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.
Well, we are.
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 about it a lot on this show.
Yep.
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.
Thank you so much.
Guys, thank you. I just want to make a quick disclaim. You know, I wrote all the really bad bits.
The bad stuff.
Okay, good, We'll only ask you about the bad parts. Yeah, but I guess our.
First question, what's the worst part of the book.
Oh yeah, that's a really good question. What is the worst put now?
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 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 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?
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. 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 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
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.
You know.
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, 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 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
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 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, you know, what is a state? Could you give me a short definition.
Yeah, I mean yeah, you would have to think about it.
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 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, 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. 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.
Would happen. We're not familiar, you wouldn't know about this, but you know, we were in America.
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.
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.
Yeah, that's right.
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 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, 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 of that story into dissarray. I wouldn't even know where to begin. You're gonna have to give you some point as it.
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?
Ooh, okay, so I'll give you both.
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.
Since I think it's a non holiday, like since I moved here, since I.
Don't respect my family.
Yeah, that's fucked up, but I did.
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 be on the nose as it is, but it insteads just as Irish underneath the shamrock.
And that's the spoiler alert for a you know, fifteen year old movie.
He gets killed, but he he bleeds out through the Irish shirt, and I was like, I want the Irish shirt.
Yeah, that's really poor.
Friends.
Is he like in disguise as or something.
He's just that, he's.
Never in disguise. Frank Frank, oh, Franco or whatever his name is is the.
He's He's Frank Costello.
He's Frank Costello. Yeah he is.
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 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 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.
I just it was.
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 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.
Floyd.
We respected.
We experienced the finest day of our life yesterday with family, faith and friends.
We could dismiss that these comments as from uninformed people.
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.
Walsh declined comment.
Oh wow, they just laid comment. How did your career ever recover from your fucking congressman?
I flamed you.
I was at his looking at his political record is pretty hilarious because he's just like a famously not a great person.
But yeah, no, I mean I was crying. I called my dad crying.
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.
It's funny.
Family.
Yeah, yes, that's amazing.
I mean you were crying.
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.
The best day of your life with family, had the best.
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.
What is that? Even where do you even get this stuff from? He said?
The land Up guy, the guy who the guy who assaulted Iranian American students in the seventies.
Yeah, so fucking wild. I mean, yeah, his record.
Is gross, like it's yeah, but I'm big at it against.
The Irish even though he was he was a said for assaulting six Iranian students, okay, right in the seventies, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It was like in seventies.
It wasn't a place in the seventies. See were dropped, they were rocked.
Good impression of Barkwalder.
Oh god, if.
I had been there on that day that she was shadowing that bar turn, that things would have gone down a little differently.
Bro.
Boston dot com wouldn't even exist.
It would have been written an article about how I was working out at three three in the morning.
I mean, yeah, the tenor of that story would have changed quite a bit if Mark Wahpber started doing push ups in the middle.
So what's something you think is underrated?
Underrated?
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. 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.
Yeah, it's an adventure. You can.
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.
To him, I said, it's crunched him up there. Let's true carefully and the.
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?
Right, yeah, right right right?
Yeah. Brother, He's like, yeah, man, it looks like we're in the ninety fifth minute here.
Yeah.
Yeah, just like good too.
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.
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.
Yeah.
If I have a good year, I think I'll get those Biden plugs. Oh it looks.
Like it shuts down some of your other like neural faculties.
Yeah, I want to go.
When to buy as junk? I got them?
Yeah? Craft versus body rejected. The craft versus is my favorite. What's something you think is overrated? Overrated?
Having a giant penis?
I think I could create problems. I don't know.
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.
I needed that fresh Kiwi muscle Man.
They've shipped it over double quick, so much more roomy, you know, Yeah, because they don't tighten the skin.
Yeah, bubbles lowers and.
Yeah, I can't sleep on my stomach without hearing light pops.
Sounds like packing bubbles.
Yeah.
We love to laugh us, we have fun.
What is something you think is overrated?
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 lot more and the returns are marginal.
I'm not saying it, but the returns are.
And listen, there's true man, with your effort, it takes.
It's a lot more like that I want to do. We'll say.
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.
It's it's there.
Are there are some returns, but not are you still boxing?
No?
No, the returns better boxing? Did you feel better from when you're training boxing?
Oh, wonderful question.
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 and drinking water, I only feel a little bit better.
Yeah.
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 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.
My body is old as fuck.
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.
Andrew, you're shaking your head no vigorously. Here's why you don't.
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.
I agree with you.
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 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.
Sure, you feel a little better, but I don't think you feel enough better to justify it.
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?
No, no, no, no. We just have a pool that is.
Cold, but you're not doing the ship where you're putting like ice in like little I'm.
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, and then my body is like yeah, well that sucked.
