Rev Left Radio - Mind & Nature: Dialectics, Evolution, and Eco-Marxism

Episode Date: July 17, 2020

In this collaboration with Revolutionary Lumpen Radio, Breht, Shibby, and Ryan have a wide-ranging discussion on a myriad of topics including Buddhist philosophy, Marxist dialectics, space travel, engaging with nature, hunting & veganism, the illusion of separateness, and much, much more.  Support Revolutionary Lumpen Radio Revolutionary Lumpen Radio on Twitter: @Lumpen_Radio Ryan on Twitter: @TheZenMarxist Shibby on Instagram: @ShibbysIG The Motown Mix for the first 34 mins: https://soundcloud.com/kaci-lea-lynch/motownmix LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. Today's episode is a collaboration with our friends and comrades from the show Revolutionary Lumpin Radio out of the UK. This conversation was incredibly sort of varied and fun and hopefully interesting to listeners. We cover so much stuff, space travel, neuroscience, meditations, psychedelics, engagement with nature, dialectics, Marxism. I mean, just every topic that I'm particularly interested in, I think at least gets touched on a little bit in this episode. So it's a wide-ranging, a fascinating conversation

with some wonderful people across the pond, and we hope people enjoy it. This will be a double-release collaboration, so you can listen to one version on our feed, and then you can go to Revolutionary Lumpin Radio, which I'll link to in the show notes, and listen to a slightly different version on their feed. But the same basic conversation is on both.

And if you like what you hear on this episode, definitely go check out and support Revolutionary Lumpin Radio. They've supported RevLeft Radio so much since really for years, I think since close to the beginning, they've been a supporter on our Patreon and have been in touch and has been an active supporter of what we do. And we really appreciate all that love and solidarity from our comrades over in the UK.

So if you like this conversation, definitely check out Revolutionary Lumpin Radio. And without further ado, let's get into it. Enjoy. Welcome, and congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn't easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize. To begin with, for you to be here now, trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and curiously obliging manner to create you. It's an arrangement so specialized in particular, that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once.

For the next many years, we hope, these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, cooperative efforts necessary to keep you intact, and let you experience the supremely agreeable, but generally underappreciated state known as existence. Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle. Being you is not a gratifying experience at the atomic level. For all their devoted attention, your atoms don't actually care about you. Indeed, don't even know that you were there. They don't even know that they are there.

They are mindless particles, after all, and not even themselves alive. It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive, but all of which had once been you. Yet somehow for the period of your existence, they will answer to a single rigid impulse to keep you, you. The bad news is that atoms are fickle, and their time of devotion is fleeting, fleeting indeed. Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours, and when that modest milestone flashes into view, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown, your atoms will close you down,

then silently disassemble and go off to be other things, and that's it for you. Still, you may rejoice that it happens at all. Generally speaking in the universe, it doesn't, so far as we can tell. This is decidedly odd, because the atoms that so liberally and congenially flocked together to form living things on earth are exactly the same atoms that declined to do it elsewhere. Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry, life is fantastically mundane. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulfur, a light dusting of other very ordinary elements, nothing you wouldn't find in any ordinary pharmacy, and that's all you need. The only thing's special.

about the atoms that make you is that they make you. That is, of course, the miracle of life. You know, completely in total biology, how are sitting in human bodies for investment.

It's not that some people are just too done to understand it. I mean, that's complete nonsense, right? It can be taught to anyone. It is intuitive to some degree, and it's not, like, an intelligence thing. You know, we had some black cards, one of them, which said the pre-factual point that Zionism is racism. You know, it's not just a moral stand, it's a political stand. You're talking about is the role that Israel plays securing the interests of U.S. and British imperialism in the Middle East.

And I would be talking about Iraq or Afghanistan or something. Today, where I am, and I, like, understand these conflicts that have literally been going on since I was born. It's just, like, horrifying. It's not British culture. It's just the world's culture. They love stories. They love this idea that there is this nation that looks like this. I think it's a distraction from the class struggle, to be honest. Hello, and welcome to the latest episode of Revolutionary Lumpin Radio. I am your co-host, Ryan, also known as the Zen Marxist. Here with me is Shibi, also known as Shibi. What's Papu? And today we have the one, the only, the honourable. Brett O'Shea from the Revolutionary Left Radio,

and we are very happy to have this guest and very excited to have him here. Yes, same, because what other Marxists? Can we talk about the cosmos, Rev. Left, Fauna, Florida, Life Consciousness, Psychedelics, Ego, Solidality, Death, Nautal Science, Quantum physics, space, and NASA's planned mission in 2024 to go to the moon and beyond to Parkman. woman on Mars so if you want HD footage of all of that good stuff it's coming up but first and foremost let's just shout out to your patrons Jake Joe Rev Left Radio and Victor

thank you so much for your support it goes a long way as Mark said I mean obviously if we had a million pounds of Patreon that would validate everything we're saying but you know everything you are saying we'll get to a million but everything and you do contribute, does help a lot. It helps us obviously survive

because we live under capitalism. But yeah, without further ado, let's just dive into it with my mate's B-Dog, Brett O'Shea from RevLeft Radio. Welcome to Revolutionary Lump and Radio. Brett was so happy to have you on here to discuss all of the themes that I've just mentioned. And to our listeners, yeah,

we were so excited that I even had to redo some of what I said because I was a mumble. mess and I was like I couldn't even speak it like I was almost speechless when I come to like the interview because I was actually interviewing Brett old shake

can you imagine well I mean dreams can come true that's materialism if we had the goddamn people power but yeah anyway I'm rambling already and I'm looking at it in this out but then I'll be doing this forever just speaking to myself into a microphone

but yeah Brett what is revolutionary left radio what's the purpose what's the point this is also a question that the lump community has also asked me they don't understand why the hell i'm doing a podcast and let alone a marxist podcast you know it's obviously to spread class consciousness and whatnot but what was your reason and hopefully we can draw out the reason for revolutionary lump and radio you know and kind of the same question and answer what's the point okay yeah and i do want to get back to what we we're just discussing because I think there's some really interesting overlap between, you know,

Marxist communism, Buddhism, and physics when it comes to thinking about the cosmos and the world and our place in it. So I'm sure we'll get to that eventually. And I have a bunch to say on that. But just to start off with a discussion about Rev. Left Radio, it really organically arose out of organizing here in the great plains of the United States after Trump got elected and there was a lot of uncertainty. There was a rise of just explicit fascism in a way that we haven't seen here in the U.S. for a while. I mean, fascism is always present, especially for black and indigenous communities, but the sort of explicit nature with which it arose during and after and still to this day surrounding the Trump campaign was very concerning. And so

a bunch of people in my community came together and we were like, we need to really start organizing. We need to take care of people. We need to protect each other. And if this fascist uprising is really going to continue to play out, we need to be able to defend one another and take defense seriously. And we also at that time had a couple neo-Nazis in our city who were becoming more sort of, you know, they were just coming out of the woodwork. They were showing their face on they were making YouTube channels. They had presences on campus and stuff. And so our first act as an organization was to collect information about these Nazis and then get it out to the community. And we did this flyer campaign where we basically 100, I mean, maybe tens of thousands, if not

multiple thousands of flyers. And we put them all over the city, including on these fascists front doorsteps and all their neighbors front doorsteps, calling them out, et cetera. And after that, we said, you know, the Nazis went back into hiding. They took down their YouTube channel. They even left the city. So that was a success. but we had to keep up the momentum.

And one of the things we realized very quickly is that you can't have effective organizing without political education. There has to be something that people who are generally interested in perhaps anti-capitalism or anti-fascism, there needs to be something that can sort of, you know, suss out those ideas and help people think through the implications of what it means to be anti-capitalist and anti-fascism. And so Rev Left Radio really grew out of that. That was the second need of our organizing. and it came very quickly after our formation. And so I said, you know, I have this, like, shitty bachelor's degree in philosophy. And although it gives me nothing but student debt, one thing it did give me was the ability to think and talk very clearly about complex ideas.

And so, you know, they were like, yeah, Brett, you take over the political education wing of our organization. And that morphed in to Rev. Left Radio. And it really is just, and still to this day is about political education. And, you know, Fred Hampton, a Black Panther Revolutionary who was killed in 1968 in Chicago, he was very adamant about this. And it was what made him such an effective organizer. He spoke the language of the people in his community. He wasn't an elitist.

He wasn't rich. He lived with an among the people. We're going to have to start practicing, and that's very hard. We've got to start getting out there with the people. And a lot of times we think we're better than the people. That's an insult and that's criminal. It's going to take a lot of hard work. He understood the need to educate himself first and then turn around and help others get educated because he knew that revolutionary energy can really go nowhere or at least has a very severe limit if it's not undergirded by political education, by the understanding of what we're fighting against, what we're fighting for, and what happens when we rise up and try to fight this system.

So for all those reasons and more, Rev Left got started. And then it was originally meant just to be a local thing. It was like, you know, here in Omaha and maybe some of the surrounding cities, you know, this will be something that we can help organize our sort of cadre and whatnot. But it just took off in a way that we never expected and became national and then international in its scope. So something about it caught on and I still can't fully figure out what it is, but I'm just humbled by it. And I just, I realize that I have a deep responsibility now that my platform has gotten to a where so many people do listen, a deep responsibility to, you know, cross my T's and dot my eyes,

if you will, and do as much work as I can on my end to really stay as principled as I can and never steer anyone wrong. That's my big fear is like, you know, maybe my ignorance will steer somebody wrong. And so I'm constantly trying to, you know, educate myself in the process of educating others and always, always staying humble about it, you know, realizing that I'm not handing down wisdom i'm learning along with my comrades the world over um and i think that's also a huge attraction because people don't feel like they're being lectured at they feel like they're in on the conversation and learning along with me and so so yeah that's what rev left is and i'm just sort of honored that it's it's gotten as big as it has a boss introduction there but it's really

interesting backstory about how we're together you know you and your organization was able to push fascist south of your area through anti-fascist activity, you know, letting Nazis know that they're not welcome in your area and having them actually leave. I mean, the best case scenario when it comes

to having Nazis in your town, so well done for that. I can also see how you were asked to host Rev left, how that went from a small communal tool for political education to an international one. I've never seen your

lipsid stats but I can presume that you pretty much seen or listen to you know internationally and yet there's many reasons from this I'm sure it is your humility it is your ability to articulate yourself and other ideas and translate you know theories and concepts from political texts that are from maybe 100 200 years ago and use like excellent examples that Everybody can relate to in the modern era. I also like to shout out to the astonishing Alice, your co-host on Red Menace who does excellent work in this manner also. And I'll like to shout out to Dave as well.

