The Daily Zeitgeist - Weekly Zeitgeist 314 (Best of 3/18/24-3/22/24)

Episode Date: March 24, 2024

The weekly round-up of the best moments from DZ's season 330 (3/18/24-3/22/24)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Gianna Pradenti. And I'm Jermaine Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. There's a lot to figure out when you're just starting your career. That's where we come in. Think of us as your work besties

you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in people who do, like negotiation expert Maury Tahiripour. If you start thinking about negotiations as just a conversation, then I think it sort of eases us a little bit. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Jess Costavetto, executive producer of the hit Netflix documentary series, Dancing for the Devil, the 7M TikTok cult. And I'm Clea Gray, former member of 7M Films and Shekinah Church. And we're the host of the new podcast, Forgive Me For I Have Followed. Together, we'll be diving even deeper into the unbelievable stories behind 7M Films and Shekinah Church. Listen to Forgive Me For I Have Followed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Keri Champion, and this is season four of Naked Sports. Up first, I explore the making of a rivalry. Kaitlyn Clark versus Angel Reese. Every great player needs a foil. I know I'll go down in history. People are talking about women's basketball just because of one single game.

Clark and Reese have changed the way we consume women's sports. Listen to the making of a rivalry. Kaitlyn Clark versus Angel Reese on the iHeart on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast presented by elf beauty founding partner of iheart women's sports hello the internet and welcome to this episode of the weekly zeitgeist uh these are some of our favorite segments from this week all edited together into one uh non-stop infotainment laugh-stravaganza. 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, 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. I talk about it a lot on this show. Yep. I read it by 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. David. Thank you so much guys. Thank you. I just want to make a quick disclaimer. You know, I, 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 part? No. 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 24 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 that 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 human societies tell themselves stories about how they came to be. Call it myth, 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. It's almost a biblical story or a story with biblical echoes. We start off in the Garden of Eden, and then there is that fateful moment when somebody somewhere invents agriculture. And this is the great transition that changes everything about how we relate to each other. Suddenly you have private property, and 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. 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 structures. They combine, if you like, three basic forms of power into one institution that we refer to as the state. You know, everyone claims to live in a nation state. You know, 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 grew 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 grew 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 organisms. So you need some kind of administration or bureaucracy. Somebody has to control knowledge at the center just to 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. Why? What happened? We're not familiar with anything. You wouldn't know about this. Yeah, we live in America. In some remote, exotic parts of the world, you get this weird phenomenon where the only people who can be elected are over 100 years old. Right. And it's really strange and they kind of get up on stage and they can barely make it up there and then they give their their kind of cheers and they're dribbling and it's awful yeah 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, right? Of 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 then they basically get to do whatever they like. And yeah, this is what some people have come to know as democracy. And, you know, if you put those three things together, I guess you get a rough approximation of the kind of societies we grow up in and the kind of societies 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 was somehow all leading up to this. And what we're trying to do in our book, me and my friend David Graeber,

In the Dawn of Everything, is actually show 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 disarray. I wouldn't even know where to begin. You're going to have to give me some pointers here. What is something from your search history? Or we added a new wrinkle, if you'd like. What's the most recent thing that you screen capped oh okay so i'll give you both okay the fur the thing i googled recently because

i i i fumbled i don't really do st patrick's day since i moved here but these are both st patrick's day related i feel like they're gonna be like since I think it's a non-holiday. Like, since I moved here. Since I don't respect my family. Yeah. No, that's fucked up. But I did want to pre-order it for next year because we recently, we were covering 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. Oh, you're really wearing a shirt that says Irish. Is he really wearing a t-shirt that says 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 instead just says Irish underneath the shamrock. And that's the spoiler alert for a 15-year-old movie. He gets killed, but he bleeds out through the Irish shirt.