All right, Yeah I need to recover for forty eight hours.
Yeah exactly, I think.
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, but I'm a little both.
Yeah, because I.
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.
I do feel like I don't want to.
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.
Yeah. Well, I'm here to say I'm one of the physically exalted few.
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.
Blood. Blood work lies, Yeah.
Blood work lies, bleeding. The follow up full circle, All right, let's take your quick break.
We'll be right back, and.
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 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.
So yeah, this is.
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 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 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 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 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.
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 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. 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.
That's got a mystery. Aliens did it right. Aliens built all those things, I agree.
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
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 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? 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 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,
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.
Yeah, they didn't like that. When we imagine them.
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.
They didn't.
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.
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 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 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?
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
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?
No, I probably would have before reading your book. But your book does a really good job of dispelling this notion.
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 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, 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, 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.
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.
With Rousseau.
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.
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, trying to understand what was this liberty that we lost. You can just clude what that might really be like.
And then Hobbes is on the Pinker side.
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.
Yeah, and I think Professor Pinker is very forthright about this. He actually refers to himself as a neo hobbs.
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.
It Well, this is what my friend David used to refer to as the extreme center.
Yes, yeah, exactly.
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.
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 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 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.
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 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 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,
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 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 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.
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 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 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.
It is what it is.
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. 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 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 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.
In one of.
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,
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 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, which is pretty mind blowing.
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.
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 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 blown of parliaments, at a time when you don't really have very much of that going on in Europe.
Yeah. Actually, let's take one more quick break, will be right.
Back, and we're back and sing it out.
The Titanic's been in the news for years now.
Since who knows when, probably like right after they were like, we're sending an unsinkable ship across the Atlantic.
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.
News streak, this things on. Yeah, I can't believe it. Yeah, unbelievable.
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.
Oh yeah, are manniquins?
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.
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.
Ye.
Yeah, this is this guy who said it.
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?
Then? If he only has one mannequin, I think.
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.
He's a fan of only the VHS's yea, yeah, never seen it.
I just like these little tapes they come in the double tape box. I think it's kind of neat.
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.
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.
Me Avatar wasn't based on a real story. Okay, sure, right.
So this guy Clive Palma, yeah, he's also a Titanic fan if it didn't.
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 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?
Good?
Isn't it like a bunch of people whole life?
Yep?
Yep, exactly. We don't have enough life rafts. There are engineering problems.
Everything that will be exactly the same. And then we'll just see if.
Annoyed he's gonna be when he's gonna try and sell this thing into an iceberg that has melted, it's like, yeah.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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 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.
I want to rebuild a boat, the most famous.
Boat that's saying yeah, good on you, bro, Yeah, go for it.
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 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.
Yeah.
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.
Now.
Let's just say the pandemic was very, very good to meet on.
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, 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.
Yeah, he's probably a massive piece of shit and.
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
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.
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 ninth Green and the tenth Green. That's right again, like this is fucking awesome. I love that.
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.
You just saw the first the first half of like every movie and oh yeah, he goes, yeah, right, they get to Jurassic Park.
He's like, I've seen enough enough.
Maybe you know they get on the boat. He's like yeah, boats, boats, boats.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
He's like, no, I have an idea we need fucking dinosaurs on the golf courses. That's where Hammond went wrong.
Who knows more about golf course and donosos some with ten billion dollars or someone who's watching the whole.
Movie like that, he was called palmer Saurus. It's like not even like the name of a park. He just called it palmer.
That's good.
See because again Trump would be Trump dinosaur or you know right, he's trying something right.
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.
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.
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 that they ca.
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 what's going on with this market? I thought I understood markets. I'm allionaire.
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.
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.
It's like no palm resaurus, that's Jeff hydroxychlorin millions of doses.
Oh, No, one wants them.
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, 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.
Yeah, so he's he's not you know, it's not all that.
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.
Yeah he's not even xenophobia.
Yeah yeah, yeah, you're you're the colonist and.
His core he's a bad guy, but on the surface, on the right day, he's probably quite a good chat.
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.
It's called Jeff Yeah like that.
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.
Yeah, he's a bit of a laugh though.
Keeps pitching me on a public transport overhaul where all the buses blow up on if they go under fifty five.
Miles per hour.
He's trying to get a blimp to fly between Australia and New Zealand. It's called that the Pamaburg Tube.
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 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.
And nearly died.
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.
Immunized with a lot more, with a lot more coffin and splashing. Right, what's double pneumonia?
Oh? Man?
Twice intense?
I can't even imagine.
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 double your infection. That that actually makes sense if you said double ammonia nut kickbacks.
Yeah yeah, yeah.
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.
Folks.
I hope you're having a great weekend and I will talk to you Monday. Bye.