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