Rev Left Radio - UNLOCKED: In Praise of Prose, Poetry, and the Present Moment

Episode Date: September 5, 2026

Breht discusses the importance of reading, writing, meditating and spending time alone in nature as essential to a well lived life; as well as mental-emotional protection from the techno-oligarchic assault on our minds, attention spans, and ability to think critically. Learn more about the show at: https://revleftradio.com/  

Okay, I know I've done this before, perhaps, maybe, in one capacity or another, but I just wanted to put this out there. It's something that I'm telling you because I've been telling myself, and it's something that I'm also, you know, in the process of really trying to get on the path with. And that is, among other things, I'll talk about some other things as well. But I want to just encourage people to read, to read books. it is something that is so important for our mind, for our imagination, the ability to stick with something, to develop our focus and our attention. There's so many fascinating, gorgeous, beautiful works of literary art in the world, so many different genres, ways of getting into reading. And I know that if I feel this way, this urge that I need to read more, but this constant graphic,

gravitational pull to get on the phone or to get on YouTube to just do the passive consumption of increasingly AI slop generated by the algorithm. Whether you're on YouTube, whether you're on social media, it's this is a qualitative shift. It's always been shitty. There's been a qualitative shift now to more and more just algorithmic nonsense slop AI bullshit. So it's not even like there's a real human connection. Oftentimes, you don't even know if you're talking to a bot and an AI chat bot or a real person online. And it's just a, it has its place. But I think increasingly people feel this inner twinge, this inner urge to almost like going back to analog. We now have this nostalgia, at least I do to some extent, which I'm critical of in many respects, but still,

I feel it for the 90s, for the pre-internet time. And there's no way, of course, to go back, but I think there are ways that we can take back our attention, take back our ability to focus, and take back what I think is a beautiful dimension of life when you can sort of imbue it with reading, whether that's poetry, that's literary fiction, that's nonfiction, you know, even reading a little airport thriller or something like that is still reading. You're still constructing scenes in your mind. You're still relating to characters and feeling for them empathetically and compassionately. I read a book recently, and I'll actually recommend this book for a few reasons. And I'll talk about it in a second. But I read this book, and it's been a while since I had read fiction. And I read this story. And I just fell in love with the idea that fiction is this fascinating doorway into the life of another person.

whoever the main character is or the figure you're following in a text and a book, to go into them to inhabit their mind, to inhabit their lives, it really adds a dimension to your own inner life. It cultivates a sense of compassion for other people. And it deepens your inner aesthetic life. The book that I read recently, and it's called Train Dreams, I highly recommend it. It's a very, very short, small little book.

It's not, you know, postmodern labyrinth. It's not Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace or or House of Leaves, which, you know, are great authors in books, even Cormec McCarthy, you know, these really great authors that can sometimes their work can be hard to get into. It's challenging, which is good and, you know, playing with the structure, you know, writing thousand-page tomes, you know, Don DeLillo. these are definitely works and authors in the American tradition that are worth getting into and worth diving into if and when you're ready. But there's something so beautiful about a solid narrative arc written incredibly well with deep human characters that you can get through in a couple hours. And I think one of the things that I like about this book and why I want to recommend it is it's a great way to start building up the momentum of reading.

Because one of the hardest things is in the modern world with all these distractions, plus our business, lives. We have so much to do and in the time where we have a little time to ourselves, to sit back and passively consume what the algorithm serves up, it's easy, it's frictionless, and so we gravitate towards it. We have this dopamine hit of opening our phone and opening the app and scrolling and looking. I get it, you know, it's literally crafted to pull you in in a million different ways. But obviously we all know the limitations of that, the internal limitations of that, and we want to build these other habits that are better, that are better for us, that are, that are more aligned with the sort of people we want to be. But it's, it's hard to do that. And reading is

one thing that many of us would want to get into. Some of us are probably, you know, we already have good habits in that regard. But for those that are agreeing with me, feeling that urge, feeling that intertension, and still, when they start a book, it's hard to focus on it. It's hard to get into it. They give up very early. I recommend train dreams. It's under $10. It's like 115 pages. It's a it's propulsive. It's addictive. It pulls you in once you read a couple pages and get into it. It's about a guy who lives a relatively unconstitutional, normal life full of course of tragedy and melancholy and heartbreak and devastation, but who lives a very simple, non-consequential life from the late 1800s through mid-20th century American life.

