SPECIAL EPISODE: Matthew Interviewed by Cory Johnston at Skeptical Leftist

SPECIAL EPISODE: Matthew Interviewed by Cory Johnston at Skeptical Leftist Host: Cory Johnston Guest: Matthew Remski Intro by: Matthew Remski --- [00:00:07] Matthew: Hello everyone, it's Matthew here with a special extra episode in your feed. I was recently the guest of Cory Johnston of the Skeptical Leftist YouTube channel. He's here in Canada, in beautiful Saskatchewan, and he's active in labor, leftist, and anarchist spaces. He asked me a lot of really good 101 life-and-theory questions that I really enjoyed answering. He’s kindly shared the audio files with me, so here’s our conversation. [00:00:40] Cory: All right. Hi, and welcome to the Skeptical Leftist podcast, the show where I talk to a variety of people to spread critical thinking, progressive politics, and left-wing philosophy. Today I'm joined by Matthew Remski. Thanks for joining me, Matthew. [00:00:51] Matthew: Thanks, Cory. It's great to meet you, and I'm very happy to be here. [00:00:55] Cory: Right on. I'm a big fan of Conspirituality, and I've started listening to Antifascist Dad, your new show, so I'm glad I could get you on. [00:01:06] Matthew: Yeah, great. [00:01:07] Cory: I guess to start off, we have to get a little bit of background, just in case people don't know who you are. [00:01:13] Matthew: Sure. Okay. So: born and raised Catholic, but in both conservative and radical churches at different times. That’s been a very interesting experience, to be able to compare those two things. I come from a union family; we always voted socialist. I've always been fascinated with, and compulsive about, writing, with maybe some neurodivergence on board. I've been through spells of seizures, and I probably have a touch of something called Geschwind syndrome, which can lead to hypergraphia and an intense interest in religion. So that kind of figures with regard to what I've written about and done journalism on. I was in college, within a year of graduating in literary theory and religious studies, when I dropped out. Partly because I met my first partner, but also because nothing made sense in terms of professional life. I was writing books of poetry and a couple of novels, but then I wound up spending about six years in cultic groups. Getting back into working life happened through working as a yoga teacher and doing journalism on cults, and that led me to the Conspirituality podcast. [00:02:35] Cory: Right. Jeez. Six years is quite a stretch there. [00:02:39] Matthew: It is, yeah. I used to think of that with a fair bit of shame, especially because they fell right in this developmental period of, I don't know, 22 to 29 or something like that. A lot of things were stalled out because of that. But I also think it took about six or seven years for me to unplug from a lot of basic cultural conditioning. In a way, I was in some very negative spaces, but I was also outside of the world of capitalist production. That just wasn't my concern. I was actually educated by both of these groups to laugh at that concern—not necessarily to change it, but to understand it as being absurd. I think that was actually helpful for me at the time. [00:03:36] Cory: Yeah, I suppose. I often think sometimes that we assume we're immune to cult-like situations. [00:03:49] Matthew: Right, right. [00:03:50] Cory: And I think that almost everybody could fall into that kind of situation given the right circumstances. [00:03:55] Matthew: Yeah. There's this famous phrase: nobody joins a cult; they delay leaving an organization that turned out to be lying about what it was. That’s a good measure of how vulnerable people are. But I'm also thinking more and more these days about: in what ways did the cultic experience actually provide some sort of positive comparison to the outside world? What are the ways in which it models collectivization, or socializing resources, or questioning aspects of nuclear family relationships? All of that can happen in very destructive ways, but it can also happen in provocative ways. [00:04:44] Cory: Yeah, for sure. A lot of the hierarchical stuff that we have in mainstream society isn’t really the positive stuff that we should be having. [00:04:49] Matthew: Right. [00:04:50] Cory: It’s not really the positive stuff that we should be having. [00:04:52] Matthew: Right, right. Yeah. [00:04:55] Cory: The main thing that got me to message you for the interview was the book and podcast Antifascist Dad. So I guess: what got you going on that? [00:05:07] Matthew: Well, people are still debating it, but as far as I can tell, we are in fascism, or close enough for it not to make a difference. So: I’m a parent, I’m a dad. Trump gets elected for the second time, and my 11-year-old comes downstairs and asks, “What’s going to happen now?” And I draw a blank—until, like, I’m a writing person, so I just sit down and start writing a book that day. I started with an awareness of other influences out there with regard to answering that question my kid brought to me. On one side we have the hellscape of the manosphere—everything downstream of Jordan Peterson. In the middle we have guys like Scott Galloway, who has two kids, is worth over $100 million, and has nominally Democrat views, but really thinks that what boys need is a good pep talk for capitalism to get through this crazy period of “the bad orange man.” I think it’s easy to see what Peterson is up to. I think it’s harder to see what Galloway is up to. I think it's even harder to recognize what someone like Jon Haidt is doing by ignoring the political conditions and awareness levels of the kids he thinks are being ruined by social media. His answer is: “Oh, it’s just Instagram that’s making everybody mentally ill. It’s not genocide, it’s not the climate, it’s not all of these other things.” I think there’s a very strong liberal parenting belief that if we get all of the kids’ behavior right—if they're really functional, if they're productive in terms of educational benchmarks—that’s most of the job. I wanted to speak directly into that more genteel space where parenting is geared towards a conservative yearning for stability. I also wanted to address something else, which was the “age appropriateness” of most principled leftist discourse. When I say age appropriateness, I don’t mean in terms of content, because I think every kid can understand the basic fatal flaws in ideas like private property and wealth inequality. They understand what genocide is. What I don't think kids can grasp, or should have to bear, is the depression and melancholy and irony and dirtbaggery that runs throughout leftist discourse—for good reason, because we're generally sad people, and I love that part of it. But one of the things I wanted to do was brighten up the conversation by leaving behind the affect of decades of loss and exhaustion. I wanted to help kids—and caregivers—navigate a world on fire without the assumptions of middle age about what can change and what can't. [00:08:06] Cory: Yeah. It's an interesting topic: being a parent and having radical politics. [00:08:12] Matthew: Right, yeah. [00:08:14] Cory: My son is 22 and my daughter is 19. [00:08:18] Matthew: Wow. [00:08:19] Cory: Over the last decade or so, I've tried to be progressive in various ways and radical in a variety of ways, but also let them build the blocks to be successful in their lives in the world that exists. [00:08:35] Matthew: Right. [00:08:35] Cory: It’s a weird balance to strike because I'm like, “We have to tear down this system and do something different—but also, go to school.” [00:08:45] Matthew: Yeah, exactly. Communicating that kind of irony or paradox depends on fostering a very deep, trusting relationship. You can't say two things at the same time without the kid really trusting that you're saying two things at the same time because they're living in a split world, and you’re trying to take care of both sides. It’s rough. [00:09:18] Cory: Yeah. I've got two stepdaughters now too. They're quite young, still going to school, still learning about the history of Canada. [00:09:27] Matthew: Right. [00:09:27] Cory: And I'm often like, “Okay, but let's keep this in perspective, about the Indigenous people who were here