TRASHFUTURE - The Mesoamerican Bill Simmons Podcast ft. Patrick Wyman

Episode Date: April 1, 2024

Recurring guest and firm favourite Patrick Wyman joins the gang to discuss the history of climate change - what adaptation has looked like for different societies that formed and deformed around changing climates. Including pre-Dynastic Egypt, the Indus Valley Civilisation, and the crises that plagued the ends of Rome and Feudalism, among others! But first, twenty minutes grousing about how strong fundamentals players with good coachability have become a rare thing in the Mesoamerican Ritual Ball Game. Liked this episode? Check out the bonus feed on www.patreon.com/trashfuture 

Oh, my God. I got to, uh, I got to explain that reference to somebody the other day and get them to watch pumping iron. And it was, it was the great, one of the greatest moments of my adult life. I'm like, you've, how, okay, first of all, how have you never heard this? Second of all, how have you never watched Pumping Iron? Like, you can't know, you can't know if you're either gay or straight until you've watched Pumping Iron. This is, I mean, because one way or the other,

you're going to figure it out. Patrick, it will not surprise you to learn that I really often, I mean, the referencing that to people like going like it's like having sex with a woman and coming I'm coming our locals on yes, Riley. I was just talking about something else Jesus Yeah, either that or I smoke stogies because I'm ballsy. The thing is, I'm kind of hamstrung here because I have the drop of the pump, but it's like a minute and a half of solid Arnold. Like, and I don't want to hit that button unless we're all ready for it, you know?

For us to, the sort of time commitment that that is. Alice, do you want to use that as your stick? Wait. Yeah, okay, fuck it. Three, two, one, mark. The greatest feeling you can get in a gym is the pump. Let's say you drain your biceps. Blood is rushing into your muscles, and that's what we call the pump.

The pump. The pump. The pump. Your muscles get a really tight feeling, like your skin is going to explode any minute. It's really tight, it's like somebody blowing air into your muscle. It just blows up and it feels different. It feels fantastic. The pump. This is all. It's as satisfying to me as the coming is.

You know, having sex with a woman and coming. The pump. I'm like getting the feeling of coming in the gym, I'm getting the feeling of coming at home, I'm getting the feeling of coming backstage when I pump up, when I pose out in front of 5,000 people, I get the same feeling. So I'm coming day and night. The pump. I mean, it's terrific, right?

The pump. So, you know, I'm coming day and night. The pump. I mean, it's terrific, right? The pump. So you know, I'm in heaven. Yeah. Alright good, are we all synced up? Do we? Yeah, please leave that in. He's not wrong. He's not wrong about any of it. Like, that's the, like, I've recently been doing more like pump work in the gym, and honestly, it does feel a little bit like he's onto something.

ALICE See, this is the thing, I've never diversified my, like, having sex with a woman and cumming feelings beyond having sex with a woman and cumming, right, and in that way I'm quite, like, specialized, you know? SEAN Yeah. ALICE Yeah. SEAN I dunno. SEAN No, you gotta branch out, you gotta to see what it feels like because it really all just is about at the end of the day pumping blood So yeah the November version of this right? It's like it's like having sex with a woman and not coming

Everybody and welcome to esteemed history podcaster Patrick Wyman. I like this, but look, kinks are part of history, man. Like there's, this is, this is, uh, this is us doing homage to our ancestors and all of the kinks that they were into. Welcome to the pumps of history podcast. Yeah. Come. Yeah.

I mean, be like the ancient Romans, not in the sense of being a fascist, but in the sense of painting one wall of your dining room with a big fresco of you getting the shit whipped out of you by beautiful women. The most realistic scene of life in the ancient world that has ever been put on film is in the Spartacus TV series, where it's a man having sex with his slave, with a slave woman, and then he turns to the other slave and he says, uh, Tiberius, I would finish, insert cock and ass. And this is the, it's the most accurate depiction of- My cock and bio.

Yeah. It's the most Accurate depiction of like life as an upper-class male Roman that has ever existed It's like this is you want to know what the benefits of Empire are this is it this is it right here This is this is why you do the Empire it's to it's to get that I want to become a statue Twitter guy But the statue in my profile picture is clearly a statue of two men having gay sex, but just never address it. There's a girl version of that, there's an artist version of that who just draws like ancient Roman yuri, it's incredible.

Miley, you need to be a statue Twitter person, but for a statue of like preapis, I think. Oh yeah, uh huh. Anyway. I'm Alci yeah. Uh huh. Yeah. Anyway. I'm Al Sabiades on Statute Twitter. Doing like, kind of structural history, right, but the sole motive force of all history is like, trying to put your cock in things? It is! Yeah.

Yeah. I'm having a, I'm talking to a really interesting economist who's writing a book on kind of the great, like the overall human history of gender divergence and the emergence of patriarchy. And it all basically comes down to men wanting to hang out with each other and then have sex with women, but not owe them anything. And like this is, this is kind of the overarching thesis and she's done all of this research all over the world.

She's gone to different countries. She's done dozens and dozens and dozens of interviews. She's like the, the list of scholarly references is incredibly thick, but really that's, that's more or less what it is. It's really growing, growing out, wanting to do some violence, and then wanting to have sex afterward. What you're suggesting- You have to hang out with the fellas. What you are suggesting is that the basic form of human society is the Turkish football

team support- Pump! It's the pump! It's the Turkish football team supporters club that has 90 men smoking inside on lawn chairs and no women at all. Exactly. That women exist solely to- Be fucked. ... as sex objects and objects of like male attraction, but not intimacy. Yes, that is the basic thesis. And I don't think it's it's not

It's not wrong and it's or it's at least not wrong enough for me to want to argue with it Mm-hmm. Well, I think the thing is if you dropped Arnold Schwarzenegger doing specifically the pumping iron the pump monologue into Like most societies like any kind of randomly selected time and place on Earth, gets by, you know? Like, yeah. We put Arnold Schwarzenegger in a boat with an outboard motor, and he's off to North Sentinel Island.

Yeah. But, yeah, rare is the society in which anything that he's saying is like, ew. You know? I don't know precisely Socrates. I don't know if I'm pump iron because it's Right makes me desire to do it Socrates was jacked that's the fucking Socrates was jacked he was an accomplished wrestler like is it that he was he was like, he was like a thick dude.

That's the part that makes that even fucking funnier. In the cave lifting weights. Well, Plato's name means big guy. Like broad shoulders. Like, yeah. The pump. He's a man who knew about the pump. So I want to bring us from our opening nonsense into what we're talking about today into our

general main body nonsense. And the pump if you haven't if you haven't guessed already, it's Patrick Wyman from Tides of History joining us for the one millionth time and every time is a delight. Patrick, how's it going? It's going fantastic. I'm sorry, I had to get the I had to get the pump out of my system before and now we can turn to more serious stuff.