And his life is before cars, before televisions. He's a working class laborer guy in the Pacific Northwest. And his whole life, sort of the background of his life, are these monumental technological developments in American history. But the book itself is just focused on the life of this guy who died, who nobody really attended his funeral, you know, a sort of guy who wouldn't have a gravestone even anymore, and totally forgotten by history. Of course, it's a fictional character, but there are many such cases in real life that are like this. Many such lives lived that nobody will ever know about. And fiction is a great way to kind of start searching through the tritis of human history in some ways, in the inner lives of these people. So if you're trying to get into

reading. You want the momentum of being able to finish a book quickly. You want a propulsive, pretty addictive, compelling narrative arc that still has genuine literary flair to it. Like, it's not just in an airport book. It has, it's literary fiction, you know, hands down. I think New York Times books, whatever the fuck, ranked it as one of the hundred best books of the 21st century or 20th century. I think it was written in the 20th century. The, the, the, the, the, book itself, of course, takes place in the late 1800s, early 1900s. But it's fascinating. This book made me laugh out loud.

This book made me weep on several occasions. It ends in a really profound and kind of artistic and strange way. And it's one of those things where you read that book, you feel that urge to keep reading, pop up in you. You get sucked in. You really love it. If you've ever got addicted to a book, you've ever had that feeling where you can't put a book down. where, you know, every second of free time you get, you go and you get back to the book. And when the book is not with you, when you're going about your life, it's the characters are with you, the scenes are with you, the what happens next is with you.

That is an intoxicating feeling. And this book gave me that. I tossed it over to my wife. After I read it, I said, this is really good. Check it out. She blew through it in one day, read the whole thing in a couple hours during the day. And she, too, wept and laughed out loud, and we both absolutely loved it. There's also interestingly a Netflix movie on the book, which is one of those things that are, I haven't seen the movie yet, we're going to watch it this week, but it's one of those things where it gives you an extra layer of excitement.

If you can read a book knowing that at the end of the book, another reward is to go watch a movie of it and to see that that comparison between the imaginative structure you built in your head, how you envision characters, how you envision scenes, you know, just in your mind. and then seeing a director and a team of people take their own various versions. Everybody's is a little different and then put them together and visualize and bring that book to life in the visual form and seeing the ways in which it compares and contrast with your own imaginative structure that you built in your head. I find that incredibly rewarding even if the movie, which they almost always do, fails to live up to the book. Books are just more in depth. you're sitting with a book longer in most cases. Average movie is 60, 90, 120 minutes.

Books are much longer. This one is short. So books have the ability to go much deeper. It's really cool. So if this is compelling to you, if this sounds like something that's resonating with you, check out train dreams. Just buy the book.

Don't read too much about it. Don't go find analysis of it first. don't watch the movie first. Just trust me, buy the little cheap book, read it. And then see if that sparks within you, that incessant sort of like, okay, what's the next book? And that was my first book by the author, Dennis Johnson, and I've now bought another book of his. I also bought a more challenging book by one of the great American authors, Thomas Pynchon, crying of Lot 49, which I'm going to start soon as well, which is probably a more challenging book.

Pynchon in particular is known in Gravity's rainbows, his magnum opus. Pynchon is known as being postmodern writer, very complex writer, one of those writers that is hard to, you are often lost and kind of on purpose. He wrote books that got turned into movies. One, which I went and saw in theaters a long, long time ago. It called Inherent Vice with Joaquin Phoenix. I think it came out in 2014. I saw it in theaters.

I didn't even know it was a pension book based on a pension book, but it is a book by pension. But the movie itself is, it sort of has that pincionian confusion. Like the plot isn't straightforward. It is challenging in that way. It's very layered, very symbolic, crazy, weird. And Joaquin Phoenix plays characters like that quite well. But he also wrote the book, One Battle After Another,

which I watched that film recently with Leonardo DiCaprio about left-wing activism and all of that. I had a great time at the theater as a really fun movie. And I just learned out like two days ago that that was actually based on a Thomas Pynchon novel. So if you at all familiar with those books, you like those movies, you might eventually want to move in that direction. But again, that is more challenging. Cheering Dreams is much more straightforward. And I think people will enjoy it. So I have Jesus' son and crying of lot 49 up next for myself.