beforehand.” [00:09:34] Matthew: Right. I'm sure it's slightly better than when you and I were in school. I mean, I had no sense of the impacts of colonization in my grade school Canadian education. [00:09:50] Cory: Yeah. I seem to recall it still being very much like, “There was no one here,” or they were “savages,” and “we civilized them,” and whatnot. [00:10:01] Matthew: And there were benefits eventually, and yeah, it might have been bumpy at certain points, but here we are, right? [00:10:13] Cory: So, I guess in regards to the book—maybe it's basics, and maybe everybody already has an idea of what it is—but what is antifascism? [00:10:25] Matthew: Practically, I think it's actually a great question, because there are a lot of different threads of discourse on it. Practically, it means learning to identify fascist behavior and then stopping it from spreading in various spaces, or protecting neighbors and the vulnerable from it when it does spread. That protection can be physical and spatial. It can take the form of surveilling the local Proud Boys group. It can take the form of disrupting or sabotaging online networks. But it can also be community gardens and mutual aid, food distribution and raising bail funds, and really living a good and connected and loving neighborly life. If we turn the question to “What is fascism?”, I think there are two versions to get clear on. One is limited to resistance, and I think this is the liberal position: identifying fascism as a form of mysterious political insanity that we should try to resist but also put behind us. “If Harris was president,” says the sign, “we'd be at brunch,” or “We have to get rid of Trump. There are no kings here, and he's an aberration. He's completely unexpected in such a country as the U.S.” If you're watching Rachel Maddow, she'll tell you how not to “obey in advance,” along with Timothy Snyder, or to “hold the line,” things like that. I think all of that has immediate protective uses, but there's no real opposing vision offered other than the hope that putting the Democrats back in charge will nurture the kinder forms of capitalism once again. So that's one version. Then I would say that the actual version, the real version of antifascism, says that Trump was inevitable, and to defeat fascism we have to dismantle the forces that produced him. This version ties the rise of fascism to the history of colonialism and capitalism. If the person you're speaking to is doing that—if the writer is doing that—they will be holding you as the reader with this rule from Aimé Césaire, who said that fascism in the Global North is colonialism in its late stages turned inward. If they have that attitude, they will hold the axiom of Bertolt Brecht, who says in Germany in the 1930s, “Don’t talk to me about fascism if you don't want to confront capitalism.” So if the writer has that on board, they're going to have a structural analysis of what's going on and how to respond holistically. If they don't, they're going to characterize fascism in psychopathology terms, like “Trump is uniquely and aberrantly bad, but if we hold the line against him, this temporary madness will end.” In practical terms, anyone can litmus-test any book on the subject of fascism by finding it on Google Books and then searching the name “Césaire,” or just putting in “boomerang.” If his name isn't there, then you're probably dealing with that liberal interpretation that's going to have real limits. I think in a few years you're going to be able to update that book test by searching for “Gaza genocide.” I think there are going to be certain benchmarks along the way that will determine whether your reading of fascism has teeth or not. [00:13:53] Cory: Yeah. I've had a few arguments online about whether or not this is fascism, because some people have pretty strict historical guidelines. [00:14:05] Matthew: Totally. [00:14:05] Cory: They'll say, “Well, there's no socialist uprising like there was in pre–World War II Germany.” [00:14:09] Matthew: Right. [00:14:09] Cory: And I'm like, “I don't think that necessarily has to be there.” [00:14:18] Matthew: Yeah. I think it checks too many boxes. I don't know if we're speaking about the same guy, but there's an influencer who has a fairly prominent position in, I think, the Revolutionary Communists of America or something like that. He has a very strong, narrow definition that says Trump has not led us into fascism because there hasn't been a robust communist movement that the capitalists have needed to enlist fascists to smash. I don't think defining fascism by the vitality of its opponent is… I think it's interesting, but when you line up all of the aesthetics, all of the cultural qualities, all of the scapegoating, all of the conspiracy theories, all of the body fascism, I don't know what the purpose of the distinction is. It's bad. To me, ultimately, fascism is the end of politics. It's irrationality. And if there's anything we can say about Trump and Bolsonaro and Milei, it's that they are completely nuts in power—completely irrational. There's no method to the madness. It just builds like a wave, and you can't argue with it. You can't convince them otherwise. You really have to build your own parallel sane place. That’s what antifascism is about, for me. [00:15:53] Cory: It reminds me of, years ago, I was out having a few beers with a friend, and we went to some guy's house. He was a conservative, and we were talking about climate change. [00:16:04] Matthew: Right. [00:16:05] Cory: I had to roll the conversation all the way back to, “Okay, but how do you know what's true? Do you know what epistemology is?” [00:16:13] Matthew: Right. Because he was saying, “I don't believe it,” right? [00:16:18] Cory: He absolutely would not accept any facts. [00:16:21] Matthew: Yeah. [00:16:22] Cory: It seems like that's the same thing as your Trumps and your J.D. Vances and whatnot. The facts, the evidence—nothing matters. They have no connection to that. [00:16:33] Matthew: One of the things that I've really learned from Mark Bray, who's the recently exiled Rutgers antifascism professor—he had to flee to Spain after death threats—is that one of the defining features of fascist rhetoric and propaganda is that it doesn't even have to appeal to sources or any kind of body of stable knowledge. It doesn't care about the consensus. The liberal argumentation is, “This is why I think what I think, and this is how I hope to convince you.” Once you cross over into fascism, it's, “This is what's true, and if you say I'm wrong, I'm going to kill you.” That's the difference. And I think that's really good to keep in mind, because fascism is not about communication; it's about power. [00:17:28] Cory: Yeah, for sure. It's a little frightening, actually. [00:17:34] Matthew: Yeah. [00:17:34] Cory: Also: Antifascist Dad. How does the “dad” part play into that? I guess we kind of talked about it a little bit, but yeah. [00:17:49] Matthew: First of all, I should make it clear that it's not exclusionary. It could have been Antifascist Parent or Antifascist Caregiver. [00:17:57] Cory: You just happen to be a dad. [00:17:58] Matthew: I happen to be a dad, and I settled on it because I'm cisgender and heterosexual. There’s a lot of discussion on what healthy masculinity means and looks like, and what present or engaged fatherhood looks like. I wanted to enter that discourse really specifically, even though I think most of that stuff is socially constructed and, frankly, bullshit. But I did want to plant a flag in that territory. More broadly, I feel like fascism is intergenerational and it never seems to go away. There's no rank-and-file fascist movement in the 1920s without the trauma of World War I and without 40 years prior of building communist revolutions across Europe that capital needs to put down to retrench its power. That happens over a long period of time, and there’s lots of family stuff going on in the middle of it. There's a great song by Chumbawamba, “The Day the Nazi Died,” and it references the death of Rudolf Hess in Spandau. He's the last Nazi prisoner and he dies in 1987, and they sing that the neo-Nazis “came out of the woodwork.” They're referring to them claiming his death was a murder, and they wanted to rally around it. [00:19:20] Cory: Oh, geez. [00:19:21] Matthew: So that's 1987—Hess dying in Spandau. To me, this is a very long story, and any long story is about families. Another point would be that typically fascism organizes through male dominance hierarchies, with older men driving recruitment for the younger men they constantly need as shock troops or cannon fodder when it comes to war. My point is that I think we have to look at how that process is working on the other side. In terms of parents and children, we have a lot of stories of kids receiving unconditional love and support from their elders in times of fascism. The parents of Sophie and Hans Scholl of the White Rose; the parents of some of the Edelweiss Pirates, who launched sabotage campaigns against the Hitler Youth and security forces. They hid defectors, put sugar in gas tanks, screwed up supply houses. They were badass. One of my favorite stories is from the Paivio family. Aimo Paivio was a Finnish Marxist writer, journalist, and poet in Sudbury, Ontario. One of his sons, Jules, at the age of 19, decides to go off to the Spanish Civil War with a brigade called the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion. Aimo, the father, leaves this poem behind about how incredibly proud, but also incredibly scared, he is for this child. He also knows that he’s written his child's destiny into his heart because he’s the one who brought him up with all of these Marxist values. Then his kid sees Franco bombing Madrid, and off he goes. I find that so powerful and moving. Then Simone Weil—antifascist, autistic philosopher—was basically able to survive as long as she did because her parents always came in to bail her out. She would get herself into trouble very regularly, including going to the front in the Spanish Civil War. They wouldn't let her fire a gun because she had very thick glasses, and they didn't really trust her; she was a little bit clumsy. Then she steps in a pot of boiling oil in the field kitchen and has to be evacuated. But she went, and she wrote about it, and she wrote inspiring things for her comrades. Her parents were there. I think her mother said something like, “May you never be the parent of a saint,” because it's a lot of work. Today we have the parents of Greta Thunberg, the parents of countless pro-Palestine and anti-ICE protesters. So the question is: how did that happen? How did people pass those values on to their kids, or learn about them together? That's kind of how it fell for me. [00:22:40] Cory: That's awesome. I think I've had this conversation with my dad a little bit. He's a pretty staunch conservative. [00:22:48] Matthew: Right. [00:22:48] Cory: But I always say to him, “Where do you think I got the values that I have? They didn't come out of nowhere.” [00:22:56] Matthew: Right. And what are you talking about in terms of overlap—just notions of personal dignity, agency, autonomy? [00:23:08] Cory: Yeah, autonomy, and even care for your community. He's a pretty staunch conservative, but care for those around you and the idea that you should share what you have and work together with people—those are things I grew up with. [00:23:22] Matthew: Yeah. [00:23:23] Cory: Even though his party doesn't really exemplify those. [00:23:28] Matthew: It doesn’t do that, but somehow it fooled a bunch of people into thinking that it did. [00:23:33] Cory: Right. Very odd. But the conversation always roots back to the values that I learned when I was growing up, and I try to pass on a lot of those values to my own kids. [00:23:47] Matthew: I'm glad you're able to have that open channel with your dad. I feel very lucky; I just want to shout out my own dad here, because he was a trained historian in Russian and Soviet history. He came very close to getting his PhD, and then he wound up being a high school teacher because the job market was terrible. To this day, I am running stuff by him. I'm asking for feedback. I'm saying, “Did you know that such-and-such?” and then he'll fill in his details and we're learning together. It's just a really happy thing. It's one of the best relationships I have. [00:24:33] Cory: It's good when you can maintain that relationship, for sure. [00:24:36] Matthew: Right. [00:24:37] Cory: To move on a little bit: you've been doing Conspirituality for a little while, and you're doing Antifascist Dad now. Where's the crossover there? Is there any? [00:24:53] Matthew: Yeah. I'm doing both still. I'm not going anywhere with regard to Conspirituality. For me, Conspirituality is an observational project in which I was scrambling to catch up, as a journalist, with the echoes of 20th-century fascism in 2020-era internet chaos—COVID pandemic chaos—that ended up brewing this online wave in support of Trump, with QAnon as this center of gravity and catch-all conspiracy theory. Derek and Julian and I had solid expertise in the wellness and New Age space. We knew how easy it was for that demographic to be red-pilled toward the right. From the 1970s, we knew it had been nominally progressive, but either really politically disengaged or focused on neoliberal self-help, self-optimization, supplements, and crap like that. It was also encouraging people to become more flexible in relation to capital: you just become your best self, or “follow your bliss,” or whatever. There was never any discussion of structural issues. I think that oftentimes the strongest hook—and it seemed benign—between this demographic and right-wing ideology was between health foodism and bodily purity. People developed obsessions around organic and natural foods and medicines. It became very easy for people to slide into, or mimic, the blood-and-soil themes of a century before. [00:26:49] Cory: Right. [00:26:49] Matthew: So we’re watching all of this, taking dictation on the fact that this is a group of people who imagine that our industrial, urbanized lives have destroyed nature for the benefit of the few. Therefore our bodies are poisoned and we should cleanse and purge not only our bodies, but the “evil elites” who have done this. That was the story we were working on. And it's not wrong—there was a lot of value in that—but there was something deeper I wanted to get to. The turning point between these two projects is really on this axiom that's about a century old: “Antisemitism is the socialism of fools.” In other words, when you get down to it, under capitalism we really are bought and sold by elites. Everybody in the Conspirituality world is right that we’re only given as many resources as we can afford. We're lied to constantly in order to maintain some facade of order or national pride. So the question is: are you going to blame the wrong guy? Are you going to blame the Jew, the Palestinian, the trans person? Or are you going to widen your analysis to reveal that capitalism itself is either creating or accelerating these social pathologies? I was able to address some of that on Conspirituality, but the primary focus was keeping on top of the news cycle. Antifascist Dad lets me step back a little bit and focus on that diagnostic part. [00:28:32] Cory: More of a deeper analysis on that. [00:28:35] Matthew: On causes—on, “Why did this really happen? Why did this happen?” It’s really a two-part project for me. They’re very connected, and I think they're going to work together. [00:28:51] Cory: Right on. For some of your content on Conspirituality, you've talked about Christian antifascism. [00:29:01] Matthew: Yeah. Sometimes I'm trying to find overlaps between my fascinations. To study something like “What influence has Christianity had over antifascist action over time?” is kind of like the underside of the Conspirituality question, which is “How do people use spirituality to do stupid things?” Using Christianity as a ballast against fascism is the opposite of that. That’s how it fits in for me. [00:29:36] Cory: Yeah, for sure. I've quite enjoyed those episodes. I'm a non-believer— [00:29:42] Matthew: Yeah. [00:29:42] Cory: But when I think about liberation theology and stuff like that—I don't know a lot about it, but what I have heard, I'm like, “Yeah, I'm on board with all this.” [00:29:56] Matthew: Right, right. I've been very fascinated by liberation theology, if you want to chat about that. I think it's hard to