening everywhere, et cetera. Obviously, cannabis being legalized isn't like the be all, end all, the revolutionary moment that changes everything in itself,

but it is something that like we've seen in our own lifetimes. And there's tons of things like that that we've seen in our own lifetimes because, you know, stuff happens really fast. And if we're not looking back and seeing those road markers, we might just look at like, oh, we're running this huge mile for the first time, and it's insurmountable, and then people get to the conclusion that they need to leave, and they can't do it because we don't have those road markers. So I think Max at your project is really like a good example of that type of thing. But it's also just like, it's a really broad thing. I think we should strive to do more, which is just keep track of the fact of when we win, or when we do on some, at least some, even if it's a marginal gain.

When people have that sense of confidence that they can change the world, that's when they really start dreaming about what they can do. Yes. What you said about weed legalization, not being the be-all and end-all, is really true. But, like, also at the same time, it's kind of fucked up to deny that it's good because, like, people who would have been put in jail for smoking weed or for selling weed in the places where it's now legalized, which isn't everywhere, even in the United States. States, but it is here in Canada. Like, you can't send someone to jail for that anymore. And yes,

we should let everybody who is in jail for it out and now we have more ground to push for that. But, like, just it's better that it's like this than that it's not. And another, I think, really good thing recently that's just like changed so much in our lifetimes, even just in the last few years is the level of cultural discussion about sexual assault. Like really since 2017 in the Me Too movement, like it feels like we've genuinely, obviously not fixed all the problems, but turned a corner to a place in society where like speaking out about this stuff is a little bit more accepted than it used to be. And you still get all the same kind of reactionary responses and stuff, but people are a bit better equipped to deal with

that now. And public opinion is a bit more on the side of listening to people who are victims. And I think like that's the direct result of people's work and speaking out. And yeah, it's, it is important to mark those milestones, those moments when things like change. I also think just to add to all of that, that there's this sense, particularly on the left, but probably more broadly, but you really see it on the left that to point at something and to say this is good or that this makes me hopeful or there's some reason for optimism is almost synonymous with being naive, right? And like the principled leftist stand is to point out that even seemingly good things are actually negative and nothing's really come of it.

And the good and bad are so intermixed. It's kind of easy to do this. And a great example is like last year's huge uprisings, Black Lives Matter uprisings across the continent and then it spread internationally around the world. And on one level, you know, the sort of cynical and realist, quote unquote, take would be, well, yes, these uprisings were good and this energy is great, but look what actually happened, little to nothing. There might be some local mingling around the edges and reforms, but nationally there's been

nothing, and really locally there's been very little. And if you want to go deeper, you could say that a lot of these police departments have gotten more funding, so what did we really accomplish? And I think that goes back to the idea that sometimes focusing on that, that can be demotivating because we miss out on what was amazing about that. And I don't think we've fully seen the repercussions and the consequences of that uprising fully come into view quite yet. I think these things happen. And then there's a resettling of consciousness and a reorientation of politics. And sometimes that takes a while. But I was always nervous after that

that the left would go too far onto, well, it didn't change anything. And like, you know, how demotivating is that? People put their lives. on the line. People were brutalized. People were beaten. And when all the dust settles to say it actually gained nothing, nothing important was one, I think is kind of sad and tragic. And so emphasizing the good parts of that, showing how that uprising was truly historical, showing how people came together spontaneously in cities across the country to fight for the same thing. This diverse, for the first time in American history, this diversity in the name of Black liberation was seen. And we have this generation of people coming up whose political and social and racial consciousnesses were radically

expanded, if not fully defined and formed in that moment. And so, you know, we should be able to critique how the system is irresponsible to these historical uprisings. Well, at the same time, saying that those uprisings were historical. They were amazing. They were, you know, as heartbreaking as they were sort of optimism building and that we should take the good with the bad and we should be able to clearly distinguish between the two so that we can continue to motivate, continue to say that there is a path forward. We do have to keep fighting while pointing to the realistic aspects that we still have to overcome. And sometimes falling on the side of peer cynicism is easier, I think, than making those distinctions and trying to pull out the good from the bad. Yeah. Well,

in terms of that, I mean, talking about things that we've seen in our lifetimes, I couldn't imagine years ago having public opinion changed so much, you know, hearing people, you know, in vast numbers say defund the police, abolish the police, you know, having people from my high school who were apolitical saying things like this, right? Like that's a big change even though necessarily, you know, we haven't abolished the police already, right? Like Sean said, we do have to measure that benchmark, right? That is really significant. And then I can point to ways that it influenced other helpers rising up in Toronto specifically. there were direct consequences that we can already see. And as Brett, you said, there's so many

we haven't seen yet and that we won't see for years. So I completely agree with you. I think that, you know, being a good critic, there's a point that it just becomes absolutely ridiculous and completely demotivating. So I'm just very excited to keep talking about all the helpers with you all. And really quick, sorry to butt in here. But one direct consequence that I think is incredibly timely from those uprisings is the shift in social awareness when it comes to the Palestine liberation movement. I think that, you know, a whole generation of young people seeing what happened with Black Lives Matter, having their notions of oppression and racialized apartheid and police state violence, all of that was sort of sharpened and formed in the Black Lives Matter uprisings. And then when you look at Israel cracking down on Palestinians, you see the exact same dynamics. And so it's much easier for somebody whose political consciousness was sort of steeped in that last year to look at that and have a better take.

and I think we are seeing a consciousness shift on Israel, Palestine, that we had not seen in our lives and that was unthinkable even just a few years ago. And then the other side of that really quickly is the inevitable backlash, which I think can lead people to feeling like nothing was accomplished because every time that there's a push for progress and movement forward in a society, particularly settler colonial white supremacist's society, there's always going to be this often white backlash to it. And in the moment, it can feel like we didn't take a step forward at all because now there's all these reactions against us. And that can also lead people to think that nothing at all was

accomplished. And I think it does take time to settle out. And if you look at all other instantiations of this throughout history, there has been this forward progress. Then there's been the backlash. And then there's overall it's settled into a more progressive state than was before. And that's the general pattern. And we shouldn't lose side of that. Yeah, the backlash is the death knell. The backlash is, is, us winning, right? Eventually. It's totally true. And I saw during like the uprising last year, people who, like Maxi mentioned, like people who I'd never seen dip their toe into this stuff being like, well, actually, Araya is actually the voice of the unheard. And I was like, what the

fuck? Like, when did you learn this? That's amazing. Like, you were not the person I expected to say that. Oh my God. It's great. And I think your point, Brett, about the way this has affected consciousness in a broader sense and how it affects the way that. we had this sort of breakthrough on the way that people talk about Israel and Palestine, where the mainstream is able to acknowledge what's going on is apartheid. And what's going on is like people being deprived of economic, political, and social rights that should be universal. The way that we've seen that spoken about recently is there's been a different sort of tone to it.

And at the end of the day, like, what happened in Palestine and what Israel did there is not a win for the left. So it almost feels vulgar to say, like, it's a good thing that people reacted to it negatively. time. And I think that sort of stuff ties into this sensitivity we're talking about why the negative gets sort of privileged in discussions is because we're very sensitive to the idea that we could be indifferent to that sort of suffering. But when you look, even like in the political spectrum here in Canada, you know, Israel, Palestine is the third rail and we've had like third party say that Canada should stop selling arms to them.

There's huge problems with the NDP still, but like it's something I really have never seen in my whole political life, that that threshold was crossed. These things are inadequate, and that's the other thing, is like, every part of this it's necessary, but it's not sufficient. And I think, like, that philosophical construct is something being necessary but not sufficient, rather than, you know, simply a binary between, like, revolutionary or not, or a binary between those sort of frames aren't going to help us understand issues in detail. And like Brett was saying, separate the good from bad in a really meaningful way.

And notice that the trajectory is, in a lot of ways, and a lot of context moving towards the good, and a lot of that happens from this sort of consciousness building. So I wanted to ask, actually, about when it comes to consciousness building, it's a certain type of help that happens. It almost makes me, there's like broadcast educational work, like the type of stuff that we do, but there's also these little conversations where people make these decisions.

And when I was thinking about this just now when someone was talking, it almost like brought me to tears to think about, is there's these situations where there's like a need, for someone to speak out about something. There's all these incentives to be quiet, and there's all these incentives sometimes where you speak out about something, and it's going to negatively affect you. And people, because of our sense of fairness, our sense of wanting to help each other, people will rise to the occasion and be the helper in this instance where there might be a social cost to them. And I think that's part of what we've seen happen

with both the Black Lives Matter, uprising, as well as the Palestine stuff, is that people who are going to that threshold where they're being an advocate and who can speak and explain clearly to others what's going on and help them to understand and help them to grasp what's happening. So they're informed and they're fortified and they're able to then communicate this with others and participate in this sort of like movement to more understanding of justice. It's so beautiful to me and it's like so key to this sort of concept. So I wanted to ask everyone about, you know, helpers that inspire you. What sort of help is really inspiring?

Well, within this category of consciousness raisers and people who speak out when it could have a great cost to themselves, I also am often brought to tears. I'm just brought to tears all the time, but especially around help. I don't know if you all get this as well, but if I witness true empathy or true solidarity or just somebody helping someone, especially when it could come at a cost to themselves, I am weeping. Like, I am just destroyed. It moves me so much. I don't know. I operate from such a place of empathy and compassion. And I think that, yeah, following the news and the way that we talk about things so critically, you can almost start to wonder about people's, you know, natures, right? And so every time that someone shows me that kind of beautiful empathy and compassion, I'm just, I'm so moved. I just find it so incredible. So someone who's moved me to tears recently, speaking of Israel, Palestine is someone called Miko Pelled. He is Israeli and he's actually the son of one of the generals who really kind of, I guess, implemented a lot of Israeli law and, you know, Zionist policies. And so he grew up in a situation where he was obviously being fed a lot of this kind of

propaganda. And I just, I find it so moving when people have the principle to know that no, that's not okay, right? And so he speaks out just the cipher. for Palestine. He was recently on the Empire Falls, moved me to tears. I recently saw him. He was participating in an all-day conference. It was live on YouTube and it was mostly Palestinian scholars and he spoke there. And just his speech, it just moved me. I'm actually surprised that he hasn't, you know, been violently attacked or anything in Israel because he is, yeah, he really, I think, speaks out when it could come at such a cost to him. And I just really appreciate that. So that's someone who's inspired me, I guess, along those lines.