I bought my wife a couple books as well that she's getting into, and we're just really trying to get into the flow of reading and being excited about reading. And short, addictive books are a great way to kind of rekindle that love within yourself. So if you're so inclined, check it out. And then, of course, as I always recommend, right, daily meditation habit, something that brings you into the present moment. that focuses your mind, that trained your mind to come back to the breath and body, which is to say, come back to the here and now.

And there's an interesting parallel in reading books, which is in meditation you are sitting there observing your mind, watching it get distracted, becoming aware that it's distracted, bringing it back to the breath, to the body, to the present moment. And when you're reading, you often have that as well in a different way. You're reading the book, you're trying to follow along with it, your mind starts talking to itself compulsively. You get distracted.

You realize, I didn't read that last sentence, that last paragraph, that last page. You become aware of the fact that you're distracted. You bring your attention back to the text over and over again. And the more you do it, the easier it becomes. And I truly think, not to be conspiratorial here. And it's not a cabal that does this. It's just the logical structure of capital and of these tech companies. I mean, we're living in a literacy crisis.

We're living in an era where literacy rates in the United States, the richest country to ever exist on human earth, human history, are on the decline where 21% of adults are functionally illiterate and over half read at or just around a sixth grade level, raising kids in this environment, right? I'm trying to always trying to get my kids to read, finding stuff that they might be into. My daughter, who is 17, has her own genre of books that she reads

and she, you know, she reads a lot. And I love that she's reading. And my son read, my 11-year-old son has read every single Calvin and Hobbs book. And I'm trying to find something that he can get into next. And it's very hard for me to find because he's read every single Calvin and Hobbs book, loved him, devoured him. But now it's like he's finished him all. There is no new Calvin and Hobbs for him to read. He's re-read many of the Calvin and Hobbs.

And now he's kind of, you know, in lieu of anything new coming to him, he's kind of now not reading as much. and I really want to find a way to get him back into reading. So as a parent, it's incredibly important, but just for our own sake, these corporate tech oligarchs and these algorithmic corporate logics and just the whole rotten system that we live in. They benefit from people who can't critically think,

who can't comprehend what they're reading, who don't have the patience to sit with things for long periods of time, challenging things without escaping into the frictionless, distraction and passive consumption of algorithmic slop. It doesn't make us feel good, right? If you scroll on your phone on Instagram or Twitter for three hours, you don't put your phone down and feel good about it. You don't even remember what you fucking scroll. You're wasting your life and you're handing over your precious time on this earth

to these fucking, to the worst people on planet Earth. And so I think there's a responsibility, a moral imperative, an obligation for us to role model that for our children, for our friends, for our family, and for us to take seriously ripping back our attention, our minds, our subjectivity from the algorithmic casino slot machine that is our phones and the apps on it. And I don't really have personally a problem with social media as much. I just set a timer for 30 minutes on Instagram a day. That's the only social media that I have. But my shit is YouTube. I have this compulsive urge to like watch the next video. and I'll find myself with no video to watch searching videos,

you know, trying to find something to watch and burn up my time at work on break or at lunch. It's, you know, it's easy to just put something on, some stupid YouTube drama, slop nonsense about, you know, comedians or some stupid, you know, shit that happened or even news sometimes, it's like, okay, I get it. Like, I know I'm just watching news almost compulsively at this point to watch something, and I'm only half paying attention anyway. And just to like, just to reclaim.

that through meditation, through reading, through being deliberate about where you put your mind, where you rest your mind, what you put into your mind, and increasingly moving from passive consumption to creation. Meditation and reading, reading is kind of consumptive. You're not writing a book. You're reading a book, so you're taking in something. But at the same time, it's demanding of you. It demands that you focus. It demands that you follow narrative arcs. It demands that you keep multiple characters and their relationships in mind at the same time as you go through the process of reading. And it requires you to build up your abstract imaginatory capacities by building out, fleshing out these scenes, which happened automatically in the human mind.