overstate the power of a revolutionary philosophy that comes from 19th-century Europe, travels on the back of the colonial wave, and then winds up finding an organic expression in a religious culture in Latin America. That's what liberation theology is. It's important to pay attention to because it's a big mistake not to view religion, generally, as a landscape of struggle—just like any other landscape. If you ignore it, you really cede the ground of religion to fascists. It’s also a mistake to minimize the role that radical or liberation theologians have already played in struggles against fascism and capitalism. The thing about liberation theology is that most leftists are not going to find anything magical or metaphysical about it because its belief systems, although linked into Catholic faith, are quite materialistic. Liberation theology basically says that loving God and serving the marginalized are the same thing. They focus on the “This is my body” part of the Mass, of the Eucharist. Jesus knows he's going to die. He's with his friends; he's at the end of his life. He's done what he could to speak truth to power in this colonized place, to give his friends a sense of hope and sanity and a capacity for resistance. He knows he's going to be killed. He breaks the bread—basically all that people have—and says, “This is my body, and I'm going to give it to you. This is the heart of what our religion is about.” Liberation theology really takes that up, because what expresses material engagement better than that? From a guy who's an unhoused migrant, who's also God—because that's what we all are inherently, they think—worthy of infinite positive regard. That's why the CIA poured millions of dollars into propagandizing against liberation theology starting in the 60s. [00:33:00] Cory: Yeah, it's too powerful as an idea, I guess. [00:33:03] Matthew: Yeah. For people out there who aren't Catholic or who are suspicious of Catholics—I get it. I grew up Catholic; I'm suspicious too. If you're talking with a liberation theology Catholic priest, you're probably going to run up against walls around reproductive rights or the morality of homosexuality. You might hit other barriers socially. But then I think you're in the same political position that you're always in, which is: to what extent can you avoid or table that issue if you have the sense that you're working on some bigger thing together? I'm really interested in the work of a particular Jesuit liberation theologian at the moment who's getting a lot of media attention. He's an ordained priest. He'll probably at least be required to represent Catholic teachings on abortion and queerness if asked, even if he personally isn't on board with them. If you watch someone like this, you can do some harm analysis. Is he pushing anti-choice politics? Is he choosing to do that? Or is he simply not challenging that at this point? In general, I would say religion offers antifascism a sense of hopefulness, secure attachment, longevity, a sense of inheritance. If we're talking about Christianity specifically, it gives the notion of a transformative or even meaningful death. I don't know if you've read a book by Peter Gelderloos called They'll Beat the Memory Out of Us. [00:34:49] Cory: I have not. [00:34:50] Matthew: It's an amazing book. He talks about how effective the state is at breaking up and suppressing movements and then making us forget about things that work—and how that can depress people in terrible ways. You're a very small band of people protesting things, and the cops arrest half of you. A quarter of you wind up in jail. The rest of you are dealing with the trauma of being kettled, and everybody kind of forgets what worked and what didn't. There isn't an intergenerational passage. Gelderloos doesn’t say this, but I would say that religious institutions—even though they've often worked in lockstep with the state—almost always have a militant flank that offers a sense of longevity and intergenerational continuity. I think that's rare to get anywhere else. [00:35:53] Cory: Yeah, I think that's fair. Like I say, I'm not a believer, but I often find myself in conflict with people who are focusing on debunking belief. I was part of the atheist movement—the New Atheist movement—for a long time. [00:36:09] Matthew: Yeah. [00:36:09] Cory: I branched off of that because I saw too much focus on trying to debate and debunk people's belief systems rather than trying to address the material conditions that we all are living under. [00:36:17] Matthew: Yeah. [00:36:17] Cory: As long as somebody's belief system leads them to a liberation-type idea set, or to trying to improve the world, then I have no problem with them believing something that I don't believe. [00:36:37] Matthew: Right. The proof is in the pudding. It’s been very interesting on Conspirituality because Derek and Julian and I are in different positions on this. Derek and Julian are atheists; I am not. I'm agnostic. If you grow up as Catholic as I did, I don't think that ever leaves you. That’s left me pretty curious about what Pope Francis and Pope Leo are up to—I’m very interested in that. They have different flavors of atheism. Derek is more of a “you do you” atheist, and, like you just said, if something leads you towards a really good social conclusion, then that's great. I appreciate that because it reminds me of how pervasive religious thought is in our culture and how, for somebody like Derek, that can be overbearing. [00:37:39] Cory: Right. [00:37:39] Matthew: Julian is a little bit different. He's focused on deconstructing magical thinking and irrational beliefs, and I find that super useful as well. It's certainly been a throughline in our podcast work together. But I think there can be distrust points and mistakes from both sides. One mistake that the agnostic or religious person, like me, can make toward the atheist is projecting onto them an internal state of blandness or dispassion—thinking that because they don't believe in something big, they don't have much to live for. But I've never met an atheist like that. Nobody is uncomplex; nobody isn't rich and full of passion. Going in the other direction, I think it's a mistake to make assumptions about the inner lives of religious people—especially to infantilize them by imagining that everyone is a literalist with regard to scriptures or creeds. I was raised Catholic, and from the time I knew what sex was, I knew that the Immaculate Conception was a myth. I knew it was a story. I understood the good and bad uses of that story. You can be an asshole like Sam Harris and pretend you understand Islam by cherry-picking some Qur'an verses in English. But then you know nothing about Muslim intellectual and political history. You don't know anything about Islamic socialism. He’s pretending that rejecting religion is rational. My biggest problem with that is that, for Harris and that entire crowd, they're not questioning the rationality of the world's dominant religion of capitalism. That's not what they're spending their time doing. To me, the atheist who needs to work on that is the one who believes that their atheism makes them a more moral, rational, or ethical person than the religious person. Pragmatically, I think everybody has to acknowledge that atheists in the U.S. are about 5% of the population. They should be protected as a minority. But for those 5% who are worried about fascism, I would say that keeping atheist judgments and grievances on the back burner is probably best at this time, while figuring out which religious people are really good to work with—because they're out there. [00:40:24] Cory: It's kind of funny, because one of the ways that I developed a more social-justice-oriented worldview was through the atheist community. I learned about religious privilege. [00:40:31] Matthew: Yes. [00:40:39] Cory: After that, I learned about male privilege and then white privilege. And then I was like, “This all makes perfect sense to me. Why would there not be…?” [00:40:51] Matthew: That's incredible. So they actually planted the seed of wokeness in you. [00:40:55] Cory: Yeah, that's right. [00:40:57] Matthew: Incredible. I did not know that. I have heard that term “religious privilege,” because of course it's