And now for the circumstance. Pump and circumstance, yeah. So, we... So I'll take that again. Frequently, when we talk to Patrick, when we have Patrick on, we like to talk about long, like long-term trends of things throughout history. We've talked about the emergence of the state and what is it, in order to sort of make Balaji Srinivasan look

stupid. We've talked about like, men of violence. We've talked about institutional rot, and what happens when people stop trusting institutions. We've talked about individual examples of social collapse. We've talked about gentry, you know? Like, tons of stuff. Yeah. However.

Many episodes. I think there's one factor that's usually present in most, if not all of those discussions that I think is worth having as a discussion of its own, which is climate, which also happens to be the subject of Patrick's forthcoming book, Lost World, the Rise and Fall of Human Societies from the Ice Age to the Bronze Age, or at least if not the subject, then let's say a major player, and also the subject of what's going to be driving events in the world as we experience it for the next as long as we're alive. Aw, not events! I hate this kind of trend in history where it gets really esoteric and talks about stuff

that has like, no bearing to the way our lives are gonna be, y'know? When we talk about changing climates in history, this is also not an episode meant to, like, when we talk about how societies adapt to changing climates, we're not talking about well, that means anthropogenic climate change we're just going to adapt to. Rather we're talking about what adaptations to changing climates have looked like in the past, if you get my meaning. And just to set a marker down first, one of the most common ways of adapting to a change in your climate is dying. Like everybody dying doesn't get much more adaptive than that, I guess. And the thing always...

Yeah, we adapted to a new way of dealing with the climate, which was no longer being alive. Yeah, exactly. It's called being a sigma male. ALICE You're outside the environment, nothing's influencing you, doesn't get more sigma. SEAN Yeah, that's right. Ataraxia. The ancient beasts knew about this. ALICE But yeah, so like, and the thing is, unlike our kind of unprecedented current anthropogenic

climate change, with like, previous changes in climate, there have been like, humanity has survived, it's just, maybe that society didn't, or the quality of life didn't, and for a while you had a pretty solid thing going and then you didn't, and the number of podcasts that existed in Mayan society was like, some, some, some, none for a long period. Long truncheon and back up again. Okay, sorry. Mayan podcast, I think we could actually come up with an app. Yeah, Trash Baktoon.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, so, I'm gonna pitch this to you right now. I can see it in my mind, right? Trash Baktoon, but we are like the Bill Simmons of the Mayan Empire. We talk about ballgame. The Mayans absolutely would have had podcast guys breaking down the ballgame and also doing a satire of guys breaking down the ballgame. Like, that's that that's the essence of Maya society. That's how you know when you have reached like capital C. Civilization is when you've got guys doing my energy, right? Well, you've generally seen he's like, you You know the Phoenicians had a nuclear reactor.

Guy seeing the first Spanish sails cresting the horizon and being like, ah this is really gonna fuck up my fantasy ballgame league. I think it's super fucked up that if you're still in ziggurat they don't let you get paid for the ballgame. And it's like- Yeah, and the what? NBGA? Yeah.

They just, it's like, oh yeah, like they're allowed to use the likenesses of all these players and all these stone carvings and everyone's like, oh yeah, like the, my favourite player in ball game is on this stone carving for the collective of like, of, of corn farmers. But the collective of corn farmers aren't allowed to pay anybody who's in ziggurat playing ball game, it's unfair. I could have been pro at ball game, but then my dad made me go into human sacrifice to take over the business. I mean, the thing about ball game is it's such bullshit, like, every time you watch

ball game they bring the fuckin' Eagle Warriors out and you're like, why do I have to thank this guy for his service? Yeah. The video assistant referee has really slowed down ballgames. The thing is, right, you know that myth about the Spanish conquest, that people thought that the horse and the guy were the same being, right, they were like, joined? Imagine if you're like a ballgame guy, and your chief concern about the Spanish is, can they hoop though? If the answer

is, if the answer is, this guy is 12 feet tall and has between 4 and 6 legs, depending on how we count, probably? At a while being really excited about the prospect, like, the 1493 draft. Well, no, because you played the ball game by striking the ball with your hips. Can you imagine a better ball game player than a guy on horseback? We haven't done that in a while. It would be like a guy on horseback playing ball game would be like Shohei Ohtani starting playing baseball.

It was changing the game kind of forever. And people would be like, I missed before we got guys on horseback playing ball game. It's all just about horses now. Which is all to say climate change. Sorry, one last thing, one last thing, one last thing. Mayan ball game fans after the conquistadors come, it's maybe like post 9-eleven they'd be like okay look if we stop playing ballgame the conquistadors have won if you're gonna call quiz the Mayan ballgame I'm not watching it anymore I'm not doing it it's fucking disgusting this is what you won't get on tides of history just to be clear I'm just I'm just wondering who the pep guardiola of ballgame was just a guy who was sitting there So okay, just a guy so tightly wound that you can feel the fabric of the universe clenched between his teeth

Like as he's as the balls bouncing around a guy who's holding on to a human heart so hard it pops Who's like okay okay, who's, who's like, because the, the Mayan empire itself would have been the Chelsea of ballgame because they just would like honker people nearby. Right. Yeah. They had John Terry because, and then, and then it would be like, Oh, you're only winning ballgame because you've won the war that preceded the ballgame that the ballgame is now a symbolic depiction of, right? I'm not racist, all me mates are mine. In many ways, right, the flower wars and things of this nature are closest exemplified by the sort of transfer budget of today's FA. It's really fucked up how the Saudis just think they can buy their way into ballgame.

I mean the thing is, I'll play some of the ballgame video games, but I can't play ballgame manager because it's just spreadsheets, you know? This is... we were gonna talk about something else I think. Sucking dick while my man plays ballgame. Yeah. Foo. Everyone's super into ballgame now that the daughter of the priestess is dating one of Oh Everyone's everyone's super into ballgame now that the daughter of the priestess is dating one of the big ballgame players

And now all the priestess heads are getting into ballgame Those of us who have been around for a long time, okay, we have to stop. Yeah, the Tulum chiefs. Okay, so you want to talk about climate change? Because we can keep riffing on ball game. I'm done talking about ball game for the moment. I think I've got all my ball game bits out of the way, yeah. Okay, I just wanted to be sure. Okay, so climate change.

Sorry, a Mesoamerican nerd being like, I don't care about sports ball game. Okay, sorry,. OK, sorry. I get that Mesoamerican nerd cared about the change in climate that may or may not have been at the root of the overall social collapse of my my society. That's what he is concerned about, not the ballgame. Yeah. So so basically in the long run of human history, climate is always there.