As you read words on a page, little scribble marks on a page, your mind is exploding with images and detail that is just irreplaceable. Whereas, you know, the visual forms we have in the modern. media environment, they do all that work for you. And so we're living in a situation where less people can focus, where less people are literate, where children growing up are now outsourcing their critical thinking, their homework to AIs, which is only going to get worse and worse. Teachers are having a hell of a time trying to navigate that. And if we believe in building a better world, we really got to have the moral responsibility and the discipline to wrench ourselves away

from it. Not to say that we can never watch YouTube or be on social media, right? Everything in moderation, of course. It's fine to engage. Those are tools in the world, but you don't want to become the tool of that. You know, you don't want them to use you. And so this literacy crisis in particular is incredibly disconcerting. It's absolutely fascinating that in 21st century America, where you have more access to information than ever before, and it's the wealthiest country to ever exist on planet Earth, that the literacy rates are declining. And it's just something we have to rage against,

we have to fight against in ourselves and with others. And so I'm finding my way back into enjoying particularly literary fiction because I spent many years really focused on nonfiction, political theory and history and philosophy. And, you know, I love all that. And I think, you know, reading deep philosophy or history is really fucking good for you. But I lost touch with how much I loved literary fiction and I'm starting to rekindle that love. And I couldn't be happier about it.

And so I want to just recommend that to other people. And then another thing, of course, is, as I always say, spending time alone in nature. Like that's always going to be healing for the mind and soul. To not bring, you know, headphones, not need to listen to anything, not need to distract yourself, but to go out and immerse yourself on a hike, right? Go to a park and sit by a lake and meditate. or read poetry. Go camping by yourself.

You know, that's a good challenge. I said that a few years ago, and I remember a patron at the time, said, because of you, I went out and I had this whole weekend camping trip by myself and just like wrestling with, you know, putting up your tent, making your own food, being out there by yourself, having no social role to play, nobody to perform two or four, setting your phone aside. You know, you can listen to music and stuff, of course. but reading books out there, those are all things that you can do that are very helpful.

And speaking of music, I also find music needs to come back into our lives. Many of you, that's already a crucial part of your life. But in the mornings when I'm driving to work, which is about a 30-minute drive, I've just listened to the news for so long. It's like, this fucking sucks.

And so I stopped listening to podcast or news on my way to work, and I just started listening to music. And it just sets a whole different five. So if you spend your day, like reading a wonderful book of literary fiction, listening to and exploring new music or listening to an album that moves you, you know, reading some poetry in the evening, spending some time meditating. Your inner life is going to expand and become richer and you will feel so much fucking better. And this is not something, this is not only something leisure people can do.

I will put my daily schedule against anybody with 50-hour work weeks right now that I'm working, hard physical labor out in the fucking mud and dirt and the elements. Kids, four and 11 and 17, who when I come home, constant with me and my wife, we're constantly doing stuff for them. You know, we have various sporting leagues that were involved in our kids and us, volleyball, softball, soccer, tea ball, et cetera. I'm finishing up a book So like I just spent seven hours yesterday

Editing the book Letter to Young Revolutionaries coming soon And then on Sundays I try to put together Rev Left episodes, Red Menace episodes Shoeless in South Dakota episodes I don't have any free time But I find ways to bring it in If you are committed

You will find time in your life Even the busiest of lives To bring in some stuff And anytime you spend on your phone could be replaced with just taking a small book with you to work or keeping a small book on you and just I'm in a line, I'm on break, and just popping out that book and just reading. You know, that can easily replace the compulsion towards the phone.

And then to take it even higher and, you know, writing. If you're good, if you read books, you start to understand different literary styles, different approaches to storytelling, you read nonfiction, you see the ways people explicate, their ideas, lay out their arguments. You learn a lot of different ways of writing. And if you can start to write yourself, not because you want to be a famous novelist or you're going to even write a book, but just writing haikus, writing little poems, journaling to yourself, taking your inner life

and your mind and your ideas and putting it on paper for its own sake. That is a step up from even, you know, reading or meditating in the sense that now you're actually. actively creating. You're actively articulating your inner life, which can sometimes be very mumbled and jumbled and feeling oriented and to take your thoughts and to put them onto the page. It's rewarding and it's cathartic. And another thing that I encourage people to do, this is, I don't know why. This is what me telling me this to myself is also me telling this to you. This is something that's been going on in my own mind. So I'm putting us out there because for some number of you, hopefully it will inspire you to do one of these.