Do you sound engineer? I don't think he gets as much credit as he deserves. So there's that. Yeah, really interesting history there. But, you know, when it comes to that political education, I think I'm probably the least educated person you've ever spoken to on a podcast ever. So, yeah, it comes down to, you know, why you're such an awesome, cool host and a cool guy. Yeah, it's also very interesting how somebody can just listen to a podcast

and also hear you develop also. It's kind of a story on top of a story. Ryan? I think it's important to just say that, like, you know, Whether you're credentialed or not isn't really important, right? Like the idea that, you know, we should only listen or take information from people who are credentialed or who come from, you know, those kind of institutions isn't really important, right? You can, I think Lenin taught Marxism to people who couldn't read and write, you know,

so the idea that, you know, you have to be credentialed in order to be listened to or, you know, it's not a great idea, I don't think. Yeah, in fact, I try to put that into practice by, you know, I do have a fair share of academics. There are revolutionary academics that have something to say. And, you know, there's also this idea that, you know, they have something to teach us. But a big part of my show and a big chunk of my guests are just regular people that, you know, start off as listeners of the show, reach out to me through Patreon, develop something like an online relationship. And then I say, hey, you know, do you want to study this topic and read this book and then come on and talk about this thing with me? And they say, yeah.

And, you know, I started doing that as a conscious effort to get away from some of the, you know, the petty bourgeois of sense. session with academia and knowing full well that the people that I come from, the people in my neighborhood, the people that, you know, raised me, they don't really speak the language of academia. They, you know, there's something to be offered for sure, but, you know, it can get exhausting if all you do is hear the NPR-like tones of academics, you know, talking in jargon that you only half understand. And so getting real people to come on the show, regular working class people, giving them a little task, like maybe read this book or do some research over the next month or two on this topic and then we can have a discussion it's turned out really well

people shine i mean i've never had a guess that's let me down and you know most of them are just regular working people people that are servers in the in the industry or like you know struggling students um or whatever it may be coming on it and shining in that way has been something that's beautiful and shown me the capacity of regular working people to have these conversations we don't need uh different you know people from different classes coming and telling us about stuff we can do it ourselves we can investigate ourselves and uh i think that's a powerful thing as well and your show your show highlights that as well and so i think there's that connection between our two shows definitely this is literally exactly what i'm trying to tell people i'm trying to tell people with no education

who do struggle to grasp you know the words used in political theory from these old historical text that you know these the yeah this is exactly what i'm trying to tell people i'm trying to tell people who do struggle to grasp the words used in these political theories that you know these the things that you're very texts, you know, these are the same people who have went to shitty comprehensive schools that have been underfunded from austerity, you know, the same people who've probably never read anything beyond the text on a video game on the screen or the text on the phone from a social media app that you can come out be a goddamn communist, there's people who are going to explain this daily to you, there's people who are going to be able to help you articulate your

own thought and feelings and use that to empower yourself and others who are part of a goddamn struggle here. You know, so do you see people who've spent the whole life on a dole or having to hustle for the living, you know, no and only the slang really into the lump and thug life or the language from their city's culture? Like, they need to know that there's a world of comrades out here to support them to help educate them so we can turn the knowledge of individual power into people power. I mean, we're literally, Actually, there's a whole world of people. I mean, you think you've got loads of mates.

Think of how many mates you're going to have when you've got a damn comrade. But I'm speaking to Beto Shea, so it's a goddamn evidence. Everything I'm saying, it's proof. It's right there. Just, fuck me. There's no amount of festivals that can justify the desperate lives that we have to live

and struggle under just to eat another day. There's a better world and we have to make it together. Ryan, what's your level of education like? you've done psychology haven't you. Not at a university level. I mean, my degree's in cybersecurity management, you know, but I mean, I'm interested in these things, you know, like sociology, psychology, psychology, philosophy.

Like, I learn about those things generally because, like you say, like everyone has internet access these days so anyone can pick up any book at any time and learn about anything. Yeah, true, true. Even if you haven't got the time to pick up a book and read whatever to learn, like you can still just plug in some headphones and listen to some red menace or red left and listening and listen to that over whatever it is that you're forced to do to make money to survive awesome so with the introductions over we can now dive into a response to the audio clip played at the start of the pod describing you know tiny atoms in the great expanse that is the cosmos what is the cosmos why have humans stared up at it at the start

and wondering just how is it connected to us spiritually? What does this say for the nature of our reality and how we should behave whilst being a conscious product of the cosmos? We'd love to hear your thoughts on this, Brad. For sure, yeah. When I was listening to that recording or just any sort of understanding of how the cosmos operates, something is overlapping between something like Buddhism,

something like Marxism, something like physics. And that is this idea of dialectics, which can be a vague term. And a lot of times, you know, it's kind of hard to pin down exactly what we mean by dialectics. But something at the core of all these philosophies is that they're inherently in the universe, there's no separation between things. You know, humans like to categorize discrete objects in the world and put them in these little categories. You know, that's a tree, that's a rock, that's a person, that's a cloud, right? and obviously it makes evolutionary sense for us to be able to discern between different objects and our brains were obviously molded by evolution but something that we lose sight of is that

inherently everything is a web of life everything is deeply interconnected and on the level of physics whether you're talking about general sort of relativity or you're talking about like the weird world of quantum mechanics both of those iterations of physics get at the idea that there actually is no separation. You can think of things like spooky action at a distance or whatever, or just how, you know, the planets interact gravitationally with one another. Things cannot be separated. And that goes also for philosophies.

You were talking earlier should be about communists. And, you know, we have more to say about the world and life than just politics. And a big reason for that is because everything is interconnected. You can't talk about outward political fights with the world. talking about, say, the inner psychology of the people engaged in those fights or the environmental, you know, arena from which those life forms, us, our minds, bubble up out of. You know, we have this idea, whether it's from our Christian tradition in the West or whatever, that we somehow come into the universe, that, you know, there's a God that exists outside the universe and we get placed in it from the outside. And even when we've, you know, sort of shooken off the shackles of that religious, explicit religious thinking, it still sort of infiltrates at a subconscious level how we think about the world that, you know,

I'm separate from that other person. That person's liberation struggle over in the Philippines has nothing to do with my struggle here in the U.S. or in the U.K. And that can be a very nefarious and obviously even bourgeois way of thinking about the world, hyper individualistic, if you will. And so just to come to these conversations with the deep understanding that everything is interconnected, everything is interdependent, the separateness is a fundamental illusion. And to be aware of that is the first step in sort of overcoming that illusion of separateness. And once you do do that on the political realm, you begin to realize that your freedom, your liberty, your happiness even is inexorably tied up with everybody else's. and that gives rise to ideas like nobody is free until we're all free. You know, internationalism.

Your struggle in the U.K. is one with my struggle here in the U.S. is one with the struggle of Palestinians in the Mideast, et cetera. And that can be a very powerful way of looking at the world on all levels, but particularly political. And I think it's communists as opposed to fascists or liberals or conservatives or any other political formation that takes that idea of interconnectedness as, seriously as it should be taken. And that is why solidarity is so important to us while it's not important to other political formation. Yeah, I mean, that's always why I've seen Marxism as sort of superior to all other ideologies, because there is actually a proper philosophical

foundation to this entire thing. It's a holistic way of viewing the world. And I mean, when you view other, you know, ideologies, you just don't, you don't see that. It isn't there. It isn't grounded and rooted in a sort of in a proper philosophical base that permeates the entire ideology you know? Absolutely. Very interesting. This is going to be a good episode.

So, yeah, these phrases are such as web of life, bubble up out of the earth, I love that because we are, obviously, we all stemmed from one point in time. Like, our distant ancestor is the big bang. It's that. meteorite and that comet that come together

just as you got them spam hit your mother's egg all of these things are so rare so astronomically rare but they are literally materials coming together to bubble up out of the earth together and it's interesting that phrase because

so much of us is water it's electricity that's hit the earth from lightning I imagine from this static that's grown up of other things just coming together you know, it's marvelous. And yet, just as Ryan said,

it's so important to use Marxism. As our base of ideology, you know, we use historical and materialism to describe these phenomena. You know, they're simply put, that's just to prove to us, even though we can see it with their own eyes, but there's people who are naive out there

and think that capitalism is the only thing that's ever been and never will be. But, you know, we know that this is true just from a simple factor both a seed and the plant comes from the other and none of them exist within the same space of time separately yeah it's dialectical so another interesting thing there you mentioned spooky science quantum physics you know regarding quantum entanglement and i just really want to share my own like theory on this from you know my life's observation and right, look, look, right,

the bourgeoisie have got that much power. So the way that we use our minds to basically describe how we create the world, like it's our brains that affect the world and then we can materialize houses out of our imagination, the bourgeoisie have had that much power. They've shaped the entire world.

The entire world may essentially be, like, a motherboard and I'll explain why because you could see like the board was either ruling class being the power supply they're the ones given power to this motherboard and you could see like Hollywood being the graphics processor you can see like the army and military being the ram you can see like the schools and education system being the processor so all of these things as well as private property shape the motherboard And, like, just an example, like, we are the electrons. We are literally forms of energy in this goddamn bag of flesh. And we can only go where our capitalists want us to go through the motherboard. So a way I link this into quantum entanglement is, like, that bourgeoisie has trained somebody to be a McDonald's work in the United States. And somebody in the UK is doing the exact same thing. You know, how many people are playing call a duty?

or whoever has made that game they know that people are going to move the controls in that same buttons in the same way that that bourgeois Z knows that the person in the US has got a flip it. It's the exact same way in the UK. So whether we like it or not, we're literally

behave, like on a neural level, the signals from our brain to move our arm in such a way or to move a thumbs and fingers on a joystick. The exact same way is happening all around the world. So, I mean, we're literally copying each other,

but copying that state of consciousness, that these neurons firing that this bourgeoisie has, you know, basically done in order to profit with us. So we don't have freedom in the same way that Mark Zuckerberg knows that if he senses this notification using dopamine and whatnot, we're going to do the exact same thing as loads of other people. So quantum entanglement happens on, an astronomical cosmos scale,

but it also happens on a smaller individual level in our brain. And, you know, call me a madman for having these theories, but there's going to be a lot more of these similar theories coming up. But, you know, these companies and businesses use neuroscience and quantum physics in order to become better people in businesses and to make us more susceptible to basically what they want. so our freedom's limited, and we as Marxists don't really talk about, you know, quantum physics or, you know, neuroscience. I don't see why not, because we're affected by dopamine and all that, so, you know, let's just look at how it makes us behave.