It's always a factor. It provides the basic context within which human societies operate. It is always in flux at every geographic scale from the kind of micro all the way up to the planetary. You can have climatic shifts that have to do with changes in insulation, the amount of sunlight the earth is receiving. You can have climatic shifts that are like, oh well the currents in this particular bay are a little different and so-

The Niagara Escalpment for example. Yeah, there's all sorts of, like all of these systems are constantly interacting with one another. So it's never like, one of the great flaws of, I would say kind of the popular approaches to climate change and climate change in history is the idea that there's one big kind of key that unlocks how people respond to it or what the effect is. What I would call the first wave of climate studies that started 20ish years ago, up until about 15 years ago, was really concerned with finding a climatic event or whether it was a volcanic eruption or a drought or something

like that and finding it in a climate record and then going to see, did this cause the collapse of a particular dynasty or did this cause the end of an empire, or something like that. They're looking for real one-to-one correlations between an identifiable climatic event, and then an identifiable historical event. It was called Consilience, like they did a lot of this shit. And it was like they would go through medieval monastic records and try to correlate a bad winter with a volcanic eruption that they found in a Greenland ice core.

Right? It's interesting how well that accidentally mirrors a lot of signs and portents of the times too, right? Like, your, you know, emperor loses the mandate of heaven because of a bad harvest or whatever. And you know, if they understood it that way, then... It wasn't... it's not entirely wrong, it's just that the basic frame kind of fails to capture how we interact with our environments. And that for all of the times when there was a volcanic eruption and the dynasty didn't

fall, right, like, that the possibility of collapse is just one thing that can happen as the result of a climatic event. But most things that have to do with the climate are not events, they're processes that take place over decades, centuries, or millennia. We had a bad harvest, and we thought that the emperor might have lost the mandate of heaven, but when it went to the VAR, it actually turned out that, you know, one more emperor left in his dynasty. Yeah, it was sexual degeneracy. That was the reason why it fell. It wasn't the climate. And the climate interacts with all of these other things that are happening sometimes in quite unpredictable ways. But the basic problem with the whole, like, here's a climatic event, here's especially

a political outcome as a result of that, is that people make decisions and they make choices and they can respond to the things that happen. There are societies that are more resilient, have buffers against those kinds of one-off things. So, if you're really good at storing surplus and then redistributing surplus in times of need, then that one really bad winter or one really bad harvest isn't going to be in the end for you. You've got this stuff built in. On the other hand, you can have even the most resilient society if you've got a decade of terrible droughts,

your surplus is going to run out at some point and things are going to come to a different end. But if you live in a place where 10-year droughts are common and your ancestors have lived there for thousands of years, then you have probably developed ways of dealing with the 10-year droughts if you're going to continue living in that area. It just ends up being a much more complex series of stories and ideas than like this climatic thing happened. And therefore this other thing happened. And a lot of what we're going to be doing today now that we're done talking about the ballgame, a lot of what we're going to be doing more ballgame bits may pop up at any time.

Like, you got to be aware of that. Yeah, you got to keep your head on a swivel for this. Is we're going to be talking about a few, like we like to do, a few examples throughout history of how changing climates have interacted with, I would say, quite dramatic civilizational transformation. And again, I want to go back to what November said at the beginning, right? The larger and more complex and less resilient your civilization is, the more likely the way you adapt to climate change is going to be, well, I guess we lose 95% of the people. Essentially.

Yeah, which bodes very well for, again, the unprecedented worldwide climate change. Indeed. And if you want an example of how, of sort of climate events, in localized climate events having globalized impacts, one of the main theories of the beginning of the sort of Arab uprisings of the early 2010s was that there was a harvest failure in China that it caused them to start purchasing a huge amount of wheat on the spot market, which basically meant that Egypt, which is ironically enough now the world's largest wheat importer... Just the perfect inverse bread basket of the world, great.

Was then unable to import flour, prices went up, and so on and so on and so on. Right? And then... I mean, even just on a simpler level, you can kind of correlate stuff like civil unrest to how hot it is in summer, you know? When people are outside and more pissed off, even irrespective of the fact that flour is 20 times more expensive, or whatever. Or you can talk about how food price inflation that we're experiencing in lots of Western Europe isn't just the result of spiking energy prices, because those have come down, but

the result of multiple failed olive harvests. And that these things aren't thought of as climate events. It's interesting too, because for a long time I was kind of anticipating more dramatic shortages of things. And I think one thing that I've learned is that we live in very very shortage-averse societies, in the sense that, like, okay, say the hazelnut crop fails, right? It's not gonna- RILEY Nutella is fucked. The Ferrero company is on its knees.

Well this is the thing, I was gonna parlay this into a Ferrero Rocher bit, because I love a Ferrero Rocher. It's that, like, okay, there's not no hazelnuts left on Earth, right, it's a big planet, so what it is instead is that you get hazelnuts that are way more expensive because you just get them from the next place over that can grow them successfully. And so, again, because we're very averse to displaying shortages, what you don't get is there's no Ferrero Rocher, what you get is one Ferrero Rocher comes individually wrapped and costs 27 quid.

LARSON You give us the bare minimum, Ambassador. ALICE Exactly! And this is the thing, I think, not for the first time that the wrong side kind of won the Cold War, because if there was one thing the Soviet Union was good at, it was communicating, without giving a fuck, that there were shortages of a commodity. And it was more adaptive in that way. Yeah. That is always more lead.

Yeah, this is... I mean, those are perfect examples in the sense that they speak to, it's like the frog in boiling water, right? Like, you don't, it's not like you're sitting here thinking, with rare exceptions, that these long-term processes of climatic change are like all of the sudden one year the food just doesn't grow. It's like maybe one... If you're used to having a crop failure one year in every 20, then maybe it's one year in every 10 or one year in every five. It's not like all of the sudden things become completely unlivable. It's not like all of the sudden one day you're

like, oh my God, we've got no food and everybody's going to die. It's that you are slowly and subtly squeezing the parameters within which people operate. You are slowly and usually subtly making it so that crops can't grow in a particular area or crop failures are more likely, or there's more likely to be drought, or there's going to be rainfall, but it's going to be rainfall at the wrong time. As these things go, people are at a basic level, people are adaptable. We have managed to survive and multiply for so long because we are adaptable. That is the hallmark of our species is that we can do things in different ways depending on what the circumstances are around us.

Especially for agriculture, agriculture relies on predictability. And that is especially true for commercial agriculture on a large scale, which is what feeds us today. You got to know when you can plant the crops. You got to know what you need to put in to make sure that the crops grow. And you got to know when you can harvest the crops

so that you can then ship them off to all the places that those crops are going to go. When you change those inputs on some level, and you introduce a lack of predictability into the system, then there are going to be a lot of downstream ramifications like an Arab Spring. Which is like three steps removed from the cause of it, but you end up getting these little shock waves that go through a system, and eventually you reach, like, when we come to the point of collapse, which we'll talk

about, it's because a lot of things have gone wrong to get you to that point. It's not that you have failed to adapt, it's that you've tried to adapt a whole bunch of times and you've reached the limits of the possibilities of what you can do. ALICE And it's stuff that, potentially, we're sort of bad at understanding is even happening, and worse at confronting, with any degree of intentionality. ZACH Yeah, like, fish populations are a really good example.