And I was like, I want the Irish shirt yeah that's so poor francis is he like in disguise as like a no volleyball player or something he's just that he just happens to be what he's wearing he's never in disguise yeah frank frank oh franco or whatever his name is in the, yeah, Frank Costello. Frank Costello, yeah, 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 Southie, it troubles me. Yeah. There's so much more out there. But every year on St. Patrick's Day, I like to fondly remember, this was nine years ago, that in 2015, I was working at the Boston Globe. And I did a piece where I hung out at a bar in Southie all day on St. 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 quoted two to three different

political officials calling me a bigot against... Against Irish? Irish. Irish. Wow. I just... It was really fun. Headlined,

True Life, I was a bartender in Southie. Oh, yeah. I was like shadowing a bartender. The post was written by Boston.com writer, Jamie Loftus. Every day is a drunk day in Southie, but St. Paddy's Day runs by a completely separate set of laws, wrote Loftus. Every day is a drunk day in Southie, but St. Paddy'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 Southie didn't sit well with two of the neighborhood's most prominent residents. I'm surprised such bigoted views are still tolerated at Boston.com, said U.S.

Representative Stephen Lynch. Wow! It's very disrespectful added former mayor raymond l flynn 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, 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 belayed my ass. How did your career ever recover? Your fucking congressman fucking flamed you? I was at his looking at his political record is pretty hilarious because he's just like famously not a great person. Right. 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 we're saving this family yeah yeah yeah that's amazing i i mean you were crying i remember that day as well as a irish person and i my whole family was crying as well because you wrote about us because it was disrespectful. We're having the best day of your life with family, faith, and friends. We just had the best day of our life. Like such an overstatement.

Like such an unhinged way to respond to that. Like it's truly like a five-year-old being like, this was the best day of my life. And then you ruined it with this comment that people in Boston South south he likes to drink what is that even where do you even get this stuff from he said a stand-up guy the guy who the guy who assaulted uh iranian american students on in the 70s yeah he's a fucking wild i mean his backwards. His record is gross. Like, it's, yeah. But I'm bigoted against the Irish. Even though he was arrested for assaulting six Iranian students. Okay. In the 70s, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like in 79. South was a different place in the 70s. Hey, the charges were dropped. The charges were dropped. They were dropped. Good impression of Bark Walbert. I'm just saying,

if I had been there on that day that she was shadowing that bartender, things would have gone down a little differently. Exactly, bro. Boston.com wouldn't even exist. Should have been written an article about how I was working out

at three in the morning. I mean, yeah. The tenor of that story would have changed quite a bit if Mark Wahlberg started doing push-ups in the morning. I mean, yeah. The tenor of that story would have changed quite a bit if Mark Wahlberg 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 cop a bit of a 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 yourself. Yeah.

Yeah. And I can appreciate that, but I, you know, it's kind of, I just see, I'm an opportunist. I see a shop and I go in and,

you know, it's, 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 i said to him i said it's crunch time up there let's tread carefully and uh the guy like you know usually we're down to the wire yeah usually they're like oh it's okay you know don't worry but this guy's like, you know, usually they're like, oh, it's okay.

You know, don't worry. But this guy was like, yeah, don't worry. It comes to everyone. Yeah. You're not even going to give me a bone. Right. Yeah. Right.

Right. Right. Yeah, brother. He's like, yeah, man. Looks like we're in the 95th minute here. Yeah. Yeah. Feels like it 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 i look like a different person if you just change the framing everything about me yeah yeah it's crazy it's i you know i don't i don't want to i don't want to go bald right it's happening. If I have a good year, I think I'll get those Biden plugs. Even if it looks like it shuts down some of your other neural faculties.

Yeah. You don't want to go all the way into your brain. It's like when Tobias Fionke got them. The body rejected them. The graft versus host is my favorite what's something you think is

overrated overrated having a giant penis I think it can create problems I don't know

I mean I don't actually have one today so I'm just going to go with the joke you don't have a giant penis today? Yeah, well, I did yesterday.

A lot of it that's coming your way is currently in a melting strawberry sundae. I needed that fresh kiwi muscle, man. They shipped it over double quick. Just so much more roomy, you know, after the surgery. Yeah, because they don't tighten the skin. All these ear bubbles.

I'm so sorry. I used to have lower back problems. Yeah, I can't sleep on my stomach without hearing light pops. It's real bad. It's real bad. Sounds like packing bubbles. Yeah.

We laugh, right? We love to laugh, huh? We have fun. What is something you think is overrated? I'm realizing as I say this one, I'd written it down. I'm 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's bad, but the returns are, and listen, there's true, man, with your minimal effort, you, but the returns are... Listen, there's... It's true, man.