But going back to the motherboard, like, I know this from my parkour days, that say we are the electrons that the power module is sending by, because they control obviously who's born who's not born if they wanted they could obviously just say yeah nobody's allowed to be born or they could you know do as they do in the United States

and have like you know money tied in with birth so you're only going to do that if obviously you can pay for a baby and whatnot and you know that that's a whole different kettle of fish but the point being is like we as electrons

are destined to come from one place and we move through this motherboard known as the capitalist world in such a pre-ordained way like we know we're going to be born we're going to have to go to school we're going to have to work in a certain kind of workplace and then we all know that we're going to die in and go into a certain hole in the ground you can't ever stray away from that and I know this from your parkour days because if we did ever stray away from where our electrons where our bodies and and our life force were supposed to go, then the police will come after us

because we're straying onto private property. So, yeah, you know, what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, there's two things that I thought of when you were talking. And you're talking about the motherboard and, like, you know, Alan Watts, he talks about this idea of, like, you know, if aliens came to Earth and the first thing they would see from a distance, right, is, you know, on the dark side of the planet as the planet moved towards nighttime, all these lights come on.

And as you said, this interwoven circuitry and, you know, the cars driving into the cities in the morning and then out to the suburbs or to the rural areas at night or whatever. And from that perspective, it radically transforms the way that you think about human civilization as this one interconnected node. And the individuals are, you know, to go to your neuroscientific analogy, independent neurons, but they're all different. deeply connected. And that neuron individually depends on the entire network for its existence and its efficacy. But, you know, and then also Carl Sagan, right, he talked about the pale blue dot. Same sort of perspectal shift of zooming way out and looking and seeing that everything is inherently unified. But you're right. When you're on the ground, especially under the sway of bourgeois ideology, everybody is an individual. Everybody has to make their own way. You're not going

to get much help go out and do your shit and if you fail it's your fault a division of labor right it's not we're not workers coming together to democratically plan the way that we create and produce and distribute the means of life but rather we have an overlord that tells us your one specific task is to you know flip the burger and your one task is to cash out the the customer and all that money that you're generating you'll get a couple cents but i'm gonna usurp that as my profit and and because we live that way for so long, we begin to understand our own lives on those terms, our own lives on the individualistic basis, and whether a deep love of science or a practice of meditation or even a use of psychedelics can be the thing that can push you out of that

individualism and even Marxism, right? All these are mechanisms by which we shift that perception away from bourgeois individualism and hyperdivision towards something closer to connection and interdependence and so yeah that can be incredibly powerful

and Marxism fits perfectly well in that perspectal shift yeah interesting Alan Watson is like an interesting guy and not lastly because his name is Watson he's talking so much about electricity

but it's also good to be reassured that there's people out there thinking the same kind of thoughts as me regarding these existential ideas but it just reinforces the fact that that's how it is that we don't have freedom

we're literally just batteries born to serve the bourgeoisie since birth and just something that pisses me off is like for months all these companies and businesses have had the lights on during the corona pandemic

they know for the fact that they're going to be closed but these lights they're not just to shape where we can and can't go but these lights are constantly shown on us so we're seeing like KFC in big lights they know that they're going to be closed for the last

like four months but they still got all the lights on in store out of store and it's just like that's just like going off on one but it's something that's just really piss me off that I can't help that notice but when we talk about these lights you know from an outside

perspective from businesses and corporations like you know you're going to be closed just turn the goddamn lights off you're wasting electricity And it's also a form of psychological harassment, you know. We'll never turn the lights off. Everywhere you look is an advertisement for something. Bye, bye, bye, bye.

Yeah, it's therefore psychological harassment. And you did touch upon, you know, breaking out of this psychological paradigm with the bourgeois as you keep you trapped in and referring to meditation, you know, hallucinogenic, you know, Buddhism and whatnot. We will go into those subjects. But firstly, let's just talk about, you know, the other life forms on the planet that don't have voices so much. So we'll look at plants, we'll look at animals. I just firstly give some interesting facts about plants that I don't think people actually truly understand in order to help, obviously, people grasp plants. Because, of course, they are what keep us alive.

We are made out of them, but you don't understand just how beneficial they are to humans in general. so what existed before the bourgeois shape the world around us so that we're just mere components mere nodes of electricity in order to fulfill whatever they want on their operating system where they control the mouse

in the operating system that they know as capitalism there was nature and what is nature is the master of crassment of molecules created it created an almost inexhaustible array of molecular entities. It stands as an infinite resource for drug development.

Novel chemotypes and farmer coffers and scaffolds for amplification into officious drugs for a multitude of disease indications and other valuable bioactive agents. Since time immemorial, natural products have been the backbone of traditional system of healing throughout the globe and has also been an integral part of history and culture although the use of bioreactive products as herbal drug preparation dates back hundreds

even thousands of years ago their application as isolated and characterized compounds to modern drug discovery and development started only the 19th century it has been well documented that natural products play critical roles in modern drug development, especially for antibacterial and antigenium agents. Even though popularity of the synthetic products increased due to its production cost, time

effectiveness, easy quality control, stringent regulation and quick effects, but their safety and efficiency always remain questionable, resulting in the dependence on the natural products by more than 80% of the total population in the developing world because of its time-tested safety and efficiency. So it's basically saying, yeah, these pharmaceuticals, big farmer, they're not making nothing like nature makes for the developing world who benefit a lot more from just natural products. A huge number of natural product devolved compounds

in various stages of clinical developments highlighted the existence. and viability and significance of the use of natural products as sources of new drug candidates but what are these new drug candidates what are the old drug candidates how are these things healing us well let's just look at you know just a few

examples of these natural products that are used in modern medicine today because I don't think that a lot of people actually truly grasp how much medicine comes from just plants I'm sure everybody here is going to be aware of caffeine. Caffeines used to treat fatigue and migraines.

You find caffeine in coffee beans, tea leaves, cocoa pods, koala nuts and garnet, but you also know it in pretty much, you know, paracetamol, you'll always find some caffeine in there because, you know, again, it's used to treat migraines. Aspirin, again, similar. It's used for pain relief and anti-clotting. The salix in which it's used is found in a willow bark. So aspirin, the main components within it that cures your headache and, you know, blood clots is a willow bark.

It's a goddamn bark of a tree who would have known. Cocaine, it's used for anesthesia and there's a recreational drug. Cocaine is derived from the cocoa plant, but yet again, it's used in anesthesia if you want like a serious, like, surgery. then you're going to use anesthesia and again that comes from a plant Digitalis never heard of it

but the leaves on it are used to treat erythemia It's arrived from Foxglove If you've heard of that plant Morphine, codeine Opium, codeine is like a strong tablet that you use for like headaches migraines pain relief

morphine again is used in serious conditions, you know, if you've ever been shot on a war zone, you've probably had morphine to numb the pain or anything like that. So yeah, you've got this codeine, this opium plant to help you. So these are just a few examples, but my point being how many of these are being annihilated by Monsanto, how many cures for cancer are out there that are now soybean farms for Monsanto, how many of these plants could heal us in ways that we can't

even imagine, but have been annihilated through capitalism and they're just extinction of these plants? Any thoughts on that breath? Yeah, I would even add one more. I don't know if you mentioned this. I don't think I heard it. But ergot, the basis of LSD,

we think of LSD as being synthesized in a chemistry lab, but the fundamental core of it is ergot, which is a sort of fungus that grows on grain and wheat. as an interesting aside. But yeah, your overall point is incredibly well taken, and I think it fits perfectly into the broader ideas that we've been discussing of interconnectedness,

because instead of, you know, that sort of theological idea that we're from outside of the cosmos or the earth and placed onto it, the truth is, you know, scientifically, is that we bubble up out of the earth. The earth is a sort of womb. It creates the conditions by which all manner of fauna and flora can burst forth and emerge out of it and we are not separate from that and all life on earth has a common ancestor right billions of years ago and so that means that everything on earth animals plants

everything is deeply genetically scientifically related to one another i think we share up to 30% of our DNA with like dandelions for example not to say anything of all the animals that we share huge chunks of our DNA you know chimpanzees over 98 8% of our DNA. And so we can see how all flora and fauna co-evolved on earth. And so it would make sense that human beings and our brains are receptive to a cacophony of different plants and how they interact with our brains. You know, a cannabis, for example, it acts on our endocanamoid system, right?

So like our brains already have receptors in them that are perfectly matched to, the cananoids that come out of the cannabis plant. So on all these levels, it's really incredibly fascinating. And what Big Pharma does is it, you know, it takes, it isolates, it creates, it patents, and then it profits off of these things that at the core of them are shared property, right? They're common to all of us because they come up out of the earth along with us. And so what they do is they build fences around these things. Well, this is ours.

and if you want it now for your headache or whatever, you're going to have to pay us money. And that's just another way in which the capitalist class is deeply parasitic. One thing that I do on my off time when I'm not doing politics or taking care of my family is I always constantly am obsessed with going out into nature and engaging with it and being with it. Lately, I've had this deep obsession with fishing. So literally almost every single day I go out for hours by myself

to pretty like isolated hidden lakes and I just fish them and you know when I catch a big bass or something I'm very careful with it I respect it I you know I take it out of the water I marvel at its beauty and I set it back in the water and let it go back and continue to live its life and that process is just one way I think that humans who struggle with isolation from nature alienation from nature can proactively work in their own lives to dissoning disentangle themselves from that web of alienation and to go out and be in an ecosystem, preferably alone, right, like in the silence of nature. And if you're out there for a long time, whether that's fishing, hunting, hiking, camping,

anything, what you begin to do is you begin to embed yourself within the beautiful patterns of nature. And it is deeply healing on an existential level just to be out in nature and to have that greenery all over and to hear the sounds and the insects and the splashes in the water and to see like you know when I was fishing yesterday I go night fishing and I went night fishing by myself and so I'm out in this in this in this like sort of hilly wooded area completely isolated two miles away from a main road and nobody else is around and the sun has already set the moon is out ahead of me and I'm fishing and this little beaver right comes like this two feet in front of me off off the

shore. And I just stop fishing for a moment. I let my line go down so that this little beaver can swim over it. And I just look at the beautiful pattern of water that is the weight created by this little beaver's maneuvers. And it has like some grass or some twigs in its mouth that it's clearly taking over to its dam to continue to build it or whatever. And I really just think that we can't overestimate and can't overstate how important it is to physically and purposefully put yourself into these ecosystems and see how they move, how they machinate. And that can be deeply healing, but also deeply instructive. And it can work against some of that hardcore alienation from nature, which I think

a significant chunk of the anxiety and depression and neuroses of our species in the modern world is really derived from, right? Is this isolation not only from one another and from the product of the things that we do, our life activity, but also our alienation from nature. So any way that you can proactively fight against that and raise your children, help your friends get out in nature, I think you're doing really important work, really. Absolutely.

