From the free press, this is honestly and I'm Barry Weiss.

Do you feel uneasy?

Do you feel a level of ambient anxiety?

Or maybe despair, despite the fact that we technically live in the most luxurious time and place in human history?

Did my producer offer to give me a clonopin yesterday?

That one I'm not going to answer. The point is, if you feel these things, you're not crazy.

You're simply attuned to reality.

And it's not a problem that's solvable with less screen time, meditation, or sea-mosh treatments.

My brilliant guest today, Paul Kingsnorth, argues that the reason you're feeling this

way is not this or that social media app or algorithm or culture war issue, that these are

superficial expressions of a thousand-year battle with what he calls the machine. Now, what exactly

that means you'll hear in this conversation? To personally fight the machine. Now what exactly that means you'll hear in this conversation.

To personally fight the machine, Paul has moved his family out of urban England to live off

the land in rural Ireland, where his family grows their own food, draws their water from a well,

and they homeschool their children. To learn more about his fascinating life,

you'll have to go back and listen to the Honestly episode that I did with him back in 2024.

In his new book, Against the Machine, Paul makes the argument that what this moment in history

requires is something of a rebellion.

He says, and this is radical, that the West is not dying, but already dead.

And this book is an attempt to understand how it died and how we got to this profound feeling of disquiet and more how we might actually return to true peace. The book is being billed as a

spiritual manual for dissidents in the technological age. There are few people in the world who

write and think the way Paul does. One word for it is wild, and I think another word for it is

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