Yeah, and I would chime in. I think we all share this, and I think we've talked about this behind the scenes and probably on episodes in the past of being moved to tears by the humanity of other human beings. Often the humanity that shows itself in like little everyday ways that aren't even necessarily, you know, getting attention or anybody even sees. And when you're helping somebody in the context of not getting or expecting any sort of praise or reward, or a clap on the back, I think there's something even more profound about it because it comes from such a deep place within you. And, you know, I have this experience where I will go, you know,

we've all been, I'm sure, too many protests. And the energy at a protest where you have all these different people coming together, sharing and chance, standing off against police, having each other's back, handing out water, there's a communal aspect to that that often brings me to tears and I would find myself so many times, especially last year during the Black Lives Matter uprising, seeing the diversity of people and people coming together from all walks of life to fight for justice, I would find myself standing on the side of the street just like trying to hide tears from other people because like nothing specifically happened that should make, you know, somebody like me sitting there crying, but it is the cooperation, the coming together, the

having total strangers backs and, you know, even if like you're not black and you could easily recoil into your whiteness and just turn away from the whole thing. But refusing to do that and coming out and standing in solidarity, you know, that's meaningful to me. And it points to something deep in human history and it points to the seeds of humanity's future. If we are to exist, if we are to take the next step in our evolutionary history and move forward as a global civilization, it's those seeds of decency, of humanity, of compassion, of love for the other, even the total stranger, that are the seeds that we need to water and give sunlight to and help grow and flourish. And it's the exact opposite of the fascist mentality, of the oppressive

mentality, of the settler colonial mentality, which actually disconnects you from humanity. And in one of the stark examples recently, you know, Abby Martin, as we just mentioned, did these wonderful interviews on the ground with Israeli settlers and just talking about, you know, what do we think you should do about the Arabs and the Palestinians and, you know, they would just say these horrific things, carpet bombed them, killed the children, et cetera. And it really shows you how the dehumanization process where you dehumanize the other, you also simultaneously dehumanize yourself when you can talk about slaughtering children with no moral inclination to say, well, maybe I'm going too far.

And I think on that side of things, you become more of a monster. So not only are you dehumanizing the other, but by doing so, you're dividing and cutting yourself off from humanity. and you yourself are denigrated, are dehumanized, are made monstrous. And that dynamic, I think, is alive and well. Wherever you see oppression, wherever you see racism, wherever you see these dynamics, the oppressor becomes dehumanized in the act of dehumanizing the other. And so anytime that you see humanity do the opposite, I think is really a beautiful thing, especially because all the incentives in our society are really geared towards individualism,

getting what you got to get, go out and get the bag, step on other. others, do whatever you have to do, blah, blah, blah. And so you're not only rejecting this dark element of human nature, but you're also rejecting a lot of the incentive structures in society, which are pointed in the exact opposite way, and I think that takes courage. That reminds me of, so a breeding for this, I was reading about some studies on what's called pro-social behavior in psychology, which is like their name for anything positive. And it's kind of funny, they, within it, they're sort of confused by it. They're like, we expect people to be more rational than to help each other this much. We need to explain this through studies.

But there's this really fascinating study about how identity and help are connected and how, like with the example of these street interviews with, you know, settlers saying these horrible things in Israel. Well, they did two studies where they basically had soccer fans. The first time they prime them on questions about their team, like why their team is the best, this sort of stuff. And then they had them walk to another room where they'd walk past a person who was apparently hurt. It was an actor like pretending to need help. And they found that if they primed them about their team and they walked by someone who was wearing the jersey of the rival team, they would stop and help them less often. And if they were wearing the same jersey as them, they'd stop and help them more often.

So, I mean, that's obviously kind of a sad story. But the hopeful part is the other aspect of the study is what they did is they actually, they did a version where they primed people on questions about being a soccer fan and what soccer means. them and why they love soccer. And then in that context, when they were primed, when they walked by the person who needed help, the difference between the two groups flattened. People saw a person with the opposing jersey as someone who was also a soccer fan because they were primed in that sense of identity. So they helped that person more. So it's sort of sad that we have these barriers and at the most extreme turn into like very dehumanizing and horrific things to say about other people. But people have the ability to see their sense of identity as larger and they can

expand their in-group to include people on the other side. I found it to be such a fascinating study about the way that people's behavior can change with such little things as priming them about what group they're a part of. And not only can that be primed by external conditions, but you can also cultivate that. You can purposely set out to cultivate that element of yourself through I mean, you could do it through service, through moral actions, through spiritual practices, but the expansion, the conscious and purposeful attempt to expand your sphere of concern and who you consider in your group, right? You can expand that to all of humanity or all sentient beings in the cosmos itself. And this can be something that you can purposefully

and intentionally cultivate. And once you start doing that, and once you start experiencing that unity with other beings, with other human beings, that may be, traditionally or conventionally would be considered an outgroup. You actually see how it deepens you. And like I said earlier, how there's this dehumanization process of the oppressor by his act of oppression. Well, the opposite is true as well by consciously cultivating this other element of unity and connection with other beings and taking seriously the suffering of other beings. You make yourself more human. You are more connected to and engaged in life and things like joy and unity, those things sort of arise spontaneously and naturally in the space created by that

purposeful cultivation. So I just always want to make that point that if you see that this is possible and maybe you don't always live up to those standards, which none of us do, there are things you can consciously engage in to develop that side of your humanity. And you'll actually find that it makes you a happier, better human being that enjoys your day-to-day existence even more than you did before. Yeah, absolutely. I want to second that. And I want to give a specific example as well about that feeling of richness, that feeling of deepening yourself through the participations process of expanding your understanding and stuff. And in particular, during the uprising, Brett, I think I might have mentioned this to you, but I listened to an episode that you did that was a collection of Black liberation activists from historical periods. And the curation to put together this group of voices, I can really, I don't want to overstate it. But, it connected in a way that has changed the way that I see the world since. And it's like that episode of your show literally has given me a sense of purpose about what racism is in society in a way that I never had before. And I feel deepened by it. Spending that time connecting with

those perspectives and those points of view, not only did it give me critical tools to look at the world in a way that I think is more accurate to the experience of people that I consider, you know, my cousins, my brothers, my sisters, my fellow people, you know, and the more that over the years personally that I've tried to expand to include and to understand the difference and to understand other things and deepen the intersubjectivity of my perspective, to bring in perspectives, which aren't the ones that were curated to me when I was a child, the more I felt deeper and more purposeful as a result of it on a personal level. So I can just, I just want to speak to underline the importance of cultivating that. And I also wanted to thank you as a helper in that

process of connecting me to these people who had such brilliant things to say. Well, that's beautiful. And I didn't necessarily think of myself as being a helper in that sense. But I'm really glad that it connected with you like that because that's why I did it. It connected with me like that. And like you said, you said it perfectly about given the curated voices that I'm given in my society, these are not voices that I've ever heard. But once you hear them, once you read them, And sometimes I would read, if they're transcripts, I would read them and try to put the emotion into it that you would think would be there if they were saying it because sometimes just reading it deadpan doesn't make that connection. But once you hear the dignity, the integrity, the decency in those voices, the humanity, you know what the right side of that particular issue is and where these voices are coming from. And it breaks down the divisions between, you know, well, I'm a white Canadian and that's a black American.

how could we ever come together and understand each other's plights or our lives and just hearing that, I think, can do that. And so something I definitely try to consciously do. And it's something that has deepened me, like the black radical tradition is so fucking important to me. It's not something that I have to feign or that I have to, you know, just put in like a token in my shows. It's like it's a deep spiritual, existential, and political influence on who I am and trying

to share that and trying to find creative ways to share that. I think it's something that we all do in our own unique, different ways, everybody on this podcast right now. In our own humble, unique and oftentimes, you know, creative ways, we try to give voice to different perspectives and build those bridges of humanity across gaps of experience and identity. So Brett and Mexie, you both mentioned that you had some groups like on your mind that you wanted to talk about that you'd been thinking about for this episode.

So I'd really like to hear about them. Awesome. Yeah. Well, okay, so I have a number. I think, okay, I'll mention four. The first, actually, my partner brought up to me and was like, this is a really good example, especially right now. So my partner is actually a Jewish anti-Zionist activist. Actually, I should say fiance. He'll probably get mad to me if I don't say that. And he's listening to this. But yeah, he's a Jewish anti-Zionist activist. And when I asked him, hey, who do you think are really great helpers from history? He immediately was like Albanian Muslims. So basically, Basically, Albanian Muslims hid Jews during the Holocaust to such a great degree. Albania emerged from the war with the population of Jewish people 11 times greater than in the beginning. So a lot of Jews, like thousands of Jews fled to Albania and then Muslim families hid them at great risk to themselves. And this is so significant, obviously, and so significant to him because, you know, it dispels these racist tropes that we hear, you know, with everything going on right now that, you know, Muslims and Jews that just can't get along or that, you know,

Muslims want to harm old Jews or something like that. And just that, you know, there's this whole history of solidarity, mutual aid, and compassion and putting yourself on the line for someone at great cost to yourself. So I just thought that's really beautiful. Some other great examples, I thought of mutual aid disaster relief, which started out as common ground clinic. I'm not sure if people have heard about it. But basically during Hurricane Katrina, kind of the aftermath of that, a former Black Panther

Malik Rahim put out a call for solidarity and volunteers started coming from all over and they set up a clinic in Malik's house called Common Ground and they provided free treatment and then people came in from a whole range of different movements like food not bombs, veterans for peace, street medic and housing rights collectives, a whole bunch of different people joined together and set up a whole bunch of different things to help people. So kitchens, they engaged in building takeovers to prevent their destruction. They create additional clinics, built community gardens. You all will love that they established a tool lending library. Nice. Very cool. Shut out. Library socialism. So yeah, just did all these things, you know, cleaned up debris, et cetera. And then that grew into the mutual aid disaster

relief network, which continues to provide relief for people. They were really present in Puerto Rico. This is, again, something just moves me to tears, right? And that's another really big event that happened that I think, I mean, rightfully so, people were focused on. I actually made a video about this where I was completely focused on, you know, critiquing capitalism and racism and racial capitalism and, you know, what was happening to people there, especially in the Superdome, was so unbelievably disgusting. So it's not surprising that we all focus on that and the critique, because that obviously needs to be talked about. But this kind of stuff kind of just completely went under the radar, I think. And to me, this is the kind of stuff that, again, really moves me and

gives me that kind of that hope and helps me to, as you were talking about, kind of expand my compassion, my universal compassion out further and further and kind of feel the humanity of that. And then I'll mention, like, I guess the Sikh religion in general, helping and giving is a really big part of it. And in Toronto, they always do food serves every week. And yeah, Some of my Sikh comrades mentioned that at their holiest place, I guess, Harmon Deere Sahib, they every single day serve 100,000 free meals, which are all vegetarian. And everyone is welcome. No one has turned away, whether religion, caste, you know, race, age, gender, or whatever.

And just the scale of that is just unbelievable. These are kind of the groups I've been thinking about in terms of helpers. And I love these kinds of exercises. is it's another reason why I just love doing, like, positive leftist news, doing that every month helps me just as much as it helps other people. Like, I get a lot of comments from people saying that, you know, they're so moved, they're so excited. And I'm like, this helps me, right? So exactly what Brett, you and Sean were just talking about, that it helps you not only to focus on this stuff, but then to engage yourself in helping and compassion and things like that, right?

