March 24, 2024 • 57 mins
The weekly round-up of the best moments from DZ's season 330 (3/18/24-3/22/24)
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello the Internet, and welcome to this episode of The
Weekly Zeitgeist. These are some of our favorite segments from
this week, all edited together into one NonStop infotainment laugh stravaganza. Yeah, So,
without further ado, here is the Weekly Zeitgeist.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Well, we are.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Thrilled to be joined by an archaeologist and professor of
comparative archaeology. He's the author of books like What Makes
a Civilization, The Origins of Monsters, and co wrote what
I think is one of the best books of the
past decade, along with the late great David Graeber. It's
called The Dawn of Everything, a New History of Humanity.
It's an international bestseller. It's really a must read. Talk
(00:48):
about it a lot on this show.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
I read it by it just for sheer repetition of
you talking about it so much. So yes, and I'm
glad I did well. Please welcome Professor David Wengro.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 4 (01:02):
Guys, thank you. I just want to make a quick disclaim.
You know, I wrote all the really bad bits.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
The bad stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Okay, good, We'll only ask you about the bad parts. Yeah,
but I guess our.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
First question, what's the worst part of the book.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
Oh yeah, that's a really good question. What is the
worst put now?
Speaker 1 (01:23):
So, I mean, I just want to jump right into
it because we only have you for a limited time,
and I feel like I could talk to you for
twenty four hours about this book. But so your book
basically upends how we understand the history of humanity, or
at least how I did, based on a public school
education understanding of history, and the version that I had
(01:44):
learned from public school and then from a lot of
these popular nonfiction books like Guns, Germs and Steel, Better,
Angels of Our Nature, you know, sapiens. The version I
learned is that our current system is the result of
a sort of inevitable linear civilizational evolution, and this is
(02:07):
just what you're stuck with, and that's it. And those
books are written, by the way, by people who aren't
archaeologists and anthropologists like yourselves. But what does the actual
archaeological record tell us?
Speaker 4 (02:22):
The first thing I would say is that I think
all human societies do this to some degree. It's not
just those of us educated in let's say a broadly
European tradition. All humans societies tell themselves stories about how
they came to be called It meth mythology, if you like.
(02:46):
We're not unique in that it's a very human thing
to do, and sometimes we reflect more carefully than others
about what those stories really are and what we're putting
in the minds of our kids. You know, almost from
the age that they can even receive such information. And
(03:07):
it so happens that the story we by which I
do now mean those of us educated in broadly European traditions,
have been telling ourselves for a very long time, probably
more than two centuries now, hasn't actually changed very much.
It starts off with people living in these tiny bands
(03:28):
of hunter gatherers wandering around the landscape. There's no private property,
so everything is very equal and egalitarian, and then comes
sort of fall from grace.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
You know.
Speaker 4 (03:39):
It's almost a biblical story, or a story with biblical echoes,
where we start off in the garden of Eden, and
then there is that fateful moment when somebody somewhere invents agriculture, right,
and this is the great transition that changes everything about
how we relate to each other. Suddenly you have private property,
(04:02):
you can support larger populations, so cities emerge, and once
you have cities, you've got to have some kind of
central government to keep order otherwise everything is going to
fall into chaos. Then you get the origins of the state,
and by the time you get to our present world,
which is of course divided up from one end to
(04:23):
the other into nation states, there's this sense that somehow
it was all kind of inevitable. All the key moves
in the game were made so long ago, we're talking
about not even thousands, but ends of thousands of years ago,
that the most we can do these days is kind
of tinker around the edges of what we have, but
(04:46):
that essentially there is no other game in town. So
we grew up in nation states, which, as we argue
in the book, are actually politically really quite weird and
unusual structure. They combine, if you like, three basic forms
of power into one institution that we refer to as
(05:08):
the state. You know, everyone, everyone claims to live in
a nation state. If you don't make that claim, you're
in a very vulnerable position. You're either a refugee or
you know, in some way in search of an alternative identity.
But if you ask people to actually define what that is,
(05:28):
you know, what is a state? Could you give me
a short definition.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Yeah, I mean yeah, you would have to think about it.
Speaker 4 (05:36):
You would have to think about it, which is kind
of scary if you think that we you know, we
live and we grow up within these political frameworks, but
actually what are they? What do they comprise? And you know,
generally if you go to the textbooks, what you get
is a definition that looks something like this. A nation
(05:59):
state of the kind that we all grow up in
is sovereign. In other words, it commands its territory. It
has the legal right to defend its territory and to
use violence in order to do so. So nation states
are sovereign and they're inviolable, and if somebody invades your sovereignty,
(06:20):
you have the right to go to war. That's one thing.
States are complex. They're kind of complex social organism. So
you need some kind of administration or bureaucracy. Somebody has
to control knowledge at the center, just kind of keep
the wheels turning, otherwise it's all going to fall apart.
(06:41):
And then we have these things called elections, which are
supposed to be the same thing as democracy. Now, as
we know, this is not necessarily going the way that
a lot of people imagined democracy would go.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Would happen. We're not familiar, you wouldn't know about this,
but you know, we were in America.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
In some remote, exotic parts of the world, you get
this weird phenomena where the only people who can be
elected are over one hundred years old and really strange,
and they kind of get up on stage and they
can barely make it up there, and then they give
their kind of ches and they're dribbling and it's awful.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
And they have to have a personality disorder just to
get in the door. You have to like have this
weird thing where you're like, I should be in charge
of all of this, all of it.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 4 (07:34):
And then it's kind of like a grand sporting occasion
and everyone votes for their favorite team and they basically
get to do whatever they like, and yeah, this is
this is what some people have come to those democracy
And you know, if you put those three things together,
I guess you get a rough approximation the kind of
(07:56):
societies we grow up in and the kind of society
that we're educated in. And of course, like all other societies,
because we grow up in those particular frameworks, we have
a natural tendency to think of human history the same
way as if it were somehow all leading up to
this and what we're trying to do in our book,
(08:18):
me and my friend David Greeber in The Dawn of
Everything Is actually showed how different things really were from
this kind of familiar story. There's really been an incredible
flood of new information, i'd say, like mainly in the
last two or three decades that throws almost every aspect
(08:40):
of that story into dissarray. I wouldn't even know where
to begin. You're gonna have to give you some point
as it.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
What is something from your search history or we added
a new wrinkle if you'd like, what the fos reason
thing that you screencapped?
Speaker 5 (08:56):
Ooh, okay, so I'll give you both.
Speaker 6 (08:58):
Okay, the thing I googled recently because I I fumbled.
I don't really do Saint Patrick's Day since I moved here,
but these are both Saint Patrick's Day related.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Since I think it's a non holiday, like since I
moved here, since I.
Speaker 5 (09:14):
Don't respect my family.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Yeah, that's fucked up, but I did.
Speaker 6 (09:19):
I did want to pre order it for next year
because we recently we are recovering The Departed on an
upcoming episode of the Bechdel cast, and I wanted to
get the shirt that the Jack Nicholson character is killed
in the one that it just says Irish on it.
He's wearing a green T shirt that has a shamrock,
and you think it's going to say Boston, which would
(09:40):
be on the nose as it is, but it insteads
just as Irish underneath the shamrock.
Speaker 5 (09:46):
And that's the spoiler alert for a you know, fifteen
year old movie.
Speaker 6 (09:50):
He gets killed, but he he bleeds out through the
Irish shirt, and I was like, I want the Irish shirt.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
Yeah, that's really poor.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
Friends.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Is he like in disguise as or something.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
He's just that, he's.
Speaker 6 (10:05):
Never in disguise. Frank Frank, oh, Franco or whatever his
name is is the.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
He's He's Frank Costello.
Speaker 5 (10:15):
He's Frank Costello. Yeah he is.
Speaker 6 (10:17):
He is Irish through and through, and he doesn't care
if it's on his shirt, Which brings me to the
thing I screenshotted because I do think you know the
fact that every movie about Boston takes place at either
Harvard or in like three blocks of Southee. It troubles me.
There's so much more out there. But I every year
on Saint Patrick's Day. I like to fondly remember this
(10:39):
was nine years ago that in twenty fifteen, I was
working at the Boston Globe and I did a piece
where I hung out at a bar in Southey all
day on Saint Patrick's Day and wrote about what I saw,
which was people being unbelievably fucked up. And then the
(11:01):
day after that was published, there was a column published
in The Boston Herald that said that I was that
quoted two to three different political officials calling me a
bigot against against Irish.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
I just it was.
Speaker 6 (11:20):
It was really fun, headlined true life, I was a
bartender in Southe. Oh yeah, I was like Shadowy a bartender.
The post was written by Boston dot com writer Jmie Loftis.
Every day is a drunk day in Southie, but Saint
Patti's Day runs by a completely separate set of laws,
wrote Loftus, whose website bio says she is also a
stand up and sketch performer. Her take on life in
(11:43):
Southey didn't sit well with two of the neighborhood's most
prominent residents. I'm surprised such bigoted views are still tolerated
at Boston dot Com, said US Representative Stephen Lynch. Wow wow,
it's very disrespectful, added former Mayor Raymond L.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
Floyd.
Speaker 5 (12:00):
We respected.
Speaker 6 (12:01):
We experienced the finest day of our life yesterday with family,
faith and friends.
Speaker 5 (12:07):
We could dismiss that these comments as from uninformed people.
Speaker 6 (12:10):
They don't know us. We're simple, ordinary people from South Boston.
Flynn said. It's unfortunate some people judge us, but you
can't control that. I wish they'd know us better. Mayor
Martin J.
Speaker 5 (12:22):
Walsh declined comment.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
Oh wow, they just laid comment. How did your career
ever recover from your fucking congressman?
Speaker 2 (12:34):
I flamed you.
Speaker 6 (12:36):
I was at his looking at his political record is
pretty hilarious because he's just like a famously not a
great person.
Speaker 5 (12:44):
But yeah, no, I mean I was crying. I called
my dad crying.
Speaker 6 (12:48):
I was like, they roasted my ass in the paper,
and he is like, no, this is the best thing
that's ever happened to you.
Speaker 5 (12:55):
It's funny.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Family.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Yeah, yes, that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
I mean you were crying.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
I remember that day as well as Irish person, and
my whole family was crying as well, because because you
wrote about us because it was disrespect disrespectful.
Speaker 5 (13:13):
The best day of your life with family, had the best.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
Day of our life like such an overstatement, like such
a unhinged way to respond, like it's truly like a
five year old like being like, this was the best
day of my life. And then you ruined it with
this comment that people in Boston South he likes to drink.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
What is that? Even where do you even get this
stuff from? He said?
Speaker 3 (13:40):
The land Up guy, the guy who the guy who
assaulted Iranian American students in the seventies.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Yeah, so fucking wild. I mean, yeah, his record.
Speaker 6 (13:51):
Is gross, like it's yeah, but I'm big at it against.
Speaker 3 (13:56):
The Irish even though he was he was a said
for assaulting six Iranian students, okay, right in the seventies, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
It was like in seventies.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
It wasn't a place in the seventies. See were dropped,
they were rocked.
Speaker 5 (14:14):
Good impression of Barkwalder.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
Oh god, if.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
I had been there on that day that she was
shadowing that bar turn, that things would have gone down
a little differently.
Speaker 7 (14:24):
Bro.
Speaker 5 (14:24):
Boston dot com wouldn't even exist.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
It would have been written an article about how I
was working out at three three in the morning.
Speaker 6 (14:31):
I mean, yeah, the tenor of that story would have
changed quite a bit if Mark Wahpber started doing push
ups in the middle.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
So what's something you think is underrated?
Speaker 8 (14:41):
Underrated?
Speaker 9 (14:41):
I'd say changing your barber between every haircut. You know, wow,
I get, I call, I call, but stick for that
at home because Chelsea says, why would you do this?
This is a decision that will have a bearing on
your self worth and you know how you feel about
your career. Yeah, yeah, and I can appreciate it, but
you know, it's kind of I just see, I'm an opportunitist.
