Love in a F*cked Up World

Episodi

• Love and Relationships Across Prison Walls (Part 1) 28.05.2026 52min

  Send us a message Prisons are designed to isolate, break social ties, and destroy communities. Yet, people fight hard to keep relationships going across prison walls, and through all the crises that prisons manufacture. Episode 26 is Part One of a multi-episode series on relating across prison walls. This episode features conversations with friends inside prison, people who have been released, and people who have been doing direct support to prisoners for decades, about the barriers to connec...
• Gossip 14.05.2026 16min

  Send us a message Morgan Bassichis is back talking gossip with Dean. Why is it so hard to tell people things directly? Why is it so hard to keep things confidential? How can we tell whether we’re sharing information because it is useful for caring, or because we want to seem important or get social credit? How can we help each other practice direct communication? How can we bring greater care to how we talk about each other, so that we can resist disorganizing patterns in our communities and ...
• Resentment 30.04.2026 24min

  Send us a message Tea kettle studies non-expert Morgan Bassichis is back with Dean to talk about resentment—how it can poison our enjoyment of the things we want and need to do, how it can be toxic for groups, how it is a reasonable response to the intense conditions we live under, and what it looks like to try to work through it so we can stay connected to the people, groups, and activities we care about. They talk through some of the tools Dean has been using in recent workshops about resen...
• Vicky Osterweil 16.04.2026 1h 16min

  Send us a message Vicky Osterweil, author of In Defense of Looting, joins Dean for a Trans Day of Visibility event organized by CLAGS (The Center for LGBTQ Studies at CUNY). Dean and Vicky talk about the gorgeous threat that trans people constitute to fascism, the power of holding multiple contradictory truths, and how to keep trying things and experimenting to create revolution. Vicky's new book, The Extended Universe: How Disney Killed the Movies and Took Over the World, is out now from Hay...
• Eli Clare 02.04.2026 57min

  Send us a message Dean chats with his friend, the brilliant writer and activist Eli Clare, about his newest book, Unfurl, which Eli describes as a queer disabled love song. Dean and Eli talk about grief and what it means to live with a broken heart, dealing with feelings of betrayal and disappointment in longtime movement work, and the persistence of internalized shame. They also talk about the importance of different types of connections across the long arc of Eli's exquisite work shaping tr...
• Benji Hart 19.03.2026 55min

  Send us a message Dean sits down with friend and collaborator Benji Hart, a facilitator, educator, writer, and artist with years of experience in multiracial abolitionist organizing. Together, they discuss their anti-militarism work with the group Dissenters and explore the deep connections between transformative justice and artistic practice. Benji shares insights from their experience facilitating transformative justice processes, emphasizing the importance of treating the work as planting ...
• Am I Working Too Hard to Fix Myself? 05.03.2026 33min

  Send us a message Morgan Bassichis is back with Dean to talk through a listener question about when self-improvement work is too rigorous and/or driven by shame. Morgan and Dean go deep, thinking together about the really painful beliefs about ourselves that sometimes come up and how to move through them. How can we hold ourselves with humility, recognizing our growth edges and taking actions we want to take, but also accept ourselves and each other as we are with gentleness? Join us on Patre...
• Andrea Ritchie 19.02.2026 1h 4min

  Send us a message Dean is joined by longtime collaborator and dear friend Andrea Ritchie, author of Practicing New Worlds, Invisible No More, No More Police, and other essential books and toolkits that you can find linked below and on the Interrupting Criminalization website. Andrea has been documenting, organizing, advocating, litigating, and agitating around policing and criminalization of Black women, girls, trans, and gender nonconforming people for the past three decades. She talks with ...
• Chani Nicholas 05.02.2026 1h

  Send us a message Chani Nicholas, queer feminist astrologer and author of You Were Born for This, joins Dean to talk about how she got politicized, how we hold fear and choose purposeful action in these difficult times, what it takes to stand up for what we believe in when were are under pressure, and what it means to worship time. Visit Chani’s website for access to her app and to listen to both of her podcasts: Astrology of the Week Ahead and Down to Astro. You can watch her 2026 Astr...
• Green Dreamer 29.01.2026 54min

  Send us a message Dean is excited to share an episode of the podcast Green Dreamer, hosted by kaméa chayne. Green Dreamer features thoughtful, engaging interviews with organizers, writers, artists, and thinkers working towards transformative change. You can listen to a recent episode featuring Dean here. This episode features an interview with adrienne maree brown and addresses questions including: How do we navigate friendships in the context of social change and increasing political divides...
• Peter Gelderloos 22.01.2026 1h 3min

