In 2026, Let's Give Our Inner Punks More Air Time

The stakes are high; it's time to get serious. Relatedly: announcing "Open-Book Debates," a new podcast for which I'm seeking sparring partners.

Photo by David Knox on Unsplash

Happy New Year, all! And uh, what a start… 🫠

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about lessons learned in 2025 and what I want to both leave behind and bring with me into 2026. 2025 started for me with the Los Angeles Fires, and it’s been all-gas-no-breaks ever since. Lots of great stuff happened in my personal life, but in macro it was a real demon of a year. And given what’s already gone down, it’s evident the demon years are only just getting started. As an iconic band once put it, they “start comin’ and they don’t stop comin.’”

This is an uncomfortable post for me, the type I never imagined I’d write. My parents took great pains to raise me to be civil and polite, to treat everyone with respect. I have them to thank for whatever gifts I have as an interlocutor. I grew up in the South, in one of the reddest counties in Florida. Suffice to say that Christianity and southern hospitality were both major parts of my upbringing. Even as my own belief systems led me away from Christianity, I learned to stay accommodating. I internalized the idea that it was rude to confront the contradictions in Christians’ beliefs and actions.

In confronting them, I essentially faced two outcomes: awkwardness if I didn’t convince them, and—in the off chance that I did somehow succeed in doing so—shattering their worldviews. Neither was particularly appealing. So I learned to tolerate their presumptions with a tight smile, regardless of my internal monologue.

There’s a lot to recommend this way of being, and I continue to believe that we must not default to meanness and nastiness for the fun of it. But we’re in an emergency now. If a recent study is to be believed, we’re on track to reach 3°C of warming above preindustrial levels by 2050. I need you to understand this: that’s a death sentence for most living things. If you survive in that context, you’ll be one of the lucky ones.

So I find myself feeling like it’s time to stop letting things slide.

When you act this way with one group of people, it inevitably seeps into how you act with others. Where I experience this most palpably these days is in a desperate cleaving to status quo. Surely the polycrisis is not as bad as all the experts say, right? Humanity is no stranger to prophecies of doom, and none of those have come true! Look around! Life is good—great!—for so many people. It’s the best time in history to be alive!

The problem is, I read a whole lot (not to brag or anything, but I clocked in at 152 books this year, though admittedly a bunch were comics) and I speak to some of the smartest, most rigorous minds on Earth on Urgent Futures. What you learn undertaking a transdisciplinary exercise like this is that the planetary situation is not only bad, it’s bad across categories. It’s not just carbon emissions, authoritarianism, or tech-accelerated automation. Nor is it just the mental health crisis, social alienation, or toxic nationalism. Across the board, the imperative of endless growth—on, it must be repeated, a finite planet—is driving us to the brink of collapse. (Cue Yeats: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre … the centre cannot hold.”)

I’m not a black-pilled doomer and I caution against letting that sentiment take root, as it neither helps you nor anyone else; it’s depressing and useless. I love life in general and mine in specific. It’s a baffling miracle that we get to have this experience at all—a thought that frequently stops me in my tracks. The fact that I’ve become one of the people sounding this alarm is in itself a sign that the situation is dire. I’d much rather spend my time on loftier, philosophical questions about life, the universe, and everything—trying to get a better grasp of who we are, how we got here, and what new realms we might uncover as we learn more about the aforementioned.

Unfortunately, none of that much matters if we rob ourselves of a habitable planet—the only habitable planet we know in the universe. Don’t get me started on the utter folly and preposterous waste about “colonizing” Mars.

Trained as a journalist, my inclination is to let experts do the talking, learn from them, and frame their positions honestly. This disposition finds a cozy home in the interview podcast format. But what that has meant in aggregate is that I remain more of a neutral party in my public presentation, even if my intentional curation does its own work to communicate my positions.

In private, I share my sharper side with my partner, family, and close friends. I’m often upset and incredulous at the ill-formed, poorly researched positions that manage to gain purchase in society—even as I intellectually understand how they all ultimately reflect the simple incentive structures of capitalism. My partner dubs the times I get especially jagged as “Dark Jesse,” and we’ve been talking a lot about letting that particular freak flag fly a bit more in public.

So in 2026, that’s what I’m gonna do. And I want to encourage you to do the same.

Through middle school and into high school, I got deep into punk, hardcore, and metal—which essentially comprised all my listening during those years. To this day they remain key pillars in my music listening. To speak in generalities: metal often goes lofty (which I love!), but what I love most about punk and hardcore is that they strip it all down to the raw.

If I had to distill the energy I want to bring into 2026, it’s encapsulated in this song—particularly the moment that starts at 1:57.

“Where’s your anger? Where’s your fucking rage?”

Our futures are being robbed from us in the name of endless growth. That’s worthy of our anger and our fucking rage. It’s only this way because a handful of dudes believe that ruining the planet is a small price to pay to maintain and increase their power.

Again, being unnecessarily nasty, levying ad hominem attacks, or aggressively nitpicking your allies because they’re easier targets? That’s no good—and not at all what I’m advocating. If anything, I think part of letting Dark Jesse out of the kennel is making sure that any righteous anger I espouse is done so with crystal clarity of my priorities. Those of us on the left need solidarity now more than ever. If we agree about the big stuff—principally, that capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with life on this planet—there’s a lot of other stuff I’m fine for us to “agree to disagree” on. Still, we have a responsibility to challenge the folks “on our side” who have good social politics but promote ideas that progress neoliberal extraction (cough Ezra Klein).