(15:03):
I see a shop and I go in, and you know,
it's if it goes badly, yeah, it's disappointing, but it's
also kind of funny.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
Yeah, it's an adventure. You can.
Speaker 9 (15:12):
I but I had a new one the other day
and I'm like, you know, I'm I'm going I'm fitting
out hard up the front now. And I was like,
I actually, I'm going back on my own underrated thing
because I was like, oh, this guy, like I said,
I said.
Speaker 8 (15:26):
To him, I said, it's crunched him up there. Let's
true carefully and the.
Speaker 9 (15:29):
Guys like you know, usually the wire. Yeah, usually they're like,
oh it's okay, you know, don't worry. But this guy's like, yeah,
don't worry. It comes to everyone. Yeah, you don't even
going to give me a bone?
Speaker 2 (15:41):
Right, yeah, right right right?
Speaker 3 (15:43):
Yeah. Brother, He's like, yeah, man, it looks like we're
in the ninety fifth minute here.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 8 (15:48):
Yeah, just like good too.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
But it is an adventure getting a haircut from someone new.
Like it's just like, turns out I didn't know what
I looked like. Yeah, look like a different person if
you just changed the framing everything about me.
Speaker 9 (16:04):
Yeah. Yeah, that's crazy. But you know I don't I
don't want to. I don't want to go bull that's happening.
Speaker 8 (16:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 9 (16:14):
If I have a good year, I think I'll get
those Biden plugs. Oh it looks.
Speaker 8 (16:19):
Like it shuts down some of your other like neural faculties.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Yeah, I want to go.
Speaker 8 (16:27):
When to buy as junk? I got them?
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Yeah? Craft versus body rejected. The craft versus is my favorite.
What's something you think is overrated? Overrated?
Speaker 8 (16:41):
Having a giant penis?
Speaker 2 (16:47):
I think I could create problems. I don't know.
Speaker 9 (16:49):
I mean I don't actually have one to those, so
I'm just gonna go with the joke. But you don't
have a JAS today. Yeah, A lot of it, A
lot of it that's coming your wise currently in a
melting scrubby Sunday.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
I needed that fresh Kiwi muscle Man.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
They've shipped it over double quick, so much more roomy,
you know, Yeah, because they don't tighten the skin.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Yeah, bubbles lowers and.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
Yeah, I can't sleep on my stomach without hearing light pops.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Sounds like packing bubbles.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 8 (17:38):
We love to laugh us, we have fun.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
What is something you think is overrated?
Speaker 7 (17:45):
I'm realizing as I say this one, I'd written it
down a thousand percent. Sure I have done this already,
but it remains true fucking taking care of yourself. I
feel like I've been like like doing like just old
man mobility stretches in the morning, drinking drinking water a
(18:05):
lot more and the returns are marginal.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
I'm not saying it, but the returns are.
Speaker 7 (18:12):
And listen, there's true man, with your effort, it takes.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
It's a lot more like that I want to do.
We'll say.
Speaker 7 (18:25):
I'm just like, oh my god, I'm going to follow
a fucking Instagram reel of how to stretch when you're old,
and I like do it and I but here's the thing.
I'm not saying it's bad. I'm saying it's overrated.
Speaker 8 (18:40):
It's it's there.
Speaker 3 (18:41):
Are there are some returns, but not are you still boxing?
Speaker 2 (18:47):
No?
Speaker 3 (18:47):
No, the returns better boxing? Did you feel better from
when you're training boxing?
Speaker 2 (18:53):
Oh, wonderful question.
Speaker 7 (18:56):
I mean, technically speaking, no, and I will say I
will say it's clear. It's clear that these are part
and parcel of things that happened whilst boxing are affecting
my need for mobility strutching. But no, I mean I
felt destroyed after boxing, but like not boxing and stretching
(19:18):
and drinking water, I only feel a little bit better.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
Interesting, as I've gotten older, like a lot of the
things that are supposed to invigorate me, like doing the
plunge or drinking enough water or like working out in
the morning, now instead just make me tired. I've like
started to be like I don't think Donald Trump is
like right about many things, but his thing about like
(19:43):
how exercise like waste the energy and you only have
a certain number of heart beats in your life. Right, Yeah,
I see where I see how he got there, because
exercise is exhausting.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
My body is old as fuck.
Speaker 3 (19:59):
Yeah. Yeah, long term though, I'm sure you'll you'll you'll
appreciate it long term though, because even the mobility stuff,
you're not gonna turn stiff.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Andrew, you're shaking your head no vigorously. Here's why you don't.
Speaker 3 (20:12):
Think there's any long term But if every older person
in my in my life has told me, man, at
the very least, fucking stretch because it will become.
Speaker 8 (20:20):
I agree with you.
Speaker 7 (20:22):
But I here's what I What I mean though, is
when you don't do it, you like have some like
you know, you have some level of regret because you
see you kind of like imagine and remember when you
were more limber and you feel yourself being old and
stiff now. But if you do stretch, you still wind
up pretty stiff, and all you do you're like you're
(20:44):
like a little more limber. Of course, again, I'm not
saying it's useless. I'm just saying the ro o I
is not what i'd hoped.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Sure, you feel a little better, but I don't think
you feel enough better to justify it.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
I also think the answer is just like everybody's body
is so different, you know, like, yeah, the cold plunch
thing really seems to work for some people, and for me,
it's like somebody just like fucking shook the ship out.
You kind of are you going to a place to
plunge you?
Speaker 3 (21:20):
No, no, no, no. We just have a pool that is.
Speaker 7 (21:24):
Cold, but you're not doing the ship where you're putting
like ice in like little I'm.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
Not cry like that, yeah, not cryo fucking myself, but
it's still just like I feel tired, and I'm like yeah,
because it just like flooded me with all this fucking
I don't know whatever the blood chemicals are that when
your body's like fu what you know, like stop it stop,
(21:52):
and then my body is like yeah, well that sucked.
Speaker 7 (21:55):
All right, Yeah I need to recover for forty eight hours.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
Yeah exactly, I think.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
But yet I think it's also revealing that maybe Andrew,
you're one of the like the rare people who doesn't
have to do much to still feel okay all the time.
Who because I am also kind of in that world
too where I'm like, nah, Brian doing shit. I'm like,
evolutionarily speaking, they're like you had to I was like,
is laziness an actual positive trait evolutionarily speaking, Yeah, probably,
(22:27):
but I'm a little both.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Yeah, because I.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
Have friends who need it and they're like, no, I'm
fucked up, like I have to. Yeah, And I look
at them, I'm like, you have to do something.
Speaker 8 (22:36):
I do feel like I don't want to.
Speaker 7 (22:37):
I don't want the listeners and you miles to misunderstand me.
I do feel like shit. I'm just saying. All I'm
saying is the amount that I feel like shit isn't
changing my stress time.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Yeah. Well, I'm here to say I'm one of the
physically exalted few.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Yeah. You can just dump garbage in
your body not do anything. I'll go back down. I mean,
I don't know what blood work says, but I don't do.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
Blood. Blood work lies, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
Blood work lies, bleeding. The follow up full circle, All right,
let's take your quick break.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
We'll be right back, and.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
We're back and yeah, I mean, so, you know, we
were talking about European settlers encountering Native American ideals, and
you know, by our definition, they were further along, but
it seems like they were also further along in terms
(23:46):
of like they had. They were constantly going back and
forth between more authoritarian less authoritarian forms of government, I mean,
and there was just this vast kind of galaxy of
different ways that societies were organized.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
So yeah, this is.
Speaker 4 (24:04):
One of the kind one of the things we discovered,
I guess in the book that surprised us and kind
of intrigued us and actually inspired us to really develop
this project is that the whole way we think about
humans in societies of the distant past is basically wrong.
You know, we begin with these categories like people were
(24:25):
either this or they were that. You know, they were
either hunter gatherers or they were farmers. They were either
living in bands or in tribes or in chiefdoms. And
actually what we found in the evidence of our fields
in archaeology and anthropology is that this really isn't the case. Actually,
most human societies, most of the history of our species
(24:48):
have been kind of playing with the clay. You know,
there'll be one of these things for part of the year,
then they'll switch it around. They might be very hierarchical
in their organization. For one part of the year. You
might have a police with coercive powers and whip people
or imprison them. But then these powers melt away, and
this often has to do with the actual form that
(25:10):
human society takes, which is not stable. It fluctuates. People
move around with the changing seasons, they change the size
of their groups. There'll be times of year when you
have a great abundance of meat and other resources. There'll
be other times that are lean. And people have generally
adapted their societies to these oscillating conditions. It's like putting
(25:34):
a mask on and taking it off where you can
have You don't start off with these purely egalitarian societies.
There are always going to be individuals who love power,
and there are always going to be individuals who want
to be flunkies. And you know that is actually very
hard to explain. You know, at another level is individual psychology.
(25:56):
But let's assume that there will always be a mixture
of people in any human group, even a family or
a household, some of whom tend towards that direction and
some of whom, let's say, are more into the caring
and sharing. The question is what do you do with
those people? What kind of institutions do you build. Do
you build institutions that are going to raise those ambitious
(26:19):
competitive types to the top, or do you create institutions
that are kind of level things out. And what we
discovered is that actually a huge number of societies on
all continents of the world have kind of done both simultaneously,
so they will not suppress hierarchy all of the time.
You might let it out in some spectacular ritual performance.
(26:41):
This is why we get these things in human history
that people often regard as mysteries or puzzles, the kind
of things that the makers of certain Netflix series like
to call all great mysteries of the ancient world.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
That's got a mystery. Aliens did it right. Aliens built
all those things, I agree.
Speaker 4 (26:58):
All the stuff that Aliens right, like Stonehenge and Egypt,
where you know, first you start out by sort of
characterizing the society as terribly, terribly primitive, and then you say,
but look, here's this incredibly mathematically geographic, geometrically sophisticated monument.
How could these idiots possibly create? Which the answer is
(27:21):
obviously they were not idiots. You know, these are people
who could at times create these incredibly impressive cultural creations,
but then at other times, you know, would actually morph
into different forms of society. This is what the anthropologist
Mussel Moss called the double morphology of society. You don't
(27:46):
just have one system of law or one system of
religion or one systems of politics. You switch things around. Now,
this was kind of a revelation to us because it
changes the whole question. You know, the big question of
human history is the days of the Enlightenments and Jean
Jacques Rousseau and people like that was about the origins
of inequality. How did we lose that original equality and freedom?
(28:11):
Whereas actually, starting from the earliest evidence that we can find,
you have to ask a different question. You have to
ask not so much what was the origins of inequality,
but how did the genie of inequality get out of
the bottle? Like when did those cages come down? The
(28:31):
restricted hierarchy which would always have been there, and that
was always the relations between adults and kids, in relations
of gender, in relations of domestic servitude. You know, the
idea that we've ever lived in societies of equals is
a little bizarre. So the question becomes more about, you know,
(28:53):
when did those cages break down? When did things like
private property and and patriarchy escape from those cages and
effectively come to dominate almost every waking moment of our
human lives.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
Yeah, they didn't like that. When we imagine them.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
There's this kind of bias that you identify frequently in
the book, which is like this idea that, like you
just said, those people are idiots.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
They didn't.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
It was primitive, so they didn't have these elaborate systems
to keep all of these impulses that today are causing
problems for us under control. They couldn't have like just
you know, we refuse to look back and you know,
from them, because.
Speaker 4 (29:41):
You see that thing the other day. One of the
authors you mentioned who wrote the Sapiens book, Yeah, you've
all Noah Harari, I think, yeah, yeah, there was. Someone
sent me a clip of an interview just recently, just
the other week, which went viral, and I can't remember
who was into being Nessahraari, but he said this thing
(30:04):
that annoyed a lot of people. It went roughly like this,
I hope I'm not misquoting, but he said. I think
the interview asked him something like, it's often said that,
you know, we're living in a time of great uncertainty
right now? Do you believe that's true? And he started
off as saying, well, everyone always says that about the
(30:24):
period of history that they live in. But today it's
actually true, for the first time in history, we have
no idea what to tell out it. You know, we
don't know what technologies are going to be relevant to
their lives in twenty years time. Are you falling for this?
