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PODCAST

Fight Like An Animal

World Tree Center for Evolutionary Politics

Fight Like An Animal searches for a synthesis of behavioral science and political theory that illuminates paths to survival for this planet and our species. Each episode examines political conflict through the lens of innate contributors to human behavior, offering new understandings of our current crises. Bibliographies: https://www.againsttheinternet.com/ Support: https://www.patreon.com/biologicalsingularity

science natural sciences

All Episodes

48:17

Children of the Wasteland: Experimental Biology vs....

Fight Like An Animal ·

2026/10/05

Chapter Four: The Depth-Seekers. After life on Earth almost ended in a mass extinction ~250 million years ago, single-celled photosynthetic plankton evolved that mineralize carbon to make exterior shells. When they die, they drop to the bottom of the ocean, and this carbon becomes geologically stable. This ushered in an age of greater climate stability. One of the most important of these marine organisms is the coccolithophores, whose beautiful calcium carbonate shells form seafloor sediments...

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54:25

Children of the Wasteland: Experimental Biology vs....

Fight Like An Animal ·

2026/09/17

Chapter Three: Rise of the Xenobots. Can life be persuaded to take novel forms and behaviors that stabilize the Earth system? The only way to find out is to find out. Let's look to the strange frontiers of experimental biology for a framework of inquiry. Two kinds of so-called biobots have been constructed, one from embryonic frog cells and one from human lung cells. These cellular collectives become autonomously mobile, begin differentiating, and take on novel problems to solve. We can't kno...

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114:17

World-Self-Void-Marx-Lenin: Interview with Adam of...

Fight Like An Animal ·

2026/09/03

What does it feel like, in our bodies, to be in a Marxist reading group or an anarchist direct action collective? What unexamined stories, from our profoundly traumatizing experiences of development, do we carry into political organizing structures? What relational patterns do we experience in situations ranging from families to graduate school that we then repeat, using new language and frames of reference, when we try to save the world? What does it mean to be a revolutionary, in terms of t...

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43:56

Children of the Wasteland: Experimental Biology vs....

Fight Like An Animal ·

2026/08/22

Chapter Two: The Poison Eaters. In this chapter, we examine some possible experimental biology-assisted climate interventions, such as mineralization of rapidly-produced biomass. We then return to the question of massive, rapid methane release from undersea deposits, journeying to a place called Hydrate Ridge off the coast of Oregon, where two very different organisms form a symbiotic association to metabolize methane. This seafloor filtration is similar to an organ like a kidney, keeping the...

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44:15

Children of the Wasteland: Experimental Biology vs....

Fight Like An Animal ·

2026/08/14

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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76:36

Deceive Like an Animal pt. 2: Narcissist vs....

Fight Like An Animal ·

2026/05/05

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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63:27

Deceive Like an Animal pt. 1: How the Nazis Won WWII

Fight Like An Animal ·

2026/05/01

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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36:31

No Option but Sabotage: Interview with Thomas Zeitzoff

Fight Like An Animal ·

2026/04/14

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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48:07

The Visitors: Tangles of Strangeness

Fight Like An Animal ·

2026/04/07

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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153:21

The Visitors pt. 1: Story War

Fight Like An Animal ·

2026/02/26

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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95:44

Without a Shot Fired

Fight Like An Animal ·

2026/01/21

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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122:15

We Are Alive!

Fight Like An Animal ·

2026/01/13

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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128:29

Survival Revival

Fight Like An Animal ·

2025/10/06

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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66:53

Survival Ecology

Fight Like An Animal ·

2025/09/27

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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106:13

A Body with Many Selves

Fight Like An Animal ·

2025/08/21

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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76:31

A World with Many Centers

Fight Like An Animal ·

2025/08/11

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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44:43

Love to the Fighters

Fight Like An Animal ·

2025/05/21

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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12:11

REVBIO201: Four in-person classes

Fight Like An Animal ·

2025/04/21

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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92:50

The Story Is the Way

Fight Like An Animal ·

2025/03/24

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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109:08

Tree Worship Revival

Fight Like An Animal ·

2025/03/01

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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104 results

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