true. If you're a religious person in U.S. political life, that’s a badge of honor. They're right about that. [00:41:11] Cory: Yeah. But then so many of the same people who know about religious privilege will flat-out reject any male privilege. [00:41:19] Matthew: Exactly. [00:41:20] Cory: And I'm like, “But this all fits together so neatly. How can you reject this?” [00:41:25] Matthew: It really comes down to what you feel you need to protect—where you feel your power and dignity come from. It's hard. [00:41:35] Cory: Yeah, for sure. I also wanted to ask you about your views on feminism, because my views on feminism have evolved over the years. I'm curious: were you always kind of on board with feminism as we know it now, and did that change as you became a parent? [00:42:01] Matthew: I would like to think that I was feminist earlier in my life, but I've had to learn a ton and really figure out what’s in the way of me taking on a more historical understanding with regard to the power of gender. I grew up in a very sexist time and place. It took a lot to start to climb out of that. I thought that by the time I'd met my partner and co-parent, I had enlightened views on feminism. I didn't. I had a lot of internal beliefs about what I was supposed to do or how important my work was. It’s easy to get a kind of baby liberal male feminism on board, which basically says, “Of course women should have equal rights. Of course women should be able to work. Of course equal pay for work of equal value is a good thing.” You might even go so far as supporting reproductive rights. But there's a lot underneath that with regard to power and roles. For me, the most radicalizing thing that has ever happened is becoming the co-parent of an autistic kid. First, nothing shows you more quickly or more clearly what the capitalist world is than feeling all the pressures to help the kid conform to it. Then you realize, “I don't want to do that,” and your life can change. The other thing it showed me was that because my partner had to pause her career to do full-time homeschool support for our kid, I got a crash course in the meaning and cost—physically, emotionally, in every way—of unpaid labor, of social reproduction. I had a front-row seat to something I suppose I always did, but this opened my eyes. That's the shameful thing: I always lived in a world in which women caregivers were making everything happen. This forced me to reckon with it in a way I couldn't ignore. Unpaid labor keeps everything going, and it was so clear that capitalism has to hide it because it won’t factor it into profitability models. Capitalism offloads all of its environmental impacts: we can ship our trash somewhere else. But it also conceals its social inputs. “We’re also going to conceal what actually makes it live.” When I was writing my book, I looked more deeply into how academics and statisticians were looking at this issue of unpaid labor. I found this study from Oxfam in the UK—they fight poverty in part by campaigning for women's rights. They asked in 2020: how much is the world's unpaid labor worth? The resulting study estimated that if every woman in the world above the age of 15 was paid the minimum wage for her unpaid labor, the total wages owed them would be something like $11 trillion per year. [00:45:49] Cory: Yeah, it's unbelievable. [00:45:51] Matthew: That's the combined revenue of the world's 50 largest companies—Walmart, Apple, Amazon, and then 47 others below them. It represents one-tenth of the total world economy of about $100 trillion. So the largest economy in the world after the U.S. and China is a silent economy. It doesn’t advertise itself. There are no conventions, no shareholder meetings, no trade agreements, no lawyers. The workers aren’t unionized. It's invisible. And yet we see and feel this labor around us all the time. Women's caregiving work is the literal air we breathe. I don't think you can really call yourself a feminist until you’ve seen the structural landscape laid out in those numbers. I knew what unpaid labor was, but I didn't see the graph. It’s kind of like looking at the climate graph or the hockey stick. It's like, “Oh my God. This is real now. This is a disaster.” And I’m sorry I didn't listen to everyone before. Things have changed for sure. It’s essential to antifascism because fascism itself is a misogynistic movement. [00:47:49] Cory: Right. [00:47:50] Matthew: I don't think you can do the, “Oh, Trump is an aberration, and he's a pervert, and release the Epstein files,” and focus or offload all of that energy onto a few people. It's the entire movement which entrenches deeply misogynistic structures that capitalism is based upon, and then accelerates them. [00:48:22] Cory: Yeah. It does seem like the whole thing has that misogynistic element to it. They think women are less than, and that's just it. [00:48:33] Matthew: Or they create a kind of sacred identity for women that is based on very carefully prescribed gender-binary roles, where your job is to be Allie Beth Stuckey or someone like that, or to be Erika Kirk and have eight children instead of just three—whatever it is. [00:48:57] Cory: Yeah, like the Phyllis Schlafly kind of aspect of things. [00:49:01] Matthew: Right. [00:49:03] Cory: I’m also curious about—you mentioned healthy masculinity before. There are lots of examples out there in the manosphere of toxic or unhealthy masculinity. What do we mean by healthy masculinity? [00:49:23] Matthew: Let me think about how I want to answer that for a moment. My brain just went fuzzy. But you're editing this, right? [00:49:41] Cory: Yeah, yeah. [00:49:42] Matthew: Okay. Yeah. Let me just think… Okay. I think the stuff I've had to work on most with regard to masculinity is undoing my own patriarchal training. That means working on patience, not projecting my need for control onto the kids, seeing myself as a partner for them instead of a guide, not abdicating protection but also not believing that I own anything or am owed stuff by the kid. Honestly, I think every view on what masculinity should look like has to be investigated critically because it's all socially constructed. Assuming qualities or powers for oneself based upon gender usually means closing them off from women or queer people, or assigning them some identity value. That never really works. Where “healthy masculinity” and parenting boys lands for me right now is that the primary doorway opens around the world of sexuality and sexual behaviors. We are completely surrounded by the objectification of bodies, and it's very noticeable to kids. If you have an open, good relationship with kids, they'll be asking you stuff; they'll be talking to you about feelings. That's wonderful to nurture. But to note and respond to how the world of objectification impacts kids becomes an open door to examining the fluidity and performativity of gender. For us—for me and our sons—that’s involved discussing positive and negative representations and seeing specifically how women's bodies are commodified. The idea that people can perform, or are encouraged to perform, or feel like they're forced to perform gender breaks a particular logic around essential identities. Ideally, that leaves the kid with a sense that their task is to become a person. The attractions they feel, or ideas they have around what is beautiful or attractive, or what a woman should be or what a man should be—that all of that is illusory in the sense that what you're seeking is human-friendly connection. The world of objectification and gender stereotypes sits on top of that. It can be used in positive ways or in destructive ways. The fact that kids can recognize that someone is being asked to, or is actively, putting on a particular persona—and that there's a difference between that persona and who they are or what they may be feeling—opens the conversation of performativity, which I think is essential. I don't know what masculinity is. I know what I've been taught to perform. But in my soul of souls, when I fall asleep at night, there is no sense of me being “male” or “masculine” as a metaphysical identity. I know I have certain body parts, but there's no metaphysical idea attached to them. If kids have exposure to the notion of performativity in