Like, it lessens your own suffering as it helps to others to lessen their suffering. as well. And there's just, there's nothing, there's nothing better than that to combat the alienation, you know, that we're all feeling under, under these oppressive systems. On that note, I'm going to throw a link in the description of some evidence from science that says that pro-social behavior reduces the negative effects of stress on your own body to the scientific evidence to prove that helping people being concerned about this stuff and taking action on it, helps reduce stress in your body, the things that cause your body to degrade and age and etc. the types of stress that you don't want to have. And secondly, data that shows that pro-social

behavior increases the perception of meaning in your life. So again, evidence that shows that people who help each other more who are more concerned about these things and who take action on it report that they have more meaning in their life than people who don't, which is a pretty big deal because having a sense of meaning in your life, it's where people get sort of a grounded sense of who they are and dignity and their own dignity and stuff like that. So this is really, really powerful stuff, both for others and for yourself. It's what we're wired to do. Yeah. And it's almost like a nature's way of saying you're on the right path by doing this thing. And it's rooted deeply in our evolutionary history as social beings. None of us would be here if it wasn't for our

profoundly social nature. I always like to point out that the very linguistic structures that you think to yourself in, like you talk to yourself in your head, you think about yourself, those very linguistic structures come out of our deeply social nature as social beings. And, you know, if you want to be miserable, if you want to guarantee a life of misery, think about yourself all day long. And if you want to work towards a life of joy and meaning and something like happiness, find ways to think about others and to serve others. And maybe we can get more into that as this conversation enters its second phase.

But just to mention some groups, just in like this last situation, with, you know, Israel just pummeling Gaza. What you did see, and this goes back to the Mr. Rogers quote, you know, and this is sad because it's become all too routine, but Gazans coming together to help dig strangers out of the rubble, taking care of each other, holding each other when a parent on camera finds out that their child is dead or this gut-wrenching video of this father going into a morgue to identify as children and you know what strangers is random people standing around who maybe are working there or help to bring the kids in or for whatever reason are there just sort of holding

each other hugging each other trying to to comfort each other i mean you know that is that is profoundly deep and and you know we can talk about people hiding jews from the nazis or the underground railroad trying to get black folks out of out of the slave south and into the north or even into Canada, nameless, faceless people throughout history who at great cost and risk to themselves put themselves at the service of other human beings when they could much more easily turn away and focus on just keeping themselves safe. In today's world, two areas of work that I don't necessarily get the attention they deserve, but are things that really mean a lot to me is people who work in hospice environments and people who work in prison environments. This idea of,

especially in our society, our throwaway culture, where productivity is all that matters. The elderly get tossed aside and put out of sight and out of mind. And the same exact things happen with prisoners. And so people that go into these contexts and try to reach out in a million different ways. I mean, there's a million different programs in these instances or in the hospice context, which are people with maybe some spiritual achievements in their life, help people to die better. or this new science coming out, that psychedelic treatment mixed with therapy at the end of life can do a lot to calm some of the existential anxieties that come with terminal illnesses, for example. These are people that we don't know their names. Oftentimes, they don't get the pat on the back.

They certainly don't get paid to do this work, but who out of the goodness of their heart go into some of the hardest and worst parts of society in the sense of like the bleakest things you could put yourself in, right? somebody dying or somebody locked in prison for life and committing your life to trying to help them, trying to keep that flame of humanity kindled and trying to make connections in those environments. Those are things that I am deeply admirable of and are the sort of helpers that I think we're talking about and wanting to reaffine this conversation. Yeah, it's a really humbling and beautiful thought and sort of sad in a way to think of all the all of the unperceived help out there. There's a part of me that just wants to perceive it. I want to know what everyone did to help each other because it's so beautiful and

meaningful. And you see these little moments sometimes you're out in public where, you know, someone stumbles and the person next to them. It's not even that they thought about it. It's not even they were like, oh, it's time to help someone in a blink of an eye where they're like already on this person, like helping them up. Are you okay? This sort of stuff. And if one person does it, people around them are doing it. And this is happening thousands and thousands and thousands of times a day. And often the only people who see it are the people who are there. And it's just beautiful to think about how much that is out there already right now, where neighbors are helping each other, where senior neighbors are doing child care for young families. And there's this

sympathetic or there's this complementary relationship where, you know, the elders, their children are out in the world and they enjoy having more social company and the parents are overworked and they need someone to watch their kids. And it works just perfectly, like pieces together like a puzzle. Like that's sort of what I think about help as in a certain level. It's like when things just come together so perfectly there's a need and then that need is filled or there's two needs that fill each other perfectly it's like a mixture between the satisfying feeling of like popping bubble wrap or something like really systematically like doing some like repetitive perfect behavior that everything in its right place except is this like thriving growing spontaneous out there

99% invisible kind of thing where people are just constantly someone trips and the other person helps them up and it's not even a thing that they had to think about It's just like it's what we're really like, you know, on that level. I think, yeah, hearing you all talk about these different levels of the way people help each other. Like, we can talk about some of the greatest events of helping in human history, like the Underground Railroad, Brett mentioned. Or we can talk about someone fell down on the street and a couple people rushed over to ask if they were okay. it's important to see that that is always happening. But just as you were all talking about it, again,

I had this sense of like a potential listener or like the part of me that feels this way when it's like, yeah, but is that enough? The sense of like chronic insufficiency, feeling like hopeless that like we can't actually fix the problems. Then I was like, also thinking about what you were saying earlier, Sean, about necessary and sufficient goodness. And like all these events of helping or whatever, like we could say that's like

necessary or it's like a good thing, but it's not sufficient. When you're looking at some of these historical ones, especially and like returning to what Brett saying about the uprisings last summer and like thinking about other versions of that in the past and like the clearest parallel to the recent Black Lives Matter protest is the civil rights movement in America in the 1960s. I can just imagine the sense while that was going on that everything that people were doing to help to try to fix this problem wasn't good enough. And I don't quite know how to say this, but like I feel like these kinds of things are always going to feel insufficient up until they're not up until something does change and it gets better. And then it's like, and then even

that's insufficient because you'll nest it inside like the next goal after that. And there's like something about the way the world is that that happens. But like you do have to mark those benchmarks and like celebrate those wins. And like the civil rights movement of the 1960s is a great example because like there were real wins there. And it wasn't sufficient. Like we didn't and white supremacy, but, like, settler, colonial white, like, that had, that's a trajectory that's been happening for centuries. And the trajectory to, like, stop it, the movement against it is still happening. But it's, like, the enormity of what we're facing can crush our sense of hope or, like, make it feel hopeless. But it can also, like, be comforting in a weird way

in terms of, like, the fact that people pushing for justice have been able to make any gains against something that horrifying that was going on in history for that long, that we have made some progress against it, is like, it's actually really important and really, like, inspiring. One way I think about this, you know, these little acts, they're necessary, but they're not sufficient. But I kind of view on like the grand scale of history and maybe people will disagree with this sort of maybe even teleological view of nature's development. Like I view all of us, all beings, everything in nature, almost in a spinozist sense of nature waking up to itself through us. And if you look back over human evolution, there is this tendency broadly conceived, right? Like starting from like when we were just climbing out of the trees to where we are today, there's this trajectory of expanding.

the sense of community to larger and larger groups of people. And that is a rocky precarious process. But you can think of tribal societies, pre-agricultural revolution, or even the early days of it, where in our community, people are taking care of. There's a sense of everybody has a role to play, et cetera, et cetera. But there's also this sense of other communities, the other tribes, there is this constant sense of warfare. And then you get into feudalism and you have these fiefdoms and kingdoms. And you have people in, who, you know, maybe treat each other pretty well in some respect, although these brutal hierarchies that have been introduced,

but there's this warring, and then you get to the place of, like, nation states, where, like, you know, in the United States, like, 350 million people in one, quote, unquote, community, well, that gives rise to a whole bunch of contradictions, but when we see something like 9-11 or a natural disaster, people tend to come together, although that's not always true. And, like, COVID has this really grotesque, I think, signal that we're a very sick society where there's this external virus that comes in and it gives us a chance to maybe come together as a society, but we're so polarized and broken that that doesn't really happen.

I feel like there's this pressure on humanity that we have to become a global civilization and a global community. We have to outgrow our quote unquote tribalism, which manifests in today's world as nation states on the international scale, but also as like racial groups or political groups. inside the nation state, there's like this contradictory sort of movement towards higher forms of community and what these little acts of kindness and selflessness that have always been present in humanity represent, to me at least, are the seeds of what we could become, the promises of what humanity could and in fact needs to become if we want to rise to the higher levels.

Like perhaps there is a community galactically that, you know, like you have to over, like, you know, think about like the great filter and the Fermi paradox and all this stuff like what does it take to reach this next level where we can maybe become a global civilization and earn the right to enter into something like a galactic community whether that exists or not it seems to be that there's this trajectory that we're aiming toward which which is imploring us to widen our circle of concern and in fact widen our circle of who we sense ourselves to be beyond the ego beyond the little tribalisms of society into a bigger, broader, more expansive sense of self

that I am part of this interconnected web of being and my happiness and safety and well-being depends on the happiness and safety of well-being of the environment and the people and the beings around me. And so there is always this insufficiency to these things, particularly when you look at all of the terrible things in contrast to some of the good things.

but it's like this aspect of our of our consciousness and of ourselves that we need to continue to cultivate and develop if we hope to reach these higher levels of being and if you view consciousness right as as as as not outside of nature but as nature waking up to itself through itself we are a mechanism by which nature comes to greater and greater understandings of itself and it's pointed in this general direction of expansion of the self to include other beings. And so I kind of view it like that. Maybe that's wrong. Maybe it's just a nihilistic universe of meaninglessness and there is no teleology and there is no trajectory upward. But I sense that there might be. And so that says to me that we need to continue to cultivate those elements,

realizing their insufficiency now, but realizing that they are the seeds and promises of what we could become, thinking about it as such and nurturing it as such. Maybe that's insufficient, but That's kind of how I think about it. I think that's exactly right. And I completely share your belief about consciousness and nature waking up to itself through itself. I think that's beautiful. And yeah,

I'm just really glad that you brought up all of that around expanding the self and moving beyond ego and things like that. Because as I kind of mentioned before, you know, those are the best antidotes to the detachment and the alienation that we're feeling under late stage capitalism, right? Like that lessons are suffering, as Sean pointed out there. I love when there's scientific evidence to back up these, like, you know, fundamental truths that we've known for so long.

