Rev Left Radio - UNLOCKED: Mamdani, Marijuana Dependency, and Unconditional Life Acceptance

Episode Date: November 16, 2025

This is an unlocked patreon episode. To support the show and get access to monthly bonus episodes like this one, join our patreon: www.patreon.com/revleftradio In this unlocked Patreon episode, Breht reads and responds to an article in the Tehran Times on the NYC mayoral race and left strategy around Palestine, then he plays and analyzes a Kurzgesagt video on the science and experience of marijuana dependency in your 20s and 30s, and finally Breht discusses his ongoing grieving process surrounding his Dad's death and the life lessons he's learned in the wake of it. In the process, he articulates what we need in left leaders, cultivating psychological resilience, the importance of sobriety as a baseline, the benefits of behavioral moderation, accepting worse case scenarios in life, the sweetness inherent in grief, dead loved ones visiting you in dreams, and much more. ---------------------------------------------------- Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. All right, so I wanted to just come on here and record kind of a quick Patreon episode. You know, I say that and ends up being six hours long, but hopefully this is under an hour. I already released a Patreon episode for this month, but, you know, more never hurt. And I really appreciate everybody who supports the show. So I want to give as much as I possibly can of useful, meaningful, extra bonus content to all our Patreon supporters because literally without you,

my life would be in financial ruins. So I do have a new job, but again, it starts off as apprentice wages. I have no experience, and they pay you as you learn, but obviously they're going to pay you a small amount. So not enough to support my family on.

They do give me benefits, of course, which allows my family to have health care. But, you know, the bulk of our income and the bulk of me keeping my family's head above water, comes from you all who support this show directly on Patreon. So my love and my appreciation goes out to all of you. And I want to give back as much as I possibly can. So here's another iteration of that.

So I'm going to do a couple things. I don't want to say it all up front because sometimes I don't get to it. And, you know, I kind of let people down on that regard. So we'll just take things one at a time and see where they go. The first thing I wanted to do is actually read a short article, read and respond to a short article from, interestingly, the Tehran Times. So coming out of Iran, a news outlet that wrote a piece on Mammani, right, the New York City mayoral race and its relevance to Gaza and the broader American left. And it's actually a very short piece for how much substance it advances.

So I kind of want to read this and react to it. And I thought it dovetailed quite well with my analysis. the Mamdani for what it's worth. So the article is called Gaza's shadow over New York City, how a mayoral race turned into a moral referendum. It was released just a couple days ago. The subtitle, the subline is, calling genocide by its name.

Zoran Mamdani forced a reckoning and unleashed a fierce counterattack. So again, very short article, let's get into it. Mamdani's blunt language, quote, We are on the brink of a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. unquote, didn't occur in ivory tower debate. It landed in subway stations, viral clips, and the homework of swing voters. That moral naming is the reason his rise matters and the reason the backlash was immediate. When he doubled down with lines like, quote, if I'm the mayor, the NYPD will arrest Netanyahu and,

quote, it is important that New York City is in compliance with international criminal law, Momdani signaled that his politics weren't just rhetorical. They were about wielding power in ways that unsettled the establishment. What followed reads less like policy disagreement than a coordinated playbook to other eyes. AI generated attack ads, some quickly deleted but widely seen, portrayed Mamdani supporters in criminalized, racialized terms. Civil rights groups called them racist and dangerous. This is old-fashioned Islamophobia in New Climbabwe.

close, code words, manufactured fear, and now AI to amplify the lie. At the same time, Trump publicly labeled him a communist and threatened to curtail federal support for New York if Mamdani won, a move that turns municipal elections into a constitutional skirmish. So as an aside, I just kind of want to touch on that very quickly, how so much of the reactionary right are now combining, red-baiting, communist, anti-communist, anti-communist paranoia with anti-Islam, anti-Muslim, Islamophobia. Again, that's a term that I think is too soft. Like homophobia and Islamophobia, they don't actually get at the cruelty and hate that is implicit in those who purvey that stuff, right? It's not that, and this is just the, you know,

the limits of semantics, and I talked about this on a recent episode a little bit, but it's not that they're scared of them necessarily, although fear does play a, uh, a role and I think fear is a predominant emotion in reactionary psychology, you know, that that generates the otherization, the cruelty, the violence, the hatred of the far right. It is oftentimes rooted in a fear. So there's there is something important that it gets at. But so much of what we've seen in the face of Mamdani's rise from the Zionist right in particular is really just this hatred, this dehumanization. this disgust at Islam and at Muslims per se, like not even, you know, the jihadists or the Wahhabists or whatever, just at Muslim Arabs in general.

And I said in that recent episode on union organizing in Islamic faith, Islamophobia, for lack of a better term, the hatred and dehumanization of Muslims because they are Muslims, of Arabs, because they are Arabs, is a core ideological pillar of Zionism. And where and when they cannot get you to get on board fully with the flag waving of Israel, right? If they can't fully get you on board with outright support and defense of Israel as such, the second best thing is for them to get you to hate Muslims. Because who are the Palestinians? Who are the Iranians?

I mean, they're Persians, but you understand they're Muslims, if not Arabs. You know, the Yemeni, the Lebanese, all the people that the, the Iranians, all the people that, The Labensrom vision of Greater Israel requires bulldozing over and mass murdering as par for the course of the realization of the Greater Israel Project are Muslims or Arabs or Persians. And cultivating hate and fear and disgust at these people is a great way to subtly reinforce the project of Zionism. And these two things are inseparable. wherever there is a Zionist, even a so-called liberal Zionist, they must bring with them, if not an outright hatred and dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims, a distrust, right? Or if they can't do that, they're super liberal and they really want to watch out from being overtly bigoted,

they will force all their dehumanization and all their, you know, racism onto what they see as an acceptable part of Islam or Muslim. or Arabhood, which is like Hamas, right? So sometimes they'll back away from dehumanizing and denigrating all Muslims or all Arabs, and they'll just take all that energy and rhetoric that otherwise would go in that direction and put it on to Hamas, right? Make you think of them as less than human, as barbarous, as terrorists. Their deaths are totally acceptable. You might not support Israel.

You might not support what they're doing to Palestinian civil society and citizens that are just innocent, you know, collateral damage or whatever. But when it comes to Hamas, well, those are the sort of Muslims. You can just slaughter at will. There's never enough dead Hamas. But who is Hamas? As I've said a million times. They're the little boys of 20 years ago.

They're the little boys of 20 years ago who watched Israel humiliate, in prison, beat, murder, kill, bomb, explode, their family, their friends, who stopped them at checkpoints, who harassed them. who made them feel otherized and like second or third or fourth class citizens are not even humans in their own fucking homeland. Right? And anybody who had to grow up under those conditions,

you know, you would understand why they would pick up a gun and fight back and that's all that Hamas is. Is the little boys of 20 years ago who said, we're not going to sit back and take it anymore. You know, and if these things were switched,

if there was a Muslim Arab, you know, settler colonial or just fascist apartheid regime that purposefully otherized, dehumanized, in prison, stripped the rights from, murdered at will, Jewish people or Christians, would not the same people defending that immediately switch around and point out why these people have every right to armed resistance, why these people have every right to fight back by any means necessary? That's when you know you're not dealing with an intellectually consistent and therefore intellectually honest interlocutor or opponent,

that if you invert the identities of the people involved, their politics turn around 100%. Right? And you know that's true in this case. So all that is, you know, there's somebody like Matt Walsh, right? There's this right-wing civil war going on. And it's like the Ben Shapiro's and the lower loomers and huge swaths of the Trump administration proper who are pro-Israel to the hill.

This fucking scumbag piece of shit, Randy Fine, who repost images of dead. Palestinian with laugh emojis. A sick fuck that should not be allowed to operate. And so he should be locked in a prison and that's the compassionate response to somebody like Randy Fine. But the Lindsey Grams of the world, all these fucking neocon psychos and these Zionist freak fucks on one side. And then you have like the America First, the Nick Fuentes, the Tucker Carlson's, the Candice Owens, the Dave Smiths and a growing number of young, you know, conservative people, reactionaries in general. that are against that section of the right and are really displacing them and and fighting against them.

But Matt Walsh is in the middle because Matt Walsh is this sort of quintessential white reactionary piece of shit who fear mongers and hate mongers all day long that proclaims himself to be a fascist, a white nationalist, etc. But he works for the Daily Wire, which is Ben Shapiro's outlet, right? The same Daily Wire that fired Candace Owens and that is going after Charlie Kirk and Nick went after Charlie Kirk a little bit. Nick Fuentes more overtly

and Tucker Carlson now explicitly for their positions on Israel. So Matt Walsh is in a position where in a vacuum based on everything he says and his whole thing, you would think he would be firmly on the America first side. But because he gets his fucking

paycheck from Daily Wire, the Ben Shapiro outlet, he can't come out right and be against Israel. So what does he do instead? He downplays the issue of Israel, I don't really care about all this Israel stuff. I care about America as if these fucking things aren't deeply connected. As if America is not giving billions of dollars, weapons,

and putting its own reputation and strategic geopolitical interest on the line for Israel, as if it has not spent trillions of dollars helping and fighting in wars that are, in a lot of cases in not only the military-industrial complexes interest, but in Israel's interests. You know, the wars on terror, the wars. in the Middle East, quote unquote, West Asia, there's a huge component that these are in the interests of Israel. The bombing of Iranian nuclear sites is in the interest of Israel. You know, bombing of Yemen, in the interest of Israel.

We can go down the list, all the shit in Palestine, Lebanon, et cetera. So this attempt to say, hey, I just care about American issues, I don't want to get, it's so fucking stupid. It's in bad faith. It's infantile. It's anti-dialactical. There's no separation between Damascus. policies and international policies. You can't just separate those two things and treat them as isolated subjects of discussion.

So that's his first stupid-ass fucking move. And his second move is to say, because I'm not going into the Israel conversation, even though it's the biggest, most important conversation on the right right now. And in any other context, when an issue was this at the forefront of right-wing discussion, Matt Walsh would engage in it immediately. But because it's Israel, he's pretend like he doesn't care about it. But what does he do instead? he doubles and triples down on the dehumanization of Muslims and Arabs in general.

So because he can't foray into this Israel thing, because if he came out against Israel, he would risk his paycheck and his connections with daily wire. If he came out for Israel and make Ben Shapiro happy, he would isolate himself from the America First crowd, which is a big part of his constituency. And anybody with any sense of political instincts know which way the wind is blowing on the right. And it's not blowing in the direction of Israel,

is blowing against the Zionist forces, you know, broadly. So what he'll do instead is he'll just triple down on the Muslim hate shit. And, you know, there's lots of ways to do this, point out the disproportionate, you know, Somali population in Minnesota or the Muslim population in Dearborn or fearmonger around the idea of a Muslim communist like Mamdani taking over in New York City, right? That's how you do it. And you see the Zionists, the way they approach Mom Dani is like this old style fucking hardcore racism. They're literally running ad showing the Twin Towers falling. Somehow Mom Dani is implicated in that because he's Muslim.

Like it is just base, vulgar, unsubtle bigotry. And that is a way that Zionist forces can attack their opponents. And the fact that the New York City's mayor race was made so much. much about Israel is interesting in its own right. Although, to be fair, New York City is this, you know, this multi-ethnic, multinational, you know, true melting pot of people from all over the world. It always has been. And there is a large Jewish population.