Speaker 10 (30:41):
Yeah, exactly right, concern that's what you're believing this is.
And then he starts talking about what things were like
back in the day, back in the Neolithic period or
the Middle Ages. You know, there were certain things you
couldn't predict, like when the Vikings or the Mongols were
going to come through and radio settlement, but you knew
that you would still be growing wheat and raising sheep
(31:05):
in twenty years time. There were these basic things that
you could tell people that you knew were going to
be relevant. But today all of that's gone. We just
have no clue what's going to be right. Are you
buying any of this?
Speaker 1 (31:18):
No, I probably would have before reading your book. But
your book does a really good job of dispelling this notion.
Speaker 4 (31:26):
That's really telling. I mean, regardless, you know, even if
you haven't read that book, the implication is actually kind
of fascinating because it implies that there's no connection between
what we teach our kids and what's actually going to
happen in the next twenty years, right, right, Yeah, do
you know what I mean? It's like this idea that
(31:46):
you're kind of floating blindly into the future and you
could tell the kids any old thing, but all that
other stuff's going to happen anyway, whereas in fact, you know,
this is obviously nonsense. I mean, if we teach our
kids people didn't always raise, they didn't always grow crops,
you know, right, And actually, as we show in the book,
these were very conscious processes which sometimes people actually rejected,
(32:09):
you know, they decided they tried it on, they tried
it on the size, and they decided to drop it again.
So it's partly this idea that actually goes back to
people like Rousseau, that we're always kind of floating blindly
into these traps which we're making for ourselves, but we
can never quite see them coming. Yeah, she is really,
(32:31):
I think, particularly right now in this historical moment, apart
from being just kind of wrong, is actually a pretty
dangerous way to look at the world, because you know,
you can kind of put your hands up and say, well,
tell our kids any old rubbish.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
Right right, Yeah, And just briefly so, Russeau and Hobbes
are kind of the two versions we get of that
narrative we were talking about earlier.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
With Rousseau.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
It's like we were living in these happy panitarian groups
and then we gave it it's the Harari like sapiens
thing where and then we decide to.
Speaker 4 (33:06):
I think that's roughly although you know, I got to
tell you, Rousseau is way more interesting, Oh for sure. Yeah,
you know, Rousseau was not about fatalism. Rousseau is not
about telling us that there's always going to be this
boot stamping on your face and on your kid's face.
Is Roussel is about revolution. Roussel is about, you know,
(33:27):
trying to understand what was this liberty that we lost.
You can just clude what that might really be like.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
And then Hobbes is on the Pinker side.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
Hobbs is like before, like, if you think this is bad,
you should see what it used to be like. Man,
everybody would just like kill each other, and then we
had to like get these laws to keep people in.
Speaker 4 (33:48):
Yeah, and I think Professor Pinker is very forthright about this.
He actually refers to himself as a neo hobbs.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Here, right, and he's like, and if you just look
at the record of what it you used to be,
like you'll see and then he just like quotes a
bunch of like widely debunked bullshit about how violent everything
used to be, and doesn't.
Speaker 4 (34:10):
It Well, this is what my friend David used to
refer to as the extreme center.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
Yes, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4 (34:17):
You know, you get it in politics, you get it
in academias, like these individuals who present themselves as very
rational centrists, and then you actually look really closely at
what they're saying and it's really out there.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
Yeah, I mean it's pretty white supremacist. Like he just
keeps talking about the like how we were saved by
these enlightenment European thinkers and then like writing the you know,
erasing the Native American influence from everything, and it's just
the story of how we like trained ourselves to have
(34:56):
better and better manners and that led to lower murder
rates if you're not counting World War Two. But yeah,
I don't want to get too bogged down by Pinker,
but it just I think there's there's just so many
examples in the book of these stories that upend this
idea that these civilizations were not complex, that they weren't
(35:19):
trying different things out, that they weren't like there's a
I think it's a Huron system of beliefs around dreams
that you cover in the book. It was like really
similar to Freud's theory, but almost more interesting because it
like doesn't go in all the weird.
Speaker 4 (35:35):
Like, yeah, I mean directions we have of this. It's
called unin Dunk and it goes by way I mean
centuries before Freud. Yeah, where actually dreams are one of
the only contexts in which it does seem like you
could have almost the kind of power of command if
(35:56):
you dreamed something. It could be a particuli object or
a relationship you wish to have. If it came to
you in a dream, people almost had to try and
make it come true. So we have these descriptions of
the I think it's the winter seasons from the late
(36:17):
seventeenth early eighteenth century of Huron societies, where people would
gather around and try and make somebody's dream come true.
There was a compulsion to do this, and they would
do this by interpreting the symbolism of the dream in
much the way that Freud was credited with an enormous breakthrough,
one of the great intellectual breakthroughs of the twentieth century,
(36:39):
Freudian psychoanalysis. They have it in their own form. The
major difference is that they do it communally. You don't
have this notion of the individual therapist and the patient.
Society gathers around the individual and supports them in much
the same way that you know, some of the same
(37:00):
kinds of hallucinogenics or psychoactive substances that we tend to
we if we ingest them. You know, people do it
as largely as individuals would actually have been done in
a very communal context, with people caressing you, supporting you,
holding your hand, kind of taking you through it as
a group. But I mean, I guess that the example
(37:24):
of these dreams and dreamings, you know, teaching teaches us
is that would be very foolish to dismiss those forms
of knowledge as somehow alien or exotic, because actually, you know,
we find them within our own culture.
Speaker 3 (37:40):
I feel like that's sort of one of the things
that we're so limited because we've dismissed so much of
this wisdom or papered it over with sort of like
revisionist versions of what had occurred or what things were
said and what those ideas were. And I think that's
why it's really important too, because as we as people
tend to look at our own systems of oppression as
being fixed and it's like, well, I don't know what
(38:02):
you can do. It's just it's just all it was
always kind of trending this way. I think there's these
examples in your book that just show a if we
can overcome our sort of perspective of like, well, these
people think this is like old ways man, and like
they didn't know what they were doing. But there are
examples I think of, you know, Teoti Hua Khan where
you talk about how that is a shift where people
(38:22):
saw what was going on with their civilization and actually
decided to change it to a completely different system. Can
you can you just sort of kind of talk us
through that process, because I think it's very interesting for
especially for us who look at what we're like sort
of these structures we live under now and think, well,
I don't know what to do.
Speaker 2 (38:40):
It is what it is.
Speaker 4 (38:42):
Yeah, I mean there seems to be a whole strand
of I guess what we would call a republican tradition
or sort of anti monarchy tradition in the deep history
of Mexican societies and especially urban societies ancient cities. Tetti
Wakhan is one of the and most spectacular manifestations of this.
(39:03):
So we're in the Valley of Mexico now around the
time of Christ, so the years sort of the year
zero one, whatever, in the first few centuries of the
common era. You get this extraordinary city forming in the
Valley of Mexico with a lot of refugees, it seems
from surrounding areas there was a lot of volcanic activity
(39:23):
at the time. There's a lot of destruction going on.
People flood into this site and they form a city
with hundreds of thousands of residents, and they start doing
all the things that netflix would probably lead you to
expect of an ancient city. They build great pyramids, that's
the Pyramid of the Sun, Pyramid of the Moon, the
Temple of the Feathered Serpent. But then, rather fascinatingly, after
(39:46):
a couple of centuries of doing this, they change course
in the most dramatic way. They stop building these great monuments,
and all of that labor and collective investment that went
in to creating them, goes into something else, and we
know what that something else was because archaeologists mapped it.
Speaker 2 (40:06):
In one of.
Speaker 4 (40:07):
The first really great urban surveys done by archaeologists, they
found this incredible system of public housing and it goes
in a grid. It's incredibly carefully planned, and it goes
in an orthogonal grid from one end of the city
to the other, and it houses, as far as we
can tell, most of the city's vast multi ethnic population,
(40:30):
multi ethnic, multilingual, in very comfortable circumstances. When archaeologists first
discovered these kind of communal villas, they actually thought they
were palaces, and then they realized that basically everybody is
living in a palace, and talking about really beautiful plastered
walls with mural subfloor drainage systems, maybe four or five
(40:52):
nuclear families living in one of these compounds or apartment houses,
and we can reconstruct a diet using the kind of
techniques that archaeologists use these days, and show that this
was an incredibly prosperous site that actually knocked in equality
on the head for hundreds of years on an urban scale,
(41:12):
which is pretty mind blowing.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
Yeah. Yeah, these are the civilizations that that we were
viewing as primitive, and they've already gone through the process
of having this authoritarian set up and then like overthrowing
it and building a civilization that up and running a
large city that's bottom up, that's right.
Speaker 4 (41:31):
I mean, they did actually have some kind of writing system,
it seems that to wak on, but nobody has really
been able to decipher it, and even if we could,
it may not give us the kind of information we
would really love because just imagine the kind of discussions
that are going Imagine the kind of philosophical discoveries and
movements that would have accompanied transition like this, which we
(41:53):
can only reconstruction the material relates. Yeah, imagine all the
intellectual stuff. And actually we do get some insight into
this from a later period when the Conquistados arrive. They
actually stumble upon cities that are organized in pretty egalitarian ways,
and they describe some of them, including ones with full
(42:14):
blown of parliaments, at a time when you don't really
have very much of that going on in Europe.
Speaker 2 (42:19):
Yeah. Actually, let's take one more quick break, will be right.
Speaker 11 (42:22):
Back, and we're back and sing it out.
Speaker 2 (42:36):
The Titanic's been in the news for years now.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
Since who knows when, probably like right after they were like,
we're sending an unsinkable ship across the Atlantic.
Speaker 2 (42:48):
I feel like there's already big news when they said that,
but boy, when it actually sunk the first time, that
must have been Wow. Man, hundred and twelve year.
Speaker 3 (42:59):
News streak, this things on. Yeah, I can't believe it. Yeah, unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
So it's been in the news recently because, first of all,
there's a guy in Florida who has a room full
of nearly three thousand Titanic VHS tapes and multiple homemade
Jack Dawson fuck mannequins.
Speaker 3 (43:15):
Oh yeah, are manniquins?
Speaker 2 (43:19):
Yeah they are. They are anatomically incorrect. Just the neck, Yeah,
this one looks like Grady dick On, like fucking Draft
Night with the long neck.
Speaker 9 (43:31):
Well you could. Yeah, who's gonna tell him that? You know,
he's been working on this. This is one thing he's doing.
Speaker 3 (43:35):
Ye.
Speaker 2 (43:35):
Yeah, this is this guy who said it.
Speaker 3 (43:38):
He said Titanic has always been my favorite film, and
I've converted my home office in Florida into my personal
Titanic museum. The two thousand, six hundred and eighty two
tapes cover my walls like wallpaper. I have my own
Jack Dawson mannequin too. What are the other two things?
Speaker 2 (43:53):
Then? If he only has one mannequin, I think.
Speaker 9 (43:56):
That it was based on a true story. This guy
doesn't even he's not even a fan of the boat.
He just likes the movie.
Speaker 1 (44:02):
He's a fan of only the VHS's yea, yeah, never
seen it.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
I just like these little tapes they come in the
double tape box. I think it's kind of neat.
Speaker 1 (44:13):
That was a fun thing at one point on the Internet,
having like seeing people on social media, like young people
find out that Titanic was based on a true story,
like wait.
Speaker 12 (44:25):
What are you fucking will there like yeah, way no,
they like one about the James Cameron one with the
with the boat thinking that, yeah, no, tell.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
Me Avatar wasn't based on a real story. Okay, sure, right.
Speaker 9 (44:42):
So this guy Clive Palma, yeah, he's also a Titanic
fan if it didn't.
