Why is capitalism incapable of valuing the more-than-human world?

This question might sound obvious, but it's at the heart of the polycrisis. If our dominant economic system literally cannot place value on nature, we're destined to live out of alignment with it.

This is the subject of Alyssa Battistoni's superb new book, Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature. We dive into it in today's conversation! In the meantime, grab your copy of Free Gifts here!

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BIO: Alyssa Battistoni is assistant professor of political science at Barnard College. She is the coauthor of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal. Her writing has appeared in The Nation, The Guardian, Boston Review, n+1, Dissent, The New Statesman, Jacobin, and New Left Review.

Free Gifts is a searing, imminently readable breakdown of how and why capitalism is incapable of “valuing” nature, treating it instead as a “free gift.” I’ve had folks on the show before talking about ecosystem services—check out my conversations with Paul R. Ehrlich, Gerardo Ceballos, and Rodolfo Dirzo as starting points!—and while Free Gifts addresses those ideas too, it goes much deeper.

It’s not merely that what we call nature provides countless services that never get factored into the economy, it’s that the incentives of capitalism are fundamentally antithetical to human beings living sustainably on this planet. In the book, she conducts Marxist feminist analysis on how we got here, what it means for us, and ultimately drives us toward the necessary changes we must make if we want to survive. She reveals how, by treating nature as “free,” capitalism ultimately diminishes human freedom; it bars us from making truly ethical choices in how we value and relate to the more-than-human world.

A quick reminder: all the messy politics you’re witnessing right now—such as rising authoritarianism—is downstream of our economic system, which determines the shape of what is possible. Alyssa’s work reveals how entangled our economic systems are in everything from social systems to individual choices, and it’s an absolutely critical time to contend with that.

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Capitalism is a problem. How exactly do we address it? First we have to cut through the noise.

Today's guest, Brett Scott, is one of those special transdisciplinary thinkers—rooted in deep understandings of economics and finance—that I absolutely love to host conversations with. In this case, it was prompted by a shared frustration with how transhumanists believe about life-extension and immortality (typified by the actions of Bryan Johnson, of “Don’t Die” fame).

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As expected, this conversation gets into so much more than I even expected, including crypto, central bank digital currencies, degrowth/post-growth, and more. We have to remember that so much of the (geo)political nonsense we’re experiencing is ultimately downstream of the economy—and Brett is somebody who’s illuminating the problems, paradoxes, and responses in accessible language. Make sure to give him a follow and subscribe to asomo.co.

BIO: Brett Scott has spent over a decade exploring the architecture of global money and big finance, and is constantly on the search for ways to rewire our economic system. In 2013 he published The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money (Pluto Press), and in 2022 I published Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto and the War for our Wallets (Penguin / Harper Collins). He has written for some of the world’s biggest publications, has appeared on major channels, and has spoken at over 300 events in over 30 countries.

People call him many things – financial activist, economic hacker – but deep down he says he’s also an artist, and in Altered States of Monetary Consciousness he’ll take you on creative journey to bring our economic system to life using visual imagery and metaphor.

Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures.

How do we bridge divides that seem impossible? It sounds so simple, but the basic answer is empathy. Of course, genuine empathy is no small feat. On the Super Humanizer podcast, today's guests hosts conversations about some of the thorniest topics related to Gaza and Zionism, so I brought them onto Urgent Futures to explain their perspectives and what they've learned through their work on the show. What results is (unsurprisingly!) a powerful, evocative conversation—I can't wait for you to hear from them.

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BIOS:

Katherine Wela Bogen is a clinical psychology PhD student and reconstructionist Jewish woman dedicated to empowering sexual abuse survivors. Her research on interpersonal violence and human sexuality has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals.

Beyond academia, she organizes international feminist psychology conferences, speaks at national political campaigns, and shares her stories and social commentary with millions on Instagram and TikTok. Raised in an American Jewish family by the son of a Holocaust survivor, Katie interrogated her inherited understanding of Zionism at a college level, and fostered relationships with anti-carceral human rights activists globally.