gender, then that series of thoughts becomes easier. Gender and its navigation becomes a lot less stressful, hopefully. [00:54:29] Cory: Yeah. It's funny. I guess in a sense, it's like gender masking—you're always putting on a show of being a man or whatever. [00:54:42] Matthew: Yeah. The ways in which you perform gender—it's almost like: if you figure out that, “Oh, when I was a Catholic choirboy, I was supposed to wear a tie like this, have my shoes shined like this, stand up straight like this,” and you start to ask, “What were these individual actions meant to convey?”, then, even as a fairly young person, you can say, “I don't want to do that,” or, “If I do it, I want it to be a choice,” or, “If I do it, it's going to be cosplay. It's going to be because I've taken on a persona in a video game, or I've changed my loadout in the lobby, or I want a new skin in Fortnite,” or something like that. Doing that with gender probably gives a person access to doing it with other ways they're performing: are you trying to please people? Are you being overly polite? Are you trying to fit in? Are you trying to influence people on the internet? Judith Butler’s discovery that gender is something beyond biological sex that is aesthetic, cultural, and performed—that’s a mystery and an amazing thing. Making young people aware of that gives a lot of agency and relieves the pressure of being trapped in, “Let's grow up into a young man. Let's read Scott Galloway’s book, Notes on Being a Man, to figure out how we should be a man.” By the way, he says it's: provide, protect, and procreate. Those are the three things men should do. [00:57:04] Cory: So if you happen to be sterile, you're fucked. [00:57:06] Matthew: You're fucked. Right. But also, providing, protecting, and procreating are somehow more male than female? It's funny because he undoes his argument throughout the book by continually referencing his mother, who's protecting and providing for him, and who obviously procreated him. His examples are all examples of unpaid labor. Kudos to him for including all that, but I don't think his book is saying what he thinks it's saying. [00:57:42] Cory: Yeah. I've found that even the search for the idea of a healthy masculinity too often seems to exclude women from categories they are obviously in. [00:57:55] Matthew: Yeah. For a while I was hearing people say, “Okay, we've identified what toxic masculinity is. What is tonic masculinity?” I'm like, “Oh God, that's no better.” That doesn't solve your problem. All it's going to do is cherry-pick a bunch of nice qualities and then attach those to masculinity, when really the differences don't make a shit of difference. Maybe in combat sports, I don't know—but maybe not for long. It’s not true on the modern battlefield anymore. Where do these differences actually have material purchase? It doesn't make much sense anymore. [00:58:43] Cory: Even back before I was ever progressive in any sense, I was still always confused by this idea of what a “real man” is. [00:58:55] Matthew: Yeah, right. If you visualize it with a capital R and capital M, it's a thought-terminating cliché. I think everybody's baffled by it. It's like someone saying “America” with a certain tone of voice. It's designed to be aspirational but also a little threatening. Whatever it is, you're not going to live up to it. That’s the underlying feeling. [00:59:37] Cory: That's the key. It's meant to leave certain people out of it on purpose. [00:59:41] Matthew: Right. [00:59:43] Cory: We're coming up on an hour here already. Is there anything we should touch on before we go? [00:59:50] Matthew: I don't know. I've got more time if you want, if you have any more questions. I'm good. [00:59:59] Cory: One of the questions I had written down here is: how do you navigate raising children with empathy and critical awareness without overwhelming them about the world? [01:00:11] Matthew: Yeah. [01:00:11] Cory: We've kind of discussed this on some level already, but— [01:00:14] Matthew: I think it's a super powerful question. One of the most important things you can make sure of is to separate out your own anxieties from the possible future that your kids have. It's very easy for us to take this feeling of constant loss and setbacks, one disaster story after another, and the fact that things can be so bleak, and pass that along. It's a big psychological task not to pass it on. It's a sacrifice, because sometimes you'll be overriding your emotions because they're simply not appropriate to share. [01:01:18] Cory: Right. [01:01:19] Matthew: The notion of prefigurative politics is really important for me, especially at home. If you live and relate as though the revolution has already happened, and you’re treating each other as though exploitation and profit-seeking are bizarre and antiquated—“Who would want to do that?”—that sets up a good situation. I also think that a kind of organic existentialism is good. With our kids, both of them had a lot of early questions about death and dying, about being nothing, about the void. We sat with those questions and we didn't make up any answers. We didn't downplay our own vulnerability. We used reassurance not to say, “Everything is going to be okay,” but to say that we're all here together with these problems. Realizing you're going to die, and making that an open part of the home conversation and squaring up with that, is really key to recognizing that we can weather a lot of different conditions if we're together. If you come up against a social process that is devastating or deadly, that's in the same category of what you've already dealt with regarding your own personhood. The choices you make in relation to both situations are going to rhyme. If you recognize the shortness and volatility of life personally or collectively—or hopefully both—you’re going to be forced to make the most generous choices, because nothing else makes sense. [01:03:20] Cory: As you're talking, I'm thinking I might be accidentally teaching my kids to be pretty cynical. [01:03:31] Matthew: I think it's easy to do. I remember one of the worst overshares that I had with one of the kids: it was a few weeks after October 7. The older one is 12 or 11 at this point. There was a story circulating everywhere that the IDF had gone in and found beheaded babies in a particular kibbutz. I had this thought that I didn't want him to come across the story and be confused. I don't know why I fixated on it, because I assumed he would be exposed to it at some point: “This is what the horrible Hamas people are doing.” We're in the car and I said, “Hey, have you heard anything about the attack on October 7 and how Israel has responded to it, and how it's escalating into a full-on collective-punishment genocide?” He wasn't that aware of it; he was slightly aware. I said, “I just wanted to let you know that if you hear any really extreme stories about what's happening there, maybe come to me with it, or hang fire before you make any hard decisions about what you're hearing, because there's a lot of propaganda and misinformation.” These are common things we've spoken about. Then he said, “Like what?” And I'm like, “Now I have to say it.” I described a little bit of it, and it just felt horrible. It was like, “Why did you have to tell me that? I wasn't hearing about it.” It was a very weird moment where I was hypervigilant about being protective with regard to a certain kind of information, but in order to be protective I had to disclose it. In disclosing it, I was actually really disruptive and unnecessary. So I'm a lot more patient about letting the kid come to me with the potentially disturbing thing. They're very good about that. They're really great about it. I trust them. I don't have to telegraph stuff in advance. [01:06:50] Cory: That's good. I can be a gruff guy sometimes. They'll tell me something that they learned or heard from somewhere and I'm going, “What are you talking about?” [01:07:11] Matthew: That can work in some family cultures if it's not taken too seriously. I know that moment of, “Oh, come on, where did you get that garbage?” What I try to do is, “Yeah, it's pretty interesting that people think stuff like that,” or, “There are a lot of stories people tell about X.” Hopefully