Speaker 1 (44:48):
Huge Titanic fan, and he is relaunching, so he's a
fan of the boat itself, just the Yeah, he is
relaunching his Titanic two. The two is typically using Roman
numerals project despite the fact that his plans to pinstangely
recreate the doomed cruise ship have failed twice before, Not
(45:10):
to mention, people might be a tad warry of any
Titanic based tourism promoted by reckless billionaires. Yea, these days,
I feel like, wasn't that that was the last one
was really bad?
Speaker 2 (45:24):
Good?
Speaker 8 (45:25):
Isn't it like a bunch of people whole life?
Speaker 2 (45:27):
Yep?
Speaker 9 (45:28):
Yep, exactly. We don't have enough life rafts. There are
engineering problems.
Speaker 2 (45:35):
Everything that will be exactly the same. And then we'll
just see if.
Speaker 9 (45:41):
Annoyed he's gonna be when he's gonna try and sell
this thing into an iceberg that has melted, it's like, yeah.
Speaker 3 (45:47):
Like the fuck just right for a slushy yeah, or
they're pretty soon next you're like, oh man, they're bringing
back United Flight ninety three. If you guys want to
hop on that, it could be really fucking cool. Mark
Wahlberg's on there though, He's like, yeah, don't worry, folks.
Speaker 9 (46:05):
This hits a lot of intriguing chick points, you know, Like,
I think anyone who's watched the movie and being stoned
enough is on board with what's happening here.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
I'm in on this one. Yeah, I watched the movie
not Stoned, and I'm kind of like, I would all
things being equal, if I like had just ridiculous wealth,
I would probably go on this for.
Speaker 3 (46:27):
Some critism, But then would you stay in steerage because
I like that he's also like trying to make just
even every class sort of like be you know, historically accurate.
So third class that serves stew and mash and I'm like, yeah,
that sounds all right, Yeah, man, this stews sounds good. Unfortunately,
I've always identified in that movie most with Billy Zayn's character,
(46:48):
so that's probably what I'd be doing, just Billy Zay
in it up fully, Hell yeah, yelling at the people
in Steerage and this is I mean, this is so
it's so raise him and like idiotic.
Speaker 9 (47:02):
It's it's kind of a nice you know, it's a
nice it's a nice use of a billionaires time and resource.
It's a waste of energy, and of course it could
go to something a lot more constructive, but you just
got to know that that's off the table from the outset.
So it's like, instead of trying to get himself back
into Australian Parliament or publing a bunch of money, which
I'm sure he's doing in the background anyway. And to
(47:22):
you know, the Conservative Party is it's like, if you're
going to just stand up here and be like, I
got this insane vanity project.
Speaker 8 (47:28):
I want to rebuild a boat, the most famous.
Speaker 9 (47:31):
Boat that's saying yeah, good on you, bro, Yeah, go
for it.
Speaker 1 (47:36):
It's really Yeah, Like I think I don't like, I
don't know enough about this. I'm just kind of finding
out about Clive Palmer. I do think this is a
level of imagination and fun that is beyond Donald Trump.
Like Donald Trump would never he would never be like, yeah,
we're going to do everything the same. He'd be like
(47:58):
everything's going to be gold. Yeah, yeah, gold Titanic, and
it will only serve it will only serve Trump steaks,
you know, like last so quickly. Whereas like just the
idea of sticking to all the details of this is
actually kind of fun.
Speaker 2 (48:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (48:15):
I also just like to like his explanation, like you've
been kind of doing this project off and on, Like
what's the difference. He said, the plan is more real
than ever because quote, I've got more money.
Speaker 2 (48:24):
Now.
Speaker 1 (48:28):
Let's just say the pandemic was very, very good to
meet on.
Speaker 9 (48:32):
Yeah, yeah, he made I think he was a real
estate agent and then he retired at twenty nine. Was
his in you know, so he got he got rich
at the right time in the right place. I think
he's you know, flipping houses in the eighties or something. Yeah,
I just think it's a it's a fun, cartoonish old
style of being a billionaire or a billionaire. You know,
(48:53):
it's the more timely association with the money. Like if
that's all he's wanted to do this whole time, power
to him. It's not he's a bad guy, but he's
doing something cool.
Speaker 3 (49:02):
Yeah, he's probably a massive piece of shit and.
Speaker 9 (49:05):
He is undoubtedly this guy is was he like doing
coal mining or something and he's like involved in mining too.
He will have got into mining. He real you know,
like it's it's ridiculous. He's a real estate agent. He's
a real estate agent at the right time. He got
rich by circumstance. And then that abused people with the
(49:26):
self belief that they are intelligent operators. And yeah, I
know how the world works because they were just in
a specific moment in time and they got one thing right,
and the flowing effect was that they are suddenly ultra wealthy,
and they're like, you know, money does not correlate to
intelligence at all, But tried telling that to a billionaire.
Speaker 2 (49:46):
We'll see if he has if he goes through with
his other plan of doing the Challenger too with he
so his other idea that he's had in the past, well,
in twenty eleven, he bought a prestigious off resort which
was home to the Australian PGA, and filled it with
animatronic dinosaurs, including a life sized t Rex between the
(50:10):
ninth Green and the tenth Green. That's right again, like
this is fucking awesome. I love that.
Speaker 9 (50:17):
The movies he's going for the ones Titanic and it
goes so yeah, yeah, or even Jurassic Park was like
that's a good idea, you know, the midster Jurassic Park
is not. We should have dinosaur parks. Yeah, because like
this boat was awesome.
Speaker 1 (50:38):
You just saw the first the first half of like
every movie and oh yeah, he goes, yeah, right, they
get to Jurassic Park.
Speaker 2 (50:45):
He's like, I've seen enough enough.
Speaker 8 (50:47):
Maybe you know they get on the boat. He's like yeah, boats, boats, boats.
Speaker 2 (50:51):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (50:52):
He's like, no, I have an idea we need fucking
dinosaurs on the golf courses. That's where Hammond went wrong.
Speaker 9 (50:58):
Who knows more about golf course and donosos some with
ten billion dollars or someone who's watching the whole.
Speaker 3 (51:04):
Movie like that, he was called palmer Saurus. It's like
not even like the name of a park. He just
called it palmer.
Speaker 2 (51:14):
That's good.
Speaker 9 (51:14):
See because again Trump would be Trump dinosaur or you
know right, he's trying something right.
Speaker 1 (51:22):
He also the dinosaur, the life sized t rex he
named Jeff and then yeah, Jeff, he said, claimed Jeff
is just the first taste of Palmersaurus. An outdoor exhibit
of one hundred and sixty two scale robotic dinosaurs that roar, slink, sluggishly,
moved their limbs and slowly gnashed their teeth.
Speaker 3 (51:45):
Can't be too much of a distraction on the golf course,
you know what I mean? That's what he's still still
there's still a sense of decorum out there when someone's
trying to put ooh it's staring at the t rigs.
Speaker 1 (51:58):
But the reason he's referred to as Australia is Trump
beyond being a you know, quote unquote billionaire who's lost
his grasp of reality. He's also gotten into politics and
he's a former NP. Yeah, launched a campaign with the
slogan make Australia great it was never great before, so
(52:19):
that they ca.
Speaker 2 (52:21):
Yeah, yeah, there's an honesty there. Yeah. But I just
also like that he's he's so like hair brained that
he fully went in on the fucking hydroxy chlorical Yes,
and by ten imported tens of millions of doses of
H hydroxychlorical when to donate to the Australian government quote
as enthusiasm for the drug. Waned, Wait what happened? But
(52:45):
what's going on with this market? I thought I understood markets.
I'm allionaire.
Speaker 3 (52:49):
Oh the enthusiasm's waning or it was horseshit to begin with,
I'm rather horse paced to begin with, sorry, thank you? Yeah,
I said five million doses had to be destroyed because
no one wanted to and clean them at the airport.
Speaker 2 (53:01):
So I just love that. It's also like really fucking
terrible swings and missus too. It's not like this sort
of like Koch Brothers tape shit.
Speaker 3 (53:09):
It's like no palm resaurus, that's Jeff hydroxychlorin millions of doses.
Speaker 2 (53:14):
Oh, No, one wants them.
Speaker 9 (53:15):
Whatever he's he has, like, while all this is happening,
he has taken time out of his busy schedule being
a fun sort of style hare brain billionaire to disrupt
progress in Australia in a variety of where I think
he pubbed a lot of money. They to referend him
on whether or not they should have an Indigenous voice
in Parliament, the vote yes referendum or vote no, you know,
(53:36):
to the whole country. It was it's a flaid process.
He sunk a bunch of his money into the no
campaign to say Indigenous, Indigenous popular shouldn't have representation.
Speaker 8 (53:43):
Yeah, so he's he's not you know, it's not all that.
Speaker 9 (53:46):
When yeah, the country voted no, it was a very
devastating moment for Australia. And so, you know, when he's
it's important that his brain remains flooded with these sort
of fun distracts because when he's not working on his
vanity projects, he's full xenophobia.
Speaker 8 (54:05):
Yeah he's not even xenophobia.
Speaker 2 (54:07):
Yeah yeah, yeah, you're you're the colonist and.
Speaker 9 (54:10):
His core he's a bad guy, but on the surface,
on the right day, he's probably quite a good chat.
Speaker 3 (54:16):
That's then I think that's sort of like the thing
that makes these kinds of characters like effective. It's like
they're like, no, they're actually advocating for some evil shit.
They're like, no, man, dude, he wants to build fucking
he likes t rexes and shit.
Speaker 2 (54:28):
It's called Jeff Yeah like that.
Speaker 3 (54:31):
It's like the like George Bush, Like you know, Bush
two really gave us that taste of that where they're like,
this guy's a fucking danger and everything. It's like, dude,
he's just a goof man, don't worry. Yeah, it's like
he's destroying the Okay.
Speaker 2 (54:45):
Yeah, he's a bit of a laugh though.
Speaker 1 (54:47):
Keeps pitching me on a public transport overhaul where all
the buses blow up on if they go under fifty five.
Speaker 2 (54:54):
Miles per hour.
Speaker 9 (54:55):
He's trying to get a blimp to fly between Australia
and New Zealand. It's called that the Pamaburg Tube.
Speaker 1 (55:08):
He's also so the thing that happens with billionaires is
they get rich, become convinced that they're right about everything,
and they're like they deserve to be rich because they're
the smartest person who's ever lived. And then they're so
rich at that point that nobody can tell them otherwise. Yeah,
And so for instance, he did the hydroxychloroquin thing during
(55:32):
the pandemic. Also tried to sue the government over COVID
related travel restrictions. Has bankrolled multiple lawsuits contesting COVID vaccine requirements. Incidentally,
when he did catch COVID, he got double pneumonia as
a result and had to go to the hospital.
Speaker 2 (55:48):
And nearly died.
Speaker 1 (55:49):
And they were like, so, do you have any regret
about not having the vaccine? He's like, no, of course,
of course I don't. Restrictions on unvaccinated no longer apply
to me. Also, so I'm winning this one because I
got it. So I no longer I'm.
Speaker 9 (56:06):
Immunized with a lot more, with a lot more coffin
and splashing. Right, what's double pneumonia?
Speaker 2 (56:13):
Oh? Man?
Speaker 8 (56:13):
Twice intense?
Speaker 2 (56:15):
I can't even imagine.
Speaker 3 (56:17):
I just I just like when like there's a medical condition,
but it's the altar, like the the modifiers just double.
Then your five year old name the disease. Oh, it's
because both of your lungs are infected. Okay, got it,
got it, got it makes sense? Yeah, but double compound
compound pneumonia. It's like, yeah, I got yeah, I got
(56:37):
double your infection. That that actually makes sense if you
said double ammonia nut kickbacks.
Speaker 2 (56:41):
Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (56:45):
All right, that's gonna do it for this week's weekly Zeitgeist.
Please like and review the show if you like, The
show means the world to Miles. He he needs your validation.
Speaker 2 (56:58):
Folks.
Speaker 1 (56:59):
I hope you're having a great weekend and I will
talk to you Monday. Bye.