things. The next task I'm setting for myself because I am committed just as an orientation to life to always be like learning new things, learning new skills, developing myself. Not in this obsessive, compulsive self-improvement way, but in this like, I have one life. There's no way I could get through every gorgeous film and every work of art and every literary book. There's no way that I could learn every instrument or learn every language. But the pursuit of learning those things is deeply edifying. It really makes your life like much, much richer. And so I have all these intellectual outlets, you know, the spiritual outlets, physical outlets with sports and working out, lifting weights and working a physical job. And now I'm like, I want a creative outlet. And so,

you know, my son played piano for many years and now he wants to switch to guitar. And I'm like, you know what would be really cool is if we took lessons together. If me and my son went and learned the guitar from scratch together. We could encourage one another to continue to learning. We can learn together. We can encourage one another to practice when we're at home. And it's an instrument that you can learn the basics of in a couple months and then spend the rest of your life getting increasingly better at. Not because you want to make an album. Not because you want to put something out there that you can sell to people or become famous or well known or liked or go for some of you i mean that that's your that's your life path but do things just because they're good

to do just because they're fun to do with without being a means to a further end um and so my my next sort of challenge to myself which will also of course deepen you know my creative relationship with my son is to is to learn guitar and i'm going to start i'm going to start that in the fall um while of course at my job right now i'm officially what i think what tomorrow or the next day is my one year anniversary of being in the trades of joining my union and getting to work and I've learned so much just over that year and I still have of course so so much to learn but you know I've never been a tools guy I've never been a build that thing guy and I am becoming that slowly with lots to learn still but it's a whole new dimension of my being that has been

opening up and work fucking sucks. Like, you know, like waking up at 5 a.m. and going out and the heat where already at 7 a.m. It's hot and humid and muggy and it's only going to get hotter and hotter. And then by the time it's 2, 3, 4 in the afternoon, it's 97, 100 degrees, 103 degrees out. I worked outside all winter. And I'm working, I worked outside now all summer. There's challenges to that. There's shittiness to that.

It fucking sucks. Oftentimes it can be danes. dangerous, exhausting work. But there is something deeply rewarding about tiring out the body, about physically exerting yourself in the world and constructing things, building things that will be there along after you walk away from the job site, wiring things up. A whole parking lot has parking lot lights that when we got there, they didn't exist. There wasn't even holes in the ground. We put the poles up. We piped the poles. We hooked it all up, wired it up. Now it's just a parking lot going to be there for decades.

And just a small little thing, right? And that's because us and like three of my guys on the crew did that for a couple months. And, you know, I really want to get into like building hospitals and helping build schools and just kind of using the stuff that I learned to help contribute meaningfully to society and construct things and feel that tangible reward of walking away from something that wasn't there when you got there that morning of building something from scratch from the ground up and troubleshooting the whole way because you can get some blueprints

and then go out and do this but that blueprint doesn't cover the fact that there's already perhaps a pipe here or there's a rainstorm coming in and that's going to shift all this mud this way or dirt that way or you know there's this complexity that we didn't anticipate so you're constantly thinking together communally as a crew and then building, constructing, working things up.

And, of course, that fucking a lot of it sucks ass. It's shitty. Many times I just don't feel like fucking doing it. But to do it, you got to do it, to be able to provide for your family. And of course, to do it all in the context of a labor union in particular is rewarding, despite its many, many challenges and very difficult downsides. It's certainly not for everybody. And I'm not saying you need to get into the trades or anything.

I'm just saying physical exertion is good for the mind. It's good for the body and it's good for the mind. Being out in the elements, it's good for the body. It's good for the mind. There's something evolutionary about being outside, working in a group, making something happen. But even if that's just going and playing sports, going and playing pickleball, going on hikes with your friend, or by yourself, those are still, there's a million different ways to just be out in the world and to use your, body in the world. And for somebody like me who's always very cerebral, intellectual, abstract, so much of my life has been a life of the mind in one way or another to have this new dimension