New York City, I think, is up there in the top one or two most Jewish cities in the world outside of perhaps Tel Aviv or something like that. So there's a big, you know, Jewish and Zionist constituency. And those two things are not the same. Of course. There's a bunch of anti-Zionist. Jews in Israel and I think a majority of of Jewish people under a certain age voted for Mamdani in that election, which, you know, really flies in the face of this idea that this is anti-Semitism

and all this shit. But it's, it's pathetic. And that's what's kind of going on. And so I just want to reiterate this idea that hatred and dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims and this attempt to revamp war on terror, rhetoric and ideology in the face of growing dissidents on the left and right against Israel is not. no mistake. But it's just so transparent and so over the top and so base and vulgar that it just doesn't work. And if you're trying to win over young people and your main thing is like we got to

hate Muslims and Arabs more, that's never going to worry. We've got to support Israel more. And part of supporting Israel means being cartoonishly racist against Muslims and Arabs. It's a losing fucking strategy. And the Israel lobby and the Zionist forces in the U.S. are losing. They're losing power. They're still fully embedded within the power structure, but insofar as they have any connection to constituencies and the population writ large on the right and the left, there's just no way you can be, you know, overtly pro-Zionists now and win elections any real way going forward. And, you know, Zionists know that. They're still going to fight. They're still trying their hardest. But that's a huge aspect of, that's a huge part of their behavior currently.

is that they see that they're losing this core ideological support on the American right in particular. The left's already gone, right? All these people that were liberals in the past, like a dumbass like Bill Ackman and these people have come over and become Trump supporters because they realize that the only base of support that they might be able to salvage for Israel and the American population exists on the right. And that's why Charlie Kirk was so important because he really was for young conservatives, he was on this pro-Israel. shit hard for the longest time. That made him enemies with somebody like Nick Fuentes, who was also representing

young conservatives, but from an anti-Zionist, and in many cases anti-Semitic point of view. So these machinations and stuff, I think, are relevant and important. And they have real relevance, material relevance, for the ongoing project of Israel.

Because if Israel loses widespread support on both sides of the spectrum in American politics, they're main base of power in the world is at real risk. And that means they have to get more desperate. But as they get more desperate, they get more overt. The ways in which they subtly shifted the conversation and galvanized support for Israel, those go away. And so they have to be more overt and explicit. And as they do that, they turn off more and more people because the desperation is so

clear. So we'll see how it plays out. But back to the article. All right. At the same time, Trump publicly labeled him a communist and threatened to curtail federal support for New York if Mamdani won, a move that turns municipal elections into a constitutional skirmish. Polshulman Mamdani leading into election day, fueled by under 45 turnout and a coalition of Muslims, Arabs, young progressives, and disillusioned working voters who care about rent, transit, and child care as much as foreign policy. But popularity is not the same as power. Mayors can use procurement, divestment, and moral pressure,

not unilaterally halt arm shipments or rewrite foreign policy, and pretending otherwise shrinks political courage by rewarding tactical retreats. A sober left must hold two truths at once. First, Mamdani injected moral clarity when much of the party offered platitudes. If naming genocide shocks a nation into debate, that's a strategic game. Second, the left's history includes a parade of, rhetorically brave figures, Sanders, AOC, other squad members, whose supposed courage dissolved when tested, leaving only theatrical posturing and habitual compromise.

So let's go a step aside from the article and revisit those two points. A sober left must hold these two truths at once. On one hand, Mamdani's election and now victory that we know, you know, he won, injected moral clarity into that Israel debate and garnered and galvanized a lot of support around that moral clarity when the rest of the Democratic Party especially the elite of the party

offer nothing but platitudes. I mean, go look at Pete Buttigieg or Kamala Harris talking on the issue of Israel, and they're squirming in their fucking suits and crawling out of their fucking skins. They can't do it. Why? Because their entire political career is premised on the donor base, which has a

deep interest in Zionism, as well as other corporate and, you know, other, other issues that completely are fly in the face of what average left-wing voters want, which is economic populism, social democracy, democratic socialism on the economic realm, a redistribution of wealth, and an end to these fucking horrific genocidal wars around the world that murder people in our name and with our money. So on one hand, that's the what's one truth. That's a good thing, right? On the other, that the left's history includes this parade of figures who could talk big, but when push comes to shove, they compromise, they dissolve, they go back.

AOC supporting funding for Israel's Iron Dome, right? And her argument is, well, you know, I'm just trying to protect innocent people. And the perfect analogy is there's a mass shooter, you know, going around killing people. And I'm not supporting what the mass shooter is doing. I'm just going to fund his bulletproof vest so that he's harder to stop. And somehow that is a humanitarian compromise. It's not. Bernie Sanders refusing forever to say that it's a genocide and still defending Israel's right to exist.

These are ways in which these figures who ostensibly should support this new movement on the left, compromise back down. In Bernie's case, I think it's because he is ideologically aligned with a theoretical, hypothetical idea of Zionism that could be good, even though all the baggage that that entails makes it so it can't be. There is no way to create a progressive socialist settler, colonial apartheid state based on ethno-supremicism, right? And AOC, I think that she just doesn't have the backbone, perhaps the ideological depth, the value and commitments, and the willingness to self-sacrifice. What we need out of a left-wing political leader is somebody who goes in knowing that it's not about them and their career, that they are an avatar, a proxy for the people and their class, and that they are willing

to sacrifice their own career advancements if it means advancing the ball for their constituency. That's real self-sacrificial left leadership. And all the people we love and praise on the left throughout history, they were all like that. Che Guevara, Rosa Luxembourg, Thomas Sankara, Malcolm X, all people who were willing to, in many cases and all those cases sacrifice their motherfucking lives, not their careers, not their comfortable position in the hierarchy of class and wealth and power, their fucking lives in the advancement of a struggle for their people, for their class, for who they represented,

something bigger than themselves. And what do you get into hyper-individualized, egoic-ass American society? These figures who emerge that probably are, since see here on some deep level, they're not acting in totally bad faith. They believe a lot of these ideals, but are fundamentally individualistic. They come from a hyper individualistic culture, and they find themselves in a really comfortable position where they have influence, they have actual political power, and they have a cozy class and wealth situation. That if you're in these upper echelons of power, all of a sudden you have assistance and you have money coming in and you have power and influence and you're like, do I want to sacrifice all of this to say nothing of my life,

but do I want to sacrifice my comfort if that means pushing forward an agenda that might alienate me from the power base of this party or whatever? Bernie Sanders said that explicitly. Hedges, what is Chris Hedges asked him once? You know, why don't you break off from the Democratic Party or become more vociferous in your criticism of the Democrats as such and the elite in the party? and Bernie Sanders' response was, I don't want to be Ralph Nader. And what is a Ralph Nader?

Somebody who tried to take on the establishment from an anti-corporate perspective from the left, and because of his ideological commitments, was blackballed from power completely, blackballed from being at all a part of the democratic apparatus. And Bernie didn't want that. Well, that shows an unwillingness to sacrifice your own career and comfortable position for a greater cause, for values that are deeper than you and your comfort and career. And still, these are the most left-wing, most courageous politicians we have in the U.S., right? They're on the leading, cutting edge of courageous, you know, left-wing political figures,

and even they succumb to that. So what we need is political leaders that arise not from a nice campaign or, you know, a good strategy to get into office or a new social media tactic to become popular with the youth, but that arise and emerge on the back of grassroots social movements, the labor movement, tenant organization movements, the organized working class, that arise and emerge of by and for that class, that they are merely a vehicle to express these broader interests, that there is no ego at all involved. This is not about me. I will take on any fight. Doesn't mean don't be strategic. It doesn't mean nuke yourself out of orbit immediately, right? You have to be tactical and

strategic for sure, but that fundamentally everything you're doing is to advance your class and your constituency. And if and when the contradiction emerges and a choice emerges, wherein you have to choose between advancing your own career or securing your own position, and advancing the ball for your class or your constituency, you take that hit, right? So what that would mean for AOC would be, I'm not funding this fucking Iron Dome. I'm coming out and using actual...

I'm using this vote and the controversy surrounding it to articulate a robust pro-Palestinian argument that shows exactly why I will never vote to send a fucking penny to Israel for any reason, for any fucking reason. Certainly not so they can defend themselves from the people they are mass murdering and destroying their lives of. To use that moment as an opportunity not to shrink away and compromise and try to explain to the left,

well, I just care about innocent Israelis. And so if I'm just supporting funding for defense and that's okay because you blah, blah, blah, but to use that as an opportunity to say, fuck you and to use your pulpit that you have as a leading figure on the left in national politics, to use that moment to push forward the pro-Palestinian cause, even if it means your total alienation from the party. That is actually required. And it's going to be more and more required as these contradictions heightened and as the socialist left makes an emergent advancement

as a real political force in this motherfucking country. Those are the leaders you need to see now. Will Mamdani be that? I don't know. I'm skeptical. I'm skeptical. There's been a lot of debate around, a lot of conversation on, you know,

on the left broadly about Mom Dani, some being hypercritical, some being like, hold on, there's something positive here, some being in full support, attacking each other over it. I've remained kind of quiet on that front, simply because I don't think it's worth really

irritating and agitating and going to war over. But my basic position is that I'm very, I'm very skeptical. Like, I don't think he's acting in bad faith. I would love nothing more. than to see him succeed in his policies, but going up against what he's going up against, which is the organized political and economic class of New York fucking city,

against the police, against both parties, against the real estate block, against the Better Business Bureau, against the billionaires and the Zionists. He has a lot of enemies that he's going up against. And how is he going to make these policies come to life in that,

even if he is well-intentioned? That's difficult, I don't envy him. I don't envy him. for what he has to do. But I'm always cautiously skeptical. But again, these figures emerging are part of a broader process, right? Even if and when they fail us, they are part of a dialectical process in society by which

these voices and this politic is grasping for an expression. and that expression is never going to come out from the womb fully coherent and fully successful. It's going to have these iterations. It's going to have these experiments of sorts. It's going to have these different type of figures emerge. They're going to handle those contradictions differently. We're going to debate and learn from that, you know, and the process goes on. So I see everything in that light and that kind of, that tempers a hypersectarianism

that wants to just go at the throat of everything that's imperfection. Although I understand the tendency. So, you know, a sober left must hold these two truths in mind. Going back to the article. Criticism of Israel, conditional aid, and BDS are righteous stances. Translating them into lasting policy requires sustained organizing and the willingness to use power, not only language. Words are wind. Policy is the millstone that grinds them into change.

There are also tactical errors that opponents seized. Mamdani's earlier refusal to disown certain provocation-ready slogans, Globalized the Intifada, gave adversaries a tidy opening, conflate critique of Israel with support for violence. Later walkbacks, discouraging inflammatory phrasing and promising Jewish New Yorkers protection, may have appeared as politically necessary, but they also revealed how easily moral clarity, becomes political liability.

Let me say that again, just to really drive that point home. Later walkbacks, particularly on the thing about globalized the Intifada, may have appeared as politically necessary. This is a thing we have to do in order to move forward. This is a tactical move of compromising rhetorically in order to advance this campaign, right? But they also revealed how easily moral clarity becomes political liability. And in the United States of, this is me talking now, not the article, in the United States of America, moral clarity is political liability. And that's exactly what I'm talking about when it comes to AOC and the Iron Dome funding and Bernie Sanders refusing to call it a genocide.

Do you, you know, once you stand up and say what's morally true in no uncertain terms, pulling no punches, the moments you have total moral clarity on. an issue like Palestine. Immediately in this political system, that becomes a huge liability. So you get to choose. Do you want to get along and acquiesce to this rotten political structure and move your way up in it, telling yourself that maybe if I advance in it and I can do some good within the system? Or do you want to use whatever pulpit you have, whatever megaphone you have as a leader,

as a representative, whatever, to unobesionable, whatever, to unobes, you have. apologetically advance the moral clarity that actually increases the subjective forces of revolution, even at the cost of your own ability to advance in your career. Obviously, I think the moral clarity is the important thing. Because even if you nuke your career in national politics as a congressman, not necessarily as a influencer or a thought leader or a pundit or somebody that can articulate it, but just to nuke your chances at moving up in the political system, as a national politician.