With your minimal effort, you mean? The returns are marginal? It takes... It's a lot more like that I want to do, is what I will 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.

Right. And I do it. But here's the thing. I'm not saying it's bad. I'm saying it's overrated. That's right. There are some returns, but not enough. Are you still boxing?

No, no. Were the returns better boxing? Did you feel better from when you were training boxing? Ooh, wonderful question. I mean, technically speaking, no. And I will say it's clear that these are part and parcel of things that happen whilst boxing are affecting my need for mobility stretching. But no, I mean, I felt

destroyed after boxing, 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 cold plunge or drinking enough water or like working out in the morning now instead just make me tired like yeah 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 wastes the energy and you only have a certain number of heartbeats in your life like yeah i see where i see how he got there because exercise is exhausting. My body is old as fuck.

Yeah. Long term though, I'm sure you'll appreciate it long term though because even the mobility stuff, you're not going to turn stiff. Andrew, you're shaking your head

no vigorously. Here's why. You don't think there's any long term benefit? 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, a little more limber, of course. Again, I'm not saying it's useless. I'm just saying the ROI is not what I'd hoped. just saying the the roi is not what i'd hoped for sure okay yeah you feel a little better but i don't think you feel enough better to justify it i i also think the answer is just like everybody's body is so different you know like yeah the cold plunge thing really seems to work for some people and for me it's like somebody just like fucking shook the

shit out how are you like central are you going to a place to plunge do you no no we have no no we just have a pool that is cold okay got it got it yeah but you're not doing the shit where you're putting like ice in like a little bucket i'm not like cryo fuck. Like that. Yeah. I'm not cryo fucking myself. Yeah. 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, fuck, fuck, fuck,

what the fuck, what the fuck is that? What, what? You know? Like, stop it. Stop. And then my body's like, yeah, well, that sucked.

All right. Yeah. Good luck. Having nearly died. I need to recover for 48 hours. Yeah, exactly. I think. But yeah, 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 OK all the time. Oh, because I am also kind of in that world too where i'm like nah bro i ain't doing shit i'm like evolutionarily speaking they're like you had to i was like is laziness an actual positive trait evolutionarily speaking i'm like yeah probably but a little both yeah because i have friends who need it and they're like nah bro i'm fucked up like i have to do something and i look at them i. Like I have to do something. And I look at them, I'm like, you have to do something? I do feel like, 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 is not proportional to my stretching time. I'm here to say I'm one of the physically exalted few. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can just dump garbage in your body and not do anything.

Taco Bell, lay down. That's not fun. I mean, I don't know what my blood work says, but I don't do it because it'll say something's wrong. A little Trumpy. Blood work lies. Yeah.

That's right. Blood work lies bleeding. Mm-hmm. The follow-up. Full circle. All right. Let's take a quick break. We'll be right back. I'm Jess Casavetto, executive producer of the hit Netflix documentary series Dancing for the Devil, the 7M TikTok cult. And I'm Clea Gray, former member of 7M Films and Shekinah Church.

And we're the host of the new podcast, Forgive Me For I Have Followed. Together, we'll be diving even deeper into the unbelievable stories behind 7M Films and LA-based Shekinah Church, an alleged cult that has impacted members for over two decades. Jessica and I will delve into the hidden truths between high-control groups and interview dancers, church members, and others whose lives and careers have been impacted, just like mine. Through powerful, in-depth interviews with former members and new, chilling, first-hand accounts, the series will illuminate untold and extremely necessary perspectives. Forgive Me For I Have Followed will be more than an exploration. It's a vital revelation aimed at ensuring these types of abuses never happen again.

Listen to Forgive Me For I Have Followed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradente. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, a new podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. When you're just starting out in your career, you have a lot of questions like, how do I speak up when I'm feeling overwhelmed? Or can I negotiate a higher salary if this is my first real job? Girl, yes. Each week, we answer your unfiltered work questions. Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer,

we bring in experts who do, like resume specialist Morgan Sanner. The only difference between the person who doesn't get the job and the person who gets the job is usually who applies. Yeah, I think a lot about that quote. What is it like you miss 100 percent of the shots you never take? Yeah, rejection is scary, but it's better than you rejecting yourself. Together, we'll share what it really takes to thrive in the early years of your career. Without sacrificing your sanity or sleep. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Keri Champion, and this is Season 4 of Naked Sports, where we live at the intersection of sports and culture.