With degrees in Political Science and Clinical Psychology, her diverse experiences inform her commitment to direct action for social change. Integrating anti-carceral, anti-racist, and anti-colonial feminist principles into her work, Katie passionately advocates for the full political enfranchisement of both Palestinians and Jews.

Dr. Hani Chaabo is board-certified in Family, Integrative & Addiction Medicine. He completed training in Family Medicine at West Virginia University, a fellowship in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, and the Primary Care Psychiatry, Addiction Medicine, and Child & Adolescent Psychiatry fellowship certification programs at the University of California in Irvine.

He has worked with middle eastern refugees, marginalized LGBTQ communities, and steered national scale public health projects.

He is currently Chief Clinical & Wellness Officer at El-Dorado Community Health Center in California. During his time as medical director of Well-being at Ridgecrest Regional Hospital, he was awarded by the American Medical Association’s Joy in Medicine Healthcare System recognition program. He established Ridgecrest’s first Addiction Medicine and Integrative Medicine programs.

Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures.

I talk a lot about transdisciplinarity on this channel because I think it’s one of the most vital approaches to perceiving, asking, and knowing. It’s something that I believe is not only important but necessary for making our way through these—ahem—urgent futures.

As you’ll instantly find here, today's guest, Indy Johar, is a truly transdisciplinary mind. It makes sense to me that he’s trained as an architect, itself a collision of multiple different fields. But as a public intellectual today, it’s much more likely you’ll know Indy from his truly vast and entangled thinking about humanity, consciousness, intelligence, democracy, and all things planetary. In this conversation, we spend extra time on the idea of resisting perfectionism, another call that feels especially important as we leave the absolute monster of 2025 and head into what’s looking to be another doozy of a year.

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BIO: Indy Johar is co-founder of Dark Matter Labs and of the RIBA award winning architecture and urban practice Architecture00. He is also a founding director of Open Systems Lab, seeded WikiHouse (open source housing) and Open Desk (open source furniture company).

He is on the advisory board for the Future Observatory and is part of the committee for the London Festival of Architecture. He is also a fellow of the London Interdisciplinary School. Indy was a non-executive international Director of the BloxHub, the Nordic Hub for sustainable urbanization.

Indy was 2016-17 Graham Willis Visiting Professorship at Sheffield University. He was Studio Master at the Architectural Association - 2019-2020, UNDP Innovation Facility Advisory Board Member 2016-20 and RIBA Trustee 2017-20.

He has taught & lectured at various institutions from the University of Bath, TU-Berlin; University College London, Princeton, Harvard, MIT and New School. He is currently a professor at RMIT University.

He was awarded the London Design Medal for Innovation in 2022 and an MBE for Services to Architecture in 2023.

Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures.

How can we think differently about what AI means?

Today's guest, Michael Garfield, is somebody I’ve learned a lot from over the years—primarily through his tireless work with the podcast formerly known as Future Fossils—now Humans On The Loop—but also through his own writings on life, the universe, and everything. One thing we bonded over early on was media ecology, specifically how reality was being shaped by fast-evolving digital tools like AI and XR. He identified key zones of concern, and mapped possible responses, for example, to the ongoing development of deepfakes and other synthetic media.

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We’ve stayed in intermittent dialogue about all this over the past few years, and with the advent of OpenAI’s Atlas browser—which I’m still horrified by—it seemed like the right time for us to properly chop up on the pod, and I was lucky to turn the proverbial tables on him and put him in the guest seat.

BIO: Artist, author, and philosopher Michael Garfield lives to foster the imagination we need in our age of exponential weirdness—and inspire the curiosity and play required to thrive in it. Drawing on over twenty years of independent scholarship and volcanic creativity, he wields a singular perspective on the past and future, a renowned capacity for synthesis, and a global network of top-tier collaborators.

