Hello, podleters. Welcome back for season eight of adulting. I took a bit of a long break, but I'm excited for you to hear all the conversations I've been having, the things I've been learning and the people that I have been speaking to.

To start off, I speak to Ash Sarkar. She is a British journalist, left-willed, winged, political activist, and also the senior editor at Navarro Media, as well as teaching and lecturing at universities.

So she is very academic, very intellectual, and certainly made me feel like, God, I have no idea what I'm talking about when it comes to these issues.

She is really generous with me in this conversation, and I certainly learnt a lot from her. We spoke about the difficulty in creating a unified, left-in-vatar commas. We also spoke about communism, the way that social media plays a part in the polarization of politics.

And at the end of every episode this season, I'm asking my guests for their three favourite books. So if you're interested in those as well, I'm going to put them in the show notes.

I'm speaking to Ash, and again, she really blew me away because it really showed how to adapt them in some of these conversations.

But I hope that you learnt just as much as I do and enjoyed the conversation just as much as I did. Happy listening! Bye!

Hello and welcome to Adleting. Today I'm joined by Ash Sarkar.

Hey! How are you doing?

I'm fine. I'm a bit sleepy, but I'm sure you'll wake me up.

Okay, good. I hope I'm going to wake you up. For people who don't know who you are and what you do, could you give us an introduction to you and your work?

Ooh, okay. So my name is Ash. I'm five-foot-two in Aries from North London. I'm a communist. I'm a contributing editor at left-wing media outlet, Navarra Media.

I'm a lecturer at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. And I also do a bit of freelance writing. I've done some ghost writing, and I'm now starting to work on my own.

Oh my god, that is so exciting. Congratulations, when did you start working on that?

We're still in the super early stages of putting it together, but it felt quite urgent after the general election result, and there's a lot to make sense of.

And I thought that the thing that I want to do is explain what's going on with the culture wars, how they become so important, and what effect do they have on our political landscape?

I think that's absolutely fascinating. That's kind of like the crux that kind of suffers from what I'm completely fascinated by, which is why I love everything that you do.

And I know that this is such annoying thing to say, I'm younger than you, and I've watched so many people in interviews with you, being like using your age as a means to be like, you don't know what you're talking about, but you aren't young to have so many strings to a bone, to have so many different parts of your career.

How did you get into being this and being this person with a myriad things?

Well, you know, Fred Hampton was in his early 20s when he was assassinated.

You know, when he was killed by the FBI. So I don't think that like age is any barrier to political awareness or activity.

For me, the single biggest influence on my politics was my mom, seeing how she had been shaped by the economic conditions that we live in as a single mom, a woman of color.

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