of my being of just this gritty-ass, blue-collar physical work, it's really opened up a dimension of my being. So I say all of that just to encourage people, encourage myself. These are things that I I struggle with and encourage other people without falling into the compulsive loop of self-improvement. You're fine as you are. You know, you're not detrit. You're not lacking anything because you have this bad habit or that bad habit or you're trying to shake that thing or you drink too much or you'd like to read more. But every time it comes time to read, you find a reason not to or you're trying to establish

a meditation practice, but goddamn, you know, it's so hard to actually do it day by day. and you feel you shame yourself for it but you know you know weeks have gone by and you haven't even done it once you let go of the the need that I need to be better let go of the need that I'm motivated by not being enough or that you know I'm somehow a worse person or not living up to my let go of all that and just see it as this stuff is genuinely enjoyable it feels fucking good to read a book it feels fucking good to get good at meditation and sit sit in silence in the present moment without having to wriggle away. It feels fucking good to be physically exhausted. You know, it feels good to sweat. It feels good to write poetry and to hold it up, to learn a new skill,

to strum a guitar for the first time and actually make a beautiful sound. Always be striving to learn new things and develop yourself, again, not for as a means to another end, but just because it's justified in and of itself. And there's a rich inner life component that is cultivated through these sorts of practices, which are becoming increasingly rare in a hyper-digitized, gamified, shit-fucking-ass economy that we're all living in. And I know it's hard out there. I work my fucking ass off just to make ends meet. You know, it's, it's incredibly hard to save anything. Groceries are expensive. Gas is expensive. Having young children is incredibly expensive. Going school shopping is incredibly fucking expensive. And so I feel like no matter how hard I work,

I'm still always pressed to the fucking grindstone. I'm always fucking, you know, this background sense of precarity is always there. And that's like the subjectivity of the working class. Truly, that in the back of all of our minds, we just feel like we can't afford to slip up. We can't afford to fuck up. One bad, one firing, one missed paycheck, one medical incident. And our lives can spiral. And so that is a constant source of anxiety in the back of our minds.

And I just wanted to say that to relate to people, that that is normal. Normal as a human being in this society, that should not be normal. We should fight to construct a world where that isn't normal. But it's a part of living in the 2020s, U.S. shitty economy and a dwindling empire ran by dumb fascists. is that this is our lot in life. For the moment, it will change. Everything does change. This will go down as a particularly dark period

in a very dark American history. Like there's no, there's very few bright spots in American history. If you understand American history, you understand that the way that we are right now, the place that we are as a society actually makes total fucking sense from the trajectory of American society.

What's beginning to become clear to me is that people's expectations have shifted downward and they're just adapting to that. The idea that your life should be better than your parents, it was always a precarious idea. But with huge economic growth, the industrial revolution, the post-World War II boom, there were instances in which, yeah, there was actually material improvement from generation and generation. That's gone. And now we're living in a world genuinely where we might be the last generation of Americans for the foreseeable. seeable future unless something radical changes, where we had that expectation that our life would be

better than our parents. It's not. If you're a millennial, on the whole, your life is worse than your parents. Your money goes less than your parents' dollar did. Your prospects for the future are more precarious than your parents. You're trying to find a good job. And when you're constantly being assaulted by the threat of AI displacing you is a new sort of economic threat that no worker in the past has really had to face. Yes, they were the Luddites. Yes, there were industrial revolution. Yes, certain industries were displaced. That's always happened through the history of capitalism in particular, given its dynamism. But the idea that's like, I don't even know what to study. I don't know what jobs will be around. Or if this

whole thing is just a big fucking hype bubble that will burst and AI is just going to be glorified chatbots forever? Or are these freaks that are going on these interviews talking about AGI and superintelligence right around the corner, are they really on to something? Like, I am agnostic about that. I could see it going every which way, all the trajectories from like the most dystopian to post-scarcity situation to like this is just a big hype bubble to nothing happens to, oh, the only thing that's being used is to bump up the surveillance state while corporate fascism entrenches itself deeper in the political system and dismantles whatever tiny little

shreds of democratic dignity. we might have once had. How do you plan a future if you're my daughter, 17 years old, if you're 20 years old, trying to pick a college major? This is a very difficult time. But I do have some solace from just being like, I mean, this is not by any means take away the desperate internal need to build a better world and to overthrow this rotten government and to fight every step of the fucking way. That's our moral existential obligation. But I do look back at human history and I say almost all of our ancestors had had it difficult. You know, our great grandparents lived through the Great Depression. You know, fought in World War I, World War II,