I also think it's really important to note that, like, moments like that are also teaching moments as to why, you know, corporate ownership of, you know, such things is unacceptable, right? So, like, if you take your example of, you know, solo fishing, at night in the woods and then compare that to sort of the mass industrial scale trege net trawling of industrial fishing

you can pull on your own experience to understand why the industrialization of such a thing isn't good for or even sustainable right yeah that's why that alienation is important isn't it because that enables your capacity to mass slaughter entire ecosystems without batting an eye, despite needing them because obviously you can't eat money.

Yeah, exactly. And to that exact point, well, really quick, I want to touch on Ryan's point about fishing and, you know, counter-juxaposing that to big ag and, you know, just the factory farming, etc. I don't know how it works in the UK, but here in the U.S., if you want to go fishing, you have to buy a fishing license. And that fishing license comes with a bunch of regulations for how you can treat the animals and it's all about game management or making sure that the populations stay healthy and the main funding mechanism to keep those fish populations or game populations healthy is through the funds raised through buying licenses so you know at the same time where i'm going out and fishing i'm also materially supporting the conservation of these areas which is

another sort of distinction from factory farming which is just take take take and never giving back But to Shibi's point about just the overall fight, I think about environmentalism and the attack on it by by multinational corporations seeking to extract and plunder profit from the natural world. And once you start getting out of your individualistic alienated mode of thinking and realize that you are one with your entire natural environment, you begin to see the destruction of the natural world as literally a physical attack on your body, on your, on your, on your, um, on the premise of your and your loved ones very existence. You know, there is no separation. My heart is just as, or, you know, my heart is just as important to my existence as the trees are, right? The oxygen level in the atmosphere is just as important to me existing as is my lungs on the inside of my body. And so when you break down that inside versus outside separation, you begin to see that the premise of ever, we bubble up out of the earth.

The premise of our existence is the earth's health and beauty. and sustainability, and anybody who seeks to destroy that health and beauty and sustainability in pursuit of profit is an enemy of all sentient beings and literally, literally an attack on your and my bodies. And I think that that radical shift can only lead to something like a radical environmentalism where we're willing to do whatever we can to protect the earth. And when you look specifically in the U.S., a settler colonial nation state, right? The U.K. gave bloody birth to the U.S., and that settler colonial project is ongoing.

The genocide of indigenous peoples is ongoing. But one of the core pillars of that genocide is to rip indigenous people off of the land that they cultivated for thousands of years that they were one with, that they lived in sustainable harmony with for thousands and thousands of years. And then European capitalists come over here, and within 200 years, we're on the brink of mass extinction and climate chaos. And that says a lot about the pathology, the psychopathology of capitalism overall. This is actually such a great bridge to something I wanted to talk to you about, which was Adorno's the culture industry. You know, enlightenment as mass deception. You know, this idea he has that, you know, the age of enlightenment brought to humans the idea that we should have dominion over nature instead of, you know, working synergistically with it. Absolutely.

And that whole idea of dominion over nature. As much as the Enlightenment Project sort of pitched itself as fighting against, you know, religious, superstitious thinking, it's a direct descendant of the sort of Christian idea of dominion that we come from the outside, we're placed here, and then this is our sort of playground to do as we will with it. And so, you know, the Enlightenment sees itself as a revolutionary rupture from superstitious religious thinking, but in so many ways it just covers up the core of rotten nature. of the very idea of dominion and carries it on into the new world and puts, you know, capitalism instead of the church at the forefront of that, quote, unquote, dominion. So, yeah, that pathology is never resolved in the Enlightenment, and the adherence and defenders of the Enlightenment are really are really adherence and defenders of a rotten, fundamentally broken system of thought and behavior in the world. And the most highfalutin ideas of the Enlightenment are actually directly undermined by how the systems that the Enlightenment produced actually operate in the real world. So, you know, the Enlightenment, people who defend the Enlightenment think of themselves as brave defenders of free speech and democracy and liberty and freedom. But every step of the way the Colonialist and Capitalist World Project has undermined those very things.

if not for every single person, then for 95% of the human beings and flora and fauna on earth itself. And so a revolutionary rupture from the capitalist colonial system is synonymous with a revolutionary rupture of the Enlightenment paradigm or at least that part of the paradigm that is unfulfilled. And so far as we believe in any aspect of the Enlightenment project, a Marxist would see it as a fundamentally unfinished and aborted and betrayed project. And carrying a true enlightenment means being enlightened against these ideas of multinational corporations of extraction, of plundering, of individualism, etc.

So however you relate to the Enlightenment Project, whether you're against it or you're for it in theory, the actual systems that it has produced are utterly insufficient and, in fact, existential threats to our entire existence and our future. Yeah, damn right. It is true enlightenment to recognize all of this and obviously not follow bourgeois understanding of science that's so abstract and only beneficial to, you know, the capitalist economy and capitalist ideology. Just go through a few points that fast, what you said about doing what we can

in order to defeat this alienation with nature and get out there in the wild and see these things and, you know, Marvel, it's beauty, you know, whether that's look at it, nature moving through water and being, you know, aesthetically mesmerized by just the natural elements and that

which lives within it. I think it's important to rescuin eyes to what you said about teaching our children to obviously realize this. Well, you know, when he was left out with my son and, you know, he's just marvelling at, like, ducks and he's marveling at caterpillars

and he's slapping leaves as he's going past because he's just, like he's basically playing with nature and you know seeing how they move with gravity seeing the attention within the branches all of this is absolutely fascinating but this gets taught out of us when we become when we become consumers and yeah regarding fishing we can do that in the UK the UK is of course heavily infrastructuralized concrete jungle there really isn't some big open plains where we can go out to just like in the US. I mean, even most of a forest, like artificial, it's really insane.

But there is the farmless fields stashed away with a little pond there, which people do go fishing in, and yeah, often you need a license. But yeah, regarding ecosystems and the natural environment, you know, we can see more of that when we go on. line, for example, I'm seeing videos of elephants taking somebody's hat off and putting it on their head as a joke, I'm seeing

a fox working with a baby badger, you know, hunting, working together. I'm seeing humans work with dolphins, knowing of the dolphins are going to give them some food. I'm seeing, you know, birds working with humans in Africa knowing that the humans are going to get rid of the bees in the beehive,

which the bird has shown them where it is, knowing that the humans are going to give the birds some honey. and seeing all of this cooperation between different species using a subtle level of communication and that's really this nature that we're alienated from and again when we talk about what is nature what is natural will like animals eat each other

all the time I think that one of the worst ways to go would be to be eating from the legs up by by another animal yet there are animals all the time the, you know, a scuriant in agony because they're being eaten alive, but I guess that is a slight circle of life.

There's no question there. It's just, you know, it's difficult to find a true balance there, and we can all become vegans, but you know, I don't really know how beneficial that would be. But, yeah,

that's kind of further more of affecting on nature. Although they would be tragic ways to go we can also die from smoking we can die from being hit by a car we can die in our way quite easily I mean we'll likely die from global warming

burning us up the nuclear sword hanging over our heads but yeah it's true that like animals have to ease each other to survive but you know and even just to reflect on like what Marks Olinner said when he can't go back to the spinning wheel

obviously technology has to go forward you have to meet foods like the world's population food demands so I completely get that obviously but like when I'm working at KFC and I'm seeing like chickens come from like Brazil Germany France Australia New Zealand and then all of these chickens are being raised on food water being shipped on a cargo container to come over to the UK be unloaded be transported to Liverpool and then literally if they don't get sold in 10 minutes after being cooked using energy

they go straight in the bin. So, you know what I'm saying? There's got to be better ways. What are we doing with the food? So here's a solution for you because I drink what calls itself a nutritionally complete food that's made with, you know,

pea protein, flaxi, coconuts, brown rice. I drink five of the day. It gives me 100% of a recommended day now to calories, vitamins, minerals, tie and protein, you get slow release carbs, you get all your essential fats, you get a source of fiber,

you get all your phytonutrients, you get everything the body needs 100%. You can get in powder form or you can get in a liquid form. The state should roll this out everywhere to every single household, everywhere. Again, the people themselves

can build this in the local communities that gives them jobs. We can obviously build the plants to build all the chemicals and the vitamins and minerals. Again, we develop professors, we develop scientists, we develop people in all over,

community so all of this is one way in which we can detach ourselves from capitalist food consumption and also advancing to the next stage of actually getting high nutritional foods to the people so yeah I went off on one there but you know as well as complaining about you know the modern industrialized food you know consumption habits we can always propose solutions and this is one it's a lot better on 50% of all the foods waste being raised transported and then go in the bin like I have experience in KFC. So, yeah, there's a lot there, but have you got any thoughts on now? Yeah, that's, I mean, just the utter deep, massive inefficiency of the capitalist system,

the very system that loves to pretend that it is the cutting edge of efficiency itself. And just that whole process of raising, spending money and energy to create the chicken, shipping it halfway across the world, and as you said, just throwing it into the trash can is just absolutely absurd and really highlights the absurdity of the entire system. But I think what you're getting at earlier and deeply is something I struggle with as well or think about a lot is, you know, we talk about the inseparability of everything and dialectics. Well, there's a dialectic between death and life. Life literally cannot exist without death.

There has to be a clearing away of the old in order for there to be a birth and growth of the new. And that happens on every single level, both cosmic, environmentally, personally, right? Like I grow up, I raise my children, I die off so that I can leave room for their children. And there is something sort of beautiful in that cycle. And one of the things that got me into fishing particularly,

but even a little bit into hunting, which we can maybe talk about, was the idea of sort of refusing to extract myself from that life and death process. As ugly as it can be, that's only one side of it, right? the bear chewing on the deer while it screams, right, is one aspect of nature. But on the other side is, as you said, two species coming together to help one another.