We must forcefully—but still civilly—reject bad ideas in public. I know it might feel futile, but it matters. Neoliberalism is a story invented by some mid-century weirdos with bad ideas that were persuasive among those in power. We can tell better stories, but we have to do it together, and recognize that these stories will unfurl in a shared, divergent universe. They won’t look the same from person to person, community to community. To find each other and connect dots, we need as many signposts as we can possibly muster.

We can demand better from public discourse. It’s a nuanced, complex world; everyone is welcome to have whatever opinions they have. But if you’re going to share them in public, make damn sure you’ve done your homework. Serotonin break for a classic:

And if, in the face of better information, you remain committed to ideas that harm other people, please be ready to be called out for it. I feel enough frustration with the Democratic Party that I’m a registered Independent now, but one delicious moment I remember is when Tim Walz called MAGA dudes “weird,” and it caught on like wildfire. They of course lost their minds, but if anything, weird is the gentlest word we could have used for them and their ideas. Even though I generally view “weird” as a badge of honor, its darker valence in this case was chef’s kiss. Let’s bring it back in 2026.

The other part of embracing your inner punk is knowing you’re going to get it wrong, you might even get some egg on your face. If we find ourselves in this position, it’s critical that we’re willing to revise our positions. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve revised my position for exactly this reason. I recently reposted what I deem to be an absolutely critical short-form video explaining why this is a hallmark of intelligence:

We really need this form of argumentation right now. As part of my effort to give my inner punk more airtime, I’m going to start debating people in public, whether at public events in the “real” world, on podcasts, or in comment sections (and privately in DMs). I’ll be launching my own new podcast (tentatively—let me know what you think?) called Open-Book Debates. As you can surmise from the title, these will entail recorded conversations where I and my guest(s) have a debate in which we can research sources, data, et al. while we talk, letting us not only fact-check each other in real time, but ensure that we have our facts exactly right. I think this is an ideal format because—at least speaking for myself—I often have strong, well-formed conclusions but don’t have the exact right stats memorized, and suspect this will be true for my guests too. (To keep things zippy and valuable for audiences, I’ll edit out the time spent researching).

As a starter list, here are some positions I’ll gladly go to the mat for:

• Capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with a finite planet and wellbeing for all but the wealthiest (and it even harms them in important ways). So-called “free market” capitalism is a special kind of death sentence. It is not controversial to claim that there can be no such thing as infinite growth on a finite planet.

• Related: capital accumulation is the root of other structural problems. Billionaires should not exist. We need to dismantle the systems that allow billionaires to exist in the first place. Likewise, we need to build antitrust infrastructure to ensure no corporation becomes “too big to fail.” Otherwise our lives will keep enshittifying.

• Inequality is the root of societal collapse (see my conversation with Luke Kemp). Shared decision-making structures are both more effective and more ethical (e.g., democracy > capitalism). This applies to corporations too. Why do we so readily accept monarchies and oligopolies in the workplace when we prefer democracy in our politics?

• We must get money out of politics.

• Climate change is real and uncomplicated. CO₂ (+ other greenhouse gases) traps heat and we are releasing ever more CO₂ into the atmosphere every year. There is no conspiracy by the climate science community. You measure the likelihood of a conspiracy on how much the conspirators stand to gain and how many people have to operate in secrecy in order for the conspiracy to succeed.

• Related: if there is a conspiracy, it’s by fossil fuel companies to flood the zone with distractions, drawing from the tobacco industry’s playbook.

• If someone’s life decisions don’t harm you, shut the fuck up. If you think their decisions do harm you, provide actual evidence and we can talk about it.

• If you say you’re a Christian, be able to defend your political positions and decisions with corresponding Bible verses that are not contradicted elsewhere in the Bible. (This goes for any religion, but Christianity is the ascendant orthodoxy in the United States, where I live, and the religion I grew up under).

• …and plenty more you can probably already infer from this short list.

So if you know anyone who wants to come debate any of those things in good faith, I’m game. Special emphasis here on “in good faith.”

Outside of OBD, you’re also going to start seeing a lot more hard-edged output from me here on Reality Studies and Urgent Futures. As an imperfect person, I’m sure there will be moments I get stuff wrong or don’t ideally comport myself. What I can promise is that I will always be willing to acknowledge when this happens, apologize when I believe I’ve done wrong or gone too far, and update my own understandings when presented with better evidence. If this feels right for you, I hope this post grants you the permission you need to join in the campaign. Because make no mistake—it’s a fight for a livable future.

Elon Musk likes to couch his aspirations to colonize Mars as “[extending] the light of consciousness to the stars.” As mentioned, this is a folly, and one buried in his own hypocrisy. Still, I resonate with the general idea. We’re a messy species, but we’ve managed to evolve traits that seemingly no other species on Earth has been able to. I think it’s worth seeing if we can make it through our species’ destructive adolescence into wizened adulthood. If we destroy the Earth, all of that possibility goes poof. We have a few short decades to make sure that doesn’t happen, and step 0 is galvanizing collective action around new stories of who we are and can be.

Hope your years are off to a great start, in whatever way(s) possible. Stay safe out there.