But yeah, it lessens our suffering and it lessens the suffering of others. And that's the path to, you know, what I would understand as, you know, real lasting happiness rather than kind of the fleeting happiness of being really hedonistic or trying to build yourself up at the expense of others. But I think that's why it's so important to recognize these imperceivable kind of moments. you're all talking about, right? Like, we need to actually perceive that and be more attentive to it, right? Because obviously the stakes are different when we're talking about, you know, a really important historical event, you know, like, you know, Muslims hiding Jews in the Holocaust, whatever. Like the stakes are a lot higher there than somebody or a group of people seeing somebody fall and picking them up. But the underlying intention to help, to give, to give freely, even if it could

come at a cost to ourselves to give freely, even if, you know, we're giving something that we value or that we need. Like, that intention is what we need everyone to cultivate if we are going to create lasting change, right? Like, if we are going to come together and have successful collective action and solidarity movements and things like that, like that, like, that's actually what we need to amplify. And I think the fact that so much of the help that goes on in our society is not perceived by anyone, it lets people come to the conclusion. Like, it lets a lot of people come to the conclusion that they are these self-made people that they didn't actually receive, you know, much help. And I guess you see that more often with wealthier people who don't

realize, you know, your parents, your family, your friends, your bus driver, your teacher, your doctor, you know, like everyone who has helped you along the way, you don't understand that, you don't understand your privilege. And then it also leads to what I think is really interesting. I don't know if you have all, you know, looked into the kind of studies they have around wealthier people and why they actually tend to give less. But there's a lot of different evidence out there that shows that the wealthy you become, the more, I guess, antisocial you become as well. And in a number of ways, right? And, you know, people will say, well, it's maybe unclear whether or not it is, you know, money and wealth that actually corrupts, which it probably

is, or if it's just certain individuals are more, they have a higher, like, predilection for hoarding things and they're people who tend to become wealthier. There's probably truth in both of those statements. But the fact that when people kind of reach this state where they feel like they don't actually need anybody else, that maybe they have all the wealth and power and privilege that they don't need help from other people, then they give less help themselves because they kind of cut themselves off from that mutual aid or reciprocal kind of relationship with other people and other beings, and they believe that, you know, their money insulates them. And it does, right? It does insulate them to such a degree. But I think that under our capitalist

and, you know, neoliberal system, we're fed this ideology that really makes us ashamed, makes us feel a lot of shame if we actually have to ask someone for help or ask anyone, because that's supposed to be just an individual failing on our part. And it's supposed to be shameful. And we attach a lot of pride. We really valorize people who, seemingly don't need any help. But I feel like if we spent more time perceiving all of these kind of unperceived, you know, probably 90% of all the help that's going on out there right now, all these people that we don't, yeah, we don't have names. We don't have faces and whatever. If we can start to perceive that more, I think that will help to push back against this kind

of indoctrination that we get under these systems that make helping or receiving help the shameful thing and give people this idea that they're not. not being helped when there's no one that's not been helped from the day that they were born until the day they die, you know? So I don't know if any of that means sense. Yeah. There's so much brilliant stuff on there. One thing that sticks out right away that I just feel like it's good to mention that you touched on there, Maxi, is that we've been talking up how great help is. And it might give the impression that that means that in order to be good, you have to receive no help and just give lots of help all the time or something like that. Like, that could be an

implicit, if we're not careful to articulate the full depths of helpiness, because you mentioned such an important point, which is that when you need help, asking for help is so beautiful and wonderful. It's like asking for help, if you need help and you can ask for it, you're playing your role so perfectly in this whole beautiful process of what makes humanity have such beautiful potentialities. And like, we have this sense of that if we need help, it's embarrassing or like we have to like put it off or figure out some way to handle everything by ourselves and that that sense of shame is so wrong I mean you you could it's possible to be overbearing and demanding everyone help you in all these different ways all the time or

something like that and I'm going to assume that someone who's anxious about asking for help isn't in that category but like if you need help and you ask for it it's such a it gives people the potential to rise to the occasion and so by asking people for help You're actually creating opportunities for people to exercise ethics. You're creating opportunities for people to live more fulfilling lives. And like the system of the helpplex, the way that all this stuff works together, it's not a unidirectional thing. It just, it really occurred to me when you mentioned that about the shame about not asking for help or the shame about asking for help, I think it's important to not have shame about asking for help when you need it and actually see it as part of this beautiful process where we're giving people the opportunity.

to rise to the occasion and stand up for each other. Like, we just have this tendency to do. Like, there's this classic meditation I heard on some podcast ages ago. So it's like a little imagination exercise here, if you'll join me. It's like, imagine you see an elderly woman carrying, you know, all these bags of groceries, too much for her to carry. And she's about to drop them. She's maybe dropping them.

She's trying to cross the road. Oh, she's got all these groceries. And the more you think about this, the more there's this part of you that's like, I want to grab the groceries. It's like, I want to grab one of these groceries. The more vividly you imagine this person struggling with being able to carry this stuff across the street, the more the part of you that wants to help starts like firing. And it's like, you can actually meditate on this and just like really cultivate and focus on that little, maybe it's a neurochemical, maybe it's like, but you can actually feel it. You can feel that part of you that wants to help so strongly when you focus on imagining something like this.

And then to connect that with the knowledge that it's not just you that feels that way. And that if you were struggling with your groceries, everyone would have that feeling about you. It's just so beautiful and true that, yeah, it's really important to ask for help when you need it because people want to help. And if you give them the opportunity to help, you're giving them an opportunity to have a more meaningful life. Yeah. And exactly what we've been talking about. Like, it feels good for you to help somebody to really be able to help somebody, then that's the same for other people helping you. so when you're asking for help is, you know, if you're doing it in a genuine, good faith and really needed way, you can think about it not as I'm burdening somebody else with my shit. You can think

of it as like, I need help. I know it feels good to help others. I'm kind of giving somebody else an opportunity to feel good by helping me. And that also, I think, requires setting the ego aside because the ego is going to either say, I don't want to burden anybody, blah, blah, blah. My problems aren't really that serious. Or they're going to say, I don't really need, I don't need help. You know, other people need help, but not me. And I think breaking those barriers down and having that communication and that sort of interpenetration of one another, I think is an important aspect of this. And speaking to the cultivation aspect, there's other meditations within Buddhism is like meta, loving kindness meditations, where it starts off like, you know, think of somebody you really have an uncomplicated loving relationship with like a child or a partner or a best friend. Bring up those feelings like, do you really want them to be happy?

you really want them to be successful in life and to be safe and to not have worries and like yeah yeah yeah you know you're building it up and then it's like okay think of somebody that you're neutral to like somebody that you know you're not really close to maybe a co-worker or somebody just randomly came across today now those feelings are already dredged up because of the previous person can you now extend that to this neutral person and then eventually you work towards a person that you have negative feelings toward or a very complicated relationship with and it's this this purposeful cultivation of that sense of compassion and love and wanting to help other people. And I also find in my own life, when you are generous, when you go out of your way to help other

people, when you go out of your way to make sure other people are okay, it comes back to you. Like it almost sounds cliche. Like you give what you get, but you really are putting something out into the world. And when your time of need comes, it comes back in abundance. And I've found this in a million small and large way. in my own life that I will go out of my way to try to cultivate the stuff through acts of generosity and letting go of things that maybe there's this initial hesitation to let go of but you know give it away give it to the other person practice doing that over and over again and you'll start to see that

when your moment of needing help comes which it always does you don't even need to ask like people will pour in and do that for you and there is this sort of reciprocal automaticity to that that I think is really fascinating. And I really encourage people to experiment with in their own life, not only just giving help or being generous when it's asked of you, but actually going out of your way when it's not asked of you to think, how can I make this person happier? And not in some big way, necessarily where you need to go out and help somebody in hospice, but even like your partner, right, like you're in this relationship, you live in the same house, you go through your routines, you kind of get stuck in these roots where you're thinking about yourself a lot. And yeah,

when something bad happens, you have each other's back. But it's actually really interesting to experiment with like, what can I do right now? Out of the blue for no reason to make my partner happier, to remind them how much I love them, to go out of my way to make their day a little bit better. And then to try to find ways of doing that with random people in your life, not in an overbearing way where you're like, you're my project today, but like in a sincere, authentic, I'm sort of not wanting to think about myself and my needs and what I want to do next all day. I'm actually going to purposely cultivate this intention to everybody I come across in the day. How can I, in the smallest ways, in a small everyday, million little ways, can I make their day better?

Can I serve them in this moment? And sometimes it's as simple as some kind words. Sometimes it's as simple as a thoughtful gesture. But by doing that and you do it over and over and over again, it does become automatic and you get to see this reciprocity that sort of comes automatically from the people around you when you cultivate that in your life and in your relationships. And it's really, really beautiful and it's really profound. And I really encourage people to experiment with that. Yeah, I think it's really important to be cultivating these kinds of things just because I'm just thinking about how like you can't have a society that isn't built on people

helping each other and doing things for each other because we can't survive by ourselves at all. Like you can't. Like you can maybe live for a while in the woods by yourself. I guess, if, like, you've had all these skills that you got from society and, like, other things that you... It's an absurd idea that you could be okay just by yourself, but, like, the neurosis or, like, illusion of, like, capitalism or of the way that we've set things up is that whenever you're doing something that's useful for society, the immediate goal that's been placed in front of you is to make money for yourself or to build your brand or to build skills that will be useful in the marketplace, ultimately reflecting back on you, like your

career success or how much money you have in your bank account or like how many likes you can get on your posts on Instagram or whatever. Even when we're doing things that are beneficial to other people, there's this layer in front of it of how is this benefiting me? How is this affecting my bank account? How is this affecting my ranking on the my my my my my myriad of ways that we've designed to rank ourselves against each other and to measure ourselves against each other and to be better than this person or not as good as that person or not as good as we should have been or just constantly turning the focus back on yourself. And it does take intentional cultivation sometimes to think about doing something for other people when you're

not getting paid for it or when they're you can't post it on social media and get likes for it or like whatever the thing is because we're so trained in that other direction but like we do have both of those potentials inside ourselves and like like i think that's also what causes in some sense like the rich person to think that they never got help from anyone because they were just an individual interfacing with the system they made money they spent money, all the people helping them who made the things that they bought or who brought the thing to their house or built their house or whatever, that's all invisible or it's covered up by this veneer of, well, yeah, other people technically did it, but I did it for myself

because I made the money and I paid them. It's like, it's this, the way we've set up the game that we're playing for each other is not an expansive sense of self. It's a very limited self-reflective, just constant self-conscious, self-awareness, self. But then at the same time, we've developed all this technology that's allowed us to not only communicate with people around the world, like the internet, the more recent technological advancement, but even like in the last 100, 200 years, 300 years, steam engines and then airplanes and like the ability to make these physical borders and these nations like this previous limit to the sense of self that we set up that in some sense is

maintained by the inability to move around the world easily or to communicate around the world easily. The technology that this society has been building has been poking all these holes in these borders of identity and identity groups that we've had by a lot of. allowing people to connect with each other and empathize with each other and see the humanity in each other. And it's just this like moment of like extreme tension between these two things because they're both happening at the same time. This like huge acceleration of numbers and ranking and who's better than who and, you know, the top 10 billionaires and oh, Elon Musk got unseated by the French guy or what it. Like, it's, but then at the same time, there's this growing, expanding consciousness of, like, the various struggles of people all over the world and, like, growing global solidarity among all of these different groups.

And, like, it's slow and it's growing slower than feels sufficient. But, like, the horror of how bad the individualist mindset of capitalism can seem, I think, is not sufficient. matched yet, but the pieces are falling into place of, like, how we can get past that, how we can expand that sense of self. And, like, you work on it on two levels. You can cultivate it in yourself and your day-to-day experience, helping the people around you. Like, it's important to stay focused on what's right in front of you on one end, and then on the other end to also think about it on that bigger scale and the human family and global struggles and all of us together in this thing, on this on spaceship earth that we have to pilot together.

