Hey everyone! Welcome to Episode 26 of Fully Automated… or, at least, Episode 26, Part One!

This is a super long overdue episode with a guest I have wanted to have on the show for a long time: Adam Proctor, the host of Dead Pundit's Society. Adam has been doing his show FULL TIME for the last four years, delivering not only on his commitment to evangelizing “socialism for ordinary ass'ed people” but to making an incredibly important (and often misunderstood) contribution to the critique of political economy.

In Part One of this episode, we discuss Adam’s background, and the story behind the Dead Pundit's Society. DPS emerged as part of the 2016 leftist podcast wave. Some I suppose would associate Adam with the “dirtbag left,” and shows like Chapo Trap House. But the story is more complicated than that.

One of the interesting things about DPS is the niche it has always occupied, between audience accessibility and issues-driven programming, on the one hand, and a commitment to rigorous academic thought, on the other. There’s a certain public intellectual function to the show. So, in this episode, we discuss the role of the left intellectual. And the question of how to balance this sort of awkward relationship, of being neither an entertainer nor an academic, but something in between.

DPS covers a wide range of themes — everything from state theory through race essentialism. These are less controversial topics today, perhaps, but in 2016 Adam was taking huge risks by trying to mainstream them among an American left that was still largely committed to horizontalist or “occupy” style ideals. Four years into this project, it is clear that DPS has played a major role in articulating these ideas to a wider audience that one might have imagined possible, back in 2016.

In Part One, you’ll hear us address the early days of the show, and Adam’s notorious attempts to take on freedom of speech issues, cancel culture, and race essentialism. We also talk socialist strategy, and the application of work by Sam Ginden and Leo Pantich to the Grexit question. And as if these takes weren’t controversial enough, wait ’til you see what we get into in Part Two! (Coming later this week).