Or you've even seen pictures of like, you know, some sort of predator with a baby version of their prey and it actually takes it under its wing and protects it. So these are two sides of the same coin. You can't have one without the other. And it's sort of idealist to assume that you can. And as much as we may want because of our moral compunction or whatever, to extract death from the life and death cycle, it's really unhealthy because what you actually get, in lieu of actually being able to separate life and death,

is you just get a pushing away of it out of view. So the death and the carnage and the torture and the bloodshed still happen, but it's just conveniently pushed way out of view, and then you can walk around feeling a little bit superior because you don't see how you're directly engaging with that bloodshed that is the fundamental basis of all nature. And when you look at that, and I think when you look at big agriculture, factory farming and the absolute depravities and torturous cruelty of those systems, you can go one of two ways. I think the vegan route is one reaction to the horror show of factory farming.

And it's an admirable, wonderful reaction, I think. And it's something that takes a lot of discipline and I respect anybody who does it. I think on the other end, though, and sometimes it doesn't get talked about enough. One of the other reactions you can have in the face of that depravity is to say, I want to go out and harvest my food from the natural world. I want to go out and fish and hunt for my food as much as I can to displace the otherwise factory farmed meat that I would be taking in. And so I think hunters and vegans, although they're sort of presented to us as complete and utter opposites with nothing in common, and they often slander one another across the firing line, in reality, are often. and motivated by very similar impulses in the face of the depravities of this system. And, you know, you can have your moral compunctions against of hunting.

But I think even if veganism were to be completely widely accepted, you know, all the land that would be need to be cleared. I mean, it's cleared already for meat, right? But, like, I'm just trying to get to this point that you can't actually separate death from the process. So even in a vegan world where you have agriculture as the main dominant way people feed themselves. You're still clearing land. You're still killing rodents and insects. You're still, you know, maybe using organic pesticides or whatever fertilizers for the crops to grow. And so you

can't, as much as you wriggle and writhe, you can't extract yourself from this life and death process. So for me, fishing and hunting are ways in which I'm trying to deal with that contradiction. And maybe I'm not doing it right. Maybe there are arguments against hunting that would put me to shame or whatever. But it at least is that shared. impulse I have with vegans of like how can I not partake at least less and less in this horrific system and how can I be as self-sufficient as possible. You know, growing gardens, going out once in a while to fish, to feed your family, you know, going out and be able to hunt. So that animal instead of being pumped full of artificial hormones and antibiotics, living a torturous life,

shoulder to shoulder with other of its species and then being slaughtered unceremoniously at the end, actually lives a full life out in nature, you know, breeds, grows, old and then you go out and you harvest that animal, bring it back, feed your family with it. Well, I know that neither veganism nor hunting could really be widespread, right? Like, not every person on earth could do both those things. It wouldn't be sustainable. And that's where scientific development and technological development need to come in, right? We can't go back to some past.

But at the same time, I don't know. I'm just throwing those sort of out on the table and would love to hear both of your responses to that sort of contradiction or conflict between veganism and hunting. no no i love both of those things and i think it's definitely important that you know as many people as possible do those two things but also not lose sight of you know the the sort of structural problems that prevail right like even if we manage to get i don't know 30 40 50 percent of the planet to become uh vegans that's still not going to you know change the fact that you know Dow Chemical still pollutes rivers and oceans and everything, right?

And I think that there is a sort of inherent problem in the individualization of correcting those issues, right? The idea that if everyone's vegan, then we can reverse climate change, except there are, you know, companies, corporations, structures that will still carry on doing things the way they are, even if they have to morph and change slightly to accommodate an ever, you know, increasing vegan population. I mean, the largest polluter on the planet is, you know, the U.S. military. So there's no level of veganism that would prevent them going, doing what they do, you know? Absolutely. Yeah.

Yes, so when you were talking about veganism, the first thing that popped into my mind was discipline, and you did mention that. It's absolutely, you know, remarkable and commendable vegans, and it is so well. bread when you were talking about how vegans and these natural hunters do have so much natural understanding in mind despite

there being methods being difference there's so much nuance in that so yeah again I do think in my ideal communist world if I was the leader I would have the

industrialized nations that you know preserve how they are and then instead of building outwards we just build up it's that simple, just build towers and then everywhere that is natural if humans did want to inhabit those lands

that it is natural and it does have natural you know ecosystems I do think that they should only be allowed in those places to live with spears you know what I'm saying because the force

to survive by themselves if they get eaten by a wild animal and that's just you know life but yeah I think that that's a way to have

you know a natural subsistence from to lifestyle whilst also being ethically model or more natural or something yeah I mean

that's something I thought about anyway but when you were talking about you know life and death there's being a dialectic and you know you need one for the other that's so

too and we can see this every time we breathe because inhaling oxygen is you know why we breathe but inhaling oxygen is actually what ages ourselves we obviously breathe out carbon dioxide so we're in this permanent rapport with you know all different life forms to produce oxygen but you know again this is why anti-oxigens are important for our health because they combat the oxygen that we breathe in so that our cells age at a slower rate. and these antioxidants can be found in you know blueberries and other things so yet that just shows this dialectic between life and death and we can just see every time we take a breath so we're moving on to the more trippy aspects of reality now so let's discuss psychedelic because you mentioned on one of your patreon episodes that you were inspired to do your nina simone episode excellent by the way after the trip with mushrooms so i really wonder what was it about those mushrooms mushrooms that really resonated with you,

that was Nina Simone and her love of humanity, her passion and her drive for a oneness, something that the mushroom felt, is there something, did they give off a language to you that made you, you know, realize this, did they say something to you? Is that mushroom rarely dead, if that's the case, did they speak to you in a way

you know as now become part of your consciousness is that mushroom dead now or is it a part of you you know just just some thoughts some questions well yeah they do live on in the sense that they impact our consciousness in ways that are truly profound and and almost inexplicable and i think the reason like this conversation particularly can get very difficult and highly speculative is because at the core of it, we're talking about human consciousness and how these substances affect human consciousness. And human consciousness itself is a profound and utter mystery. You know, philosophers have talked about it for hundreds of years. Scientists are trying to understand the neuroscientific and chemical basis of it, but the more we poke and prod, the more it seems

to elude us. And so when we're talking about psychedelics, we're not, we're talking about something that affects our brains on like you can you can talk about mushrooms or acid or DMT on the neuroscientific level on this materialist you know how does this actually affect the neurochemistry of the brain level but on the other level which is even perhaps the more profound level is its impact on consciousness and how that impact can be lasting now you can engage with psychedelics in a way that is just sort of flippant right i talked about on another episode, my flippant engagement when I was younger and I was like 16 and did way too much mushrooms. And it was the motivation behind it was just to get fucked up with my friends, right?

And sometimes some spiritual-esque revelations can come through that. But a lot of times it can just be a sort of, I'm just putting these chemicals in my head to make things wavy for a while and, you know, that's fun and cool. But on a deeper level, and as I get older, I understand that there's this other way to engage with psychedelics, which is to take that. them very seriously, to think of them medicinally, to think of them therapeutically, to set up a context in your mind and literally in the little physical space that you plan on taking these psychedelics, setting them up intentionally with the idea and with the idea of paying respect to what you're about to do and with the idea that it's not to get fucked up,

but rather to introspect, to to investigate firsthandly the mystery of your own consciousness. And when you are engaged with those substances, whether they be DMT, LSD, mushrooms, and you engage with them in that respectful sort of intentional way, they can have profound effects creatively, therapeutically, psychologically, and science is actually now slowly catching up to this idea that there are true benefits, medicinal benefits to these things, whether it's using MDMA to treat post-traumatic stress syndrome. or ayahuasca to treat heroin and alcohol addiction or mushrooms, for example, are being used an end-of-life terminal cancer patients to ease anxiety and to have a revelatory experience whereby most of the subjects who undergo these experiments say that this mushroom trip at the end of their life, facing their own mortality, in no uncertain terms, was actually completely beneficial to them radically rewired their relationship to their own mortality made them not only be okay with death but to openly embrace and accept their own death and again because this is

playing on consciousness there's still so many questions to be answered but in my own experience in my own life and i've had i you know i would say more experience with psychedelics than 99% of people on earth right um because if you actually look at the details the amount of people that do mushrooms and acid and DMT can be actually pretty small globally. And if you're in circles of people that are like psychonauts and they love this stuff, you can sort of lose sight of just how rare these things are for people to actually use in any systemic way. So it is very rare.

So I have a lot of personal experience with it. And some of my most profound spiritual revelations are wrapped up in my psychedelic trips. My last one on mushrooms a couple months ago was incredibly profound to the point where there was moments in the trip where I was openly weeping on the ground out of pure, unbounded love and compassion for all other human beings, thinking about the suffering of other people, strangers, in a way that was so profound to me that it literally brought me to my knees and I wept. It's not like a tear dribbled down my cheek, but like a hard physical weeping for the suffering

of other human beings. The human beings, I don't even know. And, you know, you can wave your hand and say, well, it's just chemicals in your brain, whatever. But no, no, no. There's something much, much deeper than that. And the sort of person who can wave their hand and say it's just chemicals in the brain, nothing to see here, are almost always the sort of people who themselves have never engaged with these substances. So what this means, I don't know. It has something to do with the co-evolution of our species and the flora and fauna around us.