  Send us a message Dean speaks (in person!) with Peter Gelderloos, whose work has profoundly shaped Dean’s political development since he first encountered How Nonviolence Protects the State in the early 2000s. Together, they discuss revolutionary tactics, the criminalization of resistance, and how to challenge dominant narratives of pacifism. Peter also describes an “ecosystem of revolt” and shares an image that helped Dean conceptualize the new introduction to the recently released second ed...
• Holly Whitaker 08.01.2026 54min

  Send us a message Dean sits down with Holly Whitaker, author of Quit Like a Woman and host of the Co-Regulation podcast to talk about Holly’s critical feminist analysis of how the alcohol industry and the ubiquity of 12-step impact how we perceive drinking and sobriety. We recommend pairing this episode with our previous episode with Shira Hassan, as well as the bonus interview with Shira that you can find for free on Patreon. Shira is the author of Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Pr...
• Giving and Receiving Feedback 24.12.2025 19min

  Send us a message In societies where we throw people away regularly, where carcerality is woven into the emotional fabric of all of our psyches and relationships, it can be VERY hard to give and receive direct feedback. Often we don’t tell people when they hurt us and then we blow up at them or ghost after saving up a pile of hurts. Or we build resentments that are toxic for us and for relationships or groups. And most of us are very defensive when people offer feedback because we’re afraid o...
• Shira Hassan 10.12.2025 52min

  Send us a message Shira Hassan brings her brilliance and decades of experience in harm reduction, transformative justice, and self-help to this deep-dive conversation. With thoughtful questions for Dean about Love in a F*cked Up World, she opens a nuanced exploration of the relationship between dissociation and numbness, rebellious awareness and radical acceptance, the role of softness in the midst of hard work, and setting boundaries as an abolitionist and harm reductionist. Join us on Patre...
• 7 Steps for De-escalating a Crush 26.11.2025 18min

  Send us a message Crushes can be fun and enlivening, but sometimes they are ill-timed or ill-suited, and it can be hard to shake them off. Morgan Bassichis is back to discuss one of the most popular tools from Dean's book Love in a F*cked Up World: 7 Steps for De-escalating a Crush. This tool can help you to turn down the intensity of the interest or obsession when you're feeling crushed out. Support this podcast by joining the Love in a F*cked Up World community on Patreon for conversations ...
• AMA with Jessica Lanyadoo (Part 2) 12.11.2025 1h 1min

  Send us a message Jessica Lanyadoo is back with Dean for part two of this AMA, where they tackle more listener questions. They dive into everything from negotiating relationship terms — like how to open a relationship, set boundaries, and talk about safer sex — to conversations about porn, casual sex, gender envy, and parasocial relationships. Listen to Part 1 of this episode on Apple here, Spotify here, or Dean's website here. Support this podcast by joining the Love in a F*cked Up World com...
• AMA with Jessica Lanyadoo (Part 1) 05.11.2025 52min

  Send us a message Jessica Lanyadoo joins Dean for the first AMA episode of Love in a F*cked Up World. Jessica and Dean answer listener questions about how to navigate our relationships with friends in the context of these terrifying times, how to deal with differing awareness and practices around COVID in our community spaces, and how to negotiate and reckon with differences in class and access to resources in organizing. We got so many great questions from listeners that we’ll be releasing t...
• Kelly Hayes 22.10.2025 56min

  Send us a message Kelly Hayes joins Dean Spade to talk about the relational work of movement building. In a critical moment in Chicago, Kelly and Dean talk about how to establish the trust needed to take the kinds of risks necessary to fight ICE and fascist invasion. They also talk about AI and journalism, and Kelly tells Dean how when confronting fascism, "The truth is a front of struggle." Support this podcast by joining the Love in a F*cked Up World community on Patreon for conversat...
• Weyam Ghadbian 15.10.2025 57min

  Send us a message Weyam Ghadbian joins Dean Spade to talk about Dean's tool 7 Steps for Deescalating a Crush, how Weyam encouraged Dean to discuss the transformative power of love, when attachment theory is useful, and when it's ok to give self help books as gifts. Support this podcast by joining the Love in a F*cked Up World community on Patreon for conversations about the themes in the podcast, tickets to online events, and to submit questions for upcoming Ask Me Anything episodes. Check ou...
• How to Survive the End of the World: Be My Senpai 06.10.2025 1h 24min

  Send us a message Dean is excited to share an episode of one of his favorite podcasts, How to Survive the End of the World, hosted by Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown. In this episode, "Be My Senpai" the sisters answer a listener question about how to interface with critical feedback and even trolling. They dive into the the importance of belonging and the ways they establish safety and boundaries in their lives, how self-protection is crucial in maintaining mental health, and how compet...