Fight Like An Animal

Afleveringen

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  Children of the Wasteland: Experimental Biology vs. Global Catastrophe ch.1 14.08.2026 44min

  Chapter One: Will the Wasteland Blossom? Here we search for synthetic biology-assisted interventions into runaway climate change and other catastrophic Earth changes. Our first chapter looks at the current state of climate science, and the schools of thought within it. We look at the physical metaphors we use to think about planetary change, such as “thresholds” and “collapse,” and how they constrain our ability to speak of the dynamic range of conceivable futures. We examine the sparse and c...
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  Deceive Like an Animal pt. 2: Narcissist vs. Machiavellian Death Match 05.05.2026 1u 16min

  The structure of a society is the sum of the different kinds of agency different kinds of people exercise. Here we tell a story of the rise of the current intrigue-riddled, paranoid state of the world by examining the roles played by four individuals. Each is a case study in a distinct political personality. One, Noel Field, who we will call the Idealist: a pious Quaker activist whose naivete entangled him in a plot that got a truly astonishing number of people tortured and killed. Two, C. Wr...
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  Deceive Like an Animal pt. 1: How the Nazis Won WWII 01.05.2026 1u 3min

  How did we come to live in such an intrigue-riddled, spook-haunted world? In this two-part series, we tell a story about the ascent of the post-WWII espionage establishment, and the permanent sense of crisis and unreality it has created. We tell this story through the lens of revolutionary biology, examining a few of the different political personalities involved: the critics, the pawns, and the conspirators. We examine how ritual deception is a common instrument of domination in traditional ...
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  No Option but Sabotage: Interview with Thomas Zeitzoff 14.04.2026 36min

  Thomas Zeitzoff's No Option but Sabotage: The Radical Environmental Movement and the Climate Crisis explores the tumultuous past and uncertain present of movements for a habitable Earth. In this interview, we explore the data he gathered, showing trends in the intensity and frequency of different kinds of ecological action. And we explore the myriad factors his many interviewees cited as shaping the movement's trajectory, from the distinct phases of the punk scene to the psychological shifts ...
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  The Visitors: Tangles of Strangeness 07.04.2026 48min

  We're not exactly asking what the true nature of the UFO phenomenon is. It's more like we're asking how people form the beliefs they do (which turns out to be a pretty good way to structure an inquiry into the true nature of something). What does being exposed to lots of stories about encounters with UFOs and their occupants, from people who are clearly emotionally impacted by those encounters, do to someone? What if they tell stories that are similar enough to corroborate one another, but to...
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  The Visitors: Story War 26.02.2026 2u 33min

  In this episode, you will find the only valid interpretation of the UFO phenomenon in the world. It involves: how psychological experiments conducted by humans on other species are structurally similar to what we call paranormal; how propaganda is best understood as the selective curation of truth to create false impressions; how some spooks got the guy from Blink-182 to hype the kids on secret military programs; how almost every definitive story about the nature of UFOs amplifies some accoun...
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  Without a Shot Fired 21.01.2026 1u 35min

  In this episode, we examine a simplified scenario—that of a total social revolution without a single shot fired—to illustrate real dynamics at work in our complex world. Across human and other animal societies, power is often maintained not with outright aggression, but with threat display. Crucially, some kinds of threats are only functional when they remain implicit, or are communicated clandestinely. In other words, there are times when surrendering or fighting are both bad options, but it...
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  We Are Alive! 12.01.2026 2u 2min

  We introduce the new Fight Like An Animal-adjacent project Defending the World Tree: A Journal of Animist Awakening, from Severed Branches Press, and describe the ceremony we are trying to spread. Using our Jan. 18 Day of the Forest Defender event as an example, we discuss ways to transmute grief and trauma into collective agency. Then we complete our examination of the structure and nature of revival movements, and their fundamental role in shaping societies throughout human history. We exam...
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  Survival Revival 05.10.2025 2u 8min

  All social change is ultimately biological change. We present a framework, called an alliance of phenotypes, for thinking concretely about societies in this way. It involves a ten-item trait inventory called RAMBO-BAMBI, which is intended to bring relevant variables out of the hazy periphery of consciousness and into explicit focus. In other words, it is a way of telling more complex stories about the world than we frequently do. We use two events, which occurred on successive nights, to illu...
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  Survival Ecology 27.09.2025 1u 6min

  What would a truly resource-minimum, viable human ecology—viable in the sense that we are fed, warm, and dry—look like? What proportion of the current system is useless economic activity, and what proportion is useless economic activity entangled with legitimate human need? Environmental policy documents don't answer these questions, but they do provide information that helps us to craft a vision. Utilizing Oregon's consumption-based greenhouse gas inventory—which looks at all energy use to m...
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  A Body with Many Selves 20.08.2025 1u 46min