I'm really glad that you brought up the need to cultivate this. And Sean, you brought up, you know, that we can really feel how others feel and how people, because of this sense of being able to feel how others feel or empathy are driven to act. compassionate in kind of ways and that that feels really good, right? It feels really good to help others in that way. And so, yeah, I just wanted to mention that the neuroscience behind this is really, really interesting because there's been so much advancement in the science that we know now that when we are feeling empathy or like when we witness something happening to others, we're not just activating the visual cortex. It's actually activating, you know, the same

neural pathways in our brains as if we were experiencing that stuff ourselves, right? And to me, that's really, really fascinating because it's this mirroring that happens. And really all it takes is just observing a person and what's going on with them. And then the exact same neural pathways in our brain will light up as if that is happening to ourselves, right? So, like, one example is, you know, if you see somebody get pricked with a needle on their hand or something like that, right? the exact same mortar and sensory areas are activated in your own brain.

And I just love that. I love when science comes through to prove these, again, kind of, I think, really old and fundamental truths that we know, but that people are still tend to be kind of skeptical about because we are indoctrinated with this kind of, you know, humans are just greedy by nature and that kind of thing. But in terms of cultivating it, maybe this is a word thing to bring up, but recently I kind fell down this YouTube rabbit hole and I've been watching people who have antisocial personality disorders. Like I guess they would be called sociopaths or psychopaths and whatnot. And I actually

found some research. I mean, first of all, they're talking about, you know, the stigma and whatnot and that they can too, like they don't actually feel empathy in the same way that neurotypicals do, but that they can consciously choose to behave in social ways and that they can still feel good about that. And I just found this all really interesting. And then I found some kind of science that went along with this. Basically, it's, you know, a bunch of studies found that people who, I guess, would be classified as psychopaths or people with antisocial personality disorder, if they observe somebody, you know, harming another person, they do exhibit, you know, a lot less brain activity than neurotypical people. But when those same people are asked to attempt to empathize

with the person, then their brain activity goes back to baseline levels. So, It suggests that even people, because the, you know, the videos that I've been seeing are for people who, like, they suffered really intense traumas when they were children and that's what led to their antisocial personality disorder. And so it suggests that, you know, they probably have the same amount of ability to be empathetic or to understand that feeling. It's just that it doesn't happen for them spontaneously. And I found this all really fascinating because I think that a lot of times, you know, in our society, when we think about people who don't give or who are really, you know, selfish, greedy, you know, capitalists, heads of state and things like that that are just committing war crimes and all these atrocities. We kind of just look at them and we think, oh, those are just sociopaths or those are just psychopaths or whatever. Like Sean, you said before

that, you know, if people see that someone is in need, then mostly everyone will have that emotional empathetic reaction. But some people don't. And then we kind of take that to be like, oh, well, you know, those are the people running everything. There's just, there's no hope, right? But I think that it's really interesting that actually no, not at all, that there can be this conscious decision to have empathy and to act that way, no matter what has happened in a person's life. And that, you know, therefore, for everyone, because I think everyone is to some sense desensitized to what's going on in the world because we're just, we're fed it all the time. And it's hard to have empathy. It's hard to have that deep feeling of empathy over and over and over, you know, seeing all the atrocities that are happening in the world all the time, especially if you feel like, oh, well, that's in another country. aren't like, you know, quote unquote my people. But I think it's important to know that like just the extent of this, that like even, even someone who doesn't have this innate, you know,

feeling that they can generate spontaneously that we would call empathy, that you can still drum that up consciously, right? And I think that for everyone, no matter, no matter where you are, neurotypical or what, yeah, I think as we've been talking about like just the cultivation of this is so important. And to me, this just gives me hope that it's like, no, there aren't, there aren't people that are just evil. You know what I mean? Like there are people who have suffered a lot and who might now have differences in terms of, like, empathy and how that affects their behavior. But, but none of this is ever set in stone. And we can all, all of us work to cultivate this, this more broad sense of self and this more broad sense of the collective.

And that, yeah, I just, I just feel like that is so hopeful. And so maybe that's a weird place to have taken it to start talking about like psychopaths. But, but yeah, I just find that really interesting. I also think really quickly just the cultivation of systems with incentive structures, that are geared toward pro-social behavior can do a lot. So, like, there's this tendency to individualize a systematic incentive structure. So, like, actually, the CEOs and the politicians, they're just sociopaths individually. Well, actually, the system itself is sociopathic, and it gears people towards sociopathic ends. And if you want to climb the ladder in a sociopathic system, you have to embrace sort of, quote, unquote,

sociopathic elements within yourself to advance. So why we want to build communities and individuals, that are healthier, we also want to build systems that have incentive structures in the pro-social direction. And I think that's where critiques of capitalism and imperialism are absolutely necessary. Hell yeah. Thank you for that. Yeah. Great point. Institutionally, we want to be able to help the helpers and facilitate these things within us about helping to create institutional forms that can reflect this and bring it to a higher level. Take these aspects within us, these things that are potentials within us that we do on an individual level and create institutions that allow

people to like supersize their impact by giving them access to resources or um direct democratic duocracy kind of way that people can come together and do things and have the resources behind it it feels like a political plateau worth pursuing along these lines the institutionalization of the helping spirit within us but i really appreciate the bringing up of sociopaths because i mean i think this is what eugene devs was talking about when he said i'm not one bit better than the meanest on earth. He wasn't just talking about, you know, people in prison being criminals or whatever. He was actually asserting this universalsness to his politics and his humanity and saying, like, I want to extend sympathy and understanding to the most unsympathetic and the most

non-understandable of the human species, because that's my responsibility. It's a political responsibility, but it's also, I think, it's a spiritual sort of truth. It's something that it's a sense of meaning inside of us that, you know, it transcends what we typically think of as politics of these sort of like competing teams or flags or people that you're voting for or whatever or like the hot takes of the week or something like that. But it's this deeper sense of all these things that we've been talking about about the way that we are connected to each other and we can see ourselves and others and we want to expand our human community to the largest scale. And what I'd say as someone who personally, at this time, I'm an atheist. I feel pretty strongly that the universe

isn't in the shape of a God. That's how I feel. But at the same time, I'm very interested in the sort of evidence as we know it in these sort of fields. And what I can report is that like all of the evidence that I'm familiar with are all the evidence that I cared to remember. Maybe there's some contradicting stuff out there. But all the evidence that I care to remember and that I can a list off the top of my head really, really does back this sort of like theory that what goes around comes around, like these sort of truths that are like Maxi said, old truths. And we've got these new ways of validating them. So one mechanism, for example, that we could say, why does what goes around comes around? We can map this out in a very materialist kind of way. We can say like,

well, Brett mentioned, you know, when he does more good things for people, more good things happen to him. Well, what could cause that? Well, first of all, could have a good reputation. People are like, oh, that's the guy that helped my friend, the so-and-so or whatever like that. So that's one material connection. Another material connection might be Brett's attitude, because we have evidence that shows that people actually get happier from giving things away than from receiving them. Like, literally, they report that they're happier and children report that they're happier when they give things away, too. Like, we think of kids as like these greedy little, like dirty hands, like stealing toys from each other. Not what the evidence shows. So like in this scenario,

Brett's helps someone. He's feeling good about it. If you're feeling good about it, subtle things change about the ways the muscles are sitting on your face, your posture, things like that, you know, like you're more open up. So then you more opportunities might open up where someone sees, oh, this is an approachable person. I'm going to say hi to them on the bus or whatever. Or I'm going to notice that they drop their wallet on the ground and told them to pick it up and this sort of stuff. So there's like this, we can track if we want to from the most hardcore sort of like atheistic perspective that we want or even like antagonistic to spirituality if we wanted to go that far. We can still trace

all of these things as principles which have a material basis. And, you know, Albert Einstein, famous for his participation in science, famous for being a genius. He invented genius hair. Albert Einstein was a socialist. And Albert Einstein said

something really beautiful that I got. This actually I got from reading this Rom Doss book. How Can I Help? When thinking about this episode and Rom Dost was like a new age guy. I love him. Yeah. So this is what Albert Einstein said. A human being is part a whole called by us the universe, a part limited in time and space. They experience themselves, their thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion

of their consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty. And obviously, also Carl Sagan. We are a way for the universe to know itself. You know, these are heavyweights. These are titans. This is Mr. Science himself.

And I just, I don't see these ideas as being in contradiction at all. And I'm probably going to keep on throwing out more studies that I found out about or I have in front of me here because they're fascinating. But I think both of these ways of understanding this topic with or without the citations and the processes behind that and all that sort of stuff, they're both valid ways of approaching this topic and coming to the right conclusions about our universal humanity. But just for example, I just want to mention this study because it's wild. It says something about who we are as people at the most fundamental level from a young age.

Babies as young as six months, they do this study where they show them a video of a circle struggling to roll up a hill, and then a yellow triangle comes and helps the circle get up the hill. And then another triangle comes, a purple triangle, and pushes the circle down the hill. And the babies will watch this video over. So you have to understand what babies are understanding because they can't talk. You have to figure out these sort of weird ways to do it. So they watch this video over and over again until the baby loses interest. And then they present the baby with a scenario where there's the yellow triangle and the purple triangle,

the helpful triangle and the unhelpful triangle. And any guesses which one the babies tend to pick? Yellow. Helpful triangle. They pick the helpful triangle. These are proto-humans. are so, all they're doing is looking at things and eating and crying, you know, and crapping. And like, they're not, they haven't experienced culture yet, really, except in this passive sort of way.

And they're already, through a brief experiment, they're picking the helpful triangle over the unhelp. They're like, this one is a friend. Like, this one, this one helps out circles and need. I prefer it. So, like, that's so deep in us. And for me is, like, more evidence, not just of the specifics, but also of this broader spiritual truth about our interconnectedness, our responsibility to each other, our responsibility to step into and be as much as we can, our place, our role within this system, this co-help

system, this mutual aid system that defined our evolutionary trajectory and defines our potentials for the future of who we can be both on an individual level, but most crucially on a societal level. How are we going to come together and have a world that works for everyone, a world that recognizes that none of us are one bit better than the meanest on earth, and that recognizes that helpers need the help to help more. And as long as we stop preventing people from helping each other, there's enough help to go around. It's spiritual, but it's also hard science, and Albert Einstein agrees with me. So that's weird. You disagree with Albert Einstein? That's the word we use sarcastically when someone's not smart.

that's how smart it is yeah no absolutely and if we take seriously this idea that through consciousness nature comes to know itself and and that's just kind of logical and scientific as well right because consciousness doesn't exist outside of nature consciousness is a product of nature through the manifestation of evolution by a natural selection and as consciousness gets to these higher levels right like the consciousness of a human for example is in some ways deeper more profound than the consciousness of lower animals. This consciousness move upwards is also sort of synonymous with this movement toward unity, toward caring about others, toward this more holistic conception of the world and one's place within it. And so, yes, science reveals to us

that there's this deep aspect of caring. And evolution explains to us how humans in particular develop this capacity to care about others. But even as human consciousness develops more and more, there is this breaking down of barriers of division. We start seeing it in our philosophy, in our science, in our morality, this push towards breaking down division and moving toward unity. And nature itself is a totality. The cosmos comes out of the big bang, an infinitesimal point.