It's amazing that these things that grow out of the earth, be they DMT, mushrooms, LSD, or anything else, can have these profound effects on us and lasting effects because after the drug itself and the trip itself goes away, I was still left with this profound sort of moral urgency to help others more, right? To do more. That was the thing that I kept coming up with in my head during that trip. I need to help people more. how can i how can i help them that month i ended up you know doing it in the in the sense that i gave hundreds and hundreds of dollars away to uh on the ground organizations feeding people serving the people etc and then the next month um after the the um the uprising hit we gave hundreds and hundreds of dollars away to bail funds to make sure people can get out of jail and

you know that's just one way of helping people but even that seems insufficient still months after my trip i'm still feeling like i'm not i need to do even more than that i need to to help people even more and dedicate my life to helping other human beings suffer less. And that dovetails beautifully with the Marxist political project of building a better world. That dovetails beautifully with the Buddhist concept of the illusion of separateness and that we're all in this together. And, you know, that radical compassion is the way toward liberation, deemphasizing your individual egoic self in replacing it with the other, right? Really what it is is absorbing the other into the self, that the self is. no longer this myopic, trembling little ego, but it is everything and everyone. And to see

somebody else suffer unnecessarily is to feel that suffering almost as if it's your own. And that's profound. And that has a capacity, perhaps, to definitely change individual psychologies. But if you can imagine maybe a future socialist society where psychedelics are brought into the culture in such a way that they can become rights of passages, things that we that we have a deep cultural societal respect for and engage with systemically, you can really have profound effects on a culture more broadly. So I don't know the answer to a lot of these mysteries. I don't know where these things will go in the future, but science is catching up, medicine is catching up, and more and more people are becoming interested in the implications

for human consciousness. And I think that can only be a good thing. Yeah, it's definitely important to underline that these times things should just be taken willy-nilly. Just, you know, with no care, no understanding of that the implications that can come from them, obviously they can call all this hard, but we're talking about, as you say, taking it in a ritualistic sense, and society should do that rather than criminalizing it, as they do now. I can remember, you know, back in the early days when I first started smoking weed, I'd just be like, you know, with smoking would just be like, oh my God,

this just opens your mind up, like you can see so much more, you can see if people just smoke weed everybody would be happy and they'd all get along and you know I rarely was convinced

it obviously capitalism would keep this from us because it would you know make us more awoken I guess to the absolutely

insane barbaric feudalistic time in which we live in under capitalist overlords but yeah regarding all the work that you do better and, you know, how inspired you were to do so much more.

Yeah, just loving solidarity, especially, you know, being, I don't know, I'm just sad that you've got to be brave to do this, but be brave enough to actually say, I was on my goddamn knees crying, and wish I could do more just thinking about all the goddamn suffering in the world. I mean, anybody who knows me knows it's extremely easy to get me to set me off crying. I swear to God, I mustn't have a single mate who's just not seeing me cry

like no joke like as like fucking adults and that because the world's fucking horrible there's so many things to be fucking upset about and you know this this drive to do more is like there's no amount of ego I could have the

could you know accept and tolerate this so people with their ego are the ones you know all the lads who can't actually express the feelings and you know are going to actually punch your head in if you ever do something to upset their ego so they're definitely not going to come out and talk about things that are upsetting because then their ego is being

offended you know a lot of people's livelihoods depend on having a massive ego so i mean the point i'm making is it's this being true to yourself to want to do more to help to help others that truly makes the world a better place so yeah i just want to thank you for obviously your open honesty whenever it comes to you know emotions and feelings because we can't ignore them we shouldn't ignore them this is why so many people fucking kill themselves regularly do you know what i'm saying it's just toxic masculinity but yeah the point i'm making here is the fact that all of these plants these compounds that affect us in rarely profound ways

you know psychologically these have historically been able to heal the fractured souls which capitalism is absolutely mined and exploited from us for their own game and as Brett said

has actually turned somebody who's going to lose the life into somebody who's made peace with that so these can heal psychologically in ways that no medicine can

and it is a goddamn shame that science is so the material's conception of science not the Marxist

sense of science but the capitalist science says you know when it comes to consciousness at

least that we can't measure these things because they can't be held like you can't hold

a thought so capitalists the science are saying if you can't measure it then it's not there but

obviously it is there because we've got consciousness and they can't measure that they can't measure dreams but yeah we know that they're there

I just want to talk a second about how like this actually helps solidify the idea of just how strong capitalist realism is right so like if you think back to the 60s you get the psychedelic revolution

you get the tune in drop out you get the you know take them to understand the system and the whole counterculture and if you fast forward to today I read an article about how people in Silicon Valley like tech workers are

microdosing psychedelics so that they can be more productive and so that they can, you know, increase the profit margins of, um, of their bosses, right? And it sort of really brings home the idea to me, not only capitalist realism, but the idea Lenin talked about, you know, anything that is remotely revolutionary, will be stripped of revolutionary potential and incorporated back into the capitalist system so that it can profit off of it.

Mm. Exactly right. And, and it's, it's, uh, it should be sacrilegious. It should, it should profoundly bother us. that these you know meditation is a similar thing right it gets it gets commodified it gets stripped of its actual you know deep and profound implications and it becomes just another tool for productivity so in both cases you're taking something beautiful with thousands and thousands of years of indigenous um significance and ways of life and you're stripping it you're stripping it of everything meaningful about it and you're repackaging it as something to make you more productive in the workplace it's a slap in the face to anybody on earth with a heart and a brain and uh and those things need to be combated by thoughtful people um on the other side of things it says no no no no no meditation and psychedelics and these things are not here for tech bros in silicon valley to produce more profit they're here

for radical engagement on a spiritual and existential level for the betterment of not only the individual but for the entire um population for all sentient beings ultimately And I think that's really an important part of it. And the one thing I wanted to say, too, is about ego. Capitalism is the centering of the ego. Imperialism is the centering of the ego. It's the domination. It's the putting down.

It's the punching somebody's head in, as Shibi said earlier. It's this idea that you need to dominate everybody else because what the ego really is is a manifestation, an overcompensation of deep trembling insecurity. The underbelly of ego is always insolventing. insecurity. The people that want to put their ego forward that want to convince you that they're the coolest, strongest, sexiest person alive that need to go out of their way to try to tell you that are the sort of people that are inside trembling little babies that don't know themselves and are insecure about themselves. And so they need to project and they need to overcompensate. And when you blow that up to a societal or civilizational scale, you get something like capitalism

imperialism. You get something like European colonialism. And so when we talk about the ego, sometimes I'll have crude Marxists to reach out and say, this is not important. You know, you're talking about individual psychology and get all that out of my face. We need to talk about the materialist conditions and the means of production and how to change them. But this is a betrayal of dialectics. This is a refusal to see the interconnectivity of all of these things. And, you know, if we're going to have an outward revolution, there needs to be changes to our paradigm, changes to the way we relate to one another at the same time.

A revolution isn't just an outward objective. thing. It's also a dialectically inward implicit thing. And I think that's a really important thing to remember. And specifically the idea that wherever there is ego, it's always undergirded and produced by a deep-seated insecurity that the ego is trying to compensate for. Thank you. God damn. That was so well said, Brett. As always, it's proper love. How you articulate the ego, it's, it's again spot on. It's something people need to realize. People don't even know what a goddamn ego is for the most part but you've just explained it perfectly

and it's obviously one of the biggest goddamn problems in society it is you know as you explain it's capitalism on this inward struggle which you talked about as you said that there's an outward struggle and an inward struggle

with a revolution yet there's also the outward struggle and the inward struggle of capitalism and that is the individual and that is the broader sense of everybody competing as individual in markets and whatnot but yeah well well said and yeah Ryan also well said you're talking about anything that is revolutionary stripped of its revolutionary potential and yeah you could say that

absolutely when it comes to psychedelics and these drugs which are being talked about that's actually well like so true I'll also just give an example of how the state actually done that well an actual scumbag who was a former Nixon policy advisor that an actual presidential policy advisor said you want to know what all this is really about he asked with the bluntness of a man who after public distraise and the stretch of federal prison had little left to protect that he said the Nixon campaign in 1968

and Nixon White House after that had two enemies the anti-war left and black people said you know what I'm saying we knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and

blacks with heroin you know obviously after the day flooded heroin in these communities and then criminalising both heavily marijuana and being against you know the drug war then we could disrupt these communities we could arrest their leaders raid their homes

break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. That's a policy advice. He's come out and said this. How fucking disgusting is that? That's why

people are getting arrested. That's why drugs are illegal. It's just some something from the Nixon campaign in 1968. Yeah, 100%. That was the beginning of the drug war here in the US, the Nixon administration, ramped up by the Reagan

administration and really ramped up, which doesn't get talked about a lot by the Clinton administration. And what the product of that was, it's not only clear, you know, racist, police brutality in poor communities of color and all of the other shit that goes along with it, the infiltration of left-wing groups, co-intel pro, etc. But it's also the basis of the incarceration system here in the U.S. The United States has about four to five percent of the world's population, but 25 percent of its prisoners. That is a profound, that is a profound statistic, a profound reality. The very nation who tells the rest of the world that it is the beacon of liberty and freedom has more people in cages per capita and in overall terms than any other society on planet Earth.

If that's not a profound hypocrisy at the heart of capitalism, I don't know what is, but you're exactly right. It started out as an attack on the left and on communities of color. And it goes way back even before that to immigrants and the first marijuana laws here in the U.S. It's always been racially coded and still to this day is incredibly deeply racially coded. And it evolves, but it never stops. So, you know, you have the early heroin and the psychedelics, but then it shifted into crack cocaine and regular cocaine. and then it just now just used as a pretext to pull people over, plant drugs on them, and then, you know, once you do that, you can brutalize them,

you can do anything you want to them. You can lock them in a cage for having a plant that grows out of the fucking earth. This system is rotten. And what the counterculture didn't get right was the idea that you could have a counterculture without challenging the underlying system that produces this rotten culture. And so what happened after the 60s is that all these hippies, they just resorted back into their individual lives. They recoiled back into their individual lives and became the next generation of oppressors.

They're the boomers today. They're the 60 and 70-year-olds in Congress today. And so what the counterculture of the 60s for whatever its successes and failures may have been, it's also a deep lesson on the idea that if you want to take these ideas about psychedelics and all this stuff and the possible emancipatory power of them, seriously, it needs to go hand in hand with a political confrontation with the underlying system of capitalism. There needs to be a rupture from the underlying system before we can treat any of the symptoms of the underlying disease. Yeah, this liberal capitalism being the disease and obviously socialism being the cure to poor people being locked up in cages, as you said.