But in order to nuke that, you're advancing a moral clarity that actually raises people's consciousness. That's worth it. Your career is not more important than advancing and deepening and strengthening the subjective forces

of understanding among the population. I'll take moral clarity even if it means political liability because fundamentally our movement is not within this political system. it exists on the outside of it and it is hostile to it. We have to use it.

It's a terrain of struggle, right? We don't totally disregard it. If we could create factions within it, that's great. But the center of gravity of our movement exists outside of it. And you always have to remember that. I am not trying to acquiesce myself to this political system. I'm coming in hostile to it. I'll be strategic.

I'll be tactical. But fundamentally, my base of support, my power, my movement, What I care about, my values and principles, are in confrontation with this political party and this broader apparatus in which it exists. That has to be at the forefront of your mind. Back to the article. The left should neither demand martyrdom nor accept dilution as inevitability. It must sharpen strategy, not surrender principle. So we shouldn't demand just, like, that's what I mean by no tactics or strategy, just going in whole hog,

saying the workers must seize the means of or whatever, you know, going in too blatantly will just nuke you immediately. You want to be strategic and tactical with how you present yourself and, you know, certain rhetorical compromises and all those things. I'm not against it in principle. I understand the need for it in many cases, right? So we should neither demand martyrdom nor accept dilution. So how do you balance those two? How do you not demand martyrdom that comes with going whole hog right out the and then immediately nuking yourself from any chance

how do you not do that but also don't accept the dilution that is admittedly a hard line to walk and so with a figure like Zoron and even to some extent of figure like AOC I'm not trying to downplay the difficulty of what they have to do even if they were totally on board

with everything else I'm saying any of us having to go play that particular role walk that particular line it would be difficult and you would you would earn enemies on your left immediately. Any step you took, any choice you made, there would be a faction of the left who you previously saw as part of your group and constituency and movement

that would turn against you. You know? So, I mean, this is genuinely a difficult balance to strike. But that's why going into it with total moral clarity and going into it as the product of a broader movement is so important because that's ultimately who you're accountable to. And those broad movements will let you know when and where you're fucking up and how to correct, right? So back to the article.

The broader story is structural. Gaza has loosened old partisan loyalties. Younger Jews and Jewish progressive organizations canvassed for Mondani, even as institutional bodies tied to the Israel lobby mobilized in opposition. If the Democratic Party cannot move from rhetoric to real leverage, conditioning aid, building congressional pressure, etc. It risks losing the very base that wants ethical coherence. This brings us to the crux of the matter.

Mamdani is neither saint nor savior. He is a test case. Aside, I'm stepping aside from the article, this is my position. What I'm about to say is what I exactly think. And it's awesome that the Tehran Times is the outlet to put out this argument, because it's, I think, perfect. So I'll restate it and start again.

This brings us to the crux of the matter. Mamdani is neither saint nor savior. He is a test case. If he wins and governs by principle and practical coalition building, his administration could model municipal solidarity that constrains complicity, meaning constrains complicity in genocide. If he retreats into the comfortable compromises that blunted other progressives, Gaza's will be another missed turning point for the American left.

Worse, the political and financial establishment may actively try to make a Mamdani-led NYC fail, starving it of resources, weaponizing regulation and markets, or otherwise setting it up as a cautionary tale, just as the U.S. empire has historically undermined left-leaning experiments abroad. What a fucking, what a sentence that is. Let's go back over that. The political and financial establishment may actively try to make a Mamdani led New York City fail by starving of resources, weaponizing regulation in markets, going on capital strike, or otherwise setting it up as a cautionary tale.

Just as the U.S. empire has historically undermined left-leaning experiments abroad. This is the dialectical relationship between a municipal city and the reactionary counter-revolutionary forces you have to contend with and the global reality of imperialism, which does the exact same. thing. What is the U.S. Empire do to a Venezuelan in Cuba? It starves its of its resources. It weaponizes its power in the U.N. to prevent anybody from doing anything to better their condition. It weaponizes their markets, meaning their big market global power as the richest epicenter of capitalist reality in the world, right? America is the biggest, strongest, richest country. It weaponizes its position to say, like in the case of the Cuban embargo,

if you trade with Cuba, you can't trade with us. So it's weaponizing that. And it's always setting it up as a cautionary tale. What's the first thing you hear when you tell a reactionary that you're a socialist? Oh, well, socialism looking real good in Venezuela and Cuba. So it undermines it. It sanctions it. It does everything it can to weaken it structurally, economically.

It foments and funds internal proxies and coup movements. It tries, like with the Juan Guaido. situation and now with the Machado situation in Venezuela to lift up these figures that are completely aligned with American Empire's corporate interests in the area and its resource interests in the area, right? And it does all these things while it tells you, hey, look it, you want socialism? Those countries don't. So the exact same thing will happen in New York City.

And that's why the only way that you can advance in a democratic socialist way, which is to say trying to advance the ball for socialism through the presently existing democratic mechanisms is with the mass mobilization of the people that can then put pressure using our only advantage, which is our numbers, on the counter-revolutionary forces that are definitely going to emerge in the face of a Mamdani victory or any other victory like it in the belly of the beast. We have to understand this. That's why ultimately there's no difference between social, a democratic socialism that says, hey, we don't want revolutionary militant confrontations

with the state or anything. We're going to use the democratic apparatus and the constitutional guardrails and we're going to win electoral victories that advance the ball. It's not ultimately different from what they call authoritarian left-wing movements that are ready to pick up arms and mobilize hostily against the system because if you win long enough and you push far enough with the democratic socialist strategy, you will be met with the dead end of counter-revolutionary forces that will not budge, that will no longer subscribe to democratic losses and victories, and will turn to all modes of sabotage and violence and state repression to prevent your movement from moving any further, which in that moment, you're forced to go, quote-unquote, authoritarian,

right? You're forced to pick up the gun or to create a more hostile and revolutionary militarily, confrontation with the state as such. That's the end game of democratic socialism, and even in the United States, social democracy. Just to do social democracy is met with this level of insane resistance.

So, you know, this, it's ultimately a false dichotomy between the libertarian left and the authoritarian left, and the libertarian right and the authoritarian right. Those are false. Those are conceptual creations that don't actually exist in material reality. Look at Malays, Argentina.

quintessential anarcho-capitalism, far libertarian right. And what does he have to do immediately? Turn into a fascist state to implement his program. Because it's class politics, material politics. The libertarian authoritarian-disc distinction is idealist nonsense. It is not grounded in material struggle. That dichotomy doesn't exist materially. It only exists conceptually, which is to say it only exists idealistically.

And we're not idealists. We're materialists. So we understand how that dichotomy collapses immediately in a real state of affairs. So that's a great point. Very last sentence of this banger of a very short article is this. The choice New Yorkers face is larger than one man. Will a city known for its immigrant muscle keep its moral nerve? Or will fear and money snuff out a rare alignment of conscience and politics?

Strike while the iron is hot and return to the forge when the fire wanes. So on one level, I just want to say I like the literary flair of this article. Like it has some fire ass bars that I really appreciate it. You don't often see with, you know, journalists, the mainstream journalists in the United States. And it doesn't pretend to have some objectivity or non-ideology. It's literally engaging with politics as such, not pretending to be apart from it or neutral in it. But it has more clarity for the American left based out of Iran than the American left itself often has. So again, that article is called Gaza's shadow over New York City from the Tehran Times.

I thought it was very cool, very interesting, very quick hitting, but very clear in its analysis. And a great jumping off point to make the arguments I made. So hopefully you found that useful. All right, let's go to this next thing here. We still have some time. This next thing is a total diversion from this topic. Total diversion in a lot of ways from politics. It's a video I watched this week that I thought was interesting and resonated a lot with me.

So totally shake off what we just talked about. Shift the gears in your head to a whole new topic. This is about marijuana and quitting weed and an argument for quitting weed if you have a daily use of it. Now right away, some of you are going to turn it off say I'm not interested. I get it. The many times in my life I was not ready to hear. I was not willing to hear. I didn't care about any arguments about why I should quit smoking weed.

So if that's you and you say my life's fine, weed is something I do every day, I have a fine relationship with it. I'm not interested. There's no internal contradiction that I feel within myself to quit weed. Totally fine, totally understandable. Maybe you'll stick around and listen to the argument anyway. Maybe you'll say, I like the Mom Donnie article. I'm out now.

Totally understandable. But if you're listening, If you do have that daily routine, this is coming from me who was a 15 to 17 year daily smoker, not all day every day. Sometimes periods of my life, it was an all day, everyday thing. But most of it was in the evening after work or something. I would smoke a couple bowls every night. And for the longest time, I, you know, rationalize that as totally acceptable as basically moderate use.

I made it an equivalency with coming home and drinking one glass of wine. and, you know, one or two bowls of weed in a pipe is pretty much the same thing. And I got away with it. Through my 20s in particular, I got away with it. As I entered my 30s, got deeper into my 30s, the contradiction within me mounted, and the downsides of long-term use became more prominent than the upsides used to be. So in my 20s, smoking weed every day, the upsides were very apparent. It made me chill, made me in a good mood.

It distressed me. There was really, I couldn't decipher it. any negative impacts whatsoever. So I was like, there's no downside here, really. There's only like some nice little upsides. As it goes on, the upsides decrease and the downsides increase. And that's true with any addiction, with any chemical dependency. And marijuana is a chemical.

You put it in your brain every day. Your brain and your body, get adapted to it. It starts to require it. And when you take it away, there's a withdrawal process. That is chemical dependency. marijuana does not sit outside of chemistry and biology as a wholly unique chemical that doesn't have any risks of dependency. It just logically it doesn't hold up to scrutiny, right? I mean, God, people can get addicted to video games.

People can get addicted to porn. People can get addicted to scrolling fucking TikTok on their phone. And you're telling me, but marijuana is different. And then in many of those cases, like TikTok on your phone is not even an, an, external chemical coming into your brain, flooding your brain. It's just the dopamine release, the Pavlovian response of the dopamine release that you get when you open up the app. So, like, we have to, we have to be intellectually honest and set aside that old canard that marijuana is not addictive. If video games and porn and TikTok are addictive, which nobody would

argue they're not, if gambling is addictive, certainly if opioids and alcohol and all that is addictive, nicotine is addictive, vaping is addictive, marijuana is addictive too. you. It doesn't have to be, right? I can go and drink a couple beers on Friday with my friends, not drink throughout the week. I'm not an alcoholic. I'm not addicted to alcohol, right? But alcoholism definitely exists, and I could use that alcohol in a way that definitely does become addiction. Same exact thing with weed. You can smoke once or twice a month. Maybe every Friday you go out with your friends and you smoke and you stay sober the rest of the time. You're not addicted to weed. If you smoke weed every day, you're literally dependent on that chemical year. Even if you are, think that

not, your body, your physiology, your chemistry absolutely is. So this is for the people that might feel that contradiction emerging, that they might have had a relationship with weed for a long time, and they might kind of have a little feeling of ambivalence of being torn inside of like, should I keep doing this? You know, maybe a little guilt comes over when you do it again. Maybe you've tried to stop and then you succumb to it again, which happened to me many, many times. and maybe you want a healthier relationship to marijuana. Maybe you do want to treat it like drinking where you'll do it on special occasions socially, but you don't want to have to be chained to it every single day.

I don't want to have to come home and drink a beer every night. I don't want to have to come home and smoke just to feel normal, right? You don't want that. And I will make an argument for sobriety, that having your baseline be sober. And you can engage, you can have fun, you know, you can, Go to a birthday party and eat birthday cake. You can go out to the bar with your buddies once in a while and have some beers when, you know, shit, even like a line of coke or something once in a blue moon.