Up first, I explore the making of a rivalry, Kaitlyn Clark versus Angel Reese. I know I'll go down in history. People are talking about women's basketball just because of one single game. Every great player needs a foil. I ain't really near them boys. I just come here to play basketball every single day and that's what I focus on. From college to the pros, Clark and Reese have changed the way we consume women's sports. Angel Reese is a joy to watch. She is unapologetically black. I love her. What exactly ignited this fire?

Why has it been so good for the game? And can the fanfare surrounding these two supernovas be sustained? This game is only going to get better because the talent is getting better. This new season will cover all things sports and culture. Listen to Naked Sports on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Black Effect Podcast Network is sponsored by Diet Coke. 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. 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. This is 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 in 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. 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 force with coercive powers that can 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 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 that is actually very hard to explain. 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 going to 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 great mysteries of the ancient world. That's not a mystery. Aliens did it, right? Aliens built all those things? I think we all know that. It's all the stuff that aliens built, right? Like Stonehenge and Egypt, where first you start out by sort of characterizing the society as terribly, terribly primitive.

And then you say, but look, here is this incredibly mathematically, geometrically sophisticated monument. How could these idiots possibly create something? Which the answer is obviously, they were not idiots. These are people who could at times create these incredibly impressive cultural creations, but then at other times would actually morph into different forms of society. This is what the anthropologist Marcel Mauss 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 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 since the days of the Enlightenment,

since 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? When when did those cages come down? The restricted hierarchy, which would always have been there. It's always there. And that was always, yeah.

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 sovereignty and patriarchy escape from those cages and effectively come to dominate almost every waking moment of our human lives. Yeah, they didn't.

Like 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 we refuse to look back and learn 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 know Harari, I think. Yeah, yeah. Someone sent me a clip of an interview just recently,

just the other week, which went viral. And I can't remember who it was interviewing, Mr. Harari, 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 interviewer 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 by 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 it. You know, we don't know what technologies are going to be relevant to their lives in 20 years time. Are you falling for this? Yeah. Yeah. Right. I can see where you're believing me. This is great. 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 raid your settlement.

But you knew that you would still be growing wheat and raising sheep in 20 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 is 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... It's really telling. I mean, regardless, even if you haven't read our book, It's really telling. I mean, regardless, even if you haven't read our book, the implication is actually kind of fascinating because it the future and you can tell your 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 sheep. They didn't always grow crops. 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 for 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. Which 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 Rousseau 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 egalitarian groups and then we gave it, it's the Harari like sapiens thing where and then we decide to cultivate wheat. I think that's roughly the story. Although, you know, I've got to tell you, Rousseau is way more interesting.

Oh, for sure. Yeah, yeah. You know, Rousseau was not about fatalism. Rousseau was not about telling us that there's always going to be this boot stamping on your face and on your kids' faces. Rousseau was about revolution. Rousseau was about, you know, trying to understand what was this liberty that we lost. He just had no clue what that might actually be like. And then Hobbes is on the Pinker side.

Hobbes 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 check, essentially. And I think Professor Pinker is very forthright about this. He actually refers to himself as a neo-Hobbesian. Right. And he's like, and if you just look at the record of what it used to be like, you'll see.

And then he just quotes a bunch of widely debunked bullshit about how violent everything used to be. Well, this is what my friend David used to refer to as the extreme center. Yeah, exactly. You know, you get it in politics, you get it in academia. It's 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 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 trained ourselves to have better and better manners, and that led to lower murder rates, if you're not counting World War II. But yeah, I don't want to get too bogged down by Pinker, but I think 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.