Hello the Internet, and welcome to this episode of The
Weekly Zeitgeist. These are some of our favorite segments from
this week, all edited together into one NonStop infotainment laugh stravaganza. Yeah, So,
without further ado, here is the Weekly Zeitgeist.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Well, we are.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Thrilled to be joined by an archaeologist and professor of
comparative archaeology. He's the author of books like What Makes
a Civilization, The Origins of Monsters, and co wrote what
I think is one of the best books of the
past decade, along with the late great David Graeber. It's
called The Dawn of Everything, a New History of Humanity.
It's an international bestseller. It's really a must read. Talk
(00:48):
about it a lot on this show.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
I read it by it just for sheer repetition of
you talking about it so much. So yes, and I'm
glad I did well. Please welcome Professor David Wengro.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 4 (01:02):
Guys, thank you. I just want to make a quick disclaim.
You know, I wrote all the really bad bits.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
The bad stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Okay, good, We'll only ask you about the bad parts. Yeah,
but I guess our.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
First question, what's the worst part of the book.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
Oh yeah, that's a really good question. What is the
worst put now?
Speaker 1 (01:23):
So, I mean, I just want to jump right into
it because we only have you for a limited time,
and I feel like I could talk to you for
twenty four hours about this book. But so your book
basically upends how we understand the history of humanity, or
at least how I did, based on a public school
education understanding of history, and the version that I had
(01:44):
learned from public school and then from a lot of
these popular nonfiction books like Guns, Germs and Steel, Better,
Angels of Our Nature, you know, sapiens. The version I
learned is that our current system is the result of
a sort of inevitable linear civilizational evolution, and this is
(02:07):
just what you're stuck with, and that's it. And those
books are written, by the way, by people who aren't
archaeologists and anthropologists like yourselves. But what does the actual
archaeological record tell us?
Speaker 4 (02:22):
The first thing I would say is that I think
all human societies do this to some degree. It's not
just those of us educated in let's say a broadly
European tradition. All humans societies tell themselves stories about how
they came to be called It meth mythology, if you like.
(02:46):
We're not unique in that it's a very human thing
to do, and sometimes we reflect more carefully than others
about what those stories really are and what we're putting
in the minds of our kids. You know, almost from
the age that they can even receive such information. And
(03:07):
it so happens that the story we by which I
do now mean those of us educated in broadly European traditions,
have been telling ourselves for a very long time, probably
more than two centuries now, hasn't actually changed very much.
It starts off with people living in these tiny bands
(03:28):
of hunter gatherers wandering around the landscape. There's no private property,
so everything is very equal and egalitarian, and then comes
sort of fall from grace.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
You know.
Speaker 4 (03:39):
It's almost a biblical story, or a story with biblical echoes,
where we start off in the garden of Eden, and
then there is that fateful moment when somebody somewhere invents agriculture, right,
and this is the great transition that changes everything about
how we relate to each other. Suddenly you have private property,
(04:02):
you can support larger populations, so cities emerge, and once
you have cities, you've got to have some kind of
central government to keep order otherwise everything is going to
fall into chaos. Then you get the origins of the state,
and by the time you get to our present world,
which is of course divided up from one end to
(04:23):
the other into nation states, there's this sense that somehow
it was all kind of inevitable. All the key moves
in the game were made so long ago, we're talking
about not even thousands, but ends of thousands of years ago,
that the most we can do these days is kind
of tinker around the edges of what we have, but
(04:46):
that essentially there is no other game in town. So
we grew up in nation states, which, as we argue
in the book, are actually politically really quite weird and
unusual structure. They combine, if you like, three basic forms
of power into one institution that we refer to as
(05:08):
the state. You know, everyone, everyone claims to live in
a nation state. If you don't make that claim, you're
in a very vulnerable position. You're either a refugee or
you know, in some way in search of an alternative identity.
But if you ask people to actually define what that is,
(05:28):
you know, what is a state? Could you give me
a short definition.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Yeah, I mean yeah, you would have to think about it.
Speaker 4 (05:36):
You would have to think about it, which is kind
of scary if you think that we you know, we
live and we grow up within these political frameworks, but
actually what are they? What do they comprise? And you know,
generally if you go to the textbooks, what you get
is a definition that looks something like this. A nation
(05:59):
state of the kind that we all grow up in
is sovereign. In other words, it commands its territory. It
has the legal right to defend its territory and to
use violence in order to do so. So nation states
are sovereign and they're inviolable, and if somebody invades your sovereignty,
(06:20):
you have the right to go to war. That's one thing.
States are complex. They're kind of complex social organism. So
you need some kind of administration or bureaucracy. Somebody has
to control knowledge at the center, just kind of keep
the wheels turning, otherwise it's all going to fall apart.
(06:41):
And then we have these things called elections, which are
supposed to be the same thing as democracy. Now, as
we know, this is not necessarily going the way that
a lot of people imagined democracy would go.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Would happen. We're not familiar, you wouldn't know about this,
but you know, we were in America.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
In some remote, exotic parts of the world, you get
this weird phenomena where the only people who can be
elected are over one hundred years old and really strange,
and they kind of get up on stage and they
can barely make it up there, and then they give
their kind of ches and they're dribbling and it's awful.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
And they have to have a personality disorder just to
get in the door. You have to like have this
weird thing where you're like, I should be in charge
of all of this, all of it.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 4 (07:34):
And then it's kind of like a grand sporting occasion
and everyone votes for their favorite team and they basically
get to do whatever they like, and yeah, this is
this is what some people have come to those democracy
And you know, if you put those three things together,
I guess you get a rough approximation the kind of
(07:56):
societies we grow up in and the kind of society
that we're educated in. And of course, like all other societies,
because we grow up in those particular frameworks, we have
a natural tendency to think of human history the same
way as if it were somehow all leading up to
this and what we're trying to do in our book,
(08:18):
me and my friend David Greeber in The Dawn of
Everything Is actually showed how different things really were from
this kind of familiar story. There's really been an incredible
flood of new information, i'd say, like mainly in the
last two or three decades that throws almost every aspect
(08:40):
of that story into dissarray. I wouldn't even know where
to begin. You're gonna have to give you some point
as it.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
What is something from your search history or we added
a new wrinkle if you'd like, what the fos reason
thing that you screencapped?
Speaker 5 (08:56):
Ooh, okay, so I'll give you both.
Speaker 6 (08:58):
Okay, the thing I googled recently because I I fumbled.
I don't really do Saint Patrick's Day since I moved here,
but these are both Saint Patrick's Day related.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Since I think it's a non holiday, like since I
moved here, since I.
Speaker 5 (09:14):
Don't respect my family.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Yeah, that's fucked up, but I did.
Speaker 6 (09:19):
I did want to pre order it for next year
because we recently we are recovering The Departed on an
upcoming episode of the Bechdel cast, and I wanted to
get the shirt that the Jack Nicholson character is killed
in the one that it just says Irish on it.
He's wearing a green T shirt that has a shamrock,
and you think it's going to say Boston, which would
(09:40):
be on the nose as it is, but it insteads
just as Irish underneath the shamrock.
Speaker 5 (09:46):
And that's the spoiler alert for a you know, fifteen
year old movie.
Speaker 6 (09:50):
He gets killed, but he he bleeds out through the
Irish shirt, and I was like, I want the Irish shirt.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
Yeah, that's really poor.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
Friends.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Is he like in disguise as or something.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
He's just that, he's.
Speaker 6 (10:05):
Never in disguise. Frank Frank, oh, Franco or whatever his
name is is the.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
He's He's Frank Costello.
Speaker 5 (10:15):
He's Frank Costello. Yeah he is.
Speaker 6 (10:17):
He is Irish through and through, and he doesn't care
if it's on his shirt, Which brings me to the
thing I screenshotted because I do think you know the
fact that every movie about Boston takes place at either
Harvard or in like three blocks of Southee. It troubles me.
There's so much more out there. But I every year
on Saint Patrick's Day. I like to fondly remember this
(10:39):
was nine years ago that in twenty fifteen, I was
working at the Boston Globe and I did a piece
where I hung out at a bar in Southey all
day on Saint Patrick's Day and wrote about what I saw,
which was people being unbelievably fucked up. And then the
(11:01):
day after that was published, there was a column published
in The Boston Herald that said that I was that
quoted two to three different political officials calling me a
bigot against against Irish.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
I just it was.
Speaker 6 (11:20):
It was really fun, headlined true life, I was a
bartender in Southe. Oh yeah, I was like Shadowy a bartender.
The post was written by Boston dot com writer Jmie Loftis.
Every day is a drunk day in Southie, but Saint
Patti's Day runs by a completely separate set of laws,
wrote Loftus, whose website bio says she is also a
stand up and sketch performer. Her take on life in
(11:43):
Southey didn't sit well with two of the neighborhood's most
prominent residents. I'm surprised such bigoted views are still tolerated
at Boston dot Com, said US Representative Stephen Lynch. Wow wow,
it's very disrespectful, added former Mayor Raymond L.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
Floyd.
Speaker 5 (12:00):
We respected.
Speaker 6 (12:01):
We experienced the finest day of our life yesterday with family,
faith and friends.
Speaker 5 (12:07):
We could dismiss that these comments as from uninformed people.
Speaker 6 (12:10):
They don't know us. We're simple, ordinary people from South Boston.
Flynn said. It's unfortunate some people judge us, but you
can't control that. I wish they'd know us better. Mayor
Martin J.
Speaker 5 (12:22):
Walsh declined comment.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
Oh wow, they just laid comment. How did your career
ever recover from your fucking congressman?
Speaker 2 (12:34):
I flamed you.
Speaker 6 (12:36):
I was at his looking at his political record is
pretty hilarious because he's just like a famously not a
great person.
Speaker 5 (12:44):
But yeah, no, I mean I was crying. I called
my dad crying.
Speaker 6 (12:48):
I was like, they roasted my ass in the paper,
and he is like, no, this is the best thing
that's ever happened to you.
Speaker 5 (12:55):
It's funny.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Family.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Yeah, yes, that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
I mean you were crying.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
I remember that day as well as Irish person, and
my whole family was crying as well, because because you
wrote about us because it was disrespect disrespectful.
Speaker 5 (13:13):
The best day of your life with family, had the best.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
Day of our life like such an overstatement, like such
a unhinged way to respond, like it's truly like a
five year old like being like, this was the best
day of my life. And then you ruined it with
this comment that people in Boston South he likes to drink.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
What is that? Even where do you even get this
stuff from? He said?
Speaker 3 (13:40):
The land Up guy, the guy who the guy who
assaulted Iranian American students in the seventies.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Yeah, so fucking wild. I mean, yeah, his record.
Speaker 6 (13:51):
Is gross, like it's yeah, but I'm big at it against.
Speaker 3 (13:56):
The Irish even though he was he was a said
for assaulting six Iranian students, okay, right in the seventies, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
It was like in seventies.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
It wasn't a place in the seventies. See were dropped,
they were rocked.
Speaker 5 (14:14):
Good impression of Barkwalder.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
Oh god, if.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
I had been there on that day that she was
shadowing that bar turn, that things would have gone down
a little differently.
Speaker 7 (14:24):
Bro.
Speaker 5 (14:24):
Boston dot com wouldn't even exist.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
It would have been written an article about how I
was working out at three three in the morning.
Speaker 6 (14:31):
I mean, yeah, the tenor of that story would have
changed quite a bit if Mark Wahpber started doing push
ups in the middle.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
So what's something you think is underrated?
Speaker 8 (14:41):
Underrated?
Speaker 9 (14:41):
I'd say changing your barber between every haircut. You know, wow,
I get, I call, I call, but stick for that
at home because Chelsea says, why would you do this?
This is a decision that will have a bearing on
your self worth and you know how you feel about
your career. Yeah, yeah, and I can appreciate it, but
you know, it's kind of I just see, I'm an opportunitist.
(15:03):
I see a shop and I go in, and you know,
it's if it goes badly, yeah, it's disappointing, but it's
also kind of funny.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
Yeah, it's an adventure. You can.