in the trenches being gassed in World War I. Go back further than that. The indigenous people's fighting, losing a whole way of life, watching their people die from disease and famine and genocide and having to live your entire life in that downward spiral. You know, economic difficulties throughout time. You know, just, I was just looking about the, about World War I recently. And, you know, from the German perspective, just all, all the whole middle classes after World War I, right, and the reparations imposed on them that eventually gave rise to Hitler in World War II. But just like a normal German that you worked, you worked hard, you had some savings, all that goes away. You get hyperinflation, savings gets obliterated. And now, you know,

through no fault of your own, nothing you could have done different. You know, you are economically just devastated. And that's just one little tiny example from a million examples throughout human history where things were shitty. And so I think this boomer entitlement to think that things will go well and should go well, I think it's kind of a deviation from normal human history, which is not to say we can't nor should we fight for a better world. We absolutely have to. We owe it to ourselves and our kids and our grandkids and your kids and all kids, truly. But at the same time there's a stoicism i have where it's like you know i'm not going to feel pity towards myself i know my ancestors lived hard lives and and lives i can't even imagine and this is my cross to bear

these are my burdens to bear no fucking free time working myself to the bone going hard as fuck um just to keep my family comfortable and and their heads above water um and that that's that's my obligation and when i wake up at 5 a m and i see it's going to be 100 fucking degrees out and I don't fucking want to go to work, I say it's not about me. I go and I need to provide for my family. I need to, you know, make sure that my family is taken care of. And even as prices go up, I just got to fucking work harder. And that's the situation that a lot of us find ourselves in, whether you have kids or not. But especially if you have kids because it just feels like the stakes are higher. It's like I can't, I'm not going to go be able to couch surf or stay at my

friend's house or something like i have kids and and and a family that i need by any means necessary to provide for and think about how many millions of people around the world are in that exact same situation think about the families in iran who are you know dignified and standing up under this disgusting assault but whose economy is suffering who you know how could that economy not suffer of course it is it was suffering already before the u.s and israel disgusting imperialist invasion of it but and those people are just like, we did nothing wrong. We're being attacked by the world's biggest, strongest military superpower and it's disgusting rabid dog colonial outpost. And because of that, our schoolgirls get blown up. Random people fucking die. Our economy goes to shit. We have

brutal sanctions imposed on our country. Nothing fair about that at all. But there's a dad right now in Iran working his third job just to make sure that his kids have food on their plate. and that to me is where my heart is with the working class. My heart is always with the poor and the working class. As the famous quote goes, I'm on the side of people who have nothing and can't even enjoy that nothing in peace. And that generates in me deep love and compassion

and internationalism and also this seething hatred and rage at these fucking parasites who live at the top of this rotten hierarchical structure and feed off the rest of the world. The least deserving people on fucking planet Earth have the most money and the most power. And the epicenter of that injustice is the United States.

Who has the most political power in the United States? Donald Trump, one of the worst humans this country has ever shat out. Who has the most money in the world right now? Elon Musk, one of the dumbest, most shallow, hollowest jokes of a human being who rode to prominence on this. luck and billions of dollars of tax dollar subsidies who who has the goal to to want to go and do his doge thing where he's kicking people off of fucking healthcare and food assistance. These are the people that are running the world. These are the sort of people that this

system launches to the heights of economic and political power. And it's not particularly unique in human history, but it is grotesque. And it really tells the lie, to the liberal delusion of meritocracy and to the idea that there's any fundamental justice or legitimacy to this system. Any system that produces a trillionaire like Elon Musk and produces a president like Donald Trump is a, is by virtue of doing that, a system that needs to be fucking dismantled. But the rich don't give a fuck. They truly believe that, and in the past it wasn't this. In the past, in American, I mean, even leading up to the New Deal with all of its contradictions, you know, the gilded age, there was this genuine fear on behalf of rich people that the poor and