I think it's a Huron system of beliefs around dreams that you cover in the book. 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 the records we have of this it's called on and 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 a kind of power of command. If you dreamed something, it could be a particular 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. 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 17th, early 18th 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 20th century, Freudian psychoanalysis. 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 some of the same kinds of hallucinogenics or psychoactive substances that we tend to, if we ingest them, people do it as largely as individuals. Yeah. What actually has 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. and dreamings you know teaching teaches us is that we'd 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 teotihuacan 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, 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. Teotihuacan is one of the earliest

and most spectacular manifestations of this. So we're in the Valley of Mexico now, around the time of Christ, so the years 0 sort of the year zero, one, whatever, 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. There'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 changed course in the most dramatic way. They stopped building these great monuments, and all of that labor and collective investment that went into 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 communal villas, they actually thought they were palaces. Then they realized that basically everybody is living in a palace. I'm talking about really beautiful plastered walls with murals, 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 inequality on the head for hundreds of years on an urban scale.

Right. Which is pretty mind-blowing. Yeah. Yeah. These are the civilizations that we're viewing as primitive, and they've already gone through the process of having this authoritarian setup and then overthrowing it and building a civilization that's bottom-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, at Teotihuacan,

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 a transition like this, which we can only reconstruct from the material remains. Imagine all the intellectual stuff. And actually, we do get some insight into this from a later period when the conquistadors arrive. They actually stumble upon cities that are organized in pretty egalitarian ways.

And they describe some of them, including ones with full-blown urban 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. We'll be right back. I'm Jess Casavetto, executive producer of the hit Netflix documentary series, Dancing for the Devil, the 7M TikTok cult. And I'm Clea Gray, former member of 7M Films and Shekinah Church. And we're the host of the new podcast, Forgive Me For I Have Followed. Together, we'll be diving even deeper into the unbelievable stories behind 7M Films and LA-based Shekinah Church, an alleged cult that has impacted members for over two

decades. Jessica and I will delve into the hidden truths between high control groups and interview dancers, church members, and others whose lives and careers have been impacted, just like mine. Through powerful, in-depth interviews with former members and new, chilling firsthand accounts, the series will illuminate untold and extremely necessary perspectives. Forgive Me For I Have Followed will be more than an exploration. It's a vital revelation aimed at ensuring these types of abuses never happen again. Listen to Forgive Me For I Have Followed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradente. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden.

We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, a new podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. When you're just starting out in your career, you have a lot of questions. Like, how do I speak up when I'm feeling overwhelmed? Or, can I negotiate a higher salary if this is my first real job? Girl, yes. Each week, we answer your unfiltered work questions. Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice.

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go down in history. People are talking about women's basketball just because of one single game. Every great player needs a foil. I ain't really near them. Why is that? Just come here and play basketball every single day, and that's what I focus on. From college to the pros, Clark and Reese have changed the way we consume women's sports. Angel Reese is a joy to watch. She is unapologetically black.

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get your podcast. The Black Effect Podcast Network is sponsored by Diet Coke. 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 it was already big news when they said that. But boy, when it actually sunk the first time, that must have been. Wow. Man, 112 year news streak this thing's on. Yeah.

I can't believe it. Unreal. Yeah. Unbelievable. So it's been in the news recently because uh first of all there's a guy in florida who has a room full of nearly 3 000 titanic vhs tapes and multiple homemade jack dawson fuck mannequins oh yeah our mannequins 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 the one thing he's doing yeah yeah this is this guy who said he said titanic has always been my favorite film and i've converted my home office in florida into my personal titanic museum the 2682 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?

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 VHSes. Yeah. Have you seen Titanic? No. Never seen it.

I just like these little tapes. They come in the double tape box. That thing is 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. You're like, wait, what?

Wow. No fucking way. You're like wait what wow no fucking way you're like yeah way no they're like one about the james cameron one with the with the books thinking that yeah no come on and now you're telling me avatar wasn't based on a real story yeah okay sure right so this guy clive palmer yeah he's also a Titanic fan, evidently. Huge Titanic fan. And he is relaunching. So he's a fan of the boat itself, not just the film. He is relaunching his Titanic 2.

The 2 is typically using Roman numerals. Project. Despite the fact that his plans to painstakingly recreate the doomed cruise ship have failed twice before, not to mention people might be a tad wary of any Titanic-based tourism promoted by reckless billionaires these days. I feel like, wasn't that, that was, the last one went really bad. It's good. It's Darwinism, isn't it?

Like a bunch of people who are like, yep, yep. I got this thing. Exactly. We don't have enough life rafts. There are engineering problems. Everything will be exactly the same. And then we'll just see. Do you know how annoyed he's going to be when he's going to try and sail this thing into an iceberg that has melted?