Speaker 9 (15:12):
I but I had a new one the other day
and I'm like, you know, I'm I'm going I'm fitting
out hard up the front now. And I was like,
I actually, I'm going back on my own underrated thing
because I was like, oh, this guy, like I said,
I said.
Speaker 8 (15:26):
To him, I said, it's crunched him up there. Let's
true carefully and the.
Speaker 9 (15:29):
Guys like you know, usually the wire. Yeah, usually they're like,
oh it's okay, you know, don't worry. But this guy's like, yeah,
don't worry. It comes to everyone. Yeah, you don't even
going to give me a bone?
Speaker 2 (15:41):
Right, yeah, right right right?
Speaker 3 (15:43):
Yeah. Brother, He's like, yeah, man, it looks like we're
in the ninety fifth minute here.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 8 (15:48):
Yeah, just like good too.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
But it is an adventure getting a haircut from someone new.
Like it's just like, turns out I didn't know what
I looked like. Yeah, look like a different person if
you just changed the framing everything about me.
Speaker 9 (16:04):
Yeah. Yeah, that's crazy. But you know I don't I
don't want to. I don't want to go bull that's happening.
Speaker 8 (16:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 9 (16:14):
If I have a good year, I think I'll get
those Biden plugs. Oh it looks.
Speaker 8 (16:19):
Like it shuts down some of your other like neural faculties.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Yeah, I want to go.
Speaker 8 (16:27):
When to buy as junk? I got them?
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Yeah? Craft versus body rejected. The craft versus is my favorite.
What's something you think is overrated? Overrated?
Speaker 8 (16:41):
Having a giant penis?
Speaker 2 (16:47):
I think I could create problems. I don't know.
Speaker 9 (16:49):
I mean I don't actually have one to those, so
I'm just gonna go with the joke. But you don't
have a JAS today. Yeah, A lot of it, A
lot of it that's coming your wise currently in a
melting scrubby Sunday.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
I needed that fresh Kiwi muscle Man.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
They've shipped it over double quick, so much more roomy,
you know, Yeah, because they don't tighten the skin.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Yeah, bubbles lowers and.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
Yeah, I can't sleep on my stomach without hearing light pops.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Sounds like packing bubbles.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 8 (17:38):
We love to laugh us, we have fun.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
What is something you think is overrated?
Speaker 7 (17:45):
I'm realizing as I say this one, I'd written it
down a thousand percent. Sure I have done this already,
but it remains true fucking taking care of yourself. I
feel like I've been like like doing like just old
man mobility stretches in the morning, drinking drinking water a
(18:05):
lot more and the returns are marginal.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
I'm not saying it, but the returns are.
Speaker 7 (18:12):
And listen, there's true man, with your effort, it takes.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
It's a lot more like that I want to do.
We'll say.
Speaker 7 (18:25):
I'm just like, oh my god, I'm going to follow
a fucking Instagram reel of how to stretch when you're old,
and I like do it and I but here's the thing.
I'm not saying it's bad. I'm saying it's overrated.
Speaker 8 (18:40):
It's it's there.
Speaker 3 (18:41):
Are there are some returns, but not are you still boxing?
Speaker 2 (18:47):
No?
Speaker 3 (18:47):
No, the returns better boxing? Did you feel better from
when you're training boxing?
Speaker 2 (18:53):
Oh, wonderful question.
Speaker 7 (18:56):
I mean, technically speaking, no, and I will say I
will say it's clear. It's clear that these are part
and parcel of things that happened whilst boxing are affecting
my need for mobility strutching. But no, I mean I
felt destroyed after boxing, but like not boxing and stretching
(19:18):
and drinking water, I only feel a little bit better.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
Interesting, as I've gotten older, like a lot of the
things that are supposed to invigorate me, like doing the
plunge or drinking enough water or like working out in
the morning, now instead just make me tired. I've like
started to be like I don't think Donald Trump is
like right about many things, but his thing about like
(19:43):
how exercise like waste the energy and you only have
a certain number of heart beats in your life. Right, Yeah,
I see where I see how he got there, because
exercise is exhausting.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
My body is old as fuck.
Speaker 3 (19:59):
Yeah. Yeah, long term though, I'm sure you'll you'll you'll
appreciate it long term though, because even the mobility stuff,
you're not gonna turn stiff.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Andrew, you're shaking your head no vigorously. Here's why you don't.
Speaker 3 (20:12):
Think there's any long term But if every older person
in my in my life has told me, man, at
the very least, fucking stretch because it will become.
Speaker 8 (20:20):
I agree with you.
Speaker 7 (20:22):
But I here's what I What I mean though, is
when you don't do it, you like have some like
you know, you have some level of regret because you
see you kind of like imagine and remember when you
were more limber and you feel yourself being old and
stiff now. But if you do stretch, you still wind
up pretty stiff, and all you do you're like you're
(20:44):
like a little more limber. Of course, again, I'm not
saying it's useless. I'm just saying the ro o I
is not what i'd hoped.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Sure, you feel a little better, but I don't think
you feel enough better to justify it.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
I also think the answer is just like everybody's body
is so different, you know, like, yeah, the cold plunch
thing really seems to work for some people, and for me,
it's like somebody just like fucking shook the ship out.
You kind of are you going to a place to
plunge you?
Speaker 3 (21:20):
No, no, no, no. We just have a pool that is.
Speaker 7 (21:24):
Cold, but you're not doing the ship where you're putting
like ice in like little I'm.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
Not cry like that, yeah, not cryo fucking myself, but
it's still just like I feel tired, and I'm like yeah,
because it just like flooded me with all this fucking
I don't know whatever the blood chemicals are that when
your body's like fu what you know, like stop it stop,
(21:52):
and then my body is like yeah, well that sucked.
Speaker 7 (21:55):
All right, Yeah I need to recover for forty eight hours.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
Yeah exactly, I think.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
But yet I think it's also revealing that maybe Andrew,
you're one of the like the rare people who doesn't
have to do much to still feel okay all the time.
Who because I am also kind of in that world
too where I'm like, nah, Brian doing shit. I'm like,
evolutionarily speaking, they're like you had to I was like,
is laziness an actual positive trait evolutionarily speaking, Yeah, probably,
(22:27):
but I'm a little both.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Yeah, because I.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
Have friends who need it and they're like, no, I'm
fucked up, like I have to. Yeah, And I look
at them, I'm like, you have to do something.
Speaker 8 (22:36):
I do feel like I don't want to.
Speaker 7 (22:37):
I don't want the listeners and you miles to misunderstand me.
I do feel like shit. I'm just saying. All I'm
saying is the amount that I feel like shit isn't
changing my stress time.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Yeah. Well, I'm here to say I'm one of the
physically exalted few.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Yeah. You can just dump garbage in
your body not do anything. I'll go back down. I mean,
I don't know what blood work says, but I don't do.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
Blood. Blood work lies, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
Blood work lies, bleeding. The follow up full circle, All right,
let's take your quick break.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
We'll be right back, and.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
We're back and yeah, I mean, so, you know, we
were talking about European settlers encountering Native American ideals, and
you know, by our definition, they were further along, but
it seems like they were also further along in terms
(23:46):
of like they had. They were constantly going back and
forth between more authoritarian less authoritarian forms of government, I mean,
and there was just this vast kind of galaxy of
different ways that societies were organized.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
So yeah, this is.
Speaker 4 (24:04):
One of the kind one of the things we discovered,
I guess in the book that surprised us and kind
of intrigued us and actually inspired us to really develop
this project is that the whole way we think about
humans in societies of the distant past is basically wrong.
You know, we begin with these categories like people were
(24:25):
either this or they were that. You know, they were
either hunter gatherers or they were farmers. They were either
living in bands or in tribes or in chiefdoms. And
actually what we found in the evidence of our fields
in archaeology and anthropology is that this really isn't the case. Actually,
most human societies, most of the history of our species
(24:48):
have been kind of playing with the clay. You know,
there'll be one of these things for part of the year,
then they'll switch it around. They might be very hierarchical
in their organization. For one part of the year. You
might have a police with coercive powers and whip people
or imprison them. But then these powers melt away, and
this often has to do with the actual form that
(25:10):
human society takes, which is not stable. It fluctuates. People
move around with the changing seasons, they change the size
of their groups. There'll be times of year when you
have a great abundance of meat and other resources. There'll
be other times that are lean. And people have generally
adapted their societies to these oscillating conditions. It's like putting
(25:34):
a mask on and taking it off where you can
have You don't start off with these purely egalitarian societies.
There are always going to be individuals who love power,
and there are always going to be individuals who want
to be flunkies. And you know that is actually very
hard to explain. You know, at another level is individual psychology.
(25:56):
But let's assume that there will always be a mixture
of people in any human group, even a family or
a household, some of whom tend towards that direction and
some of whom, let's say, are more into the caring
and sharing. The question is what do you do with
those people? What kind of institutions do you build. Do
you build institutions that are going to raise those ambitious
(26:19):
competitive types to the top, or do you create institutions
that are kind of level things out. And what we
discovered is that actually a huge number of societies on
all continents of the world have kind of done both simultaneously,
so they will not suppress hierarchy all of the time.
You might let it out in some spectacular ritual performance.
(26:41):
This is why we get these things in human history
that people often regard as mysteries or puzzles, the kind
of things that the makers of certain Netflix series like
to call all great mysteries of the ancient world.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
That's got a mystery. Aliens did it right. Aliens built
all those things, I agree.
Speaker 4 (26:58):
All the stuff that Aliens right, like Stonehenge and Egypt,
where you know, first you start out by sort of
characterizing the society as terribly, terribly primitive, and then you say,
but look, here's this incredibly mathematically geographic, geometrically sophisticated monument.
How could these idiots possibly create? Which the answer is
(27:21):
obviously they were not idiots. You know, these are people
who could at times create these incredibly impressive cultural creations,
but then at other times, you know, would actually morph
into different forms of society. This is what the anthropologist
Mussel Moss called the double morphology of society. You don't
(27:46):
just have one system of law or one system of
religion or one systems of politics. You switch things around. Now,
this was kind of a revelation to us because it
changes the whole question. You know, the big question of
human history is the days of the Enlightenments and Jean
Jacques Rousseau and people like that was about the origins
of inequality. How did we lose that original equality and freedom?
(28:11):
Whereas actually, starting from the earliest evidence that we can find,
you have to ask a different question. You have to
ask not so much what was the origins of inequality,
but how did the genie of inequality get out of
the bottle? Like when did those cages come down? The
(28:31):
restricted hierarchy which would always have been there, and that
was always the relations between adults and kids, in relations
of gender, in relations of domestic servitude. You know, the
idea that we've ever lived in societies of equals is
a little bizarre. So the question becomes more about, you know,
(28:53):
when did those cages break down? When did things like
private property and and patriarchy escape from those cages and
effectively come to dominate almost every waking moment of our
human lives.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
Yeah, they didn't like that. When we imagine them.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
There's this kind of bias that you identify frequently in
the book, which is like this idea that, like you
just said, those people are idiots.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
They didn't.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
It was primitive, so they didn't have these elaborate systems
to keep all of these impulses that today are causing
problems for us under control. They couldn't have like just
you know, we refuse to look back and you know,
from them, because.
Speaker 4 (29:41):
You see that thing the other day. One of the
authors you mentioned who wrote the Sapiens book, Yeah, you've
all Noah Harari, I think, yeah, yeah, there was. Someone
sent me a clip of an interview just recently, just
the other week, which went viral, and I can't remember
who was into being Nessahraari, but he said this thing
(30:04):
that annoyed a lot of people. It went roughly like this,
I hope I'm not misquoting, but he said. I think
the interview asked him something like, it's often said that,
you know, we're living in a time of great uncertainty
right now? Do you believe that's true? And he started
off as saying, well, everyone always says that about the
(30:24):
period of history that they live in. But today it's
actually true, for the first time in history, we have
no idea what to tell out it. You know, we
don't know what technologies are going to be relevant to
their lives in twenty years time. Are you falling for this?