It's not the worst thing. You can still indulge in some of those things that have fun, but they're only fun insofar as they can remain moderate. They can remain a thing you do once in a blue moon, not a thing that does you, right? And that's important when it comes to anything, anything that has the capacity or possibility to get addicted to or to become dependent upon. So all that aside, that's a prelude, if you're still with me, oh, here we go. This is a video from Kerska-Scott in a nutshell, which is a great YouTube channel that I really do like. They have great animation, and they're scientifically based. Everything they say is cited and notated in the description to show the studies out of which they came to these conclusions.

It's not just an opinion. So it's a scientifically based educational content that resonated with me. And the person that made this video, just like me, had a 15-year daily use habit with marijuana that in their 30s, they stopped. And so that's coming from that perspective. So let's go through this. I'll react and respond to it. And even if you're not addicted to weed, maybe you have something else you're struggling with. I think it's still relevant.

Even if you're not addicted to anything, understanding the science of this can maybe help you understand other people in your life who are. or maybe some of the things will be resonant with your observations that you've noticed in other people and this helps articulate it and clarified in your mind. So let's get into it. Weed is a serious drug that can have devastating consequences for your life. This is an unpopular thing to say, but it's true. We don't think it should be illegal because for most people using weed isn't problematic or has only mild negative consequences. But about 20% of people who've ever tried it develop cannabis use disorder. and some of them become severely addicted.

That's actually a stunning amount of people and many who start using weed don't know what they're in for. In the US, daily or near daily weed use has skyrocketed since way before legalisation and there are now more daily users of weed than drinkers of alcohol. And most daily users consume very high amounts. In 2023, one in 15 adult Americans were suffering from some form of cannabis addiction.

In England, cannabis is by far the top drug teenagers' see. helpful. Today we'll ignore medical use, casual users and people with mild problems and instead we focus on the people who have a serious addiction or are in danger of developing one even if they're not aware of it. Weed is usually discussed in the context of teenagers because using any drug while your brain is melting and rebuilding itself is a bad idea. Instead we'll have a frank conversation about how to fix you in your 20s and 30s. We'll combine research with our own personal of weed addiction, unfortunately, we do have plenty of both.

Please check out our sources, but also know this script is written by someone who used weed daily for 15 years before quitting. Okay, so, let's get into it. Becoming addicted by accident. Most people slip into addiction gradually and slowly. They start using weed for a variety of reasons, to experiment, to cope or unwind from stress, because it's fun and easily available. Weed can make you feel more alive and things more exciting.

Music sounds better, movies are funnier, food is a delight. It can be great fun with friends and a major source of comfort. The frequency with which you're consuming weed is the most obvious thing to look out for. If you're using daily or almost daily, this is a clear sign you're developing a problem. As a daily user, your risk of cannabis use disorder is up to 30% and certainly a pretty relevant risk, since it might take gears before you realize the full weight of it. So if you're not careful about it, what started out as an occasional high becomes more and more normalized. Bit by bit, your weekends revolve around weed or shift to activities that you can do stoned.

Often other hobbits or obligations become less of a priority. Then it creeps into most weekdays and finally it's an established ritual every day. Over time, weeds nature changes. The joy-enhancing effects dissipate while a comfortable numbness takes over. Weed can become your primary method of coping with life, but it doesn't make you stronger, better or more resilient. Instead, it covers up negative emotions by building a snail shell that you can retreat into. Do you have a problem with weed? Super easy test. Stop doing it for four weeks, starting today. Not tomorrow, today.

No matter what you have coming up. If that feels challenging or you can't make it, this should give you food for thought. Once weed has become a daily or near daily habit, the cumulative damage to your life can be profound. But first, let's talk about another thing that can become harmful without you noticing it. No data security. Disregard that. Forever Tomorrow. For problematic weed users, life can sometimes progress in slow motion.

The addiction keeps you where you are, while your body ages and your friends move forward. But youth masks stagnation. For years, you don't notice how much weed might be holding you back because if you're young, life changes by itself. The outside world takes on the initiative and provides a lot of support for you. You're surrounded by peers, may still have childhood friends, progress through school, start work or university, and find new places and friendships.

Moving slowly is kind of okay in your 20s as life naturally throws experiences and challenges at you. But it's still not great for you. This is the time when your body is probably at its peak and you can use it for things you'll not be able to do later, from sports to dating and staying out late, traveling and experiencing the world. It's the easiest time to build a healthy social life, the greatest predictor of how happy you'll be over the next few decades. You'll likely never have fewer responsibilities again, so you can explore and take risks.

Spending this time stoned with passive activities like scrolling over reposts on Reddit is something you might regret later. you'll never get this period of your life back as you age out of your I you know as an aside like I do want I tell that to my kids and my you know my teenage daughter and like 20 somethings you do take it for granted when you when you're that young my daughter for example is 16 and she's you know she got a job and now she's working Thursday Friday Saturday and Sunday and good for her she's very responsible she's building a savings account with a couple thousand dollars in it so far very mature very responsible thing but i tell her almost counterintuitively calm down like you don't

have to work fridays and saturdays like please like you know work a couple days a week get get a little spending money i'm always there to help you out if you need anything serious like i need gas in my car or i need to pay a bill or anything like you're only 16 i got you i'm your dad and your mom does as well but like you don't understand that from 16 to fucking like 19 you're the most free you'll ever be your whole rest of your life there'll be the gun of homelessness and poverty pressed into the back of your head making you work and never being able to stop you have this precious time right now where I know you want to be grown up I know you want to do those things there's a lot of pride and integrity that comes from paying your own way

and going out with friends and not having you to ask for it you know that's all laudable but enjoy your motherfucking time go to sleepovers go on camping trips go travel with your friends do not tie yourself to a job right now um and she kind of gets and she's like okay you know after i establish myself a little bit i'll i'll pull back and at least open up some days but even to people in their 20s you know i tell them like your body is at its peak maybe not for everybody everybody's a little different everybody has different stories maybe different health conditions etc but on the whole and in that on average you know when you're in your 20s your body your ability to rebound from injury your ability to not get enough sleep and still

function that day, your ability to recover from a hangover. All these things are at their peak. And it's a real shame to whittle that away scrolling endlessly. And when I was in my 20s and I was smoking weed, I have friends. I still have friends. I was always very social, always had a lot of friends. Before I got married, I always had, you know, women in my life, girlfriends and whatnot. So I wasn't like a hermit or anything. But there's a subtle way in which if it becomes a daily routine when you get off work in your 20s and you go home and smoke, you know, get off work, go home, smoke a bull, and then say, hey, do you guys want to come out to this party?

Hey, do you guys want to go to this thing? Maybe you and a couple friends want to go watch a movie and you guys can smoke beforehand, and there's a way in which you can integrate smoking into your social behavior, but there is a way in which it kind of makes you recoil a bit from things that it's very subtle, but it's like, I don't want to go do that right now.

I just got high. The last thing I want to do is go like talk to, to people I've never talked to. That's a big thing. If you're comfortable, it's like you and your three buddies who smoke weed together, but yeah, I go do shit. Me and my friends smoke a joint and we go hike. Me and my friends, you know, smoke a joint.

We go watch a movie or, you know, go watch the Super Bowl together or whatever. That's all cool and fun. But do you see the way in which meeting new people going into situations that might be kind of uncomfortable where you'd have to be adaptive, how you kind of shrink away from that type of stuff? That's not good. You know, I think you do want to be like, challenged socially. You want to get out of your comfort zone socially a little bit,

and the 20s is the time to do it. And the big thing I say about addictions more broadly, do not get yourself locked. I tell us to young people all the time. God forbid, do not get addicted to anything in your 20s. Because as you hobble out of your 20s, you will spend your 30s, your 40s, sometimes your 50s and beyond trying to climb out of that hole. I know so many people who spent their 20s, totally fine, totally functional, holding down a job, they got an addiction. Every night they come home and they drink a six-pack. Every night they come home and they rip a few blunts, right? Every night they come home or whatever. And that addiction that they could get away with in their 20s becomes an albatross on their motherfucking necks into their 30s and 40s.

Over at Shoeless in South Dakota, my buddy Dave, he's now had what, 250 days sober. He's 30,000. He's years old. He spent all his 20s getting addicted but still functioning, right, having girlfriends, having a social life, having jobs. And then in his 30s, he spent his entire 30s desperately trying to crawl out of the hole of alcoholic addiction. Multiple rehabs, multiple relapses, multiple ER visits. And so what he could get away within his 20s, he can't get away within his 30s.

And his whole life is on pause for basically 10 years as he tries to get out of this whole that he dug for himself that started relatively innocuously at 18, 19, 20, and 21, where hard drinking is completely normalized. And all of a sudden you start seeing people as you get in your 25, 27, less and less people are doing the all-nighters. Less and less people are fucking going on binges. It's not cool anymore. It starts to become sad. You don't want to have to deal with that. So if you keep sobriety as your baseline, you don't take for, you don't take for, you don't take for granted the fact that in your 20s you're physically the healthiest that most people will be in their entire lives and you have this real capacity to expand your social circle expand your physical capacity your mental capacities do things that challenge yourself you have the lowest level of responsibility you'll ever have and to take it full advantage of that instead of just retreating into the haze of daily marijuana use or into a bottle into a porn addiction or gambling addiction or gambling addiction.

and it's hard to do in an alienated, lonely society like we have right now. But I tell every young person, don't fall into that trap. You will spend your fucking 30s, not advancing, not expanding, but climbing out of a whole just to get on par with the average people of your age, right? So sobriety has a baseline, but then also have fun. There's nothing wrong with going to a party and drinking, as long as you're as safe as you can be about it. Another thing I like to stress is psychedelics.

I've been a proponent of psychedelics in the past, and I've had great psychedelic experiences. The last several times I've taken psychedelics, the juice is not worth the squeeze. You know, there's this old line by Ram Dass when it comes to psychedelics, that when you get the message, hang up the phone. That once you have a couple, you know, consciousness exploding insights from psychedelics, that's about all you're going to get out of it. Integrate that into a spiritual practice, use it to propel your creative art forward. but don't get caught in the loop where you're now in your 30s and 40s and 50s still chasing a psychedelic high as if it's spiritual advancement. You can only get so much out of it.

And there are people that overdue psychedelics, even though they are so much safer than almost any drug, especially when it comes to dependency. It's safer than marijuana. You're not going to get addicted to mushrooms or addicted to LSD, right? But you might get addicted in some sense, psychologically, to the pursuit of psychedelics as a stand-in, for real spiritual and emotional development.

Once you get the message, hang up the phone. There are people that fry their fucking brains by overdoing psychedelics, thinking they're chasing enlightenment or insight when really they're just disorganizing their cognitive patterns over and over again and they're not getting anything else out of it anymore. So strategic, moderate use. The famous Dead Pres line, you know, from their album, Let's Get Free, everything in moderation, even moderation.

That's like a meta, moderate position, a second order moderation, even moderation is moderate. Don't become obsessive about that. And really, a sober baseline and a responsible, moderate use of chemicals for fun and indulgence and even experimentation is totally fine, but never lose that sober baseline. And don't take it for granted. Being sober and being able to function soberly without the need of a chemical crutch is just better. And there's more to say about this from my experiences of quitting weed, but I'll get to when they bring it up in the thing. But they're kind of talking about the shifts from your 20s until your 30s, and I wanted to elaborate on that.

Things change massively. Around this time, most people naturally tone down their weed consumption or quit entirely. You're entering one of life's great inflection points, and you risk getting left behind. Your social life is different after 30. friendships need care, attention and active time investment to survive and weed addiction works against you on multiple levels. Studies show that for some people, weed can worsen social anxiety, especially if you start using more and more. And once you feel anxious about socializing, it becomes pretty tempting to just stay home and avoid events or new experiences. Since weed numbs feelings, it's easy to push away phomo or guilt about canceling last minute. you'll go next time, but will you?