Michael is the Founder of Humans On The Loop (an award-winning transdisciplinary series exploring wisdom in the age of exponential technologies) and the Communications Director for The AI Capabilities and Alignment Consensus Project (an international partnership to foster sane AI discourse between academia and the tech sector supported by The Survival and Flourishing Fund). His nonlinear career has woven through years of research, creative, and community development at The Santa Fe Institute, The Mozilla Internet Ecosystem program, The Long Now Foundation, and The Integral Institute, and secured grants and fellowships from Cosmos Institute, O’Shaughnessy Ventures, and the ASU Center for Science and The Imagination. An internationally-charting science communicator and experimental musician, a prolific artist and writer, and a public speaker who has inspired audiences everywhere from The Commonwealth Bank of Australia Innovation Lab and Cynefin to The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors and Boom Festival, his work threads insights from complex systems science with years of experience at the frothy edge of creative technology and consciousness research. As a teacher and essayist, he has been featured at Aeon Magazine, HPlus Magazine, Reality Sandwich, Mutations, Weirdosphere, and The School of Wise Innovation.

Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures.

I thought this was going to be a conversation about solar energy, decarbonization, ClimateTech, grid infrastructure—I wasn't quite prepared for an in-depth analysis of Pete Hegseth's psychology. Hopefully that gives you a quick sense of what you're in for in this episode!

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BIO: David Roberts runs the Volts newsletter & podcast and lives in Seattle.

Don’t let that brief bio fool you: David Roberts is a man of many talents and interests. Volts is a leading outlet for all things decarbonization—from science and tech to politics to policy. If climate change matters to you, Volts is one of the key places you can go to get a sense of what’s happening, the stakes, and who’s trying to meaningfully create change. Do yourself a favor and go subscribe right now.

Understandably, I was excited to bring David on to talk about electrification—and going in I thought we were going to have a wonky conversation about grid infrastructure, batteries, and all that fun stuff. And we do get into that to a good extent—but what really stands out to me about this interview is David’s impassioned approach to progressive politics. I knew this about him going in; the questions I asked to that effect weren’t afterthoughts—but I was pleasantly surprised at the places this conversation took us, going deep on pressing topics in sociopolitics, from some armchair psychology of leaders in the MAGA movement to the role that radical centrism plays in determining the American political spectrum. David’s longtime tenure as a podcaster shines through—his delivery is on a par with the best comedians, and as you’ll see, there are moments where I cannot make myself stop laughing.

So strap in for this wide-ranging and rollicking conversation with David Roberts.

Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures.

In many ways, the big story in the aftermath of the 2024 election in the U.S. was: young men. Mainstream media was aflurry in conversations about how the Dems lost boys, how the manosphere and male-centric podcasters swung the election in favor of Donald Trump. Correlated to this phenomenon was the fact that gym culture, weightlifting in particular, because an online vector through which young men developed communities within the right-wing ecosystem. Ideas about power and “being a man” became key talking points in these groups.

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Note: I’m sorry for my blown-out audio. Substack, it seems, did me dirty in how it processed my audio during this live conversation. I’ve never had this problem in the past, but I’m trying to get to the bottom of it for future Live episodes. Fortunately Colin does most of the talking.

But it didn’t—and doesn’t—have to be this way. I’m reminded of country music’s deep roots in working class struggles, and how genre has drifted rightward over the past few decades. We may take for granted that weightlifting will breed toxic masculinity, but this is not a given. Today’s guest, Colin Davis, a fitness coach based in North Carolina, is testament to this. I found his work through some banger short-form videos where he thoughtfully (and punchily) shows how strength and masculinity might be unapologetically otherwise. And there’s an appetite for it too—over the past few months his Instagram account exploded from a few hundred followers to over 50,000. In this, I saw (and continue to see!) a major opportunity for leftists to build bridges, leading boys and men away from harmful, outdated ideas toward liberatory ones.

So I had him on the show to get into all of it.

BIO: Colin Davis is a fitness coach and content creator from North Carolina. Colin has been a coach for 6 years and makes content focused on gym culture and its connection to politics. Colin’s work centers around creating a voice for left leaning individuals in the fitness community and combatting gym bro stereotypes.

Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures.