Behind the Bastards - The Bastard Manifesto

Episode Date: August 1, 2019

In Episode 77, Robert is joined by Jamie Loftus and Producer, Sophie Lichterman for look into what Robert calls, Bastards 101.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's Dick and my taters? I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, and that is the intro. People requested that intro, Sophie. I don't need to hear your guff about it. You sit down. You sit down. I do want people's feedback, but I don't need guff.

Okay, this is a no guff time. I don't agree with that. I think that was by the standards of my recent introductions, one of the best ones I've done. I just don't like crimes against potatoes. Well, that's actually totally fair. But that introduction does tie in slightly with today's episode. First off, Jamie Loftus, you are our guest today. Hi. How are you doing, Jamie? Co-host of The Bechtelcast.

Yes. The creative mind behind Boss Whom Is Girl, which is going to be in Edinburgh, probably by the time this episode drops. Most entertaining show I've been to in the last 10 years. Thanks. Flight to Edinburgh. I've seen it several times. You should, yeah. If you listen to this years later, and Jamie Loftus is not in Edinburgh,

Flight to Edinburgh and demand that they take her back. Like what happened there? Yeah, this is like 2022. Yeah. Yeah, force it upon the town fathers of Edinburgh. I mean, really optimistic for you to even mention 2022 as a possibility. As a time period that will exist. Yeah.

Well, I'm an optimist. I'm not. I'm not. Well, I don't know. I'm a mix of both, I guess. So today, normally this is a show where I talk about the very worst people in all of history, but today we're doing something a little bit different. We are getting very much behind the bastards because we're going into some prehistory about where authoritarianism comes from,

where fascism comes from, how it might be kind of programmed into our brains to an extent. This is kind of a weird one, and it's based on, you know, I read about primarily dictators and terrible, unethical political leaders and corporate leaders, people who abuse power basically as a more than full time job. And having done that for a year and change, you start to have some ideas about the nature of power and the nature of authoritarianism and the possibilities of the human race and stuff. So this is like, it's not a half ass, but it's maybe three quarters of an ass attempt at me putting some of that together and explaining some of the conclusions I've drawn from all of this research. And it's not ready for public consumption, but I'm going to put it out there anyway because I'm a hack and a fraud.

So that's where we are. I've got Sophie and Jamie in the room to tear me down if what I'm saying is nonsense. And Anderson, this would be really fun if your conclusions were actually, I was being kind of dramatic before power is actually really good. And I'm going to work for Cook Industries. Bye bye. This ends on a prosodom Hussein rant. Yeah. Robert just goes full circle.

You know what? Sabiba and the king. Who leaves. I love it. Yeah, I've become a Stalinist. Yeah. Oh God, I just want to hear you refer to yourself as a bit of a drama queen. And it turns out this year I've just been a bit of a drama queen and things are actually fine. He's like, I just been binging Mary Kay and Ashley.

You know, that's my new life. As I learned from Mary Kay and Ashley, everything's fine as long as you as long as you light of your. Wait, Mary Kay. I was too busy trying to remember exactly what had happened in that movie where they trick their parents into both getting on a cruise ship with them to make their divorced mom and dad get back together. Oh, buddy. That's a fun one. Isn't that one? Isn't that a parent trap?

Parent trap. Yeah, that is parent trap. Yeah, not Mary Kay and actually not actually twins. That's double Lindsay Lohan. And as I miss, wait, was that Lindsay Lohan? That wasn't even Mary Kay and Ashley. God damn it. I know.

Robert, I think about the time that I tried to mention Ariana Grande in casual conversation last year and you waited maybe a full 10 seconds by being like, I don't know who you're talking about. I actually bring that up. Think about it once a week. I bring it up constantly with salespeople when they ask me why Robert can't pronounce normal words and I give them the explanation that he can pronounce some crazy Russian shit but cannot pronounce Ariana Grande. See, this is frustrating because I feel like if you add up the number of words that I read every week on this show, I have above a 99% pronunciation rate. Oh, someone crunched those numbers. Yeah. We're talking about 10,000-ish words a week, you know, you get a couple wrong.

Mistakes are made. Yeah. Okay. But usually the words are like tree. It's a treh. A treh. Look, look, I love treys and I pronounce them root. Why did you let us come on the show together?

We're not going to get anything done. I needed some shit talking of my philosophizing here because if I'm going to do an episode where I unload a half-baked philosophy, somebody should be there to like point out when I've made a huge logical error or pronounce a name wrong. Okay. This actually will tie in with something we talk about later in the episode. I didn't plan that ahead of time, but it totally does and I'm very proud of myself now. Love it. So let's get into it. In 1989, Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist and author, wrote an essay titled The End of History.

Looking forward just a little bit, he was able to see the fall of the Soviet Union was on the very near horizon. To Fukuyama and to many at the dawn of the 1990s, it looked as if a new epic in human society was dawning. One in which the great historical shifts between empires and modes of government that had persisted for eons would cease because mankind had clearly arrived at the perfect system. Liberal democracy. So that's Fukuyama's thinking in like 1989. Got it. Now, he turned his essay into a book in 1992 after the fall of the USSR when he looked like he'd basically read the future. In The End of History, he wrote that humanity was witnessing, quote,

not just the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such, that is the endpoint of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. So a bit of a bold claim to make. Okay. And a little less than 30 years later, in the year of our Lord, 2019, Fukuyama's theories have not aged well. Rather than living at the end of history, we now seem to be living through a period where these once invulnerable liberal democracies are dropping faster than fat beats at a warehouse rave. Wow. Thank you. Thank you for that, Jamie.

Wow. I was proud of that one. Wow. Under Viktor Orban, Hungary has transitioned to what he calls an illiberal democracy. Under Tayyip Recep Erdogan, Turkey has moved very close to an outright dictatorship, the elections of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines hardly bowed any better. But the situation is actually even worse than it looks based on all that. Researchers with a German institute, Bertelsmann Stiftung, published a study back in March of 2018 that analyzed the quality of democracy, the market economy, and the leadership of some 129 nations. They used this to put together what they called a transformation index that roughly analyzed the overall levels of freedom, authoritarianism, and inequality in those societies. They found that roughly one billion more people live under dictatorships now than did 15 years ago. Wow, that's insane.

Yeah, it's not a great statistic. I don't like that. That's all I have to say about it. That's my only comment. Not into it. Sophie, not a dictatorship fan. Bold stance to take. Considering, honestly, brave of you. I mean, we can add to that because I feel like our relationship, Robert, is a dictatorship and I am that dictator. Yes, absolutely. I was like in which direction nothing would surprise me.

And like Stalin, you regularly throw oranges at me and make me watch cowboy movies while you drink. I've seen it. Yeah, absolutely. I've seen it. 100%. I hate to see it and I see it. You are my son and I accept you for who you are. Yeah, except for when I don't want to watch cowboy movies. Yeah, not acceptable. Then that's not acceptable.

So, yeah, so these guys look into the number of people living in dictatorships and how that's changed and they find out that there's a billion more people living under such regimes now than more 15 years ago. I'm going to write up of this study in the local, which is a German newspaper, quote, Well, the researchers concluded that the number of people living in democracies rose from 4 billion to 4.2 billion between 2003 and 2017. They also found that 3.3 billion people lived under dictatorship last year compared to 2.3 billion in 2003. So the trends aren't good. It is said that the number of countries classified as having exemplary standards of free and fair elections had dropped from one in six in 2006 to one in 14 last year. And while 17 of the 129 countries were considered to have completely unrestricted freedom of press and opinion in 2006, that was the case for just 10 countries last year. So we're not, we're not on a great trend line if you want to look at history that way. Now, in every era, there are philosophers whose purpose seems to be to reinforce in the minds of the great and good that whatever systems put them in their lofty place are right and decent and perfect.

Did someone say lofty place? Whoa! Oh, lofty business for me. What would you sell? In 1992, Francis Fukuyama was that man, cheering the victors of the Cold War on and assuring them that their world order would persist for all time. And now that mankind seems to be sinking into a darker and more authoritarian era, a new philosopher has arrived to praise the righteousness of this shift. His name is Dr. Jordan Peterson. Hey.

Stand by. Oh, wow. I was having a perfectly lovely conversation, Robert. Yeah, we were having a conversation while you were talking and then I got the Jordan Peterson memo. I know. And I just had a sharp pain in my head. But before we get into that sharp pain, what would you sell? The lofty place?

Yeah, what would you sell at the lofty place? I would sell all sorts of shit. I mean, it would be, and also none of it would be, it would be, I think probably a front for something else. Like it would be mostly, I don't even know. I'm not a very good consumer. Swords? Yeah. It would be a shop for, oh, okay.

No, it's supposed to be a shop, but it's actually a trap. So I'll lure in sword guys. You'd capture Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah, exactly. Like guys who own swords and then it's really kind of like a re-education kind of thing and the doors snap and then I teach the sword guys a thing or two about a thing or two and then they leave mentally healthier. I can respect that.

Back to Jordan Peterson. Well, I mean, speaking of sword guys, he kind of ties in there. But he also ties into authoritarianism because in his bestselling book, Twelve Rules for Life and Anodote to Chaos, Dr. Peterson argues that strict hierarchies are natural and healthy, at least to some extent. According to a write-up in the conversation, quote, To prove his point, Peterson uses the example of lobsters, which humans share a common evolutionary ancestor with. Peterson argues that like humans, lobsters exist in hierarchies and have a nervous system attuned to status, which runs on serotonin, a brain chemical often associated with feelings of happiness.

To start up a hierarchy of lobster climbs, this brain mechanism helps to make more serotonin available. The more defeated suffers, the more restricted the serotonin supply. Lower serotonin is in turn associated with more negative emotions, perhaps making it harder to climb back up the ladder. According to Peterson, hierarchies and humans work in a similar way. We are wired to live in them. So that's Dr. Peterson. And as much as I may personally find him frustrating and disagreeable, he's not the only person making arguments like this. He's just the ugliest person.

Yeah, do we have a second source? I just don't like his... Yeah, we've got other sources. Unfortunately, we have other sources. There's a distressing amount of data that reinforces the idea that strict hierarchy may be more natural to humankind than the egalitarian future those of us who grew up watching Star Trek the next generation might prefer. In 2008, a scientific study on a hierarchy in the human brain started making the rounds online. Websites like PBS NewsHour summarized it with headlines like this. Social status is hardwired into the brain, study shows.

The research this article and others like it discussed was based on a study conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health using an FMRI to measure the brain activity of 72 people playing a computer game with financial rewards on the line. According to the press release, quote, there were assigned a status that they were told was based on their playing skill. In fact, the game outcomes were predetermined by the other players simulated by computer. Participants intermittently saw pictures and scores of an inferior and a superior player they thought were simultaneously playing in other rooms. Although they knew the perceived player's scores would not affect their own outcomes or reward and were instructed to ignore them, participants' brain activity and behavior were highly influenced by their position in the implied hierarchy.

Now, I found a more detailed breakdown of that study by an actual scientist, Dr. Kabiz Kamrani, writing on Anthropology.net. And he notes, quote, Another interesting observation involved subjects that were presented a superior competitor in the game. When that happened, it triggered activity in, quote, an area near the front of the brain that appears to size people up, making interpersonal judgments and assessing social status, a circuit involving the mid-front part of the brain that processes the intentions and motives of others in a motion processing area deep in the brain,

activated when the hierarchy became unstable, allowing for upward and downward mobility. It is. The prefrontal cortex is the judgy bitch cortex. Yes. Let's call it a spate. Dr. Kamrani goes on to write, these results kind of thwart any utopian anarchists out there. This data shows that our brain's hierarchical consciousness seems to be ingrained in the human brain, so much so that there are distinct circuits activated by concerns over social rank. So what kind of a study is this?

It's an FMRI study. So they're doing these sort of things to try to put people in situations where they would be specifically maybe led to think about their rank in a hierarchy, and they're also measuring their brains at the same time. And they're finding that because of the way that people's brains react in these studies, that parts of our brain are hardwired to view ourselves in part of a social hierarchy, as opposed to like human beings inherently being egalitarian, and social hierarchy being something that's falsely imposed on us from outside.

Like the structure of our brain seems to reinforce hierarchy. And do we know, is there like, are we pulling from like a wide group of people in this study? Yeah, what's the sample size? This is just one study, but there are other studies that have found similar things. Right, but in his specific study, does he say the sample size of the group that he did? Yeah, this one's I think a 72-person study, this most recent one here. But this is like sort of emblematic of one sort of strain of research, and there's a couple of other studies in it that talk about hierarchy and stuff.

It's not, I'm not trying to present this as like the end all be all, but it is kind of a bummer to read stuff like that. Definitely. Because it would seem to push the conclusion that we are to some extent, at least irrevocably chained to hierarchy to systems of inequality, and in other words, to a world dominated by bastards. And while that would mean eternal job security for Sophie and I, it's not a worry that a world that I want to live in particularly.

So I dug a little bit deeper with a little bit of desperation to it. And I found evidence to suggest that our primate ancestors, or at least many of our primate ancestors, would have been beings with strict social hierarchies. Scientists think this is plausible because many of our modern ape and monkey relatives show evidence of this too. Gibbons are strictly monogamous. Chimpanzees have elaborate sexual hierarchies. Silverback gorillas don't exactly work out their differences in mutual self-criticism sessions. I'm trying not to be too absolutist with anything here.

But I think it's fair to say, based on a lot of anthropological research, that many of the pre-human primates we descended from would have behaved in similar ways, which is probably why we have brains that are to some extent hardwired for hierarchy. Now, this gets more complicated when you also slot in the fact that an increasing body of anthropological research suggests that many of our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have lived in egalitarian communities, which is the conclusion that scientists increasingly make as they study ancient man and modern hunter-gatherers who sort of are seen as kind of a stand-in for our ancestors.

Which kind of suggests that tens of thousands of years in our past, at some point we sort of evolved with this structures in our brain that kind of functioned the same way as like an addiction to hierarchy, and at some point in our past we got over it for a period of like thousands and thousands and thousands of years. So, yeah, that's interesting to me. In 2012, researchers writing for the Journal of Human Nature published the results of a study into a sample of 53 human societies in which polyandrous unions were common. I see where we're going here, Robert.

No, no, this is just a little bit, but not for the most part. Just a little bit, just a little bit. Grounded, forcing your own life stuff. I can't believe this. Now, we demonstrate that although polyandry is rare, it is not as rare as commonly believed, is found worldwide and is in most common in egalitarian societies. We also argue that polyandry likely existed during... You don't say! Yeah, early human history and should be examined from an evolutionary perspective.

Our analysis reveals that it may be a predictable response. Okay, here's the thing. It's a predictable response to a high operational sex ratio favoring males and may also be a response to high rates of male mortality and possibly male absenteeism. Oh my God, he's just trying to live longer. It makes sense. No, no, no, that's not what it is. Because men in ancient societies would have died so often, it didn't make sense for people to be strictly monogamous.

So if you're going to have men dying at a high rate because they're out hunting stuff, it makes sense if everyone in the tribe raises all of the kids and if people don't have strong bonds of monogamy. That's what they're saying. Ancient people weren't polyandrous because they were making an ethical choice about it being more ethical than monogamy. It's just if there's 150 of you in your tribe and people are dropping all the time because they're out fucking hunting wolves and shit,

it doesn't make sense to like have... Oh, her husband died so now her kids don't get food. That's not a great way to... If there's not that many of you, you just can't live that way. You got to stay horny, stay frothy all the time. Yeah, it's more that like... One of the things that's really common in particularly a lot of Latin American tribal societies is they have these beliefs about sperm that once a woman gets pregnant, every guy she has sex with after the pregnancy is started contributes sperm that helps build the child.

And so kids have multiple fathers in the tribe. And that means that like if two or three of them die, you still got three or four dads. And like they're all responsible for teaching the kids certain things. Which is a really logical way to have a society if you're a hunter-gatherer tribe. It makes sense. I see the logic. I've never found more daddies to be an effective option. I don't need there to be like girls that have or boys that have like more than one dad-daddy issues. Unless we're talking sugar daddy culture in which case...

Please, as many daddies as you do you. Well, I think you guys and your reaction when I started talking about polyandry does make sense to me because... I'm polyamorous and I'm familiar with a lot of frustrating people in that community who will make claims that like, oh, it's more natural, it's more ethical because our ancestors did it. And it's important enough that like, no, our ancestors, to the extent that they were polyandrous, didn't do it for ethical reasons. They did it because it like made logical sense for the world that they lived in. That's fine. Yeah, it's when it's just something to tweet about.

I love when I see my polyamorous friends and they ask me how my monogamous relationship is going and I'm like, oh, it's good. And they're like, well, well, you're missing out over here. And it's like, okay, gang, let's just play the board game. Let's just do this, friends. Let's just be respectful of each other. And the other thing that is important here is that if we're talking about like this book, Sex at Dawn, which is a really interesting book, focuses a lot on one of like the polyandrous species of monkeys, bonobos,

but ignores that there are a lot of monogamous species as well. So it's entirely possible that like, we descend more from monogamous types of primates than we do from polyandrous types of primates. And if that's the case, then this period of time in which most human beings were polyandrous isn't like natural for them. It was something that they evolved to do and no more natural than like a cell phone. And like a cell phone was essentially like an adaptation people developed over time in order to increase their odds of survival, which is what I'm getting to here. Well, Robert, you know what else can increase your chances of survival? Product and services?

Oh, it's an ad break. I'm so upset. Damn. They will, especially if it's dick pills, which just fits right into what we're talking about. But also fuck cook industries, fuck fuck news. Right. Yeah. Fuck like monkeys, thanks to dick pills.

Product! What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. To track down exclusive historical records, we've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books.

I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back and I'm continuing to build to my larger point, which is going to keep going on. There was a 2015 study by the University College of London, which put forward the same suggestion that men and women in pre-agricultural human societies likely lived in relative equality. Mark Dibble, lead author on the study, said, sexual equality is one of the important changes that distinguishes humans. It hasn't really been highlighted before. So again, this guy is saying, this is a change. It's not a thing that came naturally to us. It's something that we adapted to for specific benefits.

So these two studies are part of a surprisingly large, to me, pretty convincing body of research, which makes the case both that the now standard nuclear family has not been the norm for much of human history, and that human society in the days when life was nasty, brutish, and short was also a lot more equal and less exploitative than it does today. Not just for reasons of the kind of sexual bonds people had. I'm going to quote from a Guardian report on the matter. The first real splash in this arena came from the anthropologist Louis Morgan and his book, Ancient Society. In the book, Morgan presented the results of his study of the Iroquois, a Native American hunter-gatherer society in upstate New York. The Iroquois, Morgan observed, lived in large family units based on polyamorous relationships in which men and women lived in general equality. Morgan's work hit a broader audience when it was taken up by Friedrich Ingels, most famous for being the co-author of the Communist Manifesto in his book, The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State.

Ingels drew on Morgan's data, as well as evidence from around the world to argue that prehistoric societies lived in what he called primitive communism. Other anthropologists now call this fierce egalitarianism. Societies where families were based on polyamory and in which people lived in active equality, i.e., equality is enforced. And that's the key part here, enforced. In our society, rules are enforced unevenly and imperfectly by law enforcement of varying stripes. But we all accept that most of the things we consider crimes will not be punished. Most drug users won't be busted. Most men who beat their wives won't go to jail. Roughly 40% of murderers get away with their crimes.

And I probably don't need to point out to this audience that the number of rapists who don't get punished for their crimes is way higher than 40%. We can understand that statistic. You can have a society that more or less functions with those statistics when there's hundreds of millions of you. And there's way more food than everyone needs to eat. And the margins of survival for our social groups are pretty wide. Primitive hunter-gatherer humans, however, lived in small bands of several dozen to perhaps 150 or so at the large end of things. They lived in a world in a time in which the margins of life and death were much thinner. Their tribes could not survive people stealing food from each other or committing multiple murders.

This is one of the reasons why some scientists suspect polyamory was so common among humans in this period. Did you say the average lifespan around this time? That's not a super useful statistic because of infant mortality. One of the mistakes a lot of people make when they think about the past is like, oh, the average lifespan was 35. That means that 30, you're an old man. No, if you make it to 30, you're probably going to live to 50 or 60 at least, and 70 wouldn't even be crazy. It's just that so many fucking babies are dying back then that it drops the average a lot. Got it.

You do love to talk about babies. That makes so much more sense. Yeah, it's not at all weird for people who make it to 30 to live to like 60. Even back then, maybe 50 would be a lot more common. 60 is still really old then, but it's not the norm to die at 30. It's the norm to die as a baby. By the time you're 30, you're on a fucking roll in terms of being alive. You're probably a pretty tough son of a bitch if you make it to 30 in that kind of world or daughter of a bastard.

Although there would not have been a lot of bastards back then because societies couldn't survive them, which is the point I'm building to. So yeah. So ancient tribal people had a huge number of what are called leveling mechanisms. That's the anthropological term to defend themselves against dangerous members of the group. And this is where I get to tell you guys one of my very, very, very, very, very favorite stories. Have you ever heard of the shaming of the meat? No. Robert, I've heard about the shaming of the meat.

No, it has nothing to do with sex. It has something to do with gender, but nothing to do with sex. All right, I'll tell you. Whatever. Richard Borsche Lee is a Canadian anthropologist who has spent a huge amount of time living with and studying and writing about modern hunter-gatherer peoples, like the Ikung and the Juwansi, both of which I'm sure I've mispronounced the names of, like the Ikung. You have to do like a weird, well, I can't. I just, I'm not going to be able to, they're the Ikung people.

These are people who exist today in our modern connected world, but the rhythms of their lives and tactics of their societies are seen by anthropologists as sort of a window into the human past. Studying them is not a perfect look at our ancestors, but it's about as good as we can get. In the 1970s, Richard spent time living with the Ikung, and near the end of this period embedded with them, it just so happened to coincide with Christmas. And out of a sense of festivity and a desire to express his gratitude towards the tribe for hosting him, Richard Lee bought a gigantic ox to present them so that everybody could have a sweet ass feast. Now, the ox he picked weighed 1200 pounds, which meant that it was enough meat for every man, woman, and child among the tribe he was with to get like four pounds of meat. So he's like, this is fucking awesome. Like I've made, this is going to be a great gift. This is a great way to show my gratitude to them.

They're going to love this shit. So I'm going to quote now from what he wrote about this experience, which is basically an article titled Eating Christmas in the Kalahari, which you can find online. It'll be in the source notes. It's a great read quote. The next morning, word spread among the people that the big solid black one was was the ox chosen by my Bushman name. It means roughly whitey for the Christmas feast. That afternoon, I received the first delegation. Bina, an outspoken 60 year old mother of five, came to the point slowly.

Where were you planning to eat Christmas? Right here, I replied, alone or with others. I expect to invite all the people to eat Christmas with me. Eat what? I have purchased you a heavy black ox and I am going to slaughter and cook it. That's what we were told at the well, but refused to believe it until we heard it from yourself. Well, it's the black one, I replied expansively, although wondering what she was driving at. Oh no, Bina groaned, turning to her group.

They were right. Turning back to me, she asked, do you expect us to eat that bag of bones? Bag of bones? It's the biggest ox here. Big, yes, but old and thin. Everybody knows there's no meat on that old ox. What did you expect us to eat off it? The horns?

Everybody chuckled at Bina's one liner as they walked away, but all I could manage was a weak grin. Are you wondering where this is going? What's happening? You're going to fucking love it. Okay, I'm excited. Great. Over the next several days, tribesmen and women and children would make repeated mocking jibes to Richard about the scrawny size of the enormous ox that he'd bought them.

No, I don't know Lee, but reading his writing, you get the feeling he's a very open-minded, friendly, and a hard-to-rattle sort of dude, which you'd expect from an anthropologist who spent his whole life living among different tribal groups around the world. Right, really harping on the meat story. Yeah, it's frustrating. They keep harping on him, dozens and dozens of everyone in the tribe is making fun of him for days about this. Okay. So he starts to get frustrated and even angry as this goes on.

And eventually some of his good friends among the tribe explained to him that this was common behavior, particularly from other members of the tribe towards their young hunters. You just make fun of people for the shittiness of whatever they hunt regardless of how big it is when it's time to like help them clean and cook it. So in frustration and confusion, Lee asked one of his friends, Why insult a man after he has gone to all that trouble to track and kill an animal and when he is going to share the meat with you so that your children will have something to eat? Arrogance was his cryptic answer. Arrogance?

Yes. When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can't accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle. So this is like the meat version of like humility. Yeah.

This is how you enforce humility among a hunter-gather tribe. This is how you attack and fight the male ego when you can't afford to let it go out of control like it gets to do in our society. Wow. Yeah. That's kind of beautiful. I mean, you like to text me all the time telling me that you're embarrassed by your gender, which I just wanted to bring up for no reason. I get frustrated a lot. That's nice. I mean, I do think it is also funny that it's like, okay, how do we get through to the men?

It's like, okay, let's just wrap a moral and a bunch of meat and maybe they won't taste it on the way down. This is kind of very Texas. By any means necessary. Extremely Texas. This story is so Robert. Wow. Now, there are some scientists who theorize that sarcasm and humor itself evolved in human culture as a leveling mechanism, as a way to cool the hearts of arrogant young men before they went mad with power. So that's like why we have humor.

Deadpool. That's why we have Deadpool. That's why we're telling what he's saying. Well, things have gotten mutated, but like that was its initial purpose is to like allow us to... That's the perfect explanation for Deadpool. It's like humor is making fun of somebody, insulting somebody is a way to attack them without physically fighting and getting into a physical battle where people die and are injured. So that's sort of the theory that like maybe this is kind of the evolutionary use of a sense of humor or at least one of them. If being good at insults is just not attacking someone, I'm a fucking samurai.

Well, yeah. I mean, there's a reason why in so many cultures around the world, like it's pretty common for people's grandmas to be like both kind of in charge of the family and also talking shit about everybody all the time. The evolution of sarcasm is what a dark road to go down. I saw a short ass target the other day and said, sarcasm, it's how I hug. I think it really speaks to your point. And also fuck that shirt and anyone that's ever worn it. It's gotten out of hand in the modern era, but we can see where it started. Deadpool, Robert. Mistakes are made, I guess.

Ryan enabler. So there's a body of scientific research that suggests possessing power impacts the brain in manners similar to brain damage. Dr. Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley is one of the scientists on the forefront of this field of study from the Atlantic, quote, subjects under the influence of power he found in studies spanning two decades acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury becoming more impulsive, less risk aware and crucially less adept at seeing things from other people's point of view. Sukvinder Opie, a neuroscientist at McMaster University in Ontario, recently described something similar. Unlike Keltner, who studies behaviors, Opie studies brains. And when he put the heads of the powerful and the not so powerful under a transcranial magnetic stimulation machine, he found that power in fact impairs a specific neural process, mirroring that may be a cornerstone of empathy.

Now, before we take too much out of this, there's a lot of debate about the validity of this research and the extent to which it can tell us anything about the real world. I found an interesting neuro skeptic article that points out that power priming, which is the kind of studies that were conducted to get these results. Power priming studies have real flaws when we try to apply their lessons outside of a research context. But I think the lived experience of the Ikung and other hunter-gatherers seems to support at least the conclusion that a lot of people who live on traditional more hunter-gatherer societies kind of understood that power was bad for people and it made them more dangerous to themselves and others. And that they needed to be, like, egalitarianism was then, again, not an ethical decision. It's a defensive reaction to the dangers of power. So I find that interesting. I think, yeah, that definitely tracks with a lot of, that's part of why I do think that powerful people using social media is so extremely interesting, is you can almost see the rot on the edges of their brain. And even Trump aside, there's so many examples of just, like, you can just see in real time the brain rot forming.

With, like, overly famous people. Yeah, yeah. I mean, just, like, influential people who have too much money for their own good. Or even, like, social media influencers, you can see it. Corrosion. Well, they're chaotic evil. I don't even include them. I think, like, the best example of that I've seen recently is Elon Musk's bizarre crusade against crediting artists, which is, like, if you had sat down with him, if he'd never gotten on Twitter and you just sat down with him and be like, oh, if you share the work of an artist you like, you should add their name to it. He would have been like, oh, yeah, of course, that makes total sense. Right. And never thought about it again.

Yeah. But because of the way social media works, somebody says that on Twitter and he just immediately attacks them. It's like this. Why are you having this fight, Elon Musk? I mean, his entire online presence, like, it should be, there should be a thesis paper on it. Because it is, like, you can just see his brain turning to dust. It's bad for us. Before, very eyes. Yeah. And I'm sure that that's an extension of things that have been going on, you know, since the beginning of time. But like, actually getting to observe it and having people volunteer that information to you is fascinating.

I suspect, I don't, I can't know this, but like, if we can imagine a world in which Donald Trump never had Twitter, but also still got elected president, my suspicion is that he'd suck less. Yeah. But also, I don't think he would have been elected without Twitter. No, never without Twitter. But yeah, I think it's been bad for him. I think that it worked in his favor during the election and then during his presidency. It's been just like a giant, yeah. You're welcome listeners for that sound effect.

Back to my theory here that I'm still building towards. There's a lot of, like, I'm taking you on, like, the journey of just shit I've been thinking about for the last year and a half. So this is kind of like the pattern my brain has taken. We're touring your brain right now. As best as I can recreate my brain rot, that's what we're touring. So there's a tendency and progressive thought, and it's something that I fight against a lot, to look at groups like the Iroquois and other research into our egalitarian ancestors and make the point that such forms of social organization are more natural and thus healthier than the supremely hierarchical societies we live in today. But I tend to think the evolution of leveling mechanisms like the shaming of the meat suggests kind of the opposite.

Well, at least not about the healthy thing, but about it being natural. Hierarchy is natural for human beings. It's something our brains slide into without careful vigilance. Our ancestors were not egalitarian because it felt natural. They evolved to enforce egalitarianism with great vigilance as a defense mechanism against the dangers of power. And this presents perhaps a less utopian view of man's inherent nature, but I think it also posits a more optimistic picture of our future. Because if Homo sapiens beat the problems of ingrained hierarchy once, then we can fucking well do it again. True that.

Yeah, thank you. And that leads pretty naturally to my next question. If our ancestors once lived free fucking egalitarian lives, sleeping under the stars, probably taking hella mushrooms and not enforcing strict gender hierarchy, what went wrong? How did we go from all that to the last 10,000 years or whatever of human history, which has kind of been a shit show? But do you know what is not a shit show? Shit, the products and services that support this show? Yes! I was about to drop the ball yet again and be like, how?

What do you mean? What do you mean? I'm so proud of you, Robert. Thank you. Product! What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French.

In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! So, we're talking about why this egalitarian order of the human race that seems to have existed at a point in the distant past, what made it fall apart. And I found a good write-up on this subject in New Scientist Magazine by a researcher named Deborah Rogers. She cites social anthropologist Christopher Bohm, who believes the suppression of the dominant hierarchies of our primate ancestors was a quote, central adaptation of human evolution. Bohm thinks we would not have spread across the world without the adaptation of egalitarianism. He notes, inequality did not spread because it is a better system for our survival.

So why then did inequality eat the world? Well, that's a question that's been posed by a number of history's great thinkers. Jean-Jacques Rousseau theorized in 1754 that inequality started with the idea of private property. Social Darwinists in the 1800s thought that inequality was the inevitable result of the struggle of survival of the fittest, in which the more fit and almost inevitably white people formed a natural aristocracy by dint of their evolutionary success. But this thinking has continued to evolve in the 20th century. According to Deborah Rogers, quote, By the mid-20th century, a new theory began to dominate.

Anthropologists, including Julian Stewart, Leslie White, and Robert Carniro, offered a slightly different versions of the following story. Population growth meant we needed more food, so we turned to agriculture, which led to surplus in the need for managers and specialized roles, which in turn led to corresponding social classes. Meanwhile, we began to use up natural resources and needed to venture ever further afield to seek them out. This expansion bred conflict and conquest, with a conquered becoming the underclass. The more recent explanations have expanded on these ideas.

One line of reasoning suggests that self-aggrandizing individuals who lived in lands of plenty ascended the social ranks by exploiting their surplus, first through feasts or gift-giving, and later by outright dominance. At the group level, argue anthropologists Peter Richardson and Robert Boyd, improved coordination and division of labor, allowed more complex societies to out-compete the simpler, more equal societies. From a mechanistic perspective, others argued that once inequality took hold, as when uneven resource distribution benefited one family more than others,

it simply became ever more entrenched. The advent of agriculture and trade resulted in private property, inheritance, and larger trade networks, which perpetuated and compounded economic advantages. So it's like when you're in college and you have to do a group project, and you have some people that are either not available or bad, and then you have the people that are busy bodies and want to do everything, and then you have the people that have this special tutor so they know how to do everything because they have help, and then people get a better grade,

and then things, people get jobs, people don't, it's like college. It's like college. It's a group project. It's like college. You leave in debt. You leave sad and in debt, and you may or may not get a job, and you probably are not getting a job in the thing you studied. Or it's like college in that the people who didn't go wound up without tens of thousands of dollars in debt,

and so wind up a lot wealthier. Again, the flexing. So they benefit from the fruits of the labor of others, and the hierarchy. It's college. It's like college, yeah. Now, if we find this new school of thought credible, then hierarchy and authoritarianism itself seem not like the natural order of things,

but more like a virus, one that was forcibly beaten down and almost wiped out for thousands of years, but persisted in some isolated corners until the development of agriculture and the evolution into larger, more organized societies provided it with a chance to escape and replicate on a mass scale once more. So we always had these sort of tendencies toward hierarchy and authoritarianism programmed into our brains, and for a long time we fought it in these tiny societies,

but once we started building these larger societies, it sort of escapes and kind of runs wild. It's almost like how measles was nearly wiped out by vaccines until enough dumb people stopped vaccinating their kids that it was able to spread and get a toehold again. Thank you, Jessica Biel. Thank you, Jessica Biel. Now, some people might argue that hierarchy and authoritarianism

and Jessica Biel make for stronger and more competitive societies, and that's why these forms of organizations spread across the globe. That's certainly an arguable point. Deborah Rogers and other researchers, however, have found in their research some data that would seem to argue against that point. Quote, In a demographic simulation that Omkar Deshpande, Marcus Feldman and I conducted at Stanford University, California, we found that, rather than imparting advantages to the group,

unequal access to resources is inherently destabilizing and greatly raises the chance of group extinction in stable environments. This was true whether we modeled inequality as a multi-tiered class society or what economists call a Pareto wealth distribution, in which, as with the 1%, the rich get the lion's share. Counterintuitively, the fact that inequality was so destabilizing caused these societies to spread by creating an incentive to migrate in search of further resources. The rules in our simulation did not allow for migration to already occupied locations,

but it was clear that this would have happened in the real world, leading to conquests of the more stable egalitarian societies. Exactly what we see as we look back in history. In other words, inequality did not spread from group to group because it is an inherently better system for survival, but because it creates demographic instability, which drives migration and conflict and leads to the cultural or physical extinction of egalitarian societies. It's interesting if you look into who a lot of the Europeans who sailed to the New World,

as they called it, were. There were a lot of second and third and fourth sons of wealthier families who weren't going to inherit the family wealth and so had to go make their fortune elsewhere. This seems like a really strongly arguable point to me. It also feels more like this comparison that I keep making to a virus because the way viruses spread, viruses aren't sustainable. They're not stable. They need to continually destroy populations of living things

and need to spread to new populations in order to stay alive. I think authoritarianism comparing it to a virus, I think it's a useful way to look at it. Yeah, it's kind of weird that you don't really hear social movements or trends ever referred to as a virus. I mean, I've never heard that comparison before. We talk about virality a lot when we talk about ideas, but yeah, I think looking at authoritarianism virally.

It can spread much like a meme of a cat. Yeah, it does. It spreads just like a cat meme. Yeah, fascist dictatorships spread like a cat meme. Cat meme, but make it a dictatorship, right? Yeah. Obviously, we could try to argue at which points in history authoritarianism hit its peak.

It's probably more apt to say that it ebbed and flowed in different places across distance and time. Every now and then, individual societies would evolve like ancient Athens or the Iroquois who established cultures that were more egalitarian than those around them. But in a global sense, strict hierarchy and authoritarian means of rule were the order of the day for the majority of people across the last several thousand years. And again, I'm going to oversimplify here because I'm not a historian

and this is not an academic paper. But I think it's fair to say broadly that the last 800 years or so have seen a major push back towards egalitarianism and against authoritarian means of control across the globe. And if you're going to pick an arbitrary start point for this, you might choose the signing of the Magna Carta in June of 1215. And there would be a variety of other dates that would be important. Like 1776.

Like 1776. Like 1865. Sorry, so it's been really patriotic for a second. Yeah. And my dates picked are very western-centric because I don't know as much about like Chinese history, Japanese history. But you know, I think 1917, the Russian Revolution would be another point in that. And of course 1945 would be another big moment in the sort of

800 year or so push back against authoritarianism. And if we're going to keep rolling with my viral authoritarianism analogy, we might look at the global defeat of the Axis in World War II as equivalent to a mass vaccination campaign. And if we want to extend the analogy even further, we could compare people like CIA director Alan Dulles and his penchant for authoritarian regime changes in Latin America to the anti-vaxxers like Jessica Beale.

People who saw socialism. Hey, Jessica. Yeah, Jessica Beale and Alan Dulles are the same fucking guy. Yeah. Dan, I would read that piece on Medium.com. Thank you. Thank you. Medium.com is where I would put this if I weren't such a narcissist with a podcast.

But instead here it fucking goes. Yeah, I owe you, remember? He's become too powerful. This is a dictatorship. You must put your context here. Yeah, you guys got to shame my meat. I'm calling HR. HR.

Anderson, you're not HR. Yeah, so you've got like this, so yeah, the last several decades of creeping authoritarianism in our own society have been driven in large part by the fact that decades of American leaders supported dictators and strongmen across places like Latin America. The crisis of the border, which provided such fuel to the American right, has been driven largely by refugees fleeing from places like Guatemala and El Salvador, while the US supported and trained death squads

and assassinated democratically elected leaders. You could also make a point about our failure to intervene in Syria, all the refugees who fled from Bashar al-Assad's fascistic campaign of extermination and how that fueled the far right in Europe and in the United States. So the plight of those refugees and their decision to flee the safety of the US has invigorated a right wing movement that has grown stronger and more dangerous over the decades, starting with KKK border patrols in the 1970s and ending with concentration camps in Texas and Donald Trump in the White House.

Now, I'm not the only person thinking along lines similar to this. When I was doing my final research for the war on everyone, the audiobook that I swear is coming out soon. It is. He told me. It's being edited. Yeah. It's being edited right now by the audio people.

So, uh, Daniel. Yeah. It is coming out. Uh, I came across a- Hi, Daniel. Hey, Daniel. This, it actually might be up by the time people listen to this episode. I don't know.

Oh, I don't know. He's editing it. That's so cool. Um, I came across a study of how fascists were using the internet back in the late 90s and early 2000s to keep their movement alive. The study was written up by a researcher named Les Black and in it he cites a book called A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia from 1986. Now, the book was written by a pair of philosophers, Deleuze and Gattari,

and I don't pretend to understand the overall thrust of the text because I am so bad at reading political theory. But Black cites a piece of that book that seems to be making a similar argument to the one I've been making, albeit with a slightly different analogy. Quote, Deleuze and Gattari argue that part of the nature of fascism is a proliferation of molecular focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point before beginning to resonate together.

This comment might well have been made about the lateral connectedness found in cyberspace. Rather than seeing fascism enshrined in a totalitarian bureaucracy, they argue that fascism was and is manifest in the micro-organization of everyday life. The power of fascist culture here is in its molecular and supple segmentarity, with flows capable of suffusing every cell. What makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micro-political power, for it is a mass movement, a cancerous body, rather than a totalitarian organism. Yeah.

All right. I don't even really want to comment on that. I think it's deep. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, that's what I got so far. Robert, you just presented your world views. Very succinct.

This was like Robert's ideology on life, the crash course. More or less. Yeah, fascism isn't something that's imposed from the top down. It's something that bubbles up from within groups of human beings. And if you're going to stop it, it requires constant vigilance, like the vigilance of, say, a group of yi-kong, who makes sure to keep an eye out for any young man who gets too big of an idea of his own importance because he brought down a fucking gazelle.

And like a virus can move and change and go away, but then come back. I mean, you can basically erase the metaphor at that point of how fascism is spreading like a virus now, because it's spreading like a virus in the internet since too. It is truly one and the same. Okay, so Robert, how do we fix it? Yeah. Oh, that's a fucking good example.

And I'm not hearing any answers. Well, you know, I only had so much time to put this together, so I don't have a comprehensive... Well, you know, it does. That is a little bit of it, Sophie. Like one lesson we can take out of human prehistory in terms of how we fight fascism is that it's not something we fight by voting for the right person. It's something we fight on a day-to-day basis in our daily lives. It's something we fight not just by keeping an eye out on other people,

but by fighting the fascists within our own self, by fighting like those authoritarian impulses and urges that we all have, because it's coded into our brain. It's a constant battle that starts at the bottom, and if it doesn't persist and if there isn't discipline at every level of society to watch against it, it will come back. Terrifying. Okay, so the call's been coming from inside the house the whole time.

The fascism has been coming from inside your brain this whole time, yeah. Okay, good, good, good, good, good. By bolt cutters. It's like, and by bolt cutters, incredible. It's one tool that you can use against fascism. To pull your only brain out. I think that really a good answer, yeah, if we could just yank out the judgy bitch cortex from our brain using bolt cutters.

That's, you're pretty close to some things Kurt Vonnegut was theorizing about near the end of his life there. He was like, if we were all just dumber, this would work so much better. Yeah, it just, everyone just needs to just get a light lobotomy. Yeah, being smart is not worth it. I don't happen to hold to that idea, but I'm willing to admit that Kurt Vonnegut was way smarter than I will ever be, and he might have been right.

I mean, base level, I haven't revisited that phase of Kurt Vonnegut in a while, but sounds fun. But Robert, you wouldn't agree with that because you are not a judgy bitch. Whoa. I try not to be, but I will admit that I think when Kurt Vonnegut was a judgy bitch, she was right to be a judgy bitch. Fair. I mean, yeah, choose your moments.

Yeah, I mean, constant suppression of the judgy bitch within is necessary. I keep her locked up. Yeah, keep her locked up. Until necessary. Yeah, but there are moments where it's like, oh, there she is. Oh, there she is, coming out. Wearing that outfit. Sometime right, and doing that superhero pose ready to save the fucking day.

Well, yeah, and it's like, she has bolt cutters. She's got bolt cutters. They can be used for good or evil. Much like authoritarianism. It's not always the wrong thing. We have it. It's useful in certain situations. Well, if you've got like a wildfire, you need one person being like, okay, you go here,

you go here, you go here. This is what we're going to try to do. Like our podcast. Like our podcast, or like a military unit where to some extent, there's certain kinds of hierarchy that you want in a military unit. Like our podcast. Like our podcast, or like, that's about it. I don't think it's useful nearly as often as we use it, but it's not useless.

Elements of it, yeah. But it has to be carefully controlled. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, so like maybe if we're going to keep having presidents, we execute every president after they finish their term of office, and that way only people who are truly selfless take the job. That seems like...

Now we're out in the crazy, crazy town. Yeah. It was like, well, now we're just shouting into the void. Well, it's not the hunger games if you're just killing the person at the top. True. True. True. Still not.

Still not likely. I've only seen the first one. Does it end well? That's right. Yeah. Are the hunger games a good idea for society? Is that the conclusion? Should we give it a shot?

Should we give it a shot? Should we hunger some games? But instead of children, it's like members of the cabinet. Sick. Love it. Great. Yeah. Oh, now that would be amazing if at the end of like a presidential, because like then

I'd be really excited about some of the people who have been in Trump's cabinet. Because I would love to see Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon fighting with like homemade spears over a pit of lava. That would be a blast. That would be the fucking greatest. And Jared Kushner would hide the whole time and then somehow win. Oh yeah. He would hide the whole time.

He'd be five feet beneath the ground, which is zombie out of time. Yeah, and just kind of like Gita. Ivanka Trump and Betsy DeVos just throttling each other with like fucking scarves or something. Yeah. That's fun. That's fun to think about. Very specific scarf reference. It's almost like he's already got the graphic novel storyboarded.

I don't. Yeah. I don't have more detailed solutions than that. But this is where my thinking's gone in the last 18 months or so of doing this podcast. Yeah. So now you all have to deal with it too. Sorry. I know.

I think it's good. I think, well, not the takeaways are dire. But yeah, I've never heard it put succinctly like that. Well, I don't know if I'd call it succinctly. I've been talking for 59 minutes or so, but I did my best. It was only one part. Yeah. It was only one part.

It was only one part. Well, I would not agree to do two parts, Jamie. Oh, wow. Yeah. No. I was forced into doing this one part. Well, I'm glad that you were on like two because this is just a whole new experience of Sophie I've never had. Well, we can just make eye rolls to each other directly and then say what we're thinking.

That is Robert Evans. I know. Can you imagine if Robert was here? Oh, I'd be eye rolled into a coma by this point. Yeah. He would be unconscious. He would just be tied up. Yeah.

He would have gone out onto the poisonous balcony for sure. Yeah. The poison room. I would have cracked it open with my podcasting machete. Can't believe. That's right. Yeah, you do have a machete that says podcasting on the blade. I am wearing my throwing bagels behind the basket T-shirt right now.

Hell yeah. So I need to get one of those. I have one for you. Oh, yay. I'm wearing my what if Frasier were a part of the Fantastic Four T-shirt today. I love it. What if Frasier were a part of the Fantastic Four? I love you.

Well, that's the very question this T-shirt explores. Everyone think about that and also how do we fight against the monster coated into our brains that makes Hitler's almost inevitable. Yeah. Oh. Both of those things. Yeah. In that order, please have the answers on my desk by Monday.

If there's a better symbol for creeping authoritarianism in the human spirit than the television show Frasier, I haven't found it. Amen. Yeah. All right. Jamie, you want to plug your plugables? Sure. You can listen to the Bechtel cast every Thursday, feminist movie podcast, or follow me on

Twitter at JamieLoftisHelp or come see my show at Edinburgh Fringe Fest in Scotland all August. Yay. Yeah. And Sophie, you want to plug my plugables because you're on the thing too and we have the same podcast? Well, I didn't agree to that in my contract, but follow Robert on Twitter. I write okay.

Thank you. Didn't create that by the way. The disgust in your voice is really telling us. I mean, I just think we could have titled it better. At Bastards Pod on Twitter and Instagram behindthebastards.com for the sources for this pod. Tee public. We have t-shirts. We have totes.

We have phone cases. We have not bolt cutters, but soon to be bolt cutters. Yeah. We forget to start carrying both cutters. Come on. We have a couple new designs up there, so check it out. And they have sales like all the time. And you can find Sophie on Twitter at at Bastards Pod because she runs the Twitter, so if you

want to tell her to be less or more mean to me, you can let her know. It's a direct channel, but in reality, don't do that. Yeah. Don't do that, but do, yeah, maybe get some bolt cutters. Certainly keep an eye out for creeping authoritarianism in your own daily life and try to shame some meat on your way home. If you'd like to humble Robert, please find me on Instagram at Sophie underscore Ray underscore up underscore sunshine and let me know your opinions on Robert so I can tell it to him

to his face and make sure that he doesn't know the size of his. I don't want to say me. Because I don't use Instagram or shame. Shame. Let's go shame. Either is it. I don't want to say I don't like I just don't enjoy the phrase size of meat in general. No, I think that a meat shaming t-shirt is called for at this point.

Yeah. This episode was so Robert. Yeah. Yeah. There's serious Robert influences here. The meat shaming story really is going to so Texas. Yeah. It's fucking amazing.

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. One of those things I read a while back and has stuck with me ever since they should turn it into a children's book. Yeah. The shaming of the meat with what's that?

What's that curious chimpanzee? He seems like the right character for that. Yeah. Are you referring to George? Yeah, George. Yeah. If you'd like to keep my meat big, please message me and tell me how cute my dog is. There we go.

All right. Well, this has been a rambling enough exit. Yeah. The episode's done. Go. Yeah. Bye. Bye.

I love you. Bye. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.