Another thing I want to instantiate in people, practice being a person of your word. This is so important in organizing. In fact, it's a core principle in organizing, but I think it does apply to your broader social life. If you say you're going to do something, practice doing it even when your mood changes. You know, I promised you that we were going to go do this thing today. I can make up a lie and squeeze out of it. but think about the other person who might be looking forward to it, might have, you know, reorganize their other plans to work around it

and then to be ghosted. And organizing this becomes crucial because if you say, I'm going to do this thing, I'll tackle this part of the project, next meeting I'll come back with these things ready to go and to discuss, and you call into that meeting, you don't go to that meeting, you come unprepared, you didn't do what you promised to do, it weakens and brings down the whole organization. So practice becoming somebody,

where your word matters. I want to be the sort of person that people say, when that motherfucker says he's going to do something, he does it. We're not perfect at it. Many times I've canceled plans. Many times I've called into various things I shouldn't have. But as I get older,

I realize the importance of being a man of my word and having the integrity of showing up to something you said that you would show up to, even when inevitably, your mood shifts and you don't feel like showing up to it. And nothing is a bigger, is a bigger mood shift than like ripping a fucking bowl of weed

before you have to go do something that might be getting out of your comfort zone a little bit that might require you to talk to people that you don't know that might need that social flexibility and willingness to be a little uncomfortable in a social situation. Organizing is like that. So many times you go to a protest

or you go to a first organizing meeting the social interactions, they're a little weird at first. You don't know people. You have to kind of like, meet people where they are. This person has this personality. This person has this personality. Oh, you find yourself in a small talk situation. All of a sudden, the small talk fizzles out. And neither of you is jumping into the conversation to create the next point of topic. And you're like, oh, God, now it's kind of getting awkward. You know, we want to recoil from that because it's

uncomfortable. But if you want to be a good organizer, if you want to be socially functional, you have to look at those things and say, I welcome the challenge. You know, this is something I only developed in my 30s, where I start looking at those awkward social situations, I embrace it. I'm at a job site in blue collar trade. You go to different crews every three months. I moved around to a whole new crew, a whole new group of guys. I have to reintroduce myself, reintegrate myself, you know, create a personal relationship with every new guy on that crew because I'm going to be working with them for the next three

months intimately, right? Now I've got to see their sense of humor. I got to see what they're into. The topic of politics gets broached where they add on that. How much do I let on? you know and that could be exhausting and I used to think like I'm an introvert like I find social engagement exhausting and there's truth to that I do and I love my my free time nowadays as a parent and all the things that I do I don't get fucking free time at all but you know I'm somebody that does

value it and I know eventually life will even out to the point where I get a little bit more of it than I do now but I used to be that person that that would shy away from that or would rationalize I don't like small talk. I don't like meaningless bullshit. And as I got into this trade, I realized you're going to have to get over that. And as I start organizing within the union, you meet every sort of type of dude.

You know, it's like 98% guys, you know, in the blue collar trades for whatever reasons, obviously, you know. So it's like you meet every type of guy. And you have to be able to be socially willing to try to forge a relationship of some sort. Not everyone's going to be successful. But the awkward, conversations and you and this one guy gets set to go do this one project and you're new on the crew or he's new on the crew you don't know each other at all and you can just work in complete silence

but that would be awkward you start talking and i had this one experience recently where you know this new guy comes on the crew and me and him are in this intimate thing where we have to work on this thing together so we're apart from everybody else just him and me eight hours we're just nothing to do but talk to each other and you can't pop in your headphones and do something solo you're working with the other person so you got to have this bad back and forth all time. And we kept bringing up topics. Like,

we kept trying to bring up things we're interested in to say when and where we'd match up. And, like, for three times in a row, we would bring up something. The other person would not be interested at all. Like, you know, football or sports is an easy thing to bring up. I'm a sports fan. A lot of dudes are as well. The guy's like, I don't like sports at all. Then he brings up that he's into a fish tank, right?

He recreates the salt water fish tank at his house. I don't know. I think it's cool. I don't know anything about it. it. So, okay, we missed on that. And a couple more things we missed on. And it's just like one of those funny situations. And me and the dude ended up being cool as fuck. And by the time he left the crew, you know, like we dapped each other up. I was like, I'll see you around, dude. Like, you know, we became kind of, you know, work friends. But that first couple hours, like, we just

kept trying to hit on something that we had shared interest in and just could not do it. And it was just funny and awkward. And that's just fucking life. So get used to that and open yourself up to that. I'm going to accept the social awkwardness of meeting new fucking people. And it doesn't mean that everyone's going to become your best friend. Most of them won't. Some of them will just be people you interact with when you're organizing. Some of them will just be people you interact with when you're at work.

One in a million and one in a hundred will break through and become an outside of that context friend. Somebody you actually text and meet up with outside of that. That's fine too. Not everybody needs to become a best friend. But put yourself out there. And when you have a chemical dependency on something, your social circle gets smaller and smaller, your willingness to put yourself out there shrinks and shrinks.

And it's very subtle at first, and you can rationalize it away, and you can say something else is happening, but over long enough time horizon, and enough honesty with yourself, you'll see that that's what's happening. Speaking from personal experience, stay home and avoid events or new experiences.

Since weed numbs feelings, it's easy to push away phomo or guilt about canceling last minute. you'll go next time, but will you? Speaking from personal experience, you may turn into a friend that's unreliable, flaky or rarely shows up anymore. But the more opportunities to hang out with friends you skip, the fewer will be there in the future.

Especially if you do weed alone, it can become the central focal point in your life. Reports show that many people with addictions gradually reduce the activities or hobbies they once enjoyed in favor of consuming. Bit by bit, this can make you withdraw from the people in your life. While this can be pretty bad for your social life in your 20s, it may be catastrophic by the time you turn 30. Because in their 30s, most people are

plenty busy. Careers, partners, travel, children and their closest friends are now priorities. Free time becomes super valuable and casual hangouts turn into two adults comparing their calendars. So people in their 30s are way more selective about what and who they spend their time with. Smoking a joint drops way down their priority list. Even without falling out, you may simply become incompatible if your identity becomes tied up with weed or when your friends have a lot going on and you don't. This happens a lot without weed, but weed can supercharge it.

So many problematic weed users focus on a small circle of friends and acquaintances who are also using weed. This can create an isolation trap. If your friends quit or they withdraw to use it alone, you can face sudden isolation and loneliness. or you may feel pressure to keep using it because you're scared of losing your friends. It's harder and takes longer to make new friends in your 30s than in your 20s, so to change your situation you need courage, energy and motivation.

Things weed addiction makes much harder to muster. Worse still, people who feel lonely tend to use more weed to cope, which is linked to even more social isolation. Weed can fill the role of your best friend. It's there when you're lonely, it makes you feel okay in the moment. Your love life can also suffer. Social anxiety and complacency is a great motivator to put off dating and having sexual experiences in your 20s, and it doesn't get much easier as time passes.

In relationships, weed addiction can be extremely disruptive. Reports show that partners of daily users can feel neglected, that couple communication can break down, and that trust evaporates. The addicted partner usually doesn't realize how poorly they're handling relationship issues and can be blindsided when their love leaves them. and to be... That is the thing, like, you know, whenever you're using anything

and you become dependent on any chemical, it's an emotional salve. Even if you don't think it is, even if you don't think it is, it's an emotional salve. And my weed habit back in the day, it served that function. I was still meditating.

I was still, you know, emotionally developing in a lot of ways. I wasn't completely and totally stunted, but it was a comfortable safety blanket that I would turn to in moments of despair. And there's something character-building. about being able to sit in the pocket with suffering and not squirm away, not escape it, but be with it, honor it, process it.

And when you turn to any chemical to alter the way you feel, by definition, you are not processing and honoring that feeling. You are escaping that feeling. One of the most easy ways that every single person listening can understand this concept is with the negative feeling of boredom, which is a type of low-level suffering, and the reaching for the phone that we've gotten to the point where we actually don't need to sit with boredom.

And that's not, boredom isn't always generative. Suffering isn't always in all of its aspects generative, but it is and it can be when dealt with and related to in a certain, you know, sophisticated or responsible way. But if we're constantly deferring from facing those comfortable feelings, those uncomfortable feelings,

we become the sort of person that can't deal with uncomfortable feelings. If, on the other hand, we do not resort to numbing or escaping or distracting and we actually face, sit with, confront, and to the best of our abilities, as imperfect as it is, process those feelings, we become a more resilient person. We become a stronger person who can deal with higher levels of suffering. So you actually want to be the sort of person that doesn't run from fear, from existential despair, from grief, from boredom, from any negative emotion that you experience, can you be the sort of person that refuses to run from it, that can sit with it, that can process and honor it? Because every time you do that, you become more robust in the face of it.

Every time that I have anxiety, I could go to the fridge and smash on a bunch of food until I'm too full to think. I could smoke a bunch of weed and maybe that will increase it, maybe it won't but it'll definitely change the way I feel. I can drown it out with booze. I can distract myself by going on my phone all ways in which I'm running from an uncomfortable feeling

or I can sit with it. Now if I run from it consistently, the specter of anxiety grows and grows and grows and I'm more spooked every time I feel it starting to swirl around in my stomach. If I sit with it over and over and over again, I become so fucking acquainted with it that it no longer spooks me.

that I can, I'm literally to the point where I can, and a lot of this is meditation practice, which is the ultimate way of being with something internal, but to the point where anxiety can manifest and I can just be okay that it's here. The first day I went into my new blue collar trade, you know, the next morning I woke up, I had in my stomach overwhelming feeling of dread and despair. It's all these feelings that are sort of inchoate. I'm not built for this. This is too much.

This is harder than I thought. this is such a deviation from my lifestyle beforehand that I don't know if I can do this. I sat down at my table at 5 in the morning to drink my cup of coffee and I just felt deep anxiety. And after a long period of not having anxiety, right? And after all the times I've been through this, I just, now it's just an automatic response for me where I say, here's anxiety, let's be with it. I sat quietly for 20, 25 minutes before I had to get ready.

And I just said, anxiety is here. I'm okay with it. Welcome. Let's just sit here and be together. And I basically meditated, but instead of using my breath as the object of attention, I use my anxiety as the object of attention. Not chitter chattering in my head, talking about why I'm feeling it, fearing, feeling more of it, wondering if it'll keep going while I'm at work,

wondering if it'll fuck up my ability to be social on the job site, all those thoughts that you can run away with and that can be fueled to the fire. I said, no, I'm just sitting with the raw feeling in the, the sensation. It doesn't scare me anymore. You know, the first time I had an anxiety attack, I was 20 years old. I was in my girlfriends at the time's bed and it was like nighttime, we're getting ready to go to sleep. And we lived at different places. I wasn't at my home, right? I was at her house. And anxiety came over me. And it was related to other things and like drug usage at the time. It was a weird thing. But for my first time ever experiencing what would be

an anxiety attack. And I thought I was dying. And I got out of bed and I literally ran into my car. And I drove like fucking sweating, you know, fearing, being totally scared out of my mind, not knowing what's happening. I drove home and just like tried to isolate myself and understand. From that first time I feel anxiety to now being a 36 year old man feeling anxiety, my relationship to that exact same feeling is 180 degrees different. And that is the resilience and robustness that comes from not running from them. thing anymore. So as much as when I was using weed, I would argue that I'm not running from my

feelings. I'm not running from grief or fear. I'm not diluting or using this as an emotional salve or escape. I would tell myself that all the time. The truth is I was. And in fact, by definition, I was because I was using something every single night. And when life got hard, it was the first thing I turned to. In their 30s, people want a partner who's ready to share the growing response of adulthood and wants to build a life together. The older you get, the more unattractive your weed addiction makes you. Okay, but who needs friends or love if you have a career, right? Well, the achievement delay machine.