Space and time itself can be traced back to a combination so finite, it's smaller than an atom and it explodes out into all its particularities and specificities. And then there's this evolutionary movement toward a coming back to a recognition of the inherent unity of all beings. And it has to happen through consciousness because consciousness is how nature becomes aware of itself and becomes aware of that totality and that unity. And so, yeah, I think it's incredibly interesting that we can see that at such a young age in children themselves. And you can explain it particularly through evolutionary theory, but I think there's also this deeper movement towards the comprehension of unity that exists within

nature. And I would not be surprised if we do come across alien life and their way of being is a more advanced form of this recognition of unity, right? Like I would be very surprised if we came across an alien species and they're super individualistic and are constantly at war with other aliens right like that's a projection of humanity onto the cosmos like we should be scared if aliens come because they're going to fuck us up and take our land and resources because that's what we do to everybody else um but so i i don't know i don't really know what i'm saying uh i don't know if i'm being as articulate as i want to be there but i love that you brought up aliens and the first time you brought up aliens i was like oh yeah and also i love rom-doss

And also, Einstein said, I believe in the God of Spinoza. And Spinoza has the famous quote, God or nature, right? He's like, you can call it either thing. It is the same thing. It is a totality. We are all participants in it. And for that, Spinoza got called an atheist and a pantheist. But it's interesting because the same trends that bring science and spirituality together,

you know, whether it's pantheism or atheism or whether it's the expansion of the self or the negation of the self through these opposites, there is a unity. And I also find that incredibly fascinating. Yeah. And it's just all the more reason why we need to struggle so hard against this sociopathic system, as you described it, Brett, because, yeah, I mean, like what greater tragedy than to have that, you know, beautiful, you know, unity that we see in children just completely beat out of us by the system, right? And to desensitize us and to, you know, bring us further and further away from our humanity

and who we are, you know. I just, it's just all the more reason to struggle so hard against that because, yeah, like, just the beauty, like, this is why I get so moved to tears when I see people exhibiting that in real life. It's just, it's so beautiful. And yeah, it's just, it's unbelievable the systems that we've developed that are just so contrary to, you know, who we are on a really deeply fundamental level. With me is Ram Dass, a noted spiritual teacher and author who you suggest in your most recent book, How Can I Help? That through service, one finds a path to God or to enlightenment. I sense that in all religions, there is this path of service, and that seems to come as close as religion really gets

to political action. Yeah, but the difference is where you do the service from. There are an awful lot of religious organizations that do service, but they do service like, will help the poor. It is a way that reinforces roles and the help is disenfranchised and the helper is empowered. That's not exactly karma yoga. The use of serving somebody to transcend the dualism between the server and the served. It's not the act itself. I can take this cup of water and I can offer it to you in a way where I build myself up and put you down by doing it. Or I could offer it in a way where it's our cup of water, you need it, you drink from it.

it. I need it. I drink from it. Then you're just doing what you're doing because you're doing what you're doing. You are the help. You're not the helper. You're the help. And it's the question of whether you identify with a role or not. And when you identify with a role, it ends up being divisive. It separates people. There are plenty of people in hospitals who are surrounded by well-meaning people who do good, and the person feels isolated and lonely. Because everybody's busy loving them, but they're loving them as an object.

helping them as an object. And the art is being with somebody a subject, not as object. You often use the phrase sort of hanging out together. Hanging out, yeah. And who's getting helped remains open to question. If you're not getting helped by being a helper, forget it, you must be standing in the wrong place. What you've done in this book is you've attempted to really address that question for people who sincerely want to help. And when they come up against it and realize there's so many of the things that we do that we think are helping end up not working. But it doesn't mean not to help. It means to use your experience of helping as a way to grow. And there's such potential growth in

helping another human being if you'll be truthful about it all. And watch yourself get entrapped in a roll and then sit down and quiet down and see what you did and come back in and again. Losing it as part of the journey, you lose it, you get up. As Arra Bindo says, you brush yourself off, you look sheepishly at God and you take the next step. And it's a lovely image. And then you fall in your face again. Helping is just a beautiful art form because we have such a natural, compassionate heart.

And what we're really afraid of is our own heart because our heart would give away the store. The heart says, here, take it. You need it, you take it. Take my life. Take my money. Take my car. And the mind is saying, now watch it.

Think about tomorrow. Christ's image of be like the lilies in the field. That's like, be the heart. Just trust it all, open. It's okay. And realize you can set limits without having to close yourself down from yourself. Instead of averting your eyes from pain and suffering, turn around and embrace it into yourself,

without being afraid you're going to be drowned by it. And we are so frightened of that that we have built stuff that has ended up starving us to death. We are starving because we're afraid of our. own hearts. And there must be another way. And that's what you do, helping to explore, how you can allow that spontaneous compassion and spontaneous generosity to express itself. There's one last thing that I was just thinking that I wanted to throw in here, because I think it's also important when we're talking about helping people and helping each other, and

especially when we're talking about that in terms of not being so individual. and not centering ourselves so much in how we're seeing the world. Kind of on the note, Brett was saying about unity and opposites, there's also a thing that happens a lot in our society where, like, we don't just, like, turn in on ourselves and don't help other people anymore because we're so focused on this individualism and these numbers and these rankings. We also kind of, like, stop helping ourselves or being compassionate. to ourselves because all of our energy is directed towards, like, the things that we're doing

is these external validations of yourself, the numbers, the bank accounts, et cetera, but not what you actually need. And it's like there ends up being overlap there because a big part of what you need is to, like, help other people. But like, sometimes you also need to extend that compassion and that caring and that willingness to just do something nice for someone for no reason to yourself because like we can be our own harshest critics and we can be really kind of cruel to ourselves in ways that we wouldn't do to other people partially because we're like whipping ourselves so hard to meet these standards of whatever we need to do to get by in this society and partially just because like it's just the other side of that.

coin, like of this game that we're all playing, of ranking ourselves constantly, this individualistic, ego-driven perspective, is that, like, you're either a winner or you're a loser. And when you're thinking about things in those terms, even if you think you're mostly a winner, then you're just, like, afraid of becoming a loser. Like, yeah, if you think of, like, Donald Trump, it's like the perfect example. He's like, he has all the money. He has all this success. He's the president. of the United States, but, like, he's clearly, like, overcompensating for a fear of being a loser, like, for all of the, like, ego, like, talking up about how great he is and, like, how much he's a winner and all these wonderful things he's doing, like, someone who's, like, really okay with themselves

and thinks that they're good enough doesn't need to do all of that kind of stuff. Like, and like, that gets into all of us in, like, bigger and smaller ways and whatnot. And I just think it's a bit of a trap sometimes that we can, when we're thinking about helping others, we can start beating ourselves up for not helping others enough. And you have to be kind and compassionate to people, but yeah, also to yourself. The other side of ego is insecurity. And when you turn up the dial on ego, you're simultaneously turning up the dog. on insecurity. They are literally one in the same. And that's why egoism and machismo is always

undergirded and betrayed by insecurity and vulnerability at the end of the day. And it's always an overcompensatory mechanism for that sense of insecurity. And as you said, truly confident people who are okay with themselves don't need to wildly project constantly in that way. And I think the same thing is true for self-compassion. If we take seriously this idea that the Self is in the other. The other is in the self. You know, where do you start with the cultivation of compassion? You start by treating yourself a little nicer because you are the other. And by treating the other nicer, you're treating yourself nicer. And these things cannot be separated. In Buddhism, for example, when we talk about these things, we talk about the cultivation of the enlightened

heart and the awakened mind. One of the first things that meditation teachers will tell you is don't beat yourself up when meditation gets hard. You have to approach this practice with a sense of love compassion for yourself because that's actually a necessary prerequisite to really be able to effectively have compassion and engage in compassionate action towards others. And it's actually by observing your own insecurities, the imaginations of your own mind, how your own ego manifests itself, that you come to a better understanding of how that operates in other beings. And that opens the door to feeling compassion rooted in real understanding, not just an over-intellectualizing or abstraction, but in clear seeing within yourself how these things operate, you can clearly

see how they operate in others. And so take seriously this idea that there is really no separation ultimately, that separation is an illusion. And the idea that you should feel compassion for yourself as a necessary aspect of feeling compassion for others, it becomes as obvious as the sun in the sky. And so I think that that point that you made, Aaron, is really, really important to remember. And we are very hard on ourselves. And I know so many really good-hearted, loving people who want to make the world a better place, who have internalized low levels of self-worth, negative self-talk, always putting themselves down.

And, you know, that's a tragedy. And it also, I think, prevents you from making that connection with others and being effective in your altruism and being effective in your compassion and action. And so that's an albatross around all of our necks that we need to dismantle in the process of dismantling all the other illusions that we're conditioned to have. Definitely.

You often hear people say things about themselves or express concepts that it's like, man, if someone else was saying that about you, I'd be pretty mad at them. You know, like, if someone was saying that about you in front of me, I'd be like, why did you bring this horrible person here? Exactly. My son's name is Maddox and sometimes he'll like be rough on himself, you know? Like you can see like that negative self-talk maybe coming out in his speech. And I'm like, be nice to Maddox, like to him. I mean, I was like, nobody's mean to my Maddox, not even Maddox. I'm trying to teach him that, like, you know, be easy on yourself, bud.

And yes, I definitely, definitely feel that. Yeah. And it's something that we're not taught, right? I mean, like, I struggle with this a lot, the negative self-talk and whatnot. Because, yeah, you know, growing up under the patriarchy, under the male gaze, under capitalism, whatnot, it's, you're taught how to do this. Like, you're taught how to criticize yourself all the time because, of course, that's going to make other people money, right? and it's effectively going to keep you down, you know, within these hierarchical systems. And so, yeah, I love, I love that you're doing that with your son, Brett, and I love, I'm, you know, my partner and I are thinking of having kids in the future.