It's like the ship won ship parts. What the fuck? Just sails right through a slushy. Yeah. Or pretty soon next, they're like, oh man, they're bringing back United Flight 93. I don't know if you guys want to hop on that. It could be really fucking cool. Mark Wahlberg's on there though.

He's like, don't worry, folks. Conceptually, this hits a lot of intriguing checkpoints you know like i think anyone who's watched the movie and been 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 it all things being equal if i like had just ridiculous wealth i would probably go on this for some reason. 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. Stew and mash sounds good. Unfortunately, I've always identified in that movie most with Billy Zane's character. So that's probably what I'd be doing. Just Billy Zane-ing it up fully.

Hell yeah. Yelling at the people in steerage. And this is, I mean, this is so, it's so brazen and like idiotic. It's kind of a nice, you know, it's a nice use of a billionaire's 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 pumping a bunch of money,

which I'm sure he's doing in the background anyway, into, you know, their conservative party, 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 yeah it's really yeah like i i think i don't like i don't know enough about this i'm just kind of finding out about clive pal. 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 like do everything the same. He'd be like, everything's going to be gold and yeah,

gold Titanic. And it will only solve it. It will only serve Trump stakes. You know, like you have to buy three NFTs. You get lost so quickly. Whereas like just the idea of sticking to all the details of this is actually kind of fun. Yeah.

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? I 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 me. Spot on. Yeah. He made money.

I think he was a real estate agent, and then he retired at 29, was his end. So he got rich at the right time and the right place. I think he's flipping houses in the 80s or something. I just think it's a fun, cartoonish, old style of being a billionaire or a millionaire. It's the more timely association with the money. 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. Oh, he is. He is. Undoubtedly, this guy is. Wasn't he's probably a massive piece of shit. Oh, he is. He is. Undoubtedly, this guy is... Wasn't he like doing coal mining or something?

I know he's like involved in mining too. He's got... Yeah, he really got into mining. He... You know, like, it's ridiculous. He's a real estate agent.

He's a real estate agent at the right time. Right. He got rich by circumstance and then that abused people with the self-belief

that they are intelligent operators and that they know with the self-belief that they are intelligent operators and that they know how the world works because they were just in a specific moment in time and they got one thing right. And the flow effect was that they are suddenly ultra-wealthy. And they're like, you know, money does not correlate to intelligence at all, but try telling that to a billionaire.

We'll see if he goes through with his other plan of doing The Challenger 2. So his other idea that he's had in the past was in 2011, he bought a prestigious golf resort, which was home to the Australian PGA, and filled it with animatronic dinosaurs, including a life-size T-Rex between the ninth green and the tenth green. That's great. Again, like, this is fucking awesome.

I love that the movies he's going for are ones. Titanic and Caddyshack, too. It goes so right. Yeah, yeah. Or even Jurassic Park, where he's like, that's a good idea. You know, the message of Jurassic Park is not, we should have dinosaur parks. Yeah.

Or dinosaur golf courses. Especially the Titanic, because this boat was awesome. That's right. You just saw the first half of every movie. Oh, yeah. He goes, yeah, right. They get to Jurassic Park. He's like, I've seen enough.

I've seen enough, baby. They get on the boat. He's like, yeah, boats, boats, boats He goes, yeah, right. They get to Jurassic Park. He's like, I've seen enough. I've seen enough, baby. 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 the golf course and dinosaurs? Someone with $10 billion? Or someone who's watching the whole movie? Don't get me started. I like that he was called Palmersaurus. It's like not even like a name of a park.

He just called it Palmersaurus. 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-size T-Rex, he named Jeff. And then, yeah,Rex he named Jeff.

He claimed Jeff is just the first taste of Palmersaurus, an outdoor exhibit of 160 two-scale robotic dinosaurs that roar, blink, sluggishly move their limbs, and slowly gnash their teeth. Can't be too much of a distraction on the golf course, you know what I mean? That's what you're going for. There's still a sense of decorum out there when someone's trying to putt. But the reason he's referred to as

Australia's Trump beyond being a quote-unquote billionaire who's lost his grasp of reality, he's also gotten into politics and he's a former MP. Yeah. Launched a campaign with the slogan, make Australia great. Yeah. It was never great before.