Long-term studies show that heavy weed users are more likely to end up with reduced academic performance, a worse education, lower income, less savings, and less stable employment, even when compared to people from similar family backgrounds and social class. social class. Many people with weed addiction struggle to show up for work. They're not productive, they procrastinate and they fail to meet their responsibilities. The consequences of missed opportunities and bad decisions slowly accumulate. Maybe you skipped networking events, had no ambition and didn't get promoted or hopped between entry-level jobs. It's also much harder to build up savings

since the addiction can cost you thousands each year. In your 20s, you transition from being useless to being good at something. And so in your 30s, expectations from others and yourself change sharply. People tend to cut you a lot of slack when you're young, but this has an expiration date. The older you get, the worse it feels to compare yourself to peers that are moving on in life and start achieving things. And it's not just career goals. If you spend a decade or two using weed all the time, you grow less as a person. You probably traveled less, went out less, met fewer people, had fewer interesting experiences, and in a way lived less than your peers, which also really becomes noticeable than your 30s. In some studies, long-term chronic weed users had significantly

lower life satisfaction, from their motivation and pursuit of personal goals, social and love life, to careers and options. Your life may just overall be much less fun and fulfilling than it could have been. On top of all this, your mental health is the final thing that you may erode over time. The Prison of Weed What makes weed addiction so devious is how at first it can seem to improve your mental health. It can calm anxiety or depressive feelings make you more relaxed and feel less lonely.

But Weed acts on your brain's reward system and the effects can flip without you noticing. Weed can damage your ability to regulate your emotions and can worsen anxiety or depressive feelings and can escalate into serious mental disorders, which you might think that you can self-medicate against by doing even more weed. This can impair your coping skills, making you fragile and easily overwhelmed, unable to deal with stress, increase anxiety or depressive symptoms,

worsen your mood, cause mood swings and irritability. The addiction can hold back a dam of bottled up negative feelings that's ready to crash into you and the people around you at any time, until eventually it doesn't work anymore. especially during a mental health crisis, weed can make things much worse for you. On the flip side, there's research that shows that addicted people who give up wheat experience a noticeable improvement in their mental health. All right, that right there is fucking true.

The number one benefit I got from stopping smoking weed after 15 years of daily use was total and complete rebalancing and stabilizing of my, baseline mood. That for the longest time, I just thought that I was just a more volatile person mentally and emotionally. Oh, my dad had depression and anxiety. I have depression and anxiety. I just got to deal with it.

You know? And in the beginning, like in my early 20s when I had my first depressive episode and I smoked weed, like I literally thought like, oh, I got the medicine. Because when I smoke weed, I get lifted out of my depression. My head gets lifted above the water for a little while. I relax. I get moments of giggly. laughter. This is actually good for me. And honestly, at that point, not having access to health care and shit,

it was probably the best thing I had to offer myself in terms of getting out of depression when I had very few other resources mentally, emotionally, spiritually to navigate that. But I totally, for the longest time, did not see this, that those things were being made worse. And it makes sense. You are funneling a chemical into your brain. that chemical leaves your system, your brain shrinks and wants it, and then you smoke again the next night. So you're basically doing this oscillation, this up and down, this hitting the gong of your neurochemistry, and it vibrates out, calms down, then you hit it again, boom, you're destabilizing your neurochemistry in some sense. You're destabilizing your emotional mood state. That's why Long time smokers, when they stop smoking, they get incredibly irritable.

They deal with anxiety. They deal with depression. I did all those things. They can't go to sleep. Their body is used to being able to fall asleep by using the weed. And now, you know, one of the worst fucking withdrawal symptoms after a long time use is the inability to fall asleep. And then when you do, you have these incredibly vivid, overwhelming dreams, which can sometimes be very fun or very disturbing. but holy shit when I stop smoking every day

I realize that I am not an inherently mentally and emotionally volatile person and that doesn't mean that I was like lashing out at the world people noticed it as fine it was a completely internalized thing where I would just go one day I'm bubbly motivated happy the next day I'm like dreading and despairing and not understanding why and the next day I'm a little fucking anxious and worried about shit

and the next day I'm fine again it was that sort of oscillation that I thought was just my constitution, that I was just built in a way that had that oscillated like that. And then after quitting, I'm like, holy shit, actually, I'm a super even keel motherfucker. Like my baseline mood and emotions, I'm no longer going up and down all the time. That was the biggest revelation that I only got after I stopped smoking. And honestly, it's one of the best things I ever did. what a benefit it is not to be on this roller coaster ride of highs and lows emotionally and mentally all the

fucking time. And you think it solves your anxiety. You think it solves your depression. In the long run, it makes them worse. In the same way that if you drink alcohol because you're anxious, yeah, when you start getting buzzed, your inhibitions drop, your basic, you know, these, your stress levels drop. In the short term, you can get out of feeling a little anxious by drinking alcohol, right? Drink alcohol every motherfucking day and anxiety will be a fucking disorder you have to deal with. My dad was like that. My dad, you know, had baseline anxiety and stuff. He used alcohol to cope with it.

You know, after years of alcoholism, he was an anxious wreck all the time. You know, not all the time. There's periods of time where it ebbs and flows, of course, like all mental disturbances do. But, you know, what it solves in the show, short term, it exacerbates in the long term. And so if you think, oh, you know, I smoke weed because it helps me deal with my depression. Smoke weed every day, you will be a person more prone to depression over the long run. You will be a more destabilized person mentally and emotionally and neurochemically than you otherwise would be if you didn't depend on a chemical flooding into your brain

every single day to feel normal. And that's another thing, right? It's a classic pattern of at the beginning when I do this substance, it gives me, I feel good. I go from my baseline to a, I go from a, I go from my baseline to a above my baseline. And then over time, that starts coming down and down and down and down. And then eventually you find yourself having to use the substance to get to your baseline. Right. Now you're starting in a hole and you need that drink of booze. You need that shot.

You need that joint just to come up and feel normal again. That is the pattern all the time. It's always going to be present in any addiction you have. And that's called chasing the dragon. You're chasing that first high, that first several highs, that really were highs because you were starting from a sober baseline going up and now you're starting from an addictive hole that you need to fill just to feel normal again. You don't want to be in that position.

So in retrospect, it made my mental health worse in every way, even in those periods of my time that I thought I was actually solving or at least short-term curing or treating my mental illnesses with marijuana. I realized in retrospect and over the medium to long-term, it made all of those things worse. My mental health has never been better than after I quit pumping THC into my brain every single day. And there's, on some level, it just obviously makes logical sense. But, you know, for people that struggle with this stuff,

sometimes you've got to feel it and see it yourself before you're fully convinced. Here's the thing. All the negatives we talked about, messing your life as it flies by, social isolation and not even getting close to living up to your potential, are not happening sometime in the future, but today. No matter your age, if you find yourself addicted or in danger of becoming addicted, there is a way out. It's not fun and it will be hard.

You need to quit. And the earlier you do, the better your life will be. Don't give up. All right. So quitting is a shitty process. There's a certain level of which you have to accept the suffering that comes with quitting anything. when you withdraw from a substance, life will suck ass. And it's a grin and bear it situation.

You could even use it as a practice. Like I'm not running from these feelings anymore. You know, using marijuana all those years when I stopped, not only did I have like in the acute phase of renormalizing, I had a lot of emotions come up. A lot of people will have this. They'll have inexplicable anger come up, inexplicable grief, any substance that you abuse.

is a salve and it's a repressive mechanism on feelings instead of processing and dealing with them, you stuff them down. And you can keep stuffing them down, but eventually the lid burst because you're trying to stuff too much down. And when you remove the lid of the suppressive mechanism in the form of the chemical you're dependent on, when you take that away, oftentimes the stuff that you didn't process comes up. And you've got to deal with it. And that's on top of the actual physiological withdrawal symptoms of irritability, depression, anxiety, insomnia, that are just part for the course of withdrawing from anything.

Now, you can help that process by tapering. So for one year, one full year before I quit marijuana, after many failed attempts to quit, I went down to one to three puffs a night before bed. And in the last few months before I finally pulled off the Band-Aid and quit, I was down to one puff right as, right, I guess right before I'd brush my teeth and then I'd go lay down to go to sleep. Just one little puff a night. And that, that actually over time, that tapered down my dependency and thus my withdrawal and that final pulling of the band-aid was not as strong. I did have insomnia for several nights and honestly it would oscillate for several weeks thereafter. Not every night, but

often. And it would kind of petered out after a while. In earlier iterations of quitting, I had a lot of anxiety and depression that I didn't have this time, I think, because I tapered down. But still, despite the tapering for a fucking year. You don't have to take that long, by the way. That's just how I did it for whatever reasons. Even after that tapering process, even getting it down to so minimal a daily usage right before quitting totally, the noticeable shift to a baseline mental and emotional balance of mood, a stable mood that I had every single day, no matter what, that was still super noticeable. So even down to one puff a night, it was still functioning to destabilize my mood. and I noticed a sharp stabilization of my mood after my total ripping off of the Band-Aid and the quitting altogether.

So these are real, this is food for thought. If you're somebody that's on the fence, as I was many times, and for many years, I would not listen to such a conversation like this. I'd be like, shut the fuck up. This is dumb. I'm productive. I have friends. I have relationships. This is not holding me back in any discernible way.

So there are people that are just not ready to hear it. That's fine. But then towards the end of it, I started opening myself up to this, right? I started admitting, okay, weed is addictive. It just makes sense. Even though I am doing weed every day, I'm addicted. I just got to accept that fact. And then I started a little bit more.

Maybe it would be better if I smoked less. Like I don't need to smoke this much. It's not good for me. I started worrying about my lung health. I know for a fact that smoking every single day, anything at all, is not good for my lung health. I do not want to be somebody that struggles to breathe, you know, later in my life. I don't want to smoke something every fucking day. And so surely, slowly but surely these realizations would creep in

and this internal desire to not want to be chained to this thing I had to do every day started becoming more and more apparent. The contradiction built up within myself. I started feeling the tension of my addiction that I hadn't felt in the past. And that's a natural process. So if you're listening to this and you're feeling that tension, this is my little push to keep going in this direction because you will benefit.

And again, this is not to say to never do a thing. I still think that there are some marginal benefits to using substances. When I go to a Super Bowl party with my friends, this is not true for everybody. Everybody has different relationships to chemicals. I like to drink. Do I drink liquor and shots?

No. I'll have four to five beers and that's nice. But even after I do that, I'm not looking to do that again for a while because even that is a lot. Right. But, you know, once in a while I'll do that. If I go into a very certain social event or something and, you know, after having now sobriety as my baseline and, you know, with friends and they pass a joint around, my new job, you know, stops me from doing that. But, you know, if I could or if there's a certain situation where it would be fine, I would do it. And I've noticed since I've quit, maybe a handful of times, I've, you know, smoked a little bit here and there. And you do get the benefits again. You kind of like, because sobriety is, you know, your baseline. You're not coming from a whole trying to feel normal again. You feel normal. You get that little boost of a high again and it's nice. And there are some benefits.

I get a swirl of creative thoughts sometimes when I take one puff having sobriety as my baseline. Same with psychedelics. There is a place for a responsible, informed usage of psychedelics strategically and with serious respect for what you're dealing with that can help open up or get some things moving or can have some benefit for you, but do not do it overly. Don't do it too much. Don't do too much at once. You know, you're never going to really need to do a heroic dose of fucking this or that.