Like, even people who are... Unless you are somebody who works in commercial fishing, are you paying close attention to what's happening to fish populations? Probably not. It's 11pm, do you know where your tuna are? Yeah. I know where my yellowfin is, do you? Unless you are paying really close attention to that, you're unlikely to know.

Shellfish beds, the health of the halibut population. Like these are extraordinarily complex. Names have been the bags in the 2000s. Well, and this is in fact one of the purposes of a commodity. Of treating a fish not as a fish, but as a commodity means that you just always see fish in front of you. And the only thing that changes is the little number underneath the fish until one day you don't see fish in front of you. And the only thing that changes is the little number underneath the fish until one day you don't see fish in front of you. That's the crucial thing.

Because you do, there is the hate to not see fish in front of me. Because the, the labor, which includes the actual sort of finding, getting of the fish, the difficulty of how difficult it is to get the fish. Maybe how many fish that each of it, each trip was able to obtain, the health of each fish they're able to obtain, all of that is disguised in that little number underneath the fish on the shelf. And so it is very, very normal seeming.

And in fact, very small fluctuations in that number can have huge implications for the sort of medium term sustainability of the answer to the question, is there fish on the shelf basically Yeah, the these dynamics often end up being I Was I was gonna say I was gonna say they often end up being clearer in ancient societies because they're living closer to the edge Of subsistence they don't have it's much harder to mold to move bulk have, it's much harder to move bulk commodities in antiquity, right? Unless you're moving them by sea, especially inland.

You can move them from port to port, you can move them up river, but trying to get grain from one place to a random spot in the countryside. Let's just say Egypt to Rome, just for fun. Yeah. You can do that because you can load ships with grain at Alexandria, and you can take it to Austria, and you can offload it at Austria. So even though that looks like a long distance,

that's actually a pretty easy lift in terms of if you've got the ships to do it. But if you live way up in the Apennines, you probably ain't getting that wheat, because then it's a week's long journey by cart. And at the end of the day, even despite all of the effort and labor that you're putting into and animal traction to get it up the hills and into the mountains, it's not really worth it to do it by that point.

And so that's a really clear example of how that dynamic works. We don't think about it in those terms in the modern world, but it's absolutely the case today where at some point, it will just not be worth it to take the fish to a seafood restaurant in Des Moines, Iowa. You're not going to get the fish there because it's a long way from the ocean. And if it costs all of this stuff to go out and get the fish, process it, put it in a truck,

if gas prices go up, right? Like there are all of these inputs that go into what the little number is. Eventually it will just not be worth it to have the fish on the shelf in Des Moines. So I think we talk about this in terms of ancient societies. I want to start real ancient, because we have a few examples we're going to go through. We're going to kind of run the same few questions through these examples. I wanted to talk about, looking at how much time we spent on ball game, maybe my second example, which

was the desertification of the Sahara and how that changing climate essentially gave rise to like Narmar as climate change warlord. So it gave rise to the old kingdom of Egypt. Yeah, this is a really fascinating example. So the Sahara at the end of the last ice age was actually larger than it is today. It extended all the way to the coast and then it extended further south into central Africa. As the climate warms and gets wetter in the early part of the Holocene, the Sahara becomes essentially

like a vast Serengeti. It becomes a landscape of lakes and rivers and grasslands. The fauna of the Sahara is really similar to what you see on the African savannas. So there are lions and giraffes and elephants and herds of wildebeest and all that good stuff, right? Really welcoming environment. And people go out and they expand.

They follow the river systems of the green Sahara out into what is now the middle of the desert, but then was a really nice place to live. People populated it. It's associated with the dispersal of a whole bunch of language families, like probably the Niger-Congo languages are one of them, or the Nilo-Saharan languages, the Niger-Congo languages. There are all sorts of deep linguistic connections that probably have their roots in the green Sahara. Around 6,000-ish years ago, 6,500 years ago, the green Sahara is in the process of drying

up and all of these people who are living out in the Sahara, some of them are still hunter-gatherers, but more of them have become pastoralists. They're moving from place to place with herds of cattle. That is probably playing some role in the drying of the Sahara. There's really good recent work that suggests that the presence of large, like human managed herds of animals probably sped up the drying process because they're removing the ground cover. Nervously in Amazon.

That's fine. Yeah. Don't worry about it. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty worrisome. Like cattle are not great. Even in the Eurasian steppe, which is like we think of

as like the Ur grassland, like overgrazing by about 2,500 BC after about 1,000 years of mobile pastoralism, had had massively deleterious environmental effects. And then those people are like, fuck this place. we and our Kurgans are gonna go displace some hunter-gatherers on the west side of this peninsula. Yeah, I mean, once again, the invention of agriculture was a mistake, both in the sense of like, the story of all of it, like, you could be hunting an ibex through some long

grass right now, and instead you have to listen to a podcast on your way to work. You're going a step further than Ted Kaczynski. Agriculture was a mistake. We need to go back in time and find the first human hunter-gatherer, like maybe archaic human hunter-gatherer, who looks at an old midden pile where he used to be and sees some familiar fruits and grains and stuff growing out of the midden pile, and shoot him dead. Yeah. Except what we do is we leave, like, we go back with a Glock, right, and we shoot the guy who's about to discover corn.

But through some kind of time travel accident we leave the Glock behind, and what we do is we accidentally evolve gun world, where nobody ever becomes a pastoralist, no one ever invents agriculture, but they get really good at guns, and that's how you get the Predator. So... We create... Sorry. But...

Is that bad? I dunno if a world full of like, the Predator is better or worse. I'm not sure if I'm qualified to answer that. The reason I sort of ask about the Green Sahara, right, is this is almost a counter example of what we're talking about, which is a climate becoming less hospitable, leading to the growth of what you might call, at first glance, I know we don't sort of use these descriptors, I just don't know the proper one, the growth of a more complex society, basically.

Because if this, from my understanding, from listening to some podcast at the gym, I can't remember which one, is- Yeah, pumps of history. Yeah, pumps of history. Is that this process, these nomadic pastoralists get closer and closer to the Nile, and they end up burying their dead at the same spot,

but they themselves continue moving up and down. they're dead at the same spot, but they themselves continue moving up and down. And that the beginnings of settled, the beginnings of settlement along the Nile essentially are because they are forced this way. And that the reason that the Egyptians revered their dead so much was that the only connection that they had to individual places by the time they were forced to become Sedentary agriculturalists was the burial sites that they would visit habitually that that's my understanding Well, because the dead is adapted to climate change they had they had yeah They the the dead had seen the end of climate change like like the dead are the only ones who have seen the end of war

Same deal. Yeah, the well, but actually because their bones are still going to be around getting eroded and whatnot. So maybe they haven't seen the end of it. Getting eaten by Victorians? Want to get better boners? Ground up, ground up in a mumia. You are not immune from being eaten by a Victorian man. Sorry, please carry on.