So they can't do that again. Yeah. Yeah. There's an honesty there. Yeah. But I just also like that. He's he's so like harebrained that he fully went in on the fucking hydroxychloroquine shit. And bought, imported tens of millions of doses of hydroxychloroquine to donate to the Australian government.

By, quote, as enthusiasm for the drug waned. Wait, what happened? What's going on with this market? I thought i understood markets i'm a billionaire oh the enthusiasm's waning or it was horse shit to begin with or i'm rather horse paste to begin with sorry thank you yeah i said five million doses had to be destroyed because no one wanted to even claim them at the airport so i just love that it's also like really fucking terrible swings and misses too it's not like this sort of like Koch brothers type shit.

It's like, nope, Palmersaurus, that's Jeff. Hydroxychloroquine, millions of doses. Oh, no one wants them? Whatever. He has, like, while all this is happening, he has taken time out of his busy schedule being a fun sort of style harebrained billionaire to disrupt progress in Australia in a variety of ways. I think he pumped

a lot of money. They had a referendum 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's a flawed process. He sunk a bunch of his money into the no campaign to say Indigenous, the Indigenous populace shouldn't have representation.

So he's, he's not, you know, it's not all. Did that win? Yeah, the country voted no. It was a very devastating moment for Australians. Oh my God. indigenous populace shouldn't have representation. Yeah. So he's, he's not, you know, it's not, did that win? Yeah. The country voted no.

It was a very devastating moment for Australians. And so, you know, when he's, it's important that his brain remains flooded with these sort of fun distractions, because when he's not working on his vanity projects, he's full xenophobia. Yeah.

He's ruining, not even xenophobia. There's racism. Yeah. Yeah. You're, you're the're the colonizer he's at 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 the thing that makes these kinds of characters like effective it's like they're like no they're they're actually advocating for some evil shit they're like no man dude, man, dude, he wants to build fucking, he likes T-Rexes and shit. It's called Jeff. Yeah.

Yeah. It's like George Bush, like, you know, Bush 2 really gave us that taste of that where they're like, this guy's a fucking danger to everything. It's like, dude, he's just a goof, man. Don't worry about him. It's like he's destroying. Okay. Yeah. He's a bit of a laugh, though.

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 55 miles per hour he's trying to get a um a blimp to fly between australia and new zealand it's called the palmerberg tube Called the Palmerberg 2. Right. So the thing that happens with billionaires is they get rich, become convinced that they're right about everything and 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. they're so rich at that point that nobody can tell them otherwise. And so, for instance, he did the hydroxychloroquine 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 coughing I'm winning this one because I got it. So I no longer, you know. I'm immunized. But with a lot more coughing and spluttering. Right. What's double pneumonia? Oh, man. Twice as intense?

I can't even imagine. I just like when, like, there's a medical condition, but it's the alter, like, the modifier is just double. Then let their five-year-old name the disease. Oh, it's because both of your lungs are infected. Okay, got it, got it, got it. That makes sense. Yeah. But double pneumonia.

Compound pneumonia. Yeah. It's like, yeah, I got double ear infection. That actually makes sense if you said that. Double pneumonia, no take-backs. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. All right.

That's going to 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 needs your validation folks I hope you're having a great weekend and

I will talk to you Monday. Bye. Thank you. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradenti. And I'm Jermaine Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. There's a lot to figure out when you're just starting your career. That's where we come in. Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in people who do, like negotiation expert Maury Tahiripour.

If you start thinking about negotiations as just a conversation, then I think it sort of eases us a little bit. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jess Casavetto, executive producer of the hit Netflix documentary series, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. even deeper into the unbelievable stories behind 7M Films and Shekinah Church. Listen to Forgive Me For I Have Followed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Keri Champion, and this is season four of Naked Sports.

Up first, I explore the making of a rivalry. Kaitlyn Clark versus Angel Reese. Every great player needs a foil. I know I'll go down in history. People are talking about women's basketball just because of one single game. Clark and Reese have changed the way we consume women's sports. Listen to The Making of a Rivalry. Kaitlyn Clark versus Angel Reese.

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