Or if you do, you are rolling the dice a little bit, right? If you have schizophrenia and your family, it's probably not good to smoke high levels of THC marijuana every day or to hit your brain with multiple psychedelic fucking trips over and over again. You got to be responsible. You have to find what moderation means for you. you. You have to have a real respect for the dangers of any chemical. Putting anything in your body comes with a certain level of risk. You have to be very acknowledgeable of that and willing to

admit to yourself that that's what you're doing. And then from that moderate, responsible, sober baseline, I think there is a place in our life to engage with chemicals. In the same way, that there's a place in our life to eat birthday cake and to eat Halloween candy. But God knows if we did it every day, we would feel like shit and our bodies would break down. down, you know. So moderation, everything in moderation, even moderation. There are some standouts. I look at a figure like a Wiz Khalifa. He's a fascinating figure to me. He's obviously a successful rapper. I think he does Muay Thai, so he has like this really fit athletic body and he's in the gym sparring all the time. You know, he obviously tours the world and is, again, a successful rapper.

but smokes a nauseating amount of weed. Like if you go on his IG, just like rolling up in the morning, smoking like two blunts on the way to the airport. And coming from where I came from, I know what that level of weed inhalation and fucking intake does. And it's like, Jesus fucking Christ. Like even though you're outwardly an incredibly fit person, you have multiple hobbies, you have a very successful career. You're obviously socially engaged and probably have no problem finding romantic. and sexual relationships, like all the things that you might listen to an episode like this and think, oh, that will happen, that will happen. It doesn't seem to be happening, although we can't

peek behind the curtain and see what he's like day to day. But I just know for a fact that if you're smoking weed all day, every day, there's something that you're running from, that you're repressing, that you're not facing. You cannot live in a fog 24 fucking 7 and have a perfectly healthy mental and emotional life. And maybe outwardly, that's impossible for us to perceive. But I guarantee that inwardly there's some things that are up. And I do think that there's a cognitive decline that happens over time. When you're smoking that amount, that level of weed, I think you lose a certain sharpness

over time. I truly do believe that. And I think if you sat down and you had a several hour conversation with Snoop Dog or Wiz Khalifa, I think you would see the kinks in the art. I think you'd see them forget where they were in the middle of a sentence. You would see the full spectrum of the topics that they're able to tackle not quite be as flexible or nimble or expanded. I think you'd see these little brain farts and cognitive declines and maybe they'll repeat something they said five minutes ago. You know, you've ever seen somebody that you know that's like an alcoholic or like using weed hard every single day that has those little cognitive slips all the time?

That becomes a part of your cognitive decline. I truly believe that. And you feel it in yourself. You forget what you're saying. You forget what you just said. You forget, you know, you're in the middle of a story and you can't finish. Like, sorry, I fucking had a brain fart. I can't remember.

Anyways, what were you talking about? And it's like, okay, you can get away with that for a while. But is that who you want to be cognitively? Or do you want to be a cognitively sharp person? Even a perfectly healthy mind, you have brain farts and you forget where you're going with something and you lose the trail of your thoughts, right? but you don't want that to become the norm. And if you talk to an alcoholic, you talk to a weed addict, that is the norm.

And the cognitive decline kind of makes them a smaller person, a less able person, a less expansive person. And that's not a moral judgment. That's just a fact coming from experience. And actually it comes out of a place of compassion for that person. It's quite scary. So, okay, take that for what it is. Again, maybe it hit with you, maybe it didn't, maybe that resonates, maybe that don't. You don't have to justify yourself to me.

You're not being judged. So I don't need to hear a comment like, you said this and this. Well, for me, it's like this is, I'm totally willing to admit that for other people at other times in their life or at other parts of their progression of addiction. And, you know, that these things don't all hit. There's definitely people out there that smoke weed every day that are very successful in their careers, right? That have lots of hobbies and friends. Not everything in this thing applies to you. don't need to defend yourself.

You are not being judged. You're being talked to and loved from a place of experience and compassion with a total acceptance that it will hit for some people and it won't hit for others. If it doesn't resonate with you, walk away from it. But if it does and you're in that position and you feel that that tingle of tension continue to get kind of a little stronger, that conflict within yourself beginning to emerge and strengthen, that is a sign internally, emotionally, spiritually, that you are genuinely kind of ready to leave this behind and to move forward. Leave it behind and move forward with your life.

This does not need to be who you are. You don't need to be 70 years old smoking weed every day. You can be. Maybe there are guys that do. Maybe you take off from 30 to 70. And then when you're 70, you say, fuck it. I'm getting back into smoking weed every day in the twilight years of my life. Okay, everybody's different. But, you know, if you're young and you don't have an addiction, do not fucking form one. Do everything you can to prevent yourself from being addicted to anything. So you don't have to climb out of that hole. And if you are addicted to something, I know it's hard.

It's not easy. Shoeless in South Dakota is all about this, right? I'm not going to say the exact people in my family, but pretty much every single person that is very close in my family, like, you know, parents, siblings, etc. have a hardcore addiction. This is something that has been ever present in my life. I lost my dad four years ago this week to his alcoholism at the age of 55 years old. I had to watch my father die in front of me, a wound that will never heal. Even talking about it four years later, you hear me choking up.

If you could see me, the tears would come to my eyes. It is a pain that I will never, ever be absolved of, right? Only the grave will heal this wound. that's true when you lose anybody you love but to lose somebody you love 30 years before they should have died to an addiction like alcoholism which wrecked their body and mind

and it actually was a painful, violent death you never recover from that and you know I only think that if my dad had 10, 20 more years like he could have known his grandsons he could have watched his grandchildren grow up and had a relationship.

And one day, he could have been a great-grandfather and held another little infant in his 70-year-old arms. And he was robbed of that by his addiction and his own choices. And, you know, it went off like a nuclear bomb in the family. Like me, my sister, and my brother fucking brutalized us. And if anybody out there has lost a very close family member, you understand the grief and the pain that comes, even in the best of circumstances, right? But to see somebody died 20, 30 years before they had to, and in such a miserable, brutal way,

with years of decline leading up to it, it leaves a mark on your soul. Again, that never quite heals. And they say time heals all wounds. It doesn't. When you lose somebody close to you, the grief is a lifelong process. And maybe you don't weep as much as you used to. Maybe you don't have overt breakdowns and like crying spells like you used to. It tempers out a little bit, but again, it never leaves you.

And in an interesting way, your relationship with that person continues. But instead of it being an outward relationship, like my dad's over there, I'm here, I'll call him on the phone, we'll meet up on holidays. Instead of it being like that relationship, the relationship is totally internalized. So me and my father's relationship continues to evolve, evolve inside of me, right? And when I'm talking about addiction, I'm talking from a deep place of not only experiencing myself, but see it take the life of my father. Who as a little boy, you know, I saw as the biggest, strongest, you know, guy in the world that, you know, his hands were so big and he was so powerful. and you know you think of your dad if you have a good relationship with him as this larger than life figure especially as a little kid and to see him brought low like that it fucking devastates you

but i didn't mean to i didn't mean to go into this direction i don't like you know doing this and crying and stuff like that so i i apologize but uh it just made me think of it because it is it is four years and you know what's crazy on the four year anniversary and this might be a product of me thinking about my dad, obviously on the anniversary, but he came to me in my dream. And in multiple times since he passed away, he's come to me in dreams in the form of his young, youthful, big, strong self, like a Tony Soprano type figure, you know, just as larger than life figure. I remember as a little kid, like, when we'd go on road trips and I'd be sitting behind him and he'd be driving the car and he would reach his hand around, like to the back of the seat and just hold my hand,

you know, driving for like 10 minutes or something until his elbow hurts or something and he let's go of it. He would never say a word. You know, he would just reach back and I put my tiny little hand in his big old fucking palm. I just felt safe and secure, you know? The first time I ever watched Sopranos, I was a kid that first came out in 2000 or came out in 1999. So I was like 10 years old, 11 years old, the age that my firstborn son is now. And I remember my dad would lay in his bed, huge, you know, a huge, you know, a huge, you know, a huge, huge guy compared to me and I would lay next to him or you know he'd have blankets over him and he'd like have his

legs spread out and so like the kid you'd lay in between his legs and you got to be watching the same show and that's how I kind of fell in love with Sopranos and I've watched it two times since then once in my twenties once in my 30s is my favorite show of all time and Tony Soprano is like encapsulated

with my dad so whenever I watch my favorite show ever I kind of see my dad and Tony Soprano in subtle ways of course not a one for one identical thing but just this larger than life figure. So he comes to me in my dreams and he came to me a couple nights ago on the actual proper

four-year anniversary of his death. And he like, he like is in his healthiest version of himself and it's like comforting me or in some instances he tells me how proud he is of me. In this last instance he said like, he's like, you know, when people die, like some people go away but I'm stuck in this in-between place.

He said that. in my dream. I don't really know what to make of that. What is this in between place? But it's like he was coming back. Like he wasn't fully gone yet. And, you know, it's just your brain. All the scientific material explanations.

It's wasn't your dad actually coming back from the dead to visit you in your dream. It's just you're mourning him. You're thinking about him. You know, your brain is primed to have a dream like that. Okay, I'll concede all of that. It still meaningful. It still feels like you were visited. And in some way, I still had this experience of like,

like seeing my dad and when I saw him in the dream he was so strong and healthy and young I like touched his face out of amazement like I was just like enamored with the fact like holy shit my dad's back you know um so that's that's that's incredibly strange my sister says that she'll have dreams about him but in her dreams she'll never be able to get to him like he'll be across the room talking to somebody and she can't quite make her way there or she sees him in the distance but she loses him in the crowd and uh i don't know what to make what to make of that it's a It's a, you know, a function of our own mentalities or our own relationship with grief and losing him or whatever. But it's meaningful.

And again, you know, your relationship with the lost loved one continues. And grief is this bittersweet thing. Emphasis on the sweet. There's something sweet in the bitterness of grief. It's not pure black despair, right? Why is that? Because in grief is the obvious bitter side, right? The weeping, the hurting, the physical.

racking of your body in the wake of immediate grief. Grief is obviously bitter in the sense that it's hard and sour and suffering and all that. What's the sweet part of it? Well, you loved somebody. The reason you feel grief and sadness and you weep and you cry, that is a pure product of the love you had for them. So grieving is a bittersweet process in which you're mourning and despairing over a loss. which at the same time is, if you pardon my Marxist jargon,

has a dialectical relationship with the love you felt for them. You would not be suffering and weeping had you not known love. And so grief is a bittersweet echo of love, a real love. And actually, that love, of course, never goes away. You know, I love my dad just as much today as I did 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. And my relationship with him has ever. evolving. I think about my life in terms of his. I understand as I grow older and I have certain experiences, I understand my dad more. I become a dad. I understand aspects of my dad.

I didn't understand before. I'll do the things sometimes where I reach around the back of the seat and hold my kids' hands out of nowhere. As an honor to him. You know, lessons he taught me, I'll teach my kids and I'll tell them, that's what Hopatah Todd used to tell me. you know, Grandpa Todd, he used to tell me this. I'm telling you this. I'm teaching you this now. And so in that way, they truly do live on. And there is no separation. I'm not a separate person from my dad or my son.

We are actually all part of the same process. We are actually all the same thing, just given a different expression and manifestation temporally. But who am I without my dad? Literally down to my fucking chromosome, my genetic build, I do not exist without him. From the sound of my voice is very much like my dad's voice, right? To the way that my beard grows and the color of my hair.

I am my dad and I look at my son and I see myself and my son, he is me. You think the ego deludes itself into thinking it's fundamentally separate from this broader process taking shape and unfolding and you're not. And you can even zoom out and see yourself as intimately connected and in fact contingent upon this entire natural world. We share 33% of our DNA with fucking sunflowers, dandelions. You know, we are a product of Earth and we are intimately, biologically, scientifically, chemistry related to all other life on Earth. And when we get down to our actual genetic heritage or actually a family line, the separation is even more non-existent.