That is, that's so bleak. Imagine that, like your bones have managed to survive like 6,000 years buried someplace like carefully wrapped by, carefully wrapped by your descendants, and then you just get ground up to be eaten as a cure for syphilis or some shit. Like, that's a bleak, man. Like, that's a bleak way to go out. ALICE Yeah, a horror story where you're in the Sea of Reeds and, like, a guy gets his, like, arm eaten while he's, like, in the afterlife

with you. RILEY Oh, that's actually, that's a fucking great short story. ALICE Anyone hearing it is welcome to it, you know? Woke Egyptian guy who's got a little papyrus card in his sort of very primitive wallet that says, like, I'm happy for my bones to be ground up and made into a syphilis cure after I die. I'd actually love for my remains to be useful.

Yeah, he's like an organ donor. But but yeah, at greater remove, he's like a hieroglyph of just like a guy having his arm chewed on. That's what's on the card. Oh, god damn it. Oh, that's bleak. Let's trace this to the foundation of sort of dynastic Egypt. Yeah. So so there had been pastoralists in the Nile Valley. But as the Sahara gets drier, these people who had been pastoralists in the Nile Valley. But as the Sahara gets drier, these people

who had been living out in what were savannas end up crowding more and more and more into the Nile Valley. Populations get denser. It's still pretty pastoral until around 3,800-ish BC. And then all of the sudden, you see an explosion of what we would call social complexity. So you see a lot more evidence of permanent settlements. But more than anything, what you see is the emergence of elites. I just finished writing a book chapter about this, but the long and the short of it is,

there is no really slow run up to kings. There are three different bursts of activity in the Nile Valley over the course of centuries with long periods between them, each one of which seems to have been fueled by some sort of crisis or ongoing thing. But the first of these follows really quickly after this influx of people from out in the desert. It happens within a couple of centuries, no more. You get the first, what we would think of as like proto kings. So this

is all the way back like five or 600 years before the beginnings of the first dynasty, you get the very beginnings of what we would call like the Egyptian royal tradition. So doing things like building big tombs that are modeled on palaces, subsidiary burials. There's one dude at a place called Huracampolis who is buried with an entire menagerie of animals. Like, there are a bunch of baboons, he's got an elephant... He's baboons! He was serving me in the aftermath!

Yeah! Right? Just, so... Further to the guy getting his arm clawed off is a much older guy being swarmed by his own baboons. Yeah, the baboons were his favourite, he loved it. Yeah, he loved the baboons. It's not a small menagerie, is the crazy part.

It's like a substantial collection of exotic animals that did not live nearby that this guy had acquired, and he's like, I'm king now. Got animals, got baboons, got an elephant. You wouldn't want a small amateurish menagerie that any guy could have. It shames you to have a duck and a cow. And in a land full of domesticated cattle, this guy went out and got himself a fucking Orox. Like this guy had a gigantic wild Orocs Any corgis it was a state it was to make a point

Fortunately for not sacrificed to accompany her into the afterlife That we know yeah, yeah, that's like what kind of that's see I thought dogs were supposed to be loyal You don't want to go you don't want to follow your owner into death. What kind of loyalty is this? This is bullshit in this case right right? We talked about like the relevant status quo Coming into these sort of emergence of hierarchy in Egypt and the eventual unification of like the to the upper and lower Nile really what what changes is huge influxes of people are are sort of forced in There's an I imagine probably a lot of labor to take advantage of. They can compel a lot of labor all of a sudden. And so the institutions aren't so much challenged

as created to manage a destabilization coming from climate change. It just so happens that the existing proto-elites were in a great place to take advantage of it. Yeah, and there's a lot of... I meant to say this at first, but the corollary to this is a lot of violence. If it hadn't been before and it's not entirely clear, this becomes a pretty violent place pretty fast because there's a limited amount of viable land, you have pretty high populations. I would imagine the reason that they start settling down in farming villages is because

they've reached the limits of what you can do as a pastoralist, right? Like there just are not enough places where you can go along the Nile with your herds without bumping into someone else. And so... ALICE In that case, having an aurochs is a little bit like having the Ford F-150 that's like rolling cones. Like, I have a worse version of the thing that is destroying the environment to make us live like this.

Exactly. Yeah, I have the best worst one. That's the guy. I rolled up on some blue haired farmer in my aurochs and had to take a shit all over him. Yeah, rolling Orox shit. So this is, I'm fascinated, this is shifting gears just a tiny little bit, but I promise I'll come back to Egypt.

The Scythians, so what we think of is, oh, they're all like nomadic pastoralists and they roll from place to place in their wagons and they've got their horses and their sheep and whatnot. That was just the highest up ones. They did that as a lifestyle choice. They were like snowbirds, but with axes and scalps of their enemies. That was not a viable way of life for everybody who lived on the Eurasian steppe. Only the elites got to do that. They were the ones who got to go from place to place in their fancy wagons with their fancy gold stuff and their slaves and be like,

we're grazing here today, folks. Like that was, it was a legit power move to just show up with your wagons and your horses and be like, all right, we're hot box in the wagon right here. This is where it's going down. And we're gonna get real drunk. The ancient equivalent of sending your kids to Westminster and driving to polo matches

in your Range Rover was just the nomadic lifestyle. Exactly. I think the control of animals thing in Egypt is probably in some really deep seated cultural way a throwback to that, to the idea of you being the person who can exercise control over the natural world, over large herds of domesticated animals. Like it's a very tangible symbol of power in this rapidly changing world. So I would like to move on actually

to another sort of historical example, which is one that has been on my mind recently, which is the Indus Valley civilization, which, as I understand it, is kind of happening, it's sort of growing and declining in parallel. Like, people are starting to live in Mahenjo-Daro and Harappa and stuff around the same time as Narmar is unifying Egypt.

Yeah, it's a little bit afterward. It's more... The Old Kingdom, which marks a departure from the early dynastic period in Narmar, coincides with the beginnings of the Indus Valley Civilization. The Indus Valley Civilization is fascinating because the Indus Valley sits at the intersection of two very different climatic systems, one of which involves winter rain and one of which involves summer rain. You have built in there a lot of flexibility in terms of the crops that you can grow.

You can support large populations, but you have a lot of adaptability built in because what you choose to grow when can vary depending on the weather conditions. So around 2200 BC, after these cities have been built, these are vast mud brick cities. They've got tens of thousands of people, but even more than that, the countryside is incredibly densely populated. There are more people living, far, far, far more people living in the Indus Valley civilization than were living in Mesopotamia at the same time. It is one of the most densely populated rural landscapes on earth. The reason for that is because you can grow millet, you can grow rice, you can grow wheat, you can grow

barley, you can keep domesticated animals in large numbers. And because you've got the Indus and the other rivers of this region, you can move food from place to place really easily. Like it's conducive to supporting large numbers of people, and you've got built-in buffers in case one of your harvests does fail, you can just grow something else in the other growing season. So when this big drought hits around 2200 BC,

this is called the 4.2 Killier event. It's one of the largest and best documented major climatic shifts. The Indus Valley civilization is actually in pretty good shape to weather it. The 4.2 Killier event coincides with the end of the old kingdom in Egypt, the end of the Akkadian empire in Mesopotamia, a whole bunch of other-ish political events that we can see in the record. The Indus Valley civilization gets through this okay for quite a while because despite these recurring droughts, they can grow other things, right?