You know, I just like live there's so many drugs in my city. it's a port city so you know there's a river there it's historically been you know big on crime because there's always like you know so much fucking poverty and people trying to

make ends meet out of you you know and if you look outside of central London or even in central London just not in the rich part there's crime everywhere there's you know there's council estates housing estate and then you've got like you know what the fuck do you call them

basically the projects in London and you've got people hustling out there with no other option because I mean that they're raised in these communities that have been flooded by drugs from bourgeois Z, the capitalist, not from goddamn poor people. How their fuck are they bringing in drugs

from, you know, elsewhere, from all over the world? Obviously they're not. So obviously there's the lumping capitalists, there's a lump in petty bourgeoisie as well. But if you just want to look at an actual example in how the border is here still flooding these communities to discard damn day with drugs, I'll give you one. In 2009, US customs officials seized the container ship financed by J.P. Morgan,

one of the world's largest banks this week after authorities found nearly 18 tons of cocaine with an estimated street value of $1.3 billion in the vessel. oh my days fam the sheer quantity of cocaine roughly 39,500 pounds this is still going on today is a proletarian owning and commanding a ship like this no but are our people are politicians going to be arrested and thrown into jail having to have a fucking blade shoved up the bum in case anybody jumps in the cell

and tries to stab them to death trying to survive in jail yes they will they've set up poor communities to go to jail and then they make money on the private prisons on the other end so you know they bring in the drugs or whatever they make money off that they pharmaceuticalize and patent other drugs and make money off that and then they make money off the private prisons when you pump millions of fucking people into those cages and then you that's another source of profit so on every level of this problem you see the profiteers being the parasitic cause

and effect of this rotten system and it needs to be toppled. There's no other way out. There's no reforming this violent, disgusting genocidal death machine we know as global capitalism. And the more people that realize it, the better, and the quicker we realize it, the better, because with the climate chaos hanging over our heads like a noose, time is running out. We need to get these ideas out to more and more people, and more and more people need to be willing to dedicate their lives to building a better world before the clock runs out on us. I was going to say, I think that's actually a good, introduction to ask you whether you are, you know, ultimately optimistic on the future of

humanity. Because like you said, there's plenty of things to be depressed about. You can, you know, flip on the news and there's no shortage of things from nuclear war to the ongoing climate emergency to be depressed of that. Yeah. Well, I would answer that, you know, sort of going full circle dialectically. Wherever there is oppression, wherever there's domination, wherever there's violent depravity, colonialism, capitalism, plundering, etc., you also inherently give rise to those who fight it. The more the earth is destroyed, the more environmentalists you create. Marx talked about capitalism producing its own grave diggers.

And as the capitalist system spirals the death drain more and more, more and more people have no choice but to see the system for what it is and wake up. Here in the U.S., we're having this unprecedented, multiracial uprising right now in every major city and even little, towns across this, they've crossed this country, of people of all colors, standing up, defending black lives, but also making these systemic critiques of the overall system, knowing full well that this system has robbed most of us, my age and younger, of our future. We don't have a future.

And when capitalism is let unfettered, it robs everybody of their future, and people aren't stupid. People know it. And so, am I optimistic? I'm cautiously optimistic because I understand the dialectical process. the more depraved the system gets, the more the more people wake up to the depravity of the system and are willing to fight it. And we're seeing that process play out globally. And we saw in the last 10 years this rise of right-wing neo-fascist, quote-unquote, populism, the world over in your country, in our country, in the Philippines, in Brazil, in Hungary, all over the world.

And what I'm hoping is that this is the last sort of major global gasp of, of, of, of, of, um, in Hungary, all over the world. And what I'm hoping is that this is the last sort of major global gasp of this system. And this next generation coming up are fed up. And they know that there's no future for them. They're going to work. If we keep the system in place, we're just going to watch the world die around us why we get paid $10 a goddamn hour and work until we're 75 and die on the job and the assembly line. People don't want that future.

The capitalism has created the context in which people are saying enough. is enough. And more and more people are saying it every single day. So that's what gives me optimism. It's a revolutionary optimism. It's a belief in the masses, a belief in the people that you can only push people so far before people say no more. And I think we're seeing more and more people putting up the middle finger to the system and saying no more. And I think that's only going to increase in the face of continued climate catastrophe, in the face of continued unnecessary imperial slaughter in the face of just brutal grinding inequality in your country and my country and countries all over the world. And so that's that dialectical process

of being oppressed and then fighting up against your oppressor. And the more intense they try to restrain it and stamp it down, the more vigorous the other side becomes. And so, and so yeah, that dialectical process does give me some optimism. And I think it should give all of us optimism, but also responsibility. Because the important thing here, is that it's not a passive process. You know, history doesn't happen to us. It happens through us. We are the mechanisms by which history is made.

And so it's not enough to say, well, the dialectical process will play out. I'll just go play call of duty and recoil into my individual life because then it won't. You know, the oppressors are organized. They're funded. They're militant. They're ready to fight and die for their broken system. And we have to meet them with that level of organization, discipline, funding, and militancy in order to oppose them in enough time.

to save our futures. So as scary as things are going to get in the next couple of decades, it's a necessary process that needs to play out. And ultimately, I believe there's more people in this world that want to see a better, different way of life than there are people who are deeply invested in this rotten system. And so that does give me some hope. Yeah, I mean, it reminds me of the answer that, you know,

Antonio Gramsci gave when asked the same thing, right? I'm a pessimist of the intellect, but an optimist of will. beautiful exactly right so angela davis optimism is a political act you have to act as if it was possible to radically transform the world and you have to do it all of the time so true it's a struggle god damn it's heartbreaking the more you learn about the world the tougher it is on your soul

but you have to call your boss bourgeoisie mr bourgeoisie you've got to tell you workers he's a bourgeoisie we're workers where you know what I'm saying I mean you have you've got to do a bit of theory at least just to have a basic grasp on our position in the world and then again just even reading some of the history or

listening to podcasts to hear about revolutionary struggles and history and successes that gives you optimism anyway but even you're not optimistic we're still got to do the struggle because Brett said we're the mechanisms of history being played if we don't do something it never gets done

I mean you can't sit on call of duty nothing's going to change you've got to go out you've got to speak like this with people out there do a podcast do a podcast just speak your own thoughts so my earlier episodes I didn't know what the hell I was doing

I just knew that it's important to speak and be vocalised and then you know get guests on welcome on your podcast you know, I'm sure other people will come on your podcast, we can go through these things together. So, I mean, it might not be being out there, organising, because you might not have anybody to organise with.

You might not be any comrades close by. So this is one tool in which you can be a part of history being played. You can have people listening here in your struggle, empathising, and doing that political act to at least have some optimism to inspire it in others. It's a struggle. we're there for you where your comrades we love you use your voice god damn it every single voice is important um you're going to refine your speech you're going to refine your ideas and that will make

you an asset to the struggle let's move on now let's have a discussion that i'm so excited to talk about now so you know as as james colony said the irish people will only be free when they own everything from the plough to the stars solidarity to the Irish goddamn but I mean people in general are only going to be free when they own everything from the plough to the stars let's talk about the stars

we've talked about the light from the big bang hitting earth forming life so I mean yes we did emerge from the earth you know animals plant life let's look up beyond that now because whether we like it or not

NASA has a mission space 2024 to a mission to the moon and Mars within the next 10 years of our lifetime they're going to be establishing a permanent base on the moon they're going to go to mars they're going to have man on Mars I personally can't wait to see HD footage of man and woman on Mars but to you better have you heard about this and what does this to you say for the future of capitalism, is this step to establish a permanent base on the moon and go out to Mars? Is that something positive for mankind? Or is it simply, like, as Franz Phnom would say, is it a bourgeois prestige work?

Or is it even just simply U.S. space imperialism? I think it is. And this is where we get down to, you know, systemic things that undergird, things that could be good or bad, right? So there's a version of this that could be good, and it's sort of the Star Trekian version, of transcending the need for the amassing of wealth for its own sake, and then going out into the cosmos with a genuine and sole goal of exploration for its own sake of learning, of connecting, of seeing if there's other life forms out there, of learning more about our own place in the cosmos, right?

That's what all this is about. A lot has changed in the past 300 years. longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We have eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We've grown out of our infancy. You've got it all wrong. It has never been about possessions. It's about power. Power to do what? To control your life, your destiny. That kind of control is an illusion. Then what will happen to us? There's no trace of my money. My office is gone.

What will I do? How will I live? This is the 24th century. Material needs no longer exist. Then what's the challenge? The challenge, Mr. Offenhouse, is to improve yourself. To enrich yourself. Enjoy it.

So you can imagine a social... socialist or communist future world where space exploration and even bases on Mars are an intrinsic part of just human self-actualization, of figuring out where we fit in the cosmos for its own sake. But under capitalist imperialist paradigm, under the paradigm we see now, what it really is is an extension of colonialist logic, of a new frontier to dominate, of new commodities out in space to plunder and exploit for profit. You know, you can see this in the show, the sci-fi show, the expanse, where it really

gives a capitalist future, where the space exploration is for ultimate class society ends, the hierarchy of class society, of racism, of imperialism, of different types of people, you know, the belters, those who live out on the asteroid belt, versus the people on Earth versus the people on Mars, they begin to divide and separate each other, almost like, along, you know, what would be today racial lines or ethnic lines, but the capitalist logic always finds ways to divide and separate and conquer. And so it depends under which, under system that this, this happens. And under the current system with the Elon Musk's of the world and the overall capitalist extractive project still ongoing, this is either an expansion

of the colonialist sort of mindset and or a sort of fever dream that we, we, We can use up everything on Earth. We can destroy the forests and the Amazon and, you know, shit in our own nest. And then when that's completely sort of despoiled, we can fly off and terraform Mars and create a new Earth and start the process all over again. This is the psychopathic logic at the center of the capitalist and colonialist imperialist system. So under that context, this can only be a bad thing.

This can only be another iteration, a new frontier for domination and plundering. But under a different context, if we can manage to make this revolutionary rupture from this system and move towards a better world, it can be something that's truly beautiful. It can be the expansion of the human future. It could be humanity existing for millions of more generations, each one building off the knowledge of the last and pushing our species further into the cosmos with the, underlying urge not to profit and plunder and exploit and dominate, but to learn, to grow, to make connections with other life forms in the galaxy. And that can be a beautiful thing. So again, you know, this is why systemic understanding is essential.

The way libertarians and liberals and defenders of the system talk about it, it can become very much a sort of apocalyptic, dystopian future idea. But under the right conditions, it could be a beautiful expansion of the human project. So, yeah, it depends. Absolutely. I think that's actually what most people miss about technology or even institutions generally, right? There's no such thing as an institution devoid of class interest, right? So long as you have a bourgeois, technology will be used to meet their ends, right?

I mean, when television was first created, there were no adverts on it. And then over time, the mudied interests roll in and they cut it up and before and in the middle and after of shows, you have to have adverts now. And this is the same thing that's happened with technology. I mean, under a class society, technology will be used to benefit the class interests. I mean, you can see that in the way that technology is used now. I mean, how is it used? It's used to surveil us. It's used to track us.