And I'm just, it's so amazing now, I guess, looking at how just all the things people have learned in like how to raise kids within the system to kind of fight back against, like you said, the anti-social nature of the system. And I'm just, I'm really hopeful. I think the younger generations are already kind of getting it, you know, because they're, I think that beautiful, you know, solidarity and mutual aid that you talked about in the triangle experiment, I think fewer of them are having that beat out of them and more of them are becoming radicalized like these incredible moments. Like we mentioned, you know, the BLM uprising. So I'm just incredibly hopeful for the next generations that they hopefully won't have to struggle so much with this stuff that I think a lot of us and older people have internalized. Every generation has to advance the ball. And I have a preteen daughter and a teen niece who I'm very, very close to. And I've always sort of taught these things to and tried to introduce them to feminism and stuff. And like there's lots of reasons to be optimistic with this next generation. I mean, there's just an automaticity to their egalitarianism, to their disdain and repulsion of, you know, misogyny and racism. And, you know, I think millennials, we did advance the ball in our society specifically. typically in some ways. And I think Gen Z is going to do it even more. And it's kind of a beautiful thing to see these new minds come up in this slightly more enlightened age. And every time I interact with my nieces and nephews and kids, I have a shot of real optimism that, you know, things are going to fucking get better. It's not going to happen overnight, but the kids are all right. I want to share

a little bit of a theory on this that I've been thinking about recently, about why we see these increasing ethics over generations, and specifically in the current day, I was looking at some data around gender and society and public polling on, there's standardized questions they've been asking since the 40s or something like that, things like it is good for the woman of a household to have a job and basic stuff like that. And you can see this general trend upwards until about 1989 when it like flatlines. In the 90s, there's like a little bit of up, a little bit it down, but it's mostly like a flatline until about 2004. And it actually sort of at the end of it, it's starting to go down. So when you mentioned, you know, us millennia, I was like, oh yeah,

like I'm part of like the 30 squad and like we got the 20 squad backing us up now and that's dope. But like us in the 30 squad, we saw the 90s firsthand. And in retrospect, it makes so much sense to think about how there was this like regression during this time and like how we saw all these like really, really horrible, stupid narratives were really mainstream in the 90s. And like the sense of humor of the 90s was like this really sort of grotesque, often sense of like ironic detachment cruelty stuff. But then in 2004 it starts going up again. And so basically here's the two theories that I have is that one is that the degrading of the 90s came from in the United States. There was the deregulation of the fairness doctrine and the rise of right wing

talk radio, which was drowning out and had money behind it. And there was way more right wing talk radio then, than there was like left wing talk radio because of the cost of operating it and where money is in society. But in 2004, of all times, for the transition to happen in the opposite direction, what's happening then is Web 2.0. And what's happening in Web 2.0 is people going online to BBSs, you know, IRC, this sort of stuff, like early internet stuff. And people in 30 crew remember, we used to like have pseudonyms and have avatars. And like, we had this whole different internet infrastructure then. But around that time, when we started building collaborative information commons, where people were talking to each other outside of the context of their lives

and we're in this sort of pure space where, you know, on the internet, no one knows you're a dog. So you're just like this avatar, like, and you're like Jetsons, 1992 and your avatars like the Jetsons or whatever. But then, and this is like the proto version of it, the start of this collaborative knowledge and ultimately ethics, commons of people coming together in these digital spaces, and where we see year after year, the internet and the search engines that we have and

the websites that exist, if you know what to search for and you're part of the communities that value this type of thing, the internet over time has become a more and more continually deeper, valuable resource for education, knowledge, relevant experience. Like, for example, when the

uprising was happening in 2020, it was like, I was going to the pirate libraries to download relevant reading. And it was like the same. It was like, I was thinking about it. And I was like, oh yeah, I can just go to the secret illegal, but should be legal. Actually, should be not just legal, but like fund it. But we could get into that later. Like these internet depositories of information that exist for us are so great now. So we've got this collaborative information comments, which is accelerating the natural development in this direction. Like you look at the early data from this gender polling. There's still this steady upward

tick, just from magazines, radio, all this sort of like old media stuff. But in the current day, when you have these collaborative information spaces, you can just sort of like jettison upwards. And I think the potential right now of, you know, like people alive today, the potential of having massive sea change, not just in public opinion, but in the structures of society, in a way that doesn't leave anyone behind, and in a way that, you know, makes the world work for the maximum amount of people in the minimum amount of time with minimum ecological impact for the benefit of all is something that's really within our grasp in great part because of these collaborative information commons that we have and that are so crucial and which is also where a lot of

the education that I've got which I've been able to pass on through the show and other means has actually come from and I've thought a lot about without these collaborative information commons without Web 2.0 I don't know what I'd be doing with my life. I don't even know I guess I probably would have like went to college or something or I would have like tried to I would have like given up at an early age but I had all this hope in my heart because I kept on seeing these things around the world you know and information commons are basically intellectual communism and actually the earliest for my understanding from this book the hacker ethic the first time we ever recorded use of the word communism it was actually referring to the

notion of sharing scientific knowledge with one another rather than having ownership of knowledge all sharing it. That's like an early proto definition of the word communism. All this to say, I agree that the kids are all right, but I also want to make it sort of not about the kids in a way because I just don't want to, I see what's happening to the zoomers as being sort of what happened to us, which is that people tell us opposite things about us all the time that make no sense, that I have nothing to do with their lived experience. And they're like, I saw a video of a zoomer doing this. Oh, I guess zoomers are like this. And it's like, I just don't want to participate in this after after the way they did us millennials dirty 30 club you know i learned a hard

lesson and i just i don't believe in generational politics that way as far as i'm concerned we're all web kids we're all web 2.0 digital information commons people and the some part of me wanted to get that out i just i'm worried about the millennialification of zoomers either for good or bad oh you millennials are going to save the world oh you millennials ruin the housing market by not buying houses. Oh, you millennials are ruining the housing market by buying houses. Oh, you millennials failed to save the world. What's wrong with you? I don't want to do this shit with 20 Club. 20 Club is chill by me. Great point. Yeah, and definitely we don't want to reify generations too much. Just the point that there is like this movement that's interesting. But yet the opening up of the intellectual commons,

all the contradictory elements of the internet, like, you know, people are like, oh, the techno-utopians of the 90s were wrong. Look how terrible it is. The internet's been co-opted by corporations. and it's a vacuum and an ability to spread conspiracy theories, et cetera. And all those things are true because progress is this messy, contradictory, spirally thing, not this clean, linear march towards progress. But it's really fascinating. And it really made me think when you said that about how it changed you. And who would you be without this aspect?

Like so much of what I learned about politics, for example, and literally who I am as like a attempted political educator and have these shows, et cetera, like where would I be in my knowledge without that intellectual commons without the internet I don't think it would have been possible and so you see like this this thing that allows you to radically expand yourself and I was I remember before the internet I remember not having a cell phone not having an internet the kids coming up this next generation it's part and parcel of their life like you know from birth they're having tablets and in YouTube and things like that and there's downsides to all this stuff but there is this breaking down of barriers these these rising up

new voices. I mean, we would not be having this conversation right now if it were not for this sort of opening up of the internet space because none of us would get signed in a local radio station and get funded by major corporations and advertisers to talk the shit that we talk. So it's really fascinating to think about that theory and the opening up of those spaces, how they deconstruct barriers of division and how they, as we've been talking throughout this conversation, allow unity, allow a coming together in a new and exciting. way. And I think it's going to have interesting implications for the rest of our lives and well beyond. Yeah. And I mean, even just kind of like the material, not to bring,

the material conditions, but, um, but yeah, even just the changing material conditions because I feel like, I feel like I was radicalized even before the internet, just because the conditions of my life weren't, yeah, it's like what people were telling me about the system that I was living and didn't really translate into what I was seeing or feeling on the ground, right? You know, just the fact that jobs are getting more. more precarious, you know, wages are stagnating, the environmental crisis and things like that, I feel like, even though that's all terrible stuff, you know, revisiting mutual aid and kind of the science of mutual aid as well, that actually in, you know, kind of these crisis situations,

people do tend to come together more. And I just feel like there's so many things that combine to create progress. And definitely, I think the informational comments is one of them. And then I just the material conditions are just are not going to allow for. things to keep going the way that they're going. So I don't know. I just, for all of these reasons, hope is the way forward, I think. Absolutely. Well, this has been an awesome discussion about a variety of things here. Really important stuff. And this topic, I really feel like we did our best to get as close as we could to describing something profound. It's one of those things that you can sort of describe around and try to get at it and get at that deep point together from these different angles.

and I feel like we've maybe successfully done that in how this all connects together. And so I was thinking maybe here for the wrap-up and last question. In our current moment, we have this situation where young people and the next generation of young people, this would be even more true for, are recognizing that there are limits to our system that are hard material realities. And they fear, rightfully so, that they may not have a future on planet Earth. if we don't readjust and retackle the institutions that uphold our system. And I think it's a really reasonable thought.

It's something that I feel, and I feel like the younger you are in relation to this process, the more and more severe it's going to seem and feel. So that material conditions, information commons, intersection around the climate crisis and inequality is going to get more and more profound. And I think the people listening to our show probably really feel in their heart this tugging sense that they want to be of help. And I thought maybe that we could just end on the note here of how to think about approaching that goal of helping the world. It can be an overbearing. It can be a really large thing to think about how to try to tackle. We sometimes have this sense of like,

I have to be this hero, this helping hero. I have to be this self-sacrificing person. I need to put everything in my life aside for the good of the revolution. These types of things are endemic ways of thought about this. And I thought maybe we could end a little bit of talking about what we can do to help here, you know, 14, 15 months into the coronavirus crisis in this stage of capitalism, which is facing an ecological crisis just around the corner. I mean, the ecological crisis is already here, but we're facing it in more and more increased ways. Sometimes it feels, I guess, like there's so much to do, and it's hard to know what to do. And I imagine that people listening are probably, to some degree, sitting with this feeling

of how can I be of help? So I wanted to open the floor to talk a little bit about that. Sure. Maybe I can start with my closing thoughts. Getting involved in your community is always a good option. Organizing, joining a religious group that feeds people, having some organizational connections, getting involved in solving the problems at a local level because it's very tempting and in our modern, hyper-connected world, very alluring to think of things on the global and the national scale and then to feel completely helpless in the face of institutions and systems and inertiaes that, you know, you have no control over. But at the end of the day, everything is nested within everything else. And doing meaningful work in your community is a step in the absolutely right direction. And we cannot rely on huge governments and rotten corporate politicians to solve our problems for us. And that doesn't mean that we need to bite off more than we can chew or try to save the whole world. But it does mean that we can be part of the solution by actively engaging in projects and organizations on the community level that elite.

alleviate suffering and move us in the right direction and more and more people will be funneling into those activities as these contradictions of late capitalism become more and more intense. And as people, as you say, get more and more of a sense of the lack of a future if action is not taken. But on top of that, I would just always like to remind people that outward political external transformation is not separate and cannot be separated from the work of everyday internal transformation and there's a million different paths wisdom paths that you can engage in to try to as we've talked about throughout this conversation cultivate selflessness cultivate self-compassion and compassion for others and to try to at the same time you're

transforming the external world transform the internal world because these things are deeply and dialectically connected and we're not going to be able to simply change the external world and do no work on ourselves and think that we're going to solve all the problems. And there's a million ways that you can do that. But one little tiny thing that I would recommend is, as I gestured towards earlier, find the little ways, everyday small ways that you can serve other people, operate within your sphere of influence. You don't need to have a big platform or be somebody that's well known to have an impact.