  Those of us who understand the world cannot exercise power, while those who exercise power cannot understand the world. We have all fractured, but in different ways. Weaving together recent papers on the psychological correlates of scientific divisions, we ask: Why are lawyers and business majors so over-represented in elected offices? Why are engineers 17 times more likely to engage in authoritarian political violence than would be expected from their presence in the population? Why are soci...
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  A World with Many Centers 10.08.2025 1u 16min

  We celebrate the following three things: One, the animist revival currently sweeping the land. Two, a completed book with a tangible publication trajectory. Three, the form of ceremony, with all its diverse manifestations in various cultures, usually simply called shaking, as explicated in Bradford Keeney's book Shaking Medicine: The Healing Power of Ecstatic Movement. We contrast this type of ceremony with a set of tendencies described by Louis Sass in his brilliant work Madness and Modernis...
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  Love to the Fighters 21.05.2025 44min

  Sometimes, we just have to stop fighting and ask if it's really worth it. Or wait: I guess we won't know unless we fight. In this episode, we briefly touch on the emotional reality of confronting the 212th phase of the apocalypse, and the horrifying truth that it's worse, in some ways, than the 211th phase was. Then, we examine the bewildering combination of crisis and opportunity presented by our dark overlords being even more crazy and stupid than they used to be. We touch on the perils of ...
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  REVBIO201: Four in-person classes 20.04.2025 12min

  On four consecutive Sundays, beginning April 27, Arnold will teach some of the fundamentals of revolutionary biology. Classes take part in Kenilworth Park, in Portland, OR, from 6-8pm. Much of this will be summary of material covered in podcasts, but there will also be some novelties that are specific to this place and the actions we might take in it.
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  The Story Is the Way 24.03.2025 1u 32min

  This episode returns to the question of how to escape the freeze response so many of us are having to the world's many horrors. We live in stories, but we don't necessarily acknowledge that we do. What happens when we consciously embrace this aspect of our psychology, and seriously ask ourselves: what story are we in? We introduce a still-developing paradigm called Storyfinding: a process of successively iterating new stories out of the same sets of facts. It involves storytelling, but also i...
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  Tree Worship Revival 28.02.2025 1u 49min

  Is it a coincidence that the authoritarian system currently being imposed is fundamentally an outgrowth of religion? And what does that mean? Is religion inherently concerned with the “supernatural,” or is it an organized way to access collective meaning and purpose? In this episode, we examine what religion gives a political movement it otherwise tends to lack: a way of generating cohesion and low-level mobilization that is more enduring than any particular project, campaign, or strategy. An...
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  Revolutionary Mythology: The War for the Vision Space 03.01.2025 2u 7min

  The fog of collective resignation we are stumbling through has changed the stories we tell. As we perceive, with increasingly painful clarity, that our society cannot resolve the catastrophes it produces, we enter an era of aimless narrative drift. Atmospheric carbon dioxide accumulates in proportion to Mission Impossible sequels. Stories are losing their vitality because, no matter how many cars explode in them, they fail to describe a path away from our depression, disconnection, precarious...
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  Embodied Politics 26.11.2024 43min

  Now that the first book deriving from this podcast is complete, it feels less ridiculous to say it. The purpose of this project has always been to create a truly new political tendency, as different from any extant one—arguably more so—than, say, monarchism is from liberalism, or liberalism from anarchism. The distinction, as Arnold argues in Revolutionary Biology: Embodied Politics for Global Survival is biological coherence. The misconception that biology implies a lack of plasticity is pre...
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  Primitive Permaculture: Interview with David Lauterwasser 20.11.2024 2u 12min

  Arnold talks with David of Feun Foo Permaculture and Rewiliding and An Animist's Ramblings. An anarcho-primitivist, David has been making a case for expanding the cultures this political tendency uses as models for life outside civilization. Feun Foo is an experiment in adapting, to the modern context, practices of small-scale, forest-dwelling cultivation which have enabled a great diversity of societies—from highland Southeast Asia to the Amazon—to live in ecological equilibrium. An Animist'...
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  FLAA 2050: Patrolling the Wasteland (preview) 19.11.2024 3min

  Looking back from 2050, this episode examines a core communications strategy revolutionary movements began to employ in the late 2020s: the production of really good movies. With 2028's Patrolling the Wasteland as a case study, we examine the storytelling method of kosmentoria. Kosmentoria translates directly to “world in story,” but specifically means using dark or tragic contexts to convey beautiful or hopeful truths. We examine how the hierarchies we inhabited made kosmentoria films to val...