It's used to sell us things. I mean, these are, but yeah, I mean, definitely under a non-class society, you know, technology will be freed up to be used in other ways for the benefit of people instead of for the benefit of the bourgeois, for sure. I would love it to, I mean, to me personally, I believe all of humanity should come together again in my ideal communist world. I would fully say, okay, the Lake District, every single human being on the planet, don't care where you're from, what you're doing, anything like that. If you want to build a spaceship, go to the Lake District, I don't care how long it takes us, but everybody's going to get the necessary education to being able to facilitate this construction. of a spaceship so that we can go to Mars

and space and whatsoever. To me that's important. I think it's absolutely essential to go to space because I do believe. If we're not creating the conditions for our species to survive throughout the course of the universe's like life,

I just think that that's pointless. Do you know what I'm saying that? I think that we exist to reproduce and carry on the universe's ability to be conscious, I believe that you know, without us, the universe

doesn't know that it exists. I also kind of feel like we're here definitely basically sperm to be fertilized on an egg that happens to be another planet or a moon we can 100% go there and then make

them fertile or you could see as simply as pollen blowing off one leaf onto another. I mean this is obvious in nature where a part of nature as we keep saying, this is literally what it's meant to be. It's like kind of Schrodinger's cat. Yeah, yeah. It's like the universe

needs a conscious observer or the universe just isn't there and again that, I mean, there's no way to measure it, but again, that could just be like a material's conception you know, using modern science. Yeah, I mean, we should have spaceships, we should be going to Mars, we should

try and observe our life and life on earth because as we heard from the intro life is a miracle and we don't know if it exists elsewhere I think we should definitely go out there and travel and explore it

I don't care how long it takes us there's no evolution there's no natural selection we're all in houses we're not being killed off by nature I mean I think evolution is stunted for humanity I do think that we should continue to bound through space and time

as technology evolves with earlier humans who are travelling through space and time maybe like mars would be the first step i do believe that like i mean even if we're not technically homo sapiens um this is kind of a touchy subject because you know you do hear like them say well you know that that just ferments racism because you're saying that humans are different i don't i don't think that matters whatsoever like again i mean we're obviously in favor of plants of animals of humanity i'm going to be in favor of not even a next step but just a variance of

the sapient overall and I mean it sounds again absolutely far-fetched and absolutely mad but if you're not thinking about these things in serious terms we're just going to be hit I mean imagine the day that we we defeat the capitalist we've got international global solidarity and then we get hit by an asteroid and all

become extinct anyway what was the point so yeah we absolutely have to to exist on other bodies throughout space and otherwise we are just going to be hit by an asteroid volcano nuclear annihilation a goddamn super corona so many things that can wipe us out on this earth if we don't exist outside of earth then we're fucking failing basically we can't truly protect ourselves and the people if we're just living on one rocking space but i mean what comes from this because there's other people out there who don't even agree with this but what comes from it we'll look at what came from the apollo program we've got so many technologies nowadays that

have improved life everywhere you know the technology that comes from it is absolutely insane i can't think none of them off the top of me head but even missile technology that's being developed we can use those same missiles to literally shoot food at hungry people all around the world if people need certain equipment no matter where they are we just load a payload on top of a missile and shoot it at them it's that simple we can use these technologies that as Ryan said they only produce when it means

to save the capsulists but there's going to be no communist manifesto on the moon NASA they're not taking a communist manifesto to Mars it's not going to be on Elon Musk's ship it's definitely not going to be on Jeff Bezos spaceship

there's going to be no communists outside of Mars and all that's going to happen is they're just going to eventually have a colony outside of the earth and then invade us all for our own resources or what because that's what happened when humans left Africa if we don't have this like global consciousness in which we are all on the same page

if we all resonate with each other if I mean you start off by reading goddamn Marx because then you know what Marks said and then we don't have to debate with each other stupid shit because we're all on the same page you get me so it has to be done we have to go to space we also have to take power from the capitalists so the capitalists are just going to focus over both on earth and in space we should build a goddamn spaceship and i'm telling you

we should build a spaceship we should all have a lechy bike so we can all get around rapid and that's when we talk about this change within us as individuals and we're on a global scale we can all have these small vehicles to get a boat but these would also be like spaceships to get a boat as well and the first task for our spaceship besides obviously developing the technologies such as life support systems recycling food water energy all of this you know again by thorium like our first mission should be to clear up the space junk around the earth because at the moment we're all going to be locked in the earth like a goddamn prison and the only people who can ever escape the earth even if we had all the money and power in the world are these capitalist space agencies because

they're the ones tracking all the space debris that they've littered all around the earth going on Google and Google space junk, it's absolutely disgusting. So yeah, there'll be the first mission to clean up all the space junk, shoot food, hungry people, all of these things that we absolutely have to be talking to each other about. It's only so good

to God damn to discuss the Soviet Union. Let's fucking move past this. It's in the past. Let's start towards looking at the future. Let's plan the future. Let's get all these fucking astrophysicers hyped over how much they're going to be able to look at the stars.

that people own the means of production. Let's invite these goddamn neuroscientists. Name one neuroscientist right now who's a goddamn communists. You can't. And the closest thing to it, B-Dog, Brett and my man Ryan. So, you know, we need these on board to look at how mirror neurons work, how, you know, neuroplasticity affects us on the capitalism. So it's not just dairy, but we can actually see the practical results

to which these capitalist scientists look. love so much. So, I mean, yeah, I hope there was some stuff there that resonated with you. I really thought that you found this interest and we would absolutely one million percent love to hear your thoughts, good or bad. Rators, five stars and iTunes, only five stars because, again, as I've mentioned earlier, I'm dead easy to upset and I will start crying. But overall, the point is, Marxism is the science for revolution. Historical materialism shows us how history develops. It's not the be-all and end-all. We use Marxism to break out of capitalism. That's as simple as it is. If there's no longer capitalism, we don't need Marxism, but we still need to plan

a future beyond it. This is one way in which I hope I interested some people. Have you got any thoughts on that breath? I mean, yeah, there's so much there. I just touch on a couple points. One is the idea of human evolution and how that might already is changing. or how that might even change in the future during space exploration. And I think one way to think about it is that human beings have almost transcended evolution in the way that other animals haven't, right? The natural limitations that check evolution, right, natural selection. In a lot of ways, we've flown the coupon on that.

Like we've gotten beyond the immediate natural pressures in a lot of ways because of our technology and civilizational advances. And, you know, one of the things that separates human beings from a lot of other animals is our conscious creativity, right? Our life activity, our ability to go out, work on the world, and create totally new things. And so in some sense, I think that the future of human evolution is going to be taken over by humans themselves. It's like we've developed the intelligence and the understanding of the evolutionary process that we can take conscious control over our own evolution. and that might look like, and this could be, you know, utopian or dystopian, depending on a lot of other variables, of course,

but it might look like a slow merging with our own technology, you know, nanobots to boost the immune system and clear out toxins, you know, bionic limbs or organs, like for the blind to see, things that, you know, we could put into our bodies that make us extend our five senses to something beyond just those five senses, right? So I think when we're talking about human evolution, it might very well be in the context of humans taking control over our own evolution. And that, of course, as I said, can be utopian or dystopian.

And then the other thing I wanted to touch on is your idea of in a post-class society and a communist future society that Marxism will no longer be needed. And I think that's a really important point. Marxists literally want to get to the point where we don't need Marxism anymore and there's a there's an interesting echo in buddhism where the buddha talks about um the buddhist practice and the religion and the philosophy and the psychology of buddhism being a raft and you get on the raft and you use the raft to cross the river right and on the other side is enlightenment to be crude about it but once you get once you're enlightened once you become enlightened in the

buddhist sense you you discard the the raft right you don't get to the other side of the of the river and pick the raft up and keep carrying it over land, you let go of it because it's served its purpose and now it can be jettisoned. And that's the exact same thing with Marxism. That's how I think of myself as a Marxist. I'm a Marxist because I'm in this historical process that needs to be fulfilled and Marxism is the mechanism by which we can fulfill it and move beyond class society. And I want to get to a point where I no longer have to be a Marxist. It's, you know, eventually you end your own philosophical outlook because the need for it has been transcended.

And there's something beautiful in that, you know. It's like you don't get that in other political philosophies. All other political philosophies see themselves as existing in perpetuity as an ongoing thing. But as dialectical materialists, we want to get to a point where even the Marxist project itself is really completed. And so there's no more need for it. And so those are just interesting ways, I think, to think about a couple of the things that you mentioned. And like I said, I can't get to everything you said. but all of what you said is really interesting to dive deep on and think of the implications of

and we need to start having that future-oriented vision of what humanity could look like and busting people out of, as Ryan said earlier, the capitalist realism that acts as a containment on our political imagination. Thank you so much for your contribution on your time, Brett. It's hugely appreciated to be an absolutely incredible experience. before we let you go, is there any plugs that you'd like to put in? You know, where can people find you? Where can you find your where, et cetera? Yeah, first and foremost, I'll just say, thank you both so much for having me on.

This has been a fascinating, lovely conversation and experience, and I'll walk away with it, continuing to think about the stuff that we talked about. I'm really humbled and honored that you brought me on your show to have this conversation. And I'll release it on my feet as well so that my life. listeners can learn about your show and come and support it. So we have a two-way traffic to each other's shows. And I think that's a sort of solidarity that we can show to one another. But yeah, thank you so much for having me on. I'm deeply appreciative. If you're at all interested in my projects, you just have to go to revolutionary left radio.com. It shows both our

podcasts, our Patreon, our YouTube page, et cetera. So that's where you can find me. Yes, people, one million percent go and listen to Rev. Left Radio. Go on to Red Manus. That's where you get all your theory. So interesting. I mean, it's literally one of the greatest gifts to humanity right now. Ryan, would you like to say goodbye? Yeah, absolutely. Just that I can't thank you enough.

You know, you talk about how humbling it is for you, but I kind of feel like we have much more reason to feel that way, and it's definitely an honor to have you here. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Love and solidarity to both of you. And yeah, when you're done with this, just send it over,

on my RSS feed too because I think this is a conversation that a lot of people will get a lot out of. Wow, yeah. We also hope that people get a lot out of it. But for now, until next time,

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