All of us exist within families and friend groups and communities. And we can make a difference in that sphere. of influence and you really got to take that seriously and not convince yourself that you need to have more to do something meaningful in the lives of people around you. And I think one step that that really requires is it requires taking seriously the idea that you should try to get away from thinking about yourself all day long. We are conditioned to constantly have these self-referential thoughts, this inner chattering all day long. What am I going to do? What's my mood like? what am I hungry for? What could I do? What's my plan for the day? You know, how do people

view me? What should I post? Do people like what I post? That constant, incessant inner dialogue that is hyper self-referential is a sort of veil that separates you from the world around you. And I think trying to consciously become aware of that to notice how often you think about yourself is the first step in deconstructing that veil of illusion that we're all sort of conditioned to operate through and see the world through. And I think that is a step that one can take on the path to self-transformation in dialogue and in engagement with social, political, and economic transformation. I think that gives us the best hope for actually solving these problems on the scale and in the timeframes that we need to do that. Absolutely beautiful. I love that

you brought all of that up, especially kind of the internal revolution that we need to have the external revolution. And I'm glad also that you made it clear that, you know, you don't have to be wealthy to give. You don't have to be anything to be able to give, right? I think a lot of people because of the overwhelming nature of everything that we're fighting, we can have a lot of anxiety around what can I give and just feeling like we don't have anything to give. But really, you know, we do. We always do. We have time. We have attention. We have compassion. We have understanding. Like, play to your strengths, right? Like, we all have ways that we can give and help to secure the happiness and well-being of others, even in really small ways.

And so, you know, I know if you have a disability, a chronic illness like I do, if you're an introvert and whatnot, some of the stuff can feel, you know, kind of overwhelming. But just know that, you know, try to operate from this kind of abundance, kind of a mindset, that you always have something to give and that it feels so good to give. And there's so many ways that you can do that. So, yeah, I mean, in terms of playing to your strengths and thinking about what can be done or what you can do right now, I think there's a lot of really amazing activism and mutual aid and stuff going on with COVID and some things that are happening in Toronto that I think are

really awesome. You know, people are organizing food serves. There's the people's pantry that's kind of a mutual aid pantry for people experiencing food insecurity during COVID. People are organizing a solidarity fund because our ridiculous premier Doug Ford has only given people three paid sick leaves during the pandemic that obviously wouldn't cover you if you. you had to quarantine and self-isolate for 14 days or whatever. But people are coming together around that. People are coming together to protect people from eviction. You know, people are standing up and putting their bodies on the line for their neighbors to make sure that they don't get evicted during this pandemic. I mean, it's so incredibly moving. And actually,

recently in PLN, I reported, I think everyone probably heard about it in Scotland where, you know, hundreds of people flooded the streets and made sure that this home office van couldn't deport to people in the community. So there's so much activism going on. And so try to connect with whatever's going on in your community, you know, find out what's going on, find out where people need help, right? Like ask questions about who might need help at what point and then how you can play into that with whatever your skills are. And just always know that you, there is a way that you can help, right? Like I mentioned before, of course, the stakes are really different when we're talking about certain, you know, historical big moments of, you know, these amazing historical helpers. stakes are higher for certain actions than others, but kind of the intent behind it, because like we've said, you do so much of that self-transformation when you do give and when you do decenter the self and think of others and whatever. So the intent behind that, I think, is so powerful. And even if you're doing that on a small scale within your small sphere of influence, I think that you should think of that as progress and as something that's really wonderful. And then try as much as you

can with whatever skills you do have to push that even further outwards. As I said, I think there's a lot going on in terms of solidarity around COVID that you can probably tap into wherever you are. Yeah. I just want to echo what you both said in a very general way, which is that, you know, sometimes it can feel really overwhelming with how many problems there are in the world. And it can also kind of feel like, what can I even do about it? Who am I? Or that kind of like negative self-talk again, I think can actually like prevent people from helping sometimes because we put ourselves down so much. But like, if you think about it, each of us has these unique aspects about ourselves

and that we have our own life experiences and our own strengths and weaknesses, and we live in our particular community, and we have our particular friends and family relationships. And all those very particular things about you and your life and where, you are and what you have the ability to do, somewhere at the intersection of all those things are things that you can do to help. And we can throw out suggestions and specific examples. It's, I think, useful to do that to pump people's intuitions and whatnot. But ultimately, like, as a experience of the world, when we all exist in our lives, problems present themselves all of the time. Things that need helping present themselves to us all of the time.

And if we're looking for them and if we're thinking about what we can do and if we have taken care of ourselves well enough that we actually feel like that we're open to the world and seeing that and like maybe have the, we're not hangary or whatever and we can have that compassion in that moment to do something or the energy to do something or whatever it is, then those things happen because you'll want to. So it's like it's a question of like preparing yourself to be able to help cultivating this perspective and also just being aware of your strengths and you do have them and just then seeing what problems are around you and thinking, And what can I do?

Absolutely. That's sort-pilled. That's really sort-pilled. We talked about tubes and sorting on an episode, like a year back. And we've been joking around recently about being sort-pilled, meaning like getting your desk space clean and stuff like that, having advantages. But also, it just occurred to me when you were talking that what you're saying about people's specialties, they're where people are at, sorting the, sorting what makes

us, us, our skills, our strong points, sorting that with the help that is complementary with those skills is such an awesome, like, principle, look at this whole thing, because we all have different backgrounds, locations, vocations, and jobs, or we're connected to different social groups and all this sort of stuff. And all these opportunities arise in all these different contexts. And so the work of being a helper is a big part, like, looking at that context. And there's another point that I wanted to make about the little help versus the big help. And we can talk about big help, like people helping Jewish people to escape Nazis and this historical moment of this big, this opportunity for help that it's big

and world historic and meaningful. But there's also the little help of the stuff like, you know, seeing that your neighbors having trouble with their groceries and then lending a hand to them or noticing that someone, one of your co-workers who you aren't necessarily like close with seems to be like in a bad mood or something and wanting to comfort or cheer them up in that natural sort of thing. The interconnectedness between these things, and I feel like this is something that Brett touched on, is that these things are sort of embedded within each other in a way, and that when we're looking to, we can sort of build our way up from building a pro-help disposition to the world where we're trying to actively bring a helpfulness to our day-to-day

life on that world of the small help. It trains us in a way of interacting that's going to make organized structural help, the way that Maxi was talking about, more effective and easier to deal with. Because we know from, we've got studies that show like having more small positive interactions in your day is good for your well-being and stuff like that. People who are part of more vibrant social communities that have a variety of people with different degrees of intensity of relationships and that are all sort of positive. It's good for your well-being. And it's sort of you're building up those neural pathways on how to connect with people in these short periods of time, how to have these short positive interactions and stuff like

that. And as those skills built, not only is it nourishing to you and helping those around you, It's helping build skill sets. And I think this is a place where us web kids could use some help are thinking about this. We're like a very anxious group of people, very screen-oriented people and stuff in general. It's like what you're building up these skills around talking to people, meeting people around you, and you can thread them together into organizational structures. So the small help heads in that direction of these organizational structures that can help people to help and do these larger scale things and facilitate societal transformations.

but it also means that when there is a moment and hopefully there's never a moment quite like the Holocaust in our lives where I hope that goes without saying but there are things that happen I mean there's even stuff happening right now that we could say has the moral weight and in retrospect we're going to look back and say the moral weight of things that were happening during our lifetimes were as significant as the Holocaust there's things that are happening maybe not individual things but we could look at a system and say this system easily, like the amount of deaths of deprivation from lack of food shelter and so on, even though we have it, for example, far exceeds the death toll of the Holocaust.

It's not a conscious individual choice by, you know, so-and-so historical Hitler or whatever, but like there's systems that are happening now that have moral impacts that are large and huge. And there's going to be moments in the future where how we've facilitated the development of our own compassion, our own connectedness, and our own capacity and willingness to help others are going to be tested. And we're going to have to make choices in our lifetimes about helping people, which really matter. And hopefully none of them, hopefully we're not putting these situations where we have this world historical, enormous amount of self-sacrifice and so on. Hopefully everything goes hunky dory all the time. But I mean, with the stuff that we're facing

around the world, it seems likely to me that the more that we cultivate the sense of helpfulness and the boundaries of help and the way to ask for help and the way to give help and what strengths are. In the periods where the world is relatively stable, it means that when we're hit by crisis, like the coronavirus crisis, economic crisis, ecological crisis, we have the tools and the mindset and the connections and the social disposition that is ready to rise to that occasion and give that world's historic help, not just the small help. And so the two of them are connected. And part of that for everyone is also asking for the help. Because if you ask for help, you help facilitate these skills and others.

And if you talk about help and have these conversations and have conversations about what our responsibility as people are with our family, with our neighbors, this is something that, you know, we're embarrassed. Oh, I'm sort of a hippie or whatever. We're all interconnected. Cruelty's wrong. But like it's not an unpopular idea.

Like people, like we're embarrassed because it's like cliche or whatever. Sometimes something's cliche because it's so profoundly true. It needs to be reiterated in every generation. as long as there's humanity. And I just wanted to sort of tag that on to all these brilliant points that have been made in the same sphere, is that by facilitating this in ourselves and focusing on one step of the time through this process, the network of help can become stronger, institutionalized, and help facilitate us in a transition to a system that isn't going to brutalize our neighbors, that isn't going to bring us to tears because

of how brutally people that we care about, you know, as humans. But that also we could have the opportunity to really care about as individuals if we knew them. And I think that's part of what it's so horrible about seeing tragedy where you don't know the people involved. You can still feel it because you know that it's possible to know them. They're not just like numbers on a sheet or something and they're not just pictures in a newspaper. They're people. And they have all the depths of the people in our lives. And it doesn't matter where they are in the world. And it doesn't matter if they have some, you know, like individual reactionary view or something like that. Or doesn't matter if they're neurodiverse and they don't experience empathy without thinking about it.

They're all part of our family and we're all connected to them. And the more that we can be part of that all together to tackle the problems that face us, I think the better off we're going to be because we're not headed for calm waters as a society. So the more that we build up our capacity when the waters are relatively calm, the better. You're here. That just gave me shivers. We're going to win, guys. We're going to do it. We're going to do it.

This has been the Seriously Wrong podcast. Thanks, everyone, for listening. Maxie and Brett, do you want to shout out where people can catch more of your stuff? I guess I'll start by shouting out. You can check out our show at seriously wrong.com. It's s, R-S-R-S-L-Y-W-R-O-N-G.com. We're also on Patreon, Twitter, and so on with all that that entails. Yeah, and everything that I do can be found at Revolutionary Left Radio.com. And I have a number of different things, I guess, so you can find. find my podcast, The Vegan Vanguard at Vegan Vanguardpodcast.com. You can find positive leftist

news on YouTube. If you just Google positive leftist news, you'll find it. I think the handle is YouTube slash C slash pln underscore mex. But if you just Google it, you'll find that. And then I also have a YouTube channel Mexie. That's M-E-X-I-E. And I recently deleted Twitter, so you can find me on Instagram. Nice. yeah for you thanks again for coming on the show brett and maxi this has just been a stellar amazing conversation really enriching and i feel a sense of warmth for our human condition in a really really tough time from this conversation so i really appreciate that yeah thank you

so much for having us on the show honestly this has been the most wholesome conversation i'm going to be like riding high on the good vibes of this conversation for days so thank you for that and yeah i hope everyone gets something out of bit when they're listening. So yeah, just thanks again to everyone. Yeah, I couldn't have asked for better folks to have this conversation with, and I genuinely love and admire all three of you. So let's do it again sometime. I'd love that. Yeah, I'd love to that. Yeah. I'm wrong, you're wrong, we're wrong, wrong.

These wrong, she is wrong, she is wrong, they're wrong, so wrong, Learone, O Sears, Lear-on.