And so I conceive of myself in that way, and I conceive of myself as a living expression of my father and my children as a continuation of that. And in fact, all of our ancestors are alive and well through us. And can we honor them? Can we honor them in the way that we carry ourselves, in the way that we mourn their loss, in the way that we take responsibility for our own lives

and how we treat other people. You know, that's not just a moral responsibility to other living beings. It's a moral responsibility to everybody that came before you. Even the very imperfect ones. And all of our ancestral lines, there's good, bad, and ugly. There are broken people. They're evil people. They are amazing people.

We'll never know their names. We'll never see their faces. But if they did not exist, and more than that, if they did not reproduce, you and I would not be. here. Every single one of your ancestors was an absolutely essential building block in the U that's here. If one of them picked somebody else or didn't reproduce that night or whatever, that one sperm didn't make it into that one egg, there's this whole cascading cause and effect domino chain that led to you. You remove one domino three thousand years ago and the genetics

that creates you are now not only a little different, they're very different because they have several generations to increase that distance. So it's actually profoundly connected to every single one of our ancestors who were absolutely necessary for our consciousness to be here right now in the way that it is. So those are some things that I think about with regards to my father. And when I first lost him, I went to Louisville, Kentucky. That's where he was living at the time. And they lived in a very small house, so I couldn't stay with them.

I had to get a hotel or something. I got this Airbnb and this old, old Louisville, Kentucky multiple story house. The addict was an Airbnb that I rented out, right? So I forget the name of the house, but it's like those old style homes that are like three stories up. And the very addict was mine, you know, that I went into. And that first night that I got there, I was by myself.

I drove there alone, 10-hour drive from Omaha to Louisville. And I remember the first night. night I was in my Airbnb in this attic in this old ass house. Very like, you know, haunted ass vibes kind of thing. And I, I slept in this bed by myself in this Airbnb. And I woke up in the middle of the night already crying. And it was this fascinating experience where I wasn't even necessarily dreaming about my dad or anything or maybe, or dreaming in a way that I was grieving inside my dream. I just woke up with tears streaming down my face. So what I interpreted that as is my physiology, my body outside of my conscious mind and my conscious apprehension of my emotional state.

It was purging its grief without my conscious attendance. In the middle of me sleeping dreamlessly, my body was processing grief and literally crying. and I woke up in the middle of that process already happening, which was just a profound realization of the intelligence of the body. And the feeling, you know, talk about bittersweetness of grief, that feeling of relief and calmness you get after you weep, after you cry. It's like the rainstorm passes and everything is calm again. We see that this thing that we do uniquely among animals of actual crying,

this weird thing that humans do called crying is a physiological bodily response with its own intelligence that that actually is a necessary thing to do that you feel better after you cry because in the same way you feel better after you take a shit after being constipated for a week or something it's a bodily process that needs to occur and you know unlike taking the shit uh sorry for the the vulgar analogy people can sometimes repress this emotional thing. Talking about using chemicals to repress your feelings and all this stuff. You know, many men take pride.

Like, I don't cry. It takes a lot for me to cry. That's not good, actually. Like, you want to be an open wound in the world, in the sense that you want to be radically vulnerable of the slings and arrows of life. That if my dad were to die and I did everything I could to run and escape and cover up my grieving process, what a dishonor that would be to myself. and to my father.

The best thing I could do is grieve, genuinely, openly, process it, a process that after four years still isn't over. I'm still in some sense grieving. But I'm doing it in a way that's edifying, that I know that I am processing and dealing with these emotions, and this grief is my friend. This grief is an echo of love. And so it's not an uncomfortable thing I have to repress or run from.

It's a thing I fully welcome and honor. And when I weep, I'm not weeping and feeling like, oh, this sucks. I wish I could stop crying. Make it stop. Make it stop. I'm weeping with every part of my being. Let the rain come. Let my ears scream in tears.

My eyes, I'm sorry, my eyes scream out in tears. And let this process unfold out through me and, you know, unfold out of me. And honoring that and being there for that. and then just letting it again turn your suffering into compassion. Once you know what it's like to lose a loved one and you really process that and honor that emotion and keep your heart wide the fuck open during it, when somebody else loses the loved one,

when I hear somebody else say that they lost their father, I love them. I understand them. I don't act weird in front of them, but I express I've been there. I know how hard that is. You know, a lot of people will, be made uncomfortable by that.

Like my father passed away. Oh, I'm so sorry. Like that sucks. Like, what do I say? What do I do? But when you totally have an open heart and you've been through it and somebody else goes through it, love and compassion pour out. And you have an authentic interaction.

It's not just like a platitude or a cliche that you say, oh, I'm so sorry to hear that. You say, I've been there too. I'm so sorry. I know how that feels. You can say it, but it's not even how you say it or the words you say. It's the attention you give in that. moment where when you're fully opened up to somebody suffering and you really are spilling inwardly with compassion you don't want to be weird right like you don't want to make an ass to yourself or do

something weird it might be hard to ascertain what's going on inside of you outside of you but this is inward orientation towards total love and compassion in a way that when you're just thinking like oh i'm really sorry to hear that like what do i say and is chattering to yourself in your head kind of like oh man i what do i say i don't know you know that awkward where you're not fully open, you're kind of like shrunk back a little bit internally. So, you know, suffering can lead to compassion and that compassion is wisdom, and that wisdom is understanding of others, which makes you able to connect with them more deeply. And to be there to support them, if you've gone through something terrible, somebody else goes through it,

you can be an asset to them. And you have the authenticity and the credibility that comes with having gone through it yourself. And so suffering really is a gift. Suffering is a gift that is there to deepen you, to make your character more wise, to open up your heart and let it flow out with compassion, to allow you the possibility of being a teacher and a healer and a helper to others who down the line go through similar things,

turning your suffering into wisdom and compassion, which in the final analysis, wisdom and compassion are the same thing. There are two sides of the same coin. When you're truly wise, you are compassion. And when you're truly compassionate, that is a type of wisdom. Because it comes from understanding deeply, your own suffering and the suffering of others. And being there and being present and being open for it. So those are some thoughts that just poured out of my being.

So hopefully they're useful to you and that you can use them if you're going through addiction or if you're going through grief. Use them maybe as inspiration to keep going to do what you know deep down is right. your feelings and not repress anything. And to be present for your life and to accept that to live means the full spectrum of human experience. That means you will be bent over in a fetal position, weeping your eyes out at the devastating loss of a loved one. You will be raucously laughing with your best friends over beers one night.

You will be amazed and baffled by the enormity of the cosmos. When you look up at the stars on a clear night with no light pollution, you will feel jealousy when the person that you love is hit on by another person or despair when somebody you really care about leaves you and picks somebody else over. The full spectrum of human experience is your gift. And the very understandable human reaction to that is to want all the good stuff and to not want to face the bad stuff. but once you do that you forfeit your right to all of it you belittle yourself so to cultivate this mindset

of i radically accept life on its terms it does not need to morph and shape itself to meet my preferences and desires for me to fully be open to it and engaged with it and accepting of it and even embracing of it and eventually you get to the point where you can embrace even the dark side of life even the anxiety even the grief, even the despair. I was thinking to myself the other day, because I had this OCD thing, you know, health hypochondria, and one of the ways out of that OCD hypochondria, which I always have, the thoughts are always there,

but my main battle and treatment of that is to radically accept whatever my mind is trying to scare me about. So for the last week I had kind of like an inflamed throat kind of where my throat feels like it's kind of closed a little bit. I don't know if it's sore throat or the temperatures are changing. I have fans and I sleep with my window open so I could just have a little irritant, you know, a little inflammation in my throat. But my OCD mind, which I'm very aware of and I watch it as this happens, my OCD mind will jump to worst case scenarios. And for my whole life, it would get me.

It would trick me into believing it and spiraling and start Googling symptoms and convincing myself, I have this or that disease. And so this time it said, well, maybe it's throat cancer, right? My little OCD thought came in. It's probably throat cancer, man. And I felt in my bones having practiced radical acceptance in the face of my OCD thoughts. So what, bring it on? And where did my thoughts go after that? Okay, if I get throat cancer, oh well, now I'll have this new set of experiences.

I can relate to this new level of suffering. I can relate to my own being and the question of mortality in a deeper, more authentic way. I can write and create things to express that ineffable, subjective feeling of having a terminal disease when everybody around you doesn't. I can explore grief and alienation in the process of having. And I laughed out loud by myself driving in the car. I'm a little crazy, I guess, you know, people driving by like, what the fuck's wrong with that guy? But bellow belly laugh out loud at the OCD thought and my reaction to it and just the muscle memory.

of radical acceptance. If this terrible worst case scenario happens, I can still live my life and create and express myself until the very last instant. And there would be plenty of tragedy that goes along with it. So what I accept it. Every OCD thought is probably this. You probably have that. You're going to die of this. This is going to kill you. This is cancer. This is ALS. This is blah, blah, blah. You know, the hypochondriac OCD mindset that every little thing is wrong. And then the radical acceptance of okay, if that's true, I totally accept it. Whoa. What a mental fucking shift.

It's called unconditional life acceptance. What does that really mean? Unconditional life acceptance. I cannot control life. I do not dictate what happens to me, what happens in the world. I can only respond lovingly to life as it unfolds. And I am totally open. I not only accept, I embrace the full spectrum of life experiences, including the absolute worst-case

scenarios. I'm not scared of them. I don't run from them. I don't want them to happen. I don't want to be diagnosed with a terrible disease, right? But I don't control that. So I train myself to radically accept life as it is. And that does not mean that you don't emotionally react.

If I lose a loved one, I can simultaneously accept it. and cry like a little baby rolling around on the floor. At the same time, I can radically accept and respond to life as it happens, even in the worst case scenarios. I've already pre-accepted it. I accept that I'm going to die one day. I accept that in between now and then, many, many people that I love dearly will die and I will be at their funerals

and I will walk past their casket and I will look at their grave. And that is the price for existence. That is the ticket price you pay to come into this motherfucking world and it is still worth it. I would pay it over and over and over again. And I'm relinquishing control and I'm relinquishing the consequences of my actions. I'm going to just live as morally and ethically and as dignified as I can possibly live up to the highest standards that I set for myself according to my deepest values. And I am riding this bitch out till the end. And it will always end in the same place.

A hole in the motherfucking ground or a furnace where you get cremated. And I even accept that. And that right there is a wonder, even if you don't have OCD, I have to cultivate that mindset. Because that's the cure to OCD. But even if you don't have it, building up that unconditional life acceptance. Refusing to repress anything, processing the difficult. of life and accepting it, relinquishing control over it, these are all healthy things that each and every one of us can cultivate in our own being and in our own lives that make us more loving,

more wise, more compassionate, more open to life, and less egoic, less fearful, less constricted, less belittled by life. That's your ultimate choice. You don't get to choose what happens to you in life. You choose how you respond to it. And there are people that are victimized by it, that are made smaller it, that retreat in the face of it, that try to run from it, distract from it, escape from it. And there are people that pulled their chin up high, puffed their chest out, and say yes to all of it. A true, yay-sayer. Whatever life presents me, I say yes.

Not that I like it. Not that I'm merely passive. I can influence it. I can act in certain ways. I can be a certain sort of person in the world. But 99% of things are beyond my control and I accept it. And life is an unfolding process. and I am unfolding with it

and that's okay and that's actually beautiful and exhilarating and part of the huge beauty of life but that requires the ego to let go of its white knuckle grip on control and certainty which it will never ever ever have

all right well that's a good Patreon episode I hope that resonates with some of you I hope that's meaningful to some of you I love and appreciate each and every one of you who make it possible for me to come and opine like this I only hope that I can return the favor by being useful or interesting or sparking meaningful thoughts and, you know, reactions in you, and making perhaps people think about things in a slightly different way. I don't know.

I hope that I'm giving you something that you think is worth it for the $5 a month that you give to me. I take it as a responsibility to do so. And, you know, I can't thank you all enough. So love and solidarity. Talk to you soon.