working classes would rise up. Back in the day, they used to fucking take all their jewelry and store them in offshore yachts and boats, just staying on the high seas for the simple fact that they were worried that the rabble were going to rise up and that they would loot their houses or whatever. And that gave even rise to philanthropy, where motherfuckers like Carnegie and shit like that were handing out money and building public libraries and trying everything they could to shore up their reputation to prevent a Bolshevik-style revolution. FDR explicitly said that he is interested in preventing a Bolshevik-style revolution, and he told the capitalist and the rich oligarchs of his time, you may not like the new deal, I'm paraphrasing,

you may not like the new deal, but I'm saving you from you. I'm saving you from a communist fucking revolution. Because if you keep pushing these fucking people and you keep amassing all that wealth, you're going to have a revolutionary France situation. And, you know, Marie Antoinette, let them eat cake. Probably an apocryphal quote. But nonetheless fed into a genuine idea that the rich are just indulgent, entitled, fucking pieces of shit, contributing much, much less than they pretend to contribute to the world,

taking everything from us. And the only thing that were strained them in the past was the fear that we were going to rise up. Now the rich in the U.S. in particular and across the West, they feel untouchable in a way that perhaps they didn't in the past. One, they feel that even if socialist had electoral wins and started taxing the rich and redistributing wealth, that capital is so internationalized, so globalized, that the rich can just move to different countries with more favorable environments. And on top of that, they also know that the police state that they've constructed, since in the war on terror, the militarization of the police and the interim,

and now the construction of an AI flock-based surveillance state that not only can gather all this information, but now has for the first time in human history the computing power and the AI ability to go through all that information. Back in the day, you could have a surveillance state government that accumulated a bunch of information,

but if you have millions and millions and millions of pages of information and documents, nobody can reasonably go through that. So you're almost safe by just the cascade of information that it overwhelms any persons or groups or institutions. ability to really go through. AI is now obliterated that. You could have data centers full of information,

including all your deactivated social media accounts, and you could have an AI that just specializes in a matter of minutes going through all those documents, flagging them, making connections between them, and bringing a dossier back to the agent or the federal government or whoever may be interested in doing this. So the rich have been long protected by their hubris and by the police state from the physical fear of the rabble rising up.

And now with the rise of the AI surveillance state, they're becoming even more emboldened. Once in a blue moon, they might start, you know, glancing around looking over their shoulder after Luigi Mangione, you know, shot the health care. CEO guy. Yeah, there was like genuine fear among some aspects of the ruling class. Like, this could happen as I, Trump. I mean, he, he was golfing the other day with a, with a fucking truck that shoots down missiles. He, golfing on the golf course, I don't know if you saw that picture, go look it up. I just skimmed past it, so, you know, let me know if I'm off base here, but he was golfing and right next to him was like a, a big truck tilted up that could shoot a missile

to stop a drone or something from, from hurting him. And then he had that whole thing with, um, the plane where he pretended to take off from Turkey in Air Force One, but snuck out through the fucking dining cart and went on another plane because there was fears that it might get shot down. So there is an element. And I mean, Elon Musk after Luigi was bringing his son to every public event. Remember that? Where he was holding his son at every public event is like his fucking bulletproof vest,

a psycho. If you're in fear that you might be physically hurt, you want to bring your child to stand between you and the threat. Like, these people are insane. And there's not zero concern. They have to have some semblance of concern. But they genuinely feel that the police will protect them. The AI surveillance state will protect them.

Their gated communities will protect them. Them having their own separate schools and their own separate hospitals and their own separate neighborhoods, their own separate communities, towns, cities, really. Far away from the rabble, that that will protect them. And they are hubristic in that way. and they can only be humbled by the people's revolution, truly. And that's the only thing that have humbled out of control, aristocratic elites in the past. And it's the only thing that will humble them in the future.

Food for thought, we'll see where this all goes. This went in a more political direction than I had initially anticipated. But I'm spilling this all out to you because this has all been spilling within myself. And I've recently been making some changes and being inspired. and I hope that I can do that to you. If even one person listens to this, go reads that books and enjoys it, finds themselves crying at train dreams

because they heard about it on Rev Left. This whole episode will be worth it. If one person takes up hiking or learns an instrument or goes camping by themselves or starts a daily meditation practice starts writing poetry because they were inspired

from this episode, then it will have all been worth it. So I guess I will end it there. I'll offer this for what it is. Take it or leave it. If it doesn't resonate with you, it doesn't resonate with you. But yeah, love and solidarity. Talk to you soon.