that opens a conversation about: why do people tell stories? Where are they coming from? What do stories serve? So, finding a gap between, “I'm listening to misinformation and I'm going to say off misinformation,” and, “Misinformation is kind of interesting—how does that function?” So much of parenting is like that: do we have time to make space between the reaction and the zoom-out? [01:08:16] Cory: Yeah. [01:08:16] Matthew: It's tough. [01:08:27] Cory: It is. Like I say, I can be a gruff guy sometimes. It's part of my work culture and stuff, and a lot of the masculinity stuff that I still have to work on unpacking. [01:08:42] Matthew: Right. [01:08:43] Cory: It comes out in these dismissive ways sometimes. [01:08:49] Matthew: Those are deep instincts. They're protective. I was talking with an amazing musician named Nathan Evans Fox, who said this wonderful thing about how, in his working-class Appalachian culture, being gruff and being generous come from the same muscle. Because they both come out of knowing that you've got to protect your own—or feeling like you have to. Not just feeling, but understanding that if you don't really push something away, it can be harmful. The flip side of that is that you're always bringing your people close. [01:09:45] Cory: Yeah. I like that, actually. [01:09:49] Matthew: It makes it seem less aggressive, I guess. [01:09:55] Cory: Yeah. [01:09:55] Matthew: I don't know exactly what you're describing, but there are good ways of examining that in ourselves. Of course, we're all trying to be more patient. [01:10:12] Cory: I have down here too: do you think men—especially those of us who are raising children—what kind of political re-education do we need? I guess this kind of plays into it. [01:10:25] Matthew: The first thing to recognize, even before gender, is that power is real between people, and most people have lost their analysis of power. The notion of things like class struggle has been propagandized out of people by 40 years of neoliberalism. There’s a lot of confusion with folks who really believe the world is this open sandbox and you live and die by how well you play the game, but not according to the rules other people make or how other people control resources. One thing I try to do with my kids—this swings around to emotional maturity because I think it's about transparency and power—is have an open conversation about how we get and spend money, who profits from that, and how various players manipulate that. This is pretty fruitful for dispelling a baseline attitude of neutrality towards power, corporations, and the state. Another analysis that's helpful for emotional maturity with regard to power is: we’ll discuss who the cops are, or what cops are for. Recently I was driving with my younger kid, who is autistic. He's looking out the passenger side, and in a field, beyond my line of sight, he sees this guy ragdolled on the grass and his dog sitting near him. He says to me, “We should stop the car and go help him.” So we did. My kid got this experience of relating to a guy in crisis. We were talking, away from him, about how mental health or substance issues just mean that you need care. They don't mean that you're a bad person or undeserving of anything. Then the power conversation comes up around whether we should call for help, and whether the police are going to come, and if the police come, what they would do. An ambulance showed up and everything was okay, but all the way home we got to talk about who the police are—not as individual bad guys, but as a force of orderliness. Are they trained to care for people? Are they trained to care about people in crisis at all, or is their primary job to keep everything running for capitalism without too many disturbances? We take this all the way into discussing “all cops are bastards” and what that really means: that in times of stress, the police are beholden to stand on the side of the powerful. So I think discussing power really makes emotional maturity a lot more palpable, because then you know what you're up against and what it feels like to lose in relation to power. If you can see that clearly, you have access to sadness and grief, because they will balance out the feeling of shock or reactivity that comes when you don't have an analysis of power. “Why did that police officer do that to me?”—it’s like, “Come on. What do you think is going on here?” You can be sad about the state of the world instead of shocked at how it's going. Letting myself feel sad, and being very clear that that's how I feel when my kids are around and they can see it, provides a lot of relief from anxiety and the feeling of having to hold everything together. [01:14:57] Cory: I quite like that. In my own way, I have taught my kids that it is okay to be sad about various things, but I was trained to hold it in. [01:15:13] Matthew: Yeah. [01:15:15] Cory: So I do a lot of that still too. [01:15:18] Matthew: Do you have any strategies for not doing that for periods of time? Anything you take yourself out and do where you're like, “Okay, now I can feel sad,” or, “I feel safe enough to feel sad now”? [01:15:35] Cory: There used to be. I'd have a playlist of specific songs that I would listen to. I would let myself be sad during those moments. [01:15:45] Matthew: Right. [01:15:46] Cory: I'd think about the things that are making me sad at that time. [01:15:50] Matthew: It's so important. I think that's a really important thing to do. [01:15:55] Cory: It wasn't even that long ago—maybe four years ago—that I started really acknowledging that as an emotion that I had. [01:16:06] Matthew: It's wild, isn't it? You were a little boy. At some point, there were tears. There were things that were deeply sad. Whatever you've lost or whatever pain you've been through—that's all there. And then how old do you have to be before you say, “Oh, wow. Okay. What's this feeling here forever?” [01:16:31] Cory: Yeah. For sure. [01:16:32] Matthew: Burning a hole in me. [01:16:36] Cory: I was reading your book today at the gym, in between sets, and I had a couple things pop up that I thought, “I would like to bring this up during our conversation.” [01:16:43] Matthew: Yeah. [01:16:43] Cory: See if I can find my bookmarks… Where is it? Ah, yes. You're talking about your kids and how they interact with capitalism, and how they felt a little bit of guilt about existing within capitalism and feeling like they might have some complicity in it. [01:17:22] Matthew: I think this is huge. Every kid who has the fortune or misfortune to be around people like us is going to, at a certain point, say, “Where is this stuff coming from? Who made it? Where is the plastic going to go when I'm done with it? How long will this piece of Lego exist at the bottom of the sea?” Every kid will have to come to grips with that and it will be nauseating. There's a tendency in some progressive discourses to really lean into sadness. We were just talking about the value of sadness, but you can take that overboard. You can go into a feeling of intense self-criticism that actually works in the favor of capital for you to believe that the problems of the environment or global inequality can be individualized—can be something you obsess about. “If you were a better person, they would get better.” They love that. That's perfect for them, because of course that's not going to change anything. Rising up to be able to accept this paradox of living within a materialist and consumerist society that you can't really change when you're 9 or 12 or 16—but you can study in preparation for the possibility that you're going to figure out some other way of organizing production or your social relations—I think that's a very important bridge. There's a pocket where this happens in another place too, which is around white cisgender boys being introduced to the idea of white privilege. Understanding the surface level of what this is can make you really feel like crap. You can feel like, “I am personally a huge problem.” That emphasis on your individual responsibility is not healthy, because the only way out of any of these things is by working with other people, by changing the structures that are actually making them run. I'll throw out another name here: someone like Robin