Zero Squared

Author and podcaster Ben Burgis recently appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast and on the Wright Show with Bob Wright. In this episode of Diet Soap Doug follows up on both appearances. Is Christopher Hitchens overrated as Bob Wright claims? Is Joe Rogan a fascist as many on the left fear? Find out!

Can the socialist left become political? Chris Cutrone and Douglas Lain talk pseudo-politics, war as politics by other means, and why the task of socialism remains the same as they discuss his 2015 lecture "How is Platypus a Pre-Political Project?"Chris's 2015 Lecturehttps://youtu.be/iDiv7MioqJ8

Deep State Kuba describes the history of the conflict between Russia and the West, the role of NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the reasons behind the invasion of Ukraine. 

Dwayne Roberto Monroe is a cloud architect, strategist and social critic. He describes himself as "fashionably Hegelian" where he is developing a materialist approach to the tech industry and writing about Supercomputers, AIs, the Metaverse, and technoskepticism. In this interview he explains what the cloud is and tells Doug not to believe the hype.

In this special Pop the Left interview, Sublation Media editor and podcaster Ashley Frawley interviews Gord Magill about the Freedom Convoy. Gord has been writing about the movement for Newsweek in essays such as "Elites Are Smearing Truckers Because We're Doing Their Job Representing the People" and "Why Are Canada's Unions Siding With the Government Against Workers?"  In this episode of Pop the Left he explains just what is driving the Trucker's Convoy and explains why he thinks this is a working-class action.

Derick Varn responds to our Matt Christman interview. We get into the roots of the Left's present impasse in the post-War consensus, why both the administrative state of monopoly capital and the concept of the PMC miss their mark, bureaucratic drift on the American Left, and why progressives are so unpopular.

Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House comes on to talk about Occupy anarchism, replaying the 1960s, class politics, and what Leftist media can do after Bernie.

Lavit Maas is a social worker in North Hollywood, CA. She works on Skid Row, helping people who are most at risk receive care in the Los Angeles medical system. In this episode she responds to Tucker Carlson's rant against the homeless that aired on January 18th, 2022. In a segment entitled "We’re watching civilization collapse in real time" Tucker claimed that homelessness was intentionally caused by liberal elites who wanted nothing more than to incentivize drug use and laziness. After a severe facepalm, Lavit responds and disagrees.

Eliot Rosenstock is a psychotherapist working for an app from the UK, the author of The Ego and Its Hyperspace, and the author of Zizek in the Clinic. In this interview, he explains how Freud and Stirner might be combined in clinical practice during the first half and discusses how he's been treated by the new publishing managers at Zer0 Books in the second half for patrons only. 

Richard Wolff is a prominent Marxist economist and activist and in this conversation with Douglas Lain, he discusses vaccine mandates and the growing opposition to them amongst the working class. Richard Wolff is the author of "Capitalism Hits the Fan" and a board member of Democracy at Work. 

Dan Melo is the author of Borderlines and is currently working on a book on violence for Sublation Press. He is also a contrinbutor to Cosmonaut Magazine and the author of a recent essay entitled "Why Bordiga Got Democracy Wrong." In this episode of Diet Soap he discusses just what Bordiga's critique amounted to and describes what it's like to be ratioed by radical twitter.

Todd McGowan teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Enjoying it Right and Left, which will be the first book from Sublation Press, which is the name of Diet Soap Media's book publishing wing. He is also the author of Emancipation After Hegel,  Capitalism and Desire, and Only a Joke Can Save Us.  He is also the co-host of the Why Theory Podcast.In this episode of the Diet Soap Interview series Todd discusses how the Superego functions politically.

This episode of Pop the Left features a debate between Conrad Hamilton and Chris Cutrone as they both attempt to judge the 20th century left and the contemporary left. Has there been any progress for the socialist struggle in the last 100 years? How are we to judge the contradictory "progress" brought on by industrialization and modernity?  Special feature: Doug turns into Stalin as he tries to get a word in edgewise.Support Diet Soap Media on Patreonhttps://patreon.com/dietsoap

Ron and Urszula are members of News and Letters, a Marxist Humanist organization originally founded by Raya Dunayevskaya after a split with CLR James within The Correspondance Publishing Committee. In this interview Ron and Urszula explain what Marxist Humanism offers to workers in their struggle for socialism.

Chris Cutrone, a founding member of the Platypus Affiliated Society, returns in order to respond to a recent conversation with Conrad Hamilton about post-pandemic politics. Cutrone objects to Conrad's statism and to what he sees as the Millennial left's ultimate slide into a combination of Stalinism and Social Democracy. 

C Derick Varn returns/arrives on the Diet Soap Media channel to discuss anti-politics and the current malaise on the left. Formerly a co-host with Doug for Pop the Left when the podcast was on the Zero Books channel, Derick is now running his own show at the VarnVlog:

Conrad Hamilton is a member of Kapital Comrades, an author for Zer0 Books, and a member of the Aelita Collective. He joins Douglas Lain in this episode of the Diet Soap podcast to discuss post-pandemic politics and how the left should handle lockdowns, the State, and in order to collect an apology.Link to Manifestohttps://tripleampersand.org/state-covid-manifesto-pandemic-politics/

Michael Albert is the author of the book "No Bosses," which is forthcoming from the British imprint Zer0 Books. He is also the former editor of South End Press, the co-founder of Z-Magazine, and a friend of Noam Chomsky. This interview covers some of the ideas in his upcoming book.

Bulent Somay did his doctorate in science fiction at Montreal McGill University in 1982 and 1983, but returned to Istanbul without getting his doctorate. He earned a PhD in Psychosocial Studies from Birkbeck College, University of London, in 2013. In this first interview on the new channel, Somay discusses his skepticism about left-wing populism.

In this conversation with Slavoj Zizek, Douglas Lain discusses how working in the gig economy as a floating freelancer without a contract is symptomatic of overall trends in capitalist culture. While Zizek reflects on his two volumes: Pandemic and Pandemic 2.