They're not just screwed because they can't grow as much wheat as a winter crop. They can switch to barley, which is hardier. The yields are lower, but you can do barley. You can just expend more energy on your summer crops. You can just grow more rice instead. And this is exactly what we see in the archeological record. Despite these very long, very intense droughts, the Indus Valley civilization, they're kind of chugging on along. Eventually, they reach the limits of what they can do. So it doesn't coincide with the beginning of the drought.

It coincides with having lived with the drought for 300 years. There are long periods. And sometimes these droughts last 25, 30, 40 years. So these are generational climatic events that people are living through and they're dealing with. They're quite adaptable. They are going to the very limits of kind of their toolkit of what they have available to them to try to live with it.

And eventually they can't do it anymore. And the cities crumble. Everybody leaves the cities. Population of the region starts to decamp for the Ganges corridor. So they're kind of moving in a crescent around the rim of South Asia. Eventually, the region just cannot support those populations anymore. This, I guess, comes back to our sort of one of our first ways that the easiest method for a civilization to adopt a climate change is to rapidly lose a lot of

the outputs, output requirement, let's say. Or you can just leave. Like becoming a refugee is a fine human tradition, you know? Or dying of hunger. Not so much when, well, exactly, like, what do you do in this situation when there is no Ganges, which is not affected by the same sort of climate change, but instead you have to, I guess, go to space? Yeah. Well, the terrifying prospect is that the most inhabitable lands on Earth will be Canada

or Russia, which is a hell of a choice. Climate-proof Duluth, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, fuck yeah. We'll all be moving to Bismarck, North Dakota. Winnipeg or Novokuznetsk make your choice Which way was to learn? Yeah, I've got a nice bit of property staked out in the in the Yenisei River Basin of southern Siberia That's that's where I'll be heading. You could I do a shoe walk that rip

Like yeah, I mean but but you're you're exactly right because what do people do when they're faced with these circumstances You're right, so I'll go hunt the deer. Got to butcher our cattle. We got no more cattle. Okay, well, we'll try to do something else. Instead of keeping herds for that, we'll just dairy them instead. There are all of these things that you can try to do within the confines of the system that you already have. There's always a little bit of flexibility built into it and you can work with that. But eventually, what do you do? Well, moving, yeah, that's the biggest one. What do people do? They get up and they move. Okay, this place isn't working out. We'll go somewhere else. Mobility is the single greatest human asset for dealing with adverse climatic conditions. When that becomes a problem, and I think you can probably

see where this is going, is when you have things like national borders and dense populations that are already living in places, then mobility becomes a source of friction and conflict. When you just kind of pour people from one place into the next, you are going to create the conditions for conflict. What form that conflict takes, it's not inevitable. You can manage it, but it does make it more likely when you're just pumping people into one place from somewhere else. You're creating the conditions that allow for things to happen downstream of the climatic crisis. Because at this point, you're three steps removed from the drought or you're four steps removed from a change in precipitation.

And where that ends up is a migrant community someplace where people are poor, they're impoverished, maybe they're susceptible to a message of violence from a would-be authoritarian. These are things that can happen. You can turn climate refugees into an army or alternatively mobilize the existing population with the specter of climate refugees and turn them into a force to go out and conquer some stuff. These are things that can happen downstream. Isn't that kind of the story of the Ottoman Empire is turning refugees into an army?

Yeah, basically. The whole, I mean, yes. So the- They were climate refugees. Not just the Ottomans. They were more refugees from the Mongols, but there was a climatic component to that in the sense that this is right around the start of the Little Ice Age. So the- The Little Ice Age that preced around the start of the Little Ice Age. So the step is getting.

The Little Ice Age that precedes the crisis of the 17th century, one of the things that's on my list to talk about after we discuss the crisis of the third century, the end of the Roman climactic optimum? Pricing. It is, yes. So let's skip ahead to the Little Ice Age

because it's actually a really fun example of how you can get these things downstream. So the medieval climatic optimum ends around 1300-ish. You see this with the great famine in Europe, like this really intense period of bad weather that ruins a whole bunch of harvests, coincides with a cattle moraine too, so the livestock are dying. Anyway, really bad in Europe. But anyway, in Anatolia, which is really easy to get to from the Eurasian

steppe, because you can either come through the Caucasus or you can come around the rim of the Caspian Sea and get into get into the eastern parts of Anatolia, a whole bunch of people, some of whom are fleeing the Mongols, some of whom are fleeing climatic conditions, some of whom just want to get out and try new things, are coming into Eastern. I've heard about the ice cream men. They have. Yeah.

They're looking for good stuff there. They end up going into Eastern Anatolia. We know most about the Ottomans because we know what the Ottomans become, right? They become the Ottoman Empire. But the Ottomans are just one of these, they're called Beyliks in Anatolia. They're these little kind of petty states, petty kingdoms run by warlords. All of these states are relying on this supply of refugees who are coming into these nomadic people who are coming into Eastern Anatolia.

They're recruiting from the same, it's the same pool of military manpower. So all of these conflicts that are happening in 14th century Anatolia are driven by the fact that you can just go out to the Turkmen and you can recruit a whole bunch of soldiers to come fight for you. And they tend to flock to whoever has the, whoever's offering them the best deal, the best pastures, you know, it's, it's a fertile market for that. Also out your hairline and your teeth. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly.

The Ottomans ended up, the Ottomans weren't institutionally at the beginning doing things that were really any different. They were just kind of better at recruiting these guys. And then once they had done that, they built the institutional foundation that we associate with the Ottomans. The nephew strangling. The Janissaries and yeah, the nephew strangling. Yeah.

But, but in its origins, the Ottomans were just to... The opposite of nepotism. No, still a lot of nepotism. It just kind of ends poorly. You kind of manage it on both ends. You've just got favourites amongst your nephews. Exactly! Literally. You cultivate the one nephew, you strangle the other nephews... I am nef-zephs, first among equals. Yeah, that's right.

But look, honestly, as these nephew stranglings, as these nephew as these nephew stranglings go, it's better to go out with a bow string than a few other kinds of strangling. Like if you've got to choose, that's not the worst way. But again, that's a metaphor for dealing with climate change is because at a certain point, you are kind of choosing who's going to go out and how these opportunities are going to be distributed the the deleterious effects of climate change are not evenly distributed throughout a society, right?