Speaker 10 (30:41):
Yeah, exactly right, concern that's what you're believing this is.
And then he starts talking about what things were like
back in the day, back in the Neolithic period or
the Middle Ages. You know, there were certain things you
couldn't predict, like when the Vikings or the Mongols were
going to come through and radio settlement, but you knew
that you would still be growing wheat and raising sheep
(31:05):
in twenty years time. There were these basic things that
you could tell people that you knew were going to
be relevant. But today all of that's gone. We just
have no clue what's going to be right. Are you
buying any of this?
Speaker 1 (31:18):
No, I probably would have before reading your book. But
your book does a really good job of dispelling this notion.
Speaker 4 (31:26):
That's really telling. I mean, regardless, you know, even if
you haven't read that book, the implication is actually kind
of fascinating because it implies that there's no connection between
what we teach our kids and what's actually going to
happen in the next twenty years, right, right, Yeah, do
you know what I mean? It's like this idea that
(31:46):
you're kind of floating blindly into the future and you
could tell the kids any old thing, but all that
other stuff's going to happen anyway, whereas in fact, you know,
this is obviously nonsense. I mean, if we teach our
kids people didn't always raise, they didn't always grow crops,
you know, right, And actually, as we show in the book,
these were very conscious processes which sometimes people actually rejected,
(32:09):
you know, they decided they tried it on, they tried
it on the size, and they decided to drop it again.
So it's partly this idea that actually goes back to
people like Rousseau, that we're always kind of floating blindly
into these traps which we're making for ourselves, but we
can never quite see them coming. Yeah, she is really,
(32:31):
I think, particularly right now in this historical moment, apart
from being just kind of wrong, is actually a pretty
dangerous way to look at the world, because you know,
you can kind of put your hands up and say, well,
tell our kids any old rubbish.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
Right right, Yeah, And just briefly so, Russeau and Hobbes
are kind of the two versions we get of that
narrative we were talking about earlier.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
With Rousseau.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
It's like we were living in these happy panitarian groups
and then we gave it it's the Harari like sapiens
thing where and then we decide to.
Speaker 4 (33:06):
I think that's roughly although you know, I got to
tell you, Rousseau is way more interesting, Oh for sure. Yeah,
you know, Rousseau was not about fatalism. Rousseau is not
about telling us that there's always going to be this
boot stamping on your face and on your kid's face.
Is Roussel is about revolution. Roussel is about, you know,
(33:27):
trying to understand what was this liberty that we lost.
You can just clude what that might really be like.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
And then Hobbes is on the Pinker side.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
Hobbs is like before, like, if you think this is bad,
you should see what it used to be like. Man,
everybody would just like kill each other, and then we
had to like get these laws to keep people in.
Speaker 4 (33:48):
Yeah, and I think Professor Pinker is very forthright about this.
He actually refers to himself as a neo hobbs.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Here, right, and he's like, and if you just look
at the record of what it you used to be,
like you'll see and then he just like quotes a
bunch of like widely debunked bullshit about how violent everything
used to be, and doesn't.
Speaker 4 (34:10):
It Well, this is what my friend David used to
refer to as the extreme center.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
Yes, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4 (34:17):
You know, you get it in politics, you get it
in academias, like these individuals who present themselves as very
rational centrists, and then you actually look really closely at
what they're saying and it's really out there.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
Yeah, I mean it's pretty white supremacist. Like he just
keeps talking about the like how we were saved by
these enlightenment European thinkers and then like writing the you know,
erasing the Native American influence from everything, and it's just
the story of how we like trained ourselves to have
(34:56):
better and better manners and that led to lower murder
rates if you're not counting World War Two. But yeah,
I don't want to get too bogged down by Pinker,
but it just I think there's there's just so many
examples in the book of these stories that upend this
idea that these civilizations were not complex, that they weren't
(35:19):
trying different things out, that they weren't like there's a
I think it's a Huron system of beliefs around dreams
that you cover in the book. It was like really
similar to Freud's theory, but almost more interesting because it
like doesn't go in all the weird.
Speaker 4 (35:35):
Like, yeah, I mean directions we have of this. It's
called unin Dunk and it goes by way I mean
centuries before Freud. Yeah, where actually dreams are one of
the only contexts in which it does seem like you
could have almost the kind of power of command if
(35:56):
you dreamed something. It could be a particuli object or
a relationship you wish to have. If it came to
you in a dream, people almost had to try and
make it come true. So we have these descriptions of
the I think it's the winter seasons from the late
(36:17):
seventeenth early eighteenth century of Huron societies, where people would
gather around and try and make somebody's dream come true.
There was a compulsion to do this, and they would
do this by interpreting the symbolism of the dream in
much the way that Freud was credited with an enormous breakthrough,
one of the great intellectual breakthroughs of the twentieth century,
(36:39):
Freudian psychoanalysis. They have it in their own form. The
major difference is that they do it communally. You don't
have this notion of the individual therapist and the patient.
Society gathers around the individual and supports them in much
the same way that you know, some of the same
(37:00):
kinds of hallucinogenics or psychoactive substances that we tend to
we if we ingest them. You know, people do it
as largely as individuals would actually have been done in
a very communal context, with people caressing you, supporting you,
holding your hand, kind of taking you through it as
a group. But I mean, I guess that the example
(37:24):
of these dreams and dreamings, you know, teaching teaches us
is that would be very foolish to dismiss those forms
of knowledge as somehow alien or exotic, because actually, you know,
we find them within our own culture.
Speaker 3 (37:40):
I feel like that's sort of one of the things
that we're so limited because we've dismissed so much of
this wisdom or papered it over with sort of like
revisionist versions of what had occurred or what things were
said and what those ideas were. And I think that's
why it's really important too, because as we as people
tend to look at our own systems of oppression as
being fixed and it's like, well, I don't know what
(38:02):
you can do. It's just it's just all it was
always kind of trending this way. I think there's these
examples in your book that just show a if we
can overcome our sort of perspective of like, well, these
people think this is like old ways man, and like
they didn't know what they were doing. But there are
examples I think of, you know, Teoti Hua Khan where
you talk about how that is a shift where people
(38:22):
saw what was going on with their civilization and actually
decided to change it to a completely different system. Can
you can you just sort of kind of talk us
through that process, because I think it's very interesting for
especially for us who look at what we're like sort
of these structures we live under now and think, well,
I don't know what to do.
Speaker 2 (38:40):
It is what it is.
Speaker 4 (38:42):
Yeah, I mean there seems to be a whole strand
of I guess what we would call a republican tradition
or sort of anti monarchy tradition in the deep history
of Mexican societies and especially urban societies ancient cities. Tetti
Wakhan is one of the and most spectacular manifestations of this.
(39:03):
So we're in the Valley of Mexico now around the
time of Christ, so the years sort of the year
zero one, whatever, in the first few centuries of the
common era. You get this extraordinary city forming in the
Valley of Mexico with a lot of refugees, it seems
from surrounding areas there was a lot of volcanic activity
(39:23):
at the time. There's a lot of destruction going on.
People flood into this site and they form a city
with hundreds of thousands of residents, and they start doing
all the things that netflix would probably lead you to
expect of an ancient city. They build great pyramids, that's
the Pyramid of the Sun, Pyramid of the Moon, the
Temple of the Feathered Serpent. But then, rather fascinatingly, after
(39:46):
a couple of centuries of doing this, they change course
in the most dramatic way. They stop building these great monuments,
and all of that labor and collective investment that went
in to creating them, goes into something else, and we
know what that something else was because archaeologists mapped it.
Speaker 2 (40:06):
In one of.
Speaker 4 (40:07):
The first really great urban surveys done by archaeologists, they
found this incredible system of public housing and it goes
in a grid. It's incredibly carefully planned, and it goes
in an orthogonal grid from one end of the city
to the other, and it houses, as far as we
can tell, most of the city's vast multi ethnic population,
(40:30):
multi ethnic, multilingual, in very comfortable circumstances. When archaeologists first
discovered these kind of communal villas, they actually thought they
were palaces, and then they realized that basically everybody is
living in a palace, and talking about really beautiful plastered
walls with mural subfloor drainage systems, maybe four or five
(40:52):
nuclear families living in one of these compounds or apartment houses,
and we can reconstruct a diet using the kind of
techniques that archaeologists use these days, and show that this
was an incredibly prosperous site that actually knocked in equality
on the head for hundreds of years on an urban scale,
(41:12):
which is pretty mind blowing.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
Yeah. Yeah, these are the civilizations that that we were
viewing as primitive, and they've already gone through the process
of having this authoritarian set up and then like overthrowing
it and building a civilization that up and running a
large city that's bottom up, that's right.
Speaker 4 (41:31):
I mean, they did actually have some kind of writing system,
it seems that to wak on, but nobody has really
been able to decipher it, and even if we could,
it may not give us the kind of information we
would really love because just imagine the kind of discussions
that are going Imagine the kind of philosophical discoveries and
movements that would have accompanied transition like this, which we
(41:53):
can only reconstruction the material relates. Yeah, imagine all the
intellectual stuff. And actually we do get some insight into
this from a later period when the Conquistados arrive. They
actually stumble upon cities that are organized in pretty egalitarian ways,
and they describe some of them, including ones with full
(42:14):
blown of parliaments, at a time when you don't really
have very much of that going on in Europe.
Speaker 2 (42:19):
Yeah. Actually, let's take one more quick break, will be right.
Speaker 11 (42:22):
Back, and we're back and sing it out.
Speaker 2 (42:36):
The Titanic's been in the news for years now.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
Since who knows when, probably like right after they were like,
we're sending an unsinkable ship across the Atlantic.
Speaker 2 (42:48):
I feel like there's already big news when they said that,
but boy, when it actually sunk the first time, that
must have been Wow. Man, hundred and twelve year.
Speaker 3 (42:59):
News streak, this things on. Yeah, I can't believe it. Yeah, unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
So it's been in the news recently because, first of all,
there's a guy in Florida who has a room full
of nearly three thousand Titanic VHS tapes and multiple homemade
Jack Dawson fuck mannequins.
Speaker 3 (43:15):
Oh yeah, are manniquins?
Speaker 2 (43:19):
Yeah they are. They are anatomically incorrect. Just the neck, Yeah,
this one looks like Grady dick On, like fucking Draft
Night with the long neck.
Speaker 9 (43:31):
Well you could. Yeah, who's gonna tell him that? You know,
he's been working on this. This is one thing he's doing.
Speaker 3 (43:35):
Ye.
Speaker 2 (43:35):
Yeah, this is this guy who said it.
Speaker 3 (43:38):
He said Titanic has always been my favorite film, and
I've converted my home office in Florida into my personal
Titanic museum. The two thousand, six hundred and eighty two
tapes cover my walls like wallpaper. I have my own
Jack Dawson mannequin too. What are the other two things?
Speaker 2 (43:53):
Then? If he only has one mannequin, I think.
Speaker 9 (43:56):
That it was based on a true story. This guy
doesn't even he's not even a fan of the boat.
He just likes the movie.
Speaker 1 (44:02):
He's a fan of only the VHS's yea, yeah, never
seen it.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
I just like these little tapes they come in the
double tape box. I think it's kind of neat.
Speaker 1 (44:13):
That was a fun thing at one point on the Internet,
having like seeing people on social media, like young people
find out that Titanic was based on a true story,
like wait.
Speaker 12 (44:25):
What are you fucking will there like yeah, way no,
they like one about the James Cameron one with the
with the boat thinking that, yeah, no, tell.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
Me Avatar wasn't based on a real story. Okay, sure, right.
Speaker 9 (44:42):
So this guy Clive Palma, yeah, he's also a Titanic
fan if it didn't.