DiAngelo will describe white privilege almost relentlessly as a kind of internal psychological stressor that you must always be wrestling with in order to purify yourself. There’s a very religious aspect to it, where you're never going to be quite clean enough. We're not even really looking at your behaviors anymore; we're looking at your internal feelings. [01:21:23] Cory: Yeah, we're looking at the core of your being. [01:21:26] Matthew: Which is impossible for anybody to suss out. It becomes the kind of thing where the kid, in this case, feels more personally embroiled than structurally engaged. That's not a good situation. You do have to deal with the feelings of guilt and shame that arise when you realize that you have food and somebody else doesn't. You have to deal with survivor's guilt when you realize that you've just watched people get bombed in another country on your phone. You have to deal with the horrible absurdities of global inequality in your awareness. You will feel bad about those things; you will feel terrible, and that means you're human. But to focus on your personal psychology as a way out of these conditions is mismatched. It's not the same category. [01:22:48] Cory: It makes me think of: somebody framed antiracism as the liberal view of antiracism being, “I have grown beyond racism,” instead of the systemic analysis of it. [01:23:02] Matthew: Right. I think what DiAngelo is saying is, “No, you've never grown beyond it. Actually, let's keep the focus on that problem: have you personally ever grown beyond it?” That's not ultimately where the problem gets fixed. [01:23:24] Cory: Yeah, no, I think that's right. It was kind of funny when I was reading this section because you mention something about, “Why do we want a particular device or experience or piece of clothing or even a particular type of body?” [01:23:41] Matthew: Yeah. [01:23:42] Cory: It made me think of when I first started—I’ve been in and out of bodybuilding as a gym goer since I was 33 or 35. Early in my interest in that, I read a pro who said, “The moment you don't hate your body is the moment you're done as a bodybuilder.” [01:24:06] Matthew: Oh my God. Well, that's very honest. [01:24:14] Cory: Yeah. [01:24:14] Matthew: Holy mackerel. That hits hard, eh? [01:24:17] Cory: Yeah. At the time, I did hate my body, and I adopted that view of myself. This internalization—this hatred of the things that we do as an individual rather than viewing them as part of the world, part of the system we're in—it's two conflicting viewpoints. [01:24:45] Matthew: Realizing—being so frank about, “Okay, you're being driven on by self-loathing here; you're being driven on by dissatisfaction”—that's a skeleton key for unlocking capitalism. It's a skeleton key for figuring out, “How else am I doing that? How else am I driving myself forward based on a whole bunch of conditioning that I don't actually buy?” The need to accumulate, to own stuff, to dominate others—it's all part of that. [01:25:32] Cory: I think I had one more bookmark here too. [01:25:34] Matthew: Yeah. [01:25:39] Cory: My work shift was very strange, so I didn't get a chance to read too much of the book. But I did do some reading this morning at the gym. At the start of chapter one, you talk about the pace of things and how we all are in a hurry. You expand it to almost an avoidance of our existential dread. The way you talk about it in the first bit—how many times do you say, “Hurry up, we’ve got to get going, you’ve got to match the schedule”? I do that every day, trying to get the girls to the bus. It's always, “Go, go, go. We’ve got to go faster.” It's just always there. [01:26:25] Matthew: I hope in recording that, it doesn't make people feel bad about the condition they find themselves in, but provides a snapshot of what it means for what would otherwise be a fairly self-regulated and organic life to be under pressure from these external forces that provide some benefit and structure and protection, but ultimately feed into this rolling train towards the cliff. I should note my own privilege here: being able to focus on the speed of things like that is highlighted by the fact that we have to homeschool one of our kids. It's very common for us to think about how we're organizing time in a way that's different from everybody else getting packed off. There's a real advantage there that I don't want to abuse. It's really more about the contrast between what you're being forced to do by external conditions of productivity and time management and what you feel your real life would otherwise be. Noting the difference—and the pain of the difference—between those two things is probably a real revolutionary provocation. [01:28:43] Cory: My work is seven days on, seven days off. I work for a week, and I'm on this constant treadmill that everybody else is on. Then, for a week, I get to do things mostly on my schedule. [01:29:01] Matthew: Right. [01:29:02] Cory: It gives me, in a way that a lot of people who work five days a week don’t get, a perspective on time. [01:29:08] Matthew: Right. You have two lives, actually. [01:29:15] Cory: That's right. I actually get a work-life balance that other people don't get. [01:29:19] Matthew: That's interesting. [01:29:22] Cory: My partner is from Burundi, and she often talks about how this obsession with being on time that we have in Canada is kind of nonsense. [01:29:37] Matthew: Right. [01:29:37] Cory: Like, “What do you mean, you show up five minutes before you have to be there?” [01:29:43] Matthew: Right. That's great. Let’s hear it for different times, man. [01:29:52] Cory: It speaks to a certain cultural difference, but also: maybe we should all be able to relax a little bit more. [01:30:01] Matthew: Yeah. What else do you have but your time? It's so easy for it to be appropriated and taken. It's really disorienting when you realize, “Oh, you're actually participating. Somehow you've been encouraged to speed up the treadmill.” [01:30:35] Cory: Yeah. I was talking to somebody I do regular recordings with—Owen—and we got on the topic of education. He recently did a debate with an anti-Trump Republican on the subject of education. The idea was that schools don't need more money; parents need to take more responsibility. [01:31:04] Matthew: Right. [01:31:04] Cory: He said they did the math and most people have maybe six hours a day that they're not at work and not sleeping. Somehow you're supposed to fit all these extra roles and responsibilities into that six hours. [01:31:19] Matthew: Totally. It's nuts. Loosening up around time, playing more games. For me, at the end of the day, trying to fully… I was talking with Ben Case, who's a scholar of antifascist street action and street rebellion. He said fascism puts us in this situation way too often where we have to flex these muscles of hypervigilance and protection. That's really good; we should train for that. But if it's overused, we can get injured. You know that from your gym life: if you're too tight on your politics all the time, you're not really going to— Because they're for something. They're for the time and love of the family or the community. I try to do as much completely empty space around contemplating just how great the kids are, or how incredible my partner is, or how much I miss my mom, who died four years ago, and how much I feel her around me. I try to break those very rapid cycles of time and productivity with as much contemplation as I can manage. [01:33:17] Cory: Well, it's been an hour and a half. I guess: thanks so much for your time. Where can people find the book and where can people find you? [01:33:24] Matthew: I'm on Instagram under my own name: it's Matthew Remski with an underscore. I'm also on TikTok @antifascistdad and on YouTube under that as well. In any of those bylines you'll find a connection to the preorder link for the book, which comes out in April. If you go to your podcast app and put in “Antifascist Dad,” you'll see my podcast there and all of the episodes are up. It's great to talk with you, Cory. [01:34:02] Cory: Yeah, thanks so much for your time. It was really fun. [01:34:05] Matthew: All right. Thanks again, Cory, and thank you everyone for listening. Take care of each other, and we'll see you soon.