They're not evenly distributed in space either The people who are going to suffer the most from these things are the people who are most marginal to start with There are people who are living closest to the edge of subsistence or living in the most vulnerable areas Who don't have the kind of the slack in the system to pick up that's going to allow them to deal with it. So like when we're talking about the doomerism that's going along with climate these days, like I don't think it's going to wipe out humanity, but I think who survives is not going to be a representative sample of all of the people that are alive on the planet at this point. It's people who have built-in advantages, whether those are

socioeconomic or geographic, are much more likely to make it out than... If you're a poor person living in Bangladesh, that's a fucking rough draw right now. Because you don't have a lot of slack built into the system. You're vulnerable to rising sea levels. You're vulnerable to- Food distribution. To heat, food distribution. And also you have the disadvantage of being brown in a world of white people. It is unlikely that the Western world is going to welcome

an enormous stream of migrants with open arms. And that's increasingly likely to be true if they're people who don't look like a kind of an ethnic authoritarian in the West is likely to... Like Vladimir Putin is not going to be like, yeah, okay, come on, we got you. Donald Trump is not going to be like, yeah, we gotcha. Right? Like, that's... The... Donald Trump is not gonna be like, yeah, we gotcha. You know, whoever- And nor will any European head of state, either. Well, look, I mean, if anyone needs a refugee army at this point, it probably is Vladimir Putin.

So maybe what we need to do is get Vladimir Putin a massive Ottoman turban. What he needs is some Turkmen. Really, are you touching the lathe for that I mean He's kind of run through his supply of Chechens and Dagestanis in this point like he's sorry you and stuff Yeah, but yeah Bringing it bringing it back around right like we're talking about sort of the period from 1300 to 1700 is as you alluded to is the little ice age and It the effects of these things can be incredibly complex you talk about winners and losers is, as you alluded to, is the Little Ice Age.

The effects of these things can be incredibly complex. You talk about winners and losers. I mean, you talk about the, in the effect that the Little Ice Age, sort of, in a very abstract way, is one of the events that creates the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire is one of the events that, one of the, sort of, historical players that fractures the sort of european feudal system because it's difficult if you're the holy roman emperor and you have a series of landlord contracts to kind of muster an army powerful enough to fight off a strong unitary state that is able to cast and build canon right that becomes the

invention of the little footstool was a game changer the Roman Empire had not thought of it But we love we love to kick up our feet the Ottomans were so comfy But right like it all of that at the same time the audit the presence It's not just sort of crop failures or let's see just as you say at the beginning Slightly tighter parameters for what you're able to grow to feed people in Europe that are causing the kind of ongoing weakening of institutional feudalism. It's also the presence of the Ottomans, which is sort of caused by kind of the same thing happening elsewhere. But before we go back to the Romans, if we have time, I wanted to just sort of move the lens over to Europe and say, okay, well, from 1300 is when, you know, there,

let's say a lot of cracks really start appearing in the sort of European feudal contract, compact as it were. It's where, and there are lots of other events, like I think people are well familiar with, such as, you know, the printing press breaking the, breaking the monopoly on knowledge held by the Catholic Church, the Black Death changing the number of peasants able to work and therefore the value of that labour. But fundamentally- Don't five oaths start the podcast amidst Advent, you know? But fundamentally, right?

It has to come together from five different villages. Let's look at how feudalism, just in brief even, tried to keep itself going. So we talk about it's not just climate change and you fail, but rather challenges come in and you adapt until you run out of room. So there are a couple of things here. I want to put these strands together.

Because the later Middle Ages in Europe population has dropped pretty dramatically from the pre-1300 era. It's down by at least a third and as much as half pretty much everywhere. This means labor is scarcer. Now, on the one hand, this is because of the Black Death. It's because of the Black Death in the sense that the plague shows up, it kills a bunch of people, and then it keeps coming back generationally to affect the next generation. But the other part of this is that the weather has gotten a lot worse. There is an ongoing climatic shift that is making it colder and wetter, and this is helping

to keep the population lower. It's not just that the plague keeps coming back, it's also that the carrying capacity of the land is substantially different than it was 200 years before if you're living in 1450. So all of these developments, such as the printing press, which things that are in effect labor saving technologies grow out of a set of circumstances that's predicated on having fewer people around. So as they're trying to, I'm not going to say feudalism so much as the elites are trying to maintain their control over the populace to the greatest extent that they can. In Western Europe, they try and they fail to do this through laws

that are setting maximum wages, through really heavy-handedly putting down peasant rebellions. So the violence that goes along with putting down the 1381 Peasants' Revolt in England is exemplary violence. It's not like we're just going to kill the ringleaders. It's like, we're going to drag these guys behind the horses and cut their hamstrings and behead them with a rusty ax in public. It's that kind of stuff. The same deal with the jocquery in France. This has exacerbated class tensions and the response to it is to put these things down with as much violence as humanly possible. We should view that probably as a conscious strategy to try to keep the people under control,

to try to turn back the clock on these shifts that are downstream of, but a direct result of climatic shifts and plague. There's also an argument that's been made that the plague itself is the result of the changing climate. That because it changes where the animal reservoirs in which plague hides out between epidemics. It changes where those animals can live. And as the climate is shifting, it's bringing people into closer contact with these zoonotic reservoirs of plague.

So even the plague- Some guys go menagerie. If you really like ground dwelling rodents in Central Asia, then yes. And who doesn't? And who doesn't? They're not as cool. I feel like the Americans kind of won out on that, because we got prairie dogs.

And I feel like prairie dogs are cooler than their Central Asian equivalents. But that's just one man's opinion. But right, in the background of all of this, and I think one of the things I wanted to sort of bring some focus on in this episode was ongoing attempts by the existing powerful to maintain their base of power,

whether that is through restrictive laws or also religious innovations, essentially. Yeah, like the really big turban. Yeah. Or innovations, I guess, not just religious, but innovations in ideology. These are all ways in which you try to maintain your hold on power until your mode of social reproduction, which involves like purely agriculturalist sort of tie-ings of people to land

and sort of mutual obligations between landlords and tenants and increasingly high levels of landlord, is just no longer able to function when faced with, well, I mean, this even goes back to our war discussion, actually. It's no longer able to function when faced with a unitary state that's able to build canon. And then all of a sudden, you need to start thinking about industrial production rather than agricultural production, and then you are unable to continue. And if something like a changing

climate is able to so fundamentally disrupt agricultural production as to, I don't know, be like one of the ultimate causes, I don't wanna be sort of too simplifying here, but one of the ultimate causes of the transformation of feudalism into something like modernity by just making the productive method of feudalism impossible to sustain, then, well think about this, is a drought in China makes governance in North Africa and elements of the Middle East more or less impossible because it makes the basic agreement of Egypt

up until, you know, 2011 and then subsequently, which is you're fed, you're paid, you probably work in the public service, you're not, you're paid, you probably work in the public service, you're not allowed to care about politics though, that's the deal, it makes that untenable. And so if we need to have more or less this climate everywhere in order to sustain the economy of everything is always on the shelf, but the number just changes every once and again,

then I wonder what kind of, and I feel it's always difficult to say what's going to happen, but it's easy to say something's going to happen, we might be in for when that is no longer possible. Are you suggesting that our society is very precariously organized, Riley? See, I think if one tree is removed, the whole thing can collapse. It's a Jenga tower of treats. Once the marmite goes, you're fucked. One week without those little goo puddings, and Redding is gone.