Speaker 1 (44:48):
Huge Titanic fan, and he is relaunching, so he's a
fan of the boat itself, just the Yeah, he is
relaunching his Titanic two. The two is typically using Roman
numerals project despite the fact that his plans to pinstangely
recreate the doomed cruise ship have failed twice before, Not
(45:10):
to mention, people might be a tad warry of any
Titanic based tourism promoted by reckless billionaires. Yea, these days,
I feel like, wasn't that that was the last one
was really bad?
Speaker 2 (45:24):
Good?
Speaker 8 (45:25):
Isn't it like a bunch of people whole life?
Speaker 2 (45:27):
Yep?
Speaker 9 (45:28):
Yep, exactly. We don't have enough life rafts. There are
engineering problems.
Speaker 2 (45:35):
Everything that will be exactly the same. And then we'll
just see if.
Speaker 9 (45:41):
Annoyed he's gonna be when he's gonna try and sell
this thing into an iceberg that has melted, it's like, yeah.
Speaker 3 (45:47):
Like the fuck just right for a slushy yeah, or
they're pretty soon next you're like, oh man, they're bringing
back United Flight ninety three. If you guys want to
hop on that, it could be really fucking cool. Mark
Wahlberg's on there though, He's like, yeah, don't worry, folks.
Speaker 9 (46:05):
This hits a lot of intriguing chick points, you know, Like,
I think anyone who's watched the movie and being stoned
enough is on board with what's happening here.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
I'm in on this one. Yeah, I watched the movie
not Stoned, and I'm kind of like, I would all
things being equal, if I like had just ridiculous wealth,
I would probably go on this for.
Speaker 3 (46:27):
Some critism, But then would you stay in steerage because
I like that he's also like trying to make just
even every class sort of like be you know, historically accurate.
So third class that serves stew and mash and I'm like, yeah,
that sounds all right, Yeah, man, this stews sounds good. Unfortunately,
I've always identified in that movie most with Billy Zayn's character,
(46:48):
so that's probably what I'd be doing, just Billy Zay
in it up fully, Hell yeah, yelling at the people
in Steerage and this is I mean, this is so
it's so raise him and like idiotic.
Speaker 9 (47:02):
It's it's kind of a nice you know, it's a
nice it's a nice use of a billionaires time and resource.
It's a waste of energy, and of course it could
go to something a lot more constructive, but you just
got to know that that's off the table from the outset.
So it's like, instead of trying to get himself back
into Australian Parliament or publing a bunch of money, which
I'm sure he's doing in the background anyway. And to
(47:22):
you know, the Conservative Party is it's like, if you're
going to just stand up here and be like, I
got this insane vanity project.
Speaker 8 (47:28):
I want to rebuild a boat, the most famous.
Speaker 9 (47:31):
Boat that's saying yeah, good on you, bro, Yeah, go
for it.
Speaker 1 (47:36):
It's really Yeah, Like I think I don't like, I
don't know enough about this. I'm just kind of finding
out about Clive Palmer. I do think this is a
level of imagination and fun that is beyond Donald Trump.
Like Donald Trump would never he would never be like, yeah,
we're going to do everything the same. He'd be like
(47:58):
everything's going to be gold. Yeah, yeah, gold Titanic, and
it will only serve it will only serve Trump steaks,
you know, like last so quickly. Whereas like just the
idea of sticking to all the details of this is
actually kind of fun.
Speaker 2 (48:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (48:15):
I also just like to like his explanation, like you've
been kind of doing this project off and on, Like
what's the difference. He said, the plan is more real
than ever because quote, I've got more money.
Speaker 2 (48:24):
Now.
Speaker 1 (48:28):
Let's just say the pandemic was very, very good to
meet on.
Speaker 9 (48:32):
Yeah, yeah, he made I think he was a real
estate agent and then he retired at twenty nine. Was
his in you know, so he got he got rich
at the right time in the right place. I think
he's you know, flipping houses in the eighties or something. Yeah,
I just think it's a it's a fun, cartoonish old
style of being a billionaire or a billionaire. You know,
(48:53):
it's the more timely association with the money. Like if
that's all he's wanted to do this whole time, power
to him. It's not he's a bad guy, but he's
doing something cool.
Speaker 3 (49:02):
Yeah, he's probably a massive piece of shit and.
Speaker 9 (49:05):
He is undoubtedly this guy is was he like doing
coal mining or something and he's like involved in mining too.
He will have got into mining. He real you know,
like it's it's ridiculous. He's a real estate agent. He's
a real estate agent at the right time. He got
rich by circumstance. And then that abused people with the
(49:26):
self belief that they are intelligent operators. And yeah, I
know how the world works because they were just in
a specific moment in time and they got one thing right,
and the flowing effect was that they are suddenly ultra wealthy,
and they're like, you know, money does not correlate to
intelligence at all, But tried telling that to a billionaire.
Speaker 2 (49:46):
We'll see if he has if he goes through with
his other plan of doing the Challenger too with he
so his other idea that he's had in the past, well,
in twenty eleven, he bought a prestigious off resort which
was home to the Australian PGA, and filled it with
animatronic dinosaurs, including a life sized t Rex between the
(50:10):
ninth Green and the tenth Green. That's right again, like
this is fucking awesome. I love that.
Speaker 9 (50:17):
The movies he's going for the ones Titanic and it
goes so yeah, yeah, or even Jurassic Park was like
that's a good idea, you know, the midster Jurassic Park
is not. We should have dinosaur parks. Yeah, because like
this boat was awesome.
Speaker 1 (50:38):
You just saw the first the first half of like
every movie and oh yeah, he goes, yeah, right, they
get to Jurassic Park.
Speaker 2 (50:45):
He's like, I've seen enough enough.
Speaker 8 (50:47):
Maybe you know they get on the boat. He's like yeah, boats, boats, boats.
Speaker 2 (50:51):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (50:52):
He's like, no, I have an idea we need fucking
dinosaurs on the golf courses. That's where Hammond went wrong.
Speaker 9 (50:58):
Who knows more about golf course and donosos some with
ten billion dollars or someone who's watching the whole.
Speaker 3 (51:04):
Movie like that, he was called palmer Saurus. It's like
not even like the name of a park. He just
called it palmer.
Speaker 2 (51:14):
That's good.
Speaker 9 (51:14):
See because again Trump would be Trump dinosaur or you
know right, he's trying something right.
Speaker 1 (51:22):
He also the dinosaur, the life sized t rex he
named Jeff and then yeah, Jeff, he said, claimed Jeff
is just the first taste of Palmersaurus. An outdoor exhibit
of one hundred and sixty two scale robotic dinosaurs that roar, slink, sluggishly,
moved their limbs and slowly gnashed their teeth.
Speaker 3 (51:45):
Can't be too much of a distraction on the golf course,
you know what I mean? That's what he's still still
there's still a sense of decorum out there when someone's
trying to put ooh it's staring at the t rigs.
Speaker 1 (51:58):
But the reason he's referred to as Australia is Trump
beyond being a you know, quote unquote billionaire who's lost
his grasp of reality. He's also gotten into politics and
he's a former NP. Yeah, launched a campaign with the
slogan make Australia great it was never great before, so
(52:19):
that they ca.
Speaker 2 (52:21):
Yeah, yeah, there's an honesty there. Yeah. But I just
also like that he's he's so like hair brained that
he fully went in on the fucking hydroxy chlorical Yes,
and by ten imported tens of millions of doses of
H hydroxychlorical when to donate to the Australian government quote
as enthusiasm for the drug. Waned, Wait what happened? But
(52:45):
what's going on with this market? I thought I understood markets.
I'm allionaire.
Speaker 3 (52:49):
Oh the enthusiasm's waning or it was horseshit to begin with,
I'm rather horse paced to begin with, sorry, thank you? Yeah,
I said five million doses had to be destroyed because
no one wanted to and clean them at the airport.
Speaker 2 (53:01):
So I just love that. It's also like really fucking
terrible swings and missus too. It's not like this sort
of like Koch Brothers tape shit.
Speaker 3 (53:09):
It's like no palm resaurus, that's Jeff hydroxychlorin millions of doses.
Speaker 2 (53:14):
Oh, No, one wants them.
Speaker 9 (53:15):
Whatever he's he has, like, while all this is happening,
he has taken time out of his busy schedule being
a fun sort of style hare brain billionaire to disrupt
progress in Australia in a variety of where I think
he pubbed a lot of money. They to referend him
on whether or not they should have an Indigenous voice
in Parliament, the vote yes referendum or vote no, you know,
(53:36):
to the whole country. It was it's a flaid process.
He sunk a bunch of his money into the no
campaign to say Indigenous, Indigenous popular shouldn't have representation.
Speaker 8 (53:43):
Yeah, so he's he's not you know, it's not all that.
Speaker 9 (53:46):
When yeah, the country voted no, it was a very
devastating moment for Australia. And so, you know, when he's
it's important that his brain remains flooded with these sort
of fun distracts because when he's not working on his
vanity projects, he's full xenophobia.
Speaker 8 (54:05):
Yeah he's not even xenophobia.
Speaker 2 (54:07):
Yeah yeah, yeah, you're you're the colonist and.
Speaker 9 (54:10):
His core he's a bad guy, but on the surface,
on the right day, he's probably quite a good chat.
Speaker 3 (54:16):
That's then I think that's sort of like the thing
that makes these kinds of characters like effective. It's like
they're like, no, they're actually advocating for some evil shit.
They're like, no, man, dude, he wants to build fucking
he likes t rexes and shit.
Speaker 2 (54:28):
It's called Jeff Yeah like that.
Speaker 3 (54:31):
It's like the like George Bush, Like you know, Bush
two really gave us that taste of that where they're like,
this guy's a fucking danger and everything. It's like, dude,
he's just a goof man, don't worry. Yeah, it's like
he's destroying the Okay.
Speaker 2 (54:45):
Yeah, he's a bit of a laugh though.
Speaker 1 (54:47):
Keeps pitching me on a public transport overhaul where all
the buses blow up on if they go under fifty five.
Speaker 2 (54:54):
Miles per hour.
Speaker 9 (54:55):
He's trying to get a blimp to fly between Australia
and New Zealand. It's called that the Pamaburg Tube.
Speaker 1 (55:08):
He's also so the thing that happens with billionaires is
they get rich, become convinced that they're right about everything,
and they're like they deserve to be rich because they're
the smartest person who's ever lived. And then they're so
rich at that point that nobody can tell them otherwise. Yeah,
And so for instance, he did the hydroxychloroquin thing during
(55:32):
the pandemic. Also tried to sue the government over COVID
related travel restrictions. Has bankrolled multiple lawsuits contesting COVID vaccine requirements. Incidentally,
when he did catch COVID, he got double pneumonia as
a result and had to go to the hospital.
Speaker 2 (55:48):
And nearly died.
Speaker 1 (55:49):
And they were like, so, do you have any regret
about not having the vaccine? He's like, no, of course,
of course I don't. Restrictions on unvaccinated no longer apply
to me. Also, so I'm winning this one because I
got it. So I no longer I'm.
Speaker 9 (56:06):
Immunized with a lot more, with a lot more coffin
and splashing. Right, what's double pneumonia?
Speaker 2 (56:13):
Oh? Man?
Speaker 8 (56:13):
Twice intense?
Speaker 2 (56:15):
I can't even imagine.
Speaker 3 (56:17):
I just I just like when like there's a medical condition,
but it's the altar, like the the modifiers just double.
Then your five year old name the disease. Oh, it's
because both of your lungs are infected. Okay, got it,
got it, got it makes sense? Yeah, but double compound
compound pneumonia. It's like, yeah, I got yeah, I got
(56:37):
double your infection. That that actually makes sense if you
said double ammonia nut kickbacks.
Speaker 2 (56:41):
Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (56:45):
All right, that's gonna do it for this week's weekly Zeitgeist.
Please like and review the show if you like, The
show means the world to Miles. He he needs your validation.
Speaker 2 (56:58):
Folks.
Speaker 1 (56:59):
I hope you're having a great weekend and I will
talk to you Monday. Bye.
The Daily Zeitgeist News
Hosts And Creators
Jack O'Brien
Miles Gray
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