They've burnt it to the ground. Milo, you're joking, right? Am I? But most people- But those little goo puddings, mmm. Mmm, it's a naughty little pudding. That's what things are based on, right? It's the people is the exchange of exchange of currency for commodified goods, commodified goods, all of which must basically always generally be available.

Well, the prime minister stepped in the very last goo pudding in the country because it was, it was on my staircase. And again, the Soviet union handled this in some ways better. Like, you just... Okay, fine, you have a parallel economy that's run entirely on connections and nepotism and organized crime, to get you the little goo puddings. LIAM Yeah, that's crazy. That wouldn't happen here. ALICE Yeah, imagine that. But like, at least the actual government is going to tell you, yeah, there's no little goo puddings.

There's only one pub, one friend at a pub can get you all the goo puddings, and all you have to do is give them a lot of government money. Yeah, day one, the goo pudding is no longer available in Tesco, like four years later, and a guy is like floating face down in the Thames from like four gunshot wounds in the back for trying to corner the goo pudding black market. Yeah, yeah. Shot with a crossbow and sauna. But this is the kind of stuff, honestly, that's going to happen, is I feel like when we drill down, what you're doing is you're increasing the friction within the system.

So you've got all of these interlocking parts of a complex system, and you're doing is you're increasing the friction within the system. You've got all of these interlocking parts of a complex system and you're increasing, you're just kind of like, you're removing, it's like you're doing the opposite of spraying WD-40 into a, or some sort of lubricant into a joint. You are creating more and more and more friction. You're creating more and more points where some little spark can get set off. To pardon the pun, but you're turning the temperature up and you're waiting for the water to start boiling. You don't know where the bubbles are going to come up exactly.

You can take some guesses, but you're not going to be sure. The example of the Arab Spring is a really good one because that's not how you would have thought that that would have played out. If you take a step back and you look at the structural factors, it's like legitimacy of government. It's the social contract between rulers and ruled. The perception of elite competence. These are structural factors, but how those structural factors end up playing into whatever the actual event is, the inciting event is usually something funny or stupid. It's usually something dumb that happens. But if you keep rubbing these things against each other,

eventually, you're going to create a fire. I realize I'm mixing all sorts of rubbing metaphors, and I should probably be doing better But the the point remains like when you when you have all of this friction in a system It's only a matter of time before you get a flashpoint somewhere It's going it will be downstream of these causes the proximate cause is likely to be something much stupider Look the point is in Britain is gonna be cushy because you're fried frog in boiling water it jumps out it's like ah fuck that that's fucking on you put a frog in warm water and you slowly eat it up until it's boiling you're like this is nice

this is like a jacuzzi it's like fucking centre parks, bosh. So I'm not worried. It would be the most British thing ever to be just sat in the boiling water and going yeah I like it. Is it also sort of the case, one of the things you were trying to get at is even though the sort of flashpoints are always going to be stupid and it wouldn't sort of be, it wouldn't surprise me that like a riot would sort of come out somewhere because a local Tesco did get rid of like goo puddings because they couldn't afford it But they refused to say they couldn't afford to get them anymore. Don't you try and palm me off with a millionaire's shortbread. You know we want the Melty Middle.

I could go a little for millionaire's shortbread. That's not why I come to fucking Tesco, is it? Like underneath these, is it sort of the point being that once you're able to kind of see the complexes, cause like I wonder whether how much of this is like the complex system exists but you know, in order to sort of like maintain as kind of harmony for lack of a better term, like people, like a good percent of the population can't actually recognize that complex system is very, it all has to sort of seem, yeah, it all has to be seamless in the moment that it doesn't become seamless and you become like aware of it, oh, like

there is. Let's see, Hussein, I think it's not- Well, like COVID, everyone freaked out when there was like no toilet paper for a week. So Hussein, I think it's not just that in general it has to seem seamless. It's that we are built on infinite frictionless, free flowing global trading commerce. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, that's sort of what I mean. So the moment that like friction is sort of introduced and you're kind of having to confront

it on a very, and like, I think one of the things that we've seen or like one of the things that like has kind of been very apparent in the past few years is that like not that long ago, if you had enough money, if you had like, if you were like kind of upper middle class, like, you know, you could sort of avoid those frictions. You could kind of like pay your way out of it. But now, even if you are more comfortable materially, it's very likely that you will have to face that friction. You can explain some of the recent political phenomena, at least electorally, on the basis that you have a class of people who now actually do face these very minor frictions and are maybe becoming much

more aware of their place within this broader complex system. I don't know. Well, I mean- I think- Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Patrick. Yeah. No, I mean, I think you're absolutely right. I don't think people are stupid. Individually, people say and do a great many stupid things when it comes to politics. Like, if you question the average person about their political beliefs, they will often turn out to be contradictory and just real dumb.

But with that said, I think people have a really good sense at a general level for the disconnect between ideology and reality. And I think they have a sense for when they're being fed a line of bullshit about how the world is supposed to work or what they're being promised by a political system. In the United States right now, there's this whole segment of democratic policy people who are like, the economy's great. The economy's fantastic. The lines are going up.

Everybody's, everything's good. We're in great shape. We've got inflation under control. And then when you talk to people who are actually out there working in the economy, this kind of fucking sucks. This is not, I don't feel good. My quality of life is not good. So I don't think that the people who are saying

this is not going well are not wrong because the lines are going up. Like that's not they're talking about kind of different things. There is a disconnect between the way that between the information that they're being presented about how the world is and their and their kind of core experience of it. And I think the Soviet Union again, if you rate the number of goo puddings we produced by weight due to these new lead cups that they come in, I think you'll find we've produced more than ever before. Yeah. And like those lines are measuring something. The lines going up are measuring a thing.

It's just it's not the same thing that people are feeling or experiencing. And so I think the real danger for governments as they face climate change is when is when they go out there and they're like no We're dealing with this just fine. Look, we've put up the seawalls and then someplace floods They'd be like the seawalls didn't do shit. Like you're talking about we're like you're telling me everything build the seawall Yeah, like the seawall and now all of these all of these sea peoples are clambering over it And now all of these all of these sea peoples are clambering over it Yeah, there is the the the Kaiju breaking through the seawall in Pacific Rim. You've had some right men in here It's like people like the governments are going to say and do things and political figures are going to say and do things

that make it seem like they're addressing these problems. And then when it becomes obvious that they're not addressing them or that what they think of as addressing them is inadequate or dumb, then that's when at a basic level, their legitimacy will be called into question. Legitimacy only functions if you don't have to ask about it. Well, I don't know, Patrick. I think that this idea of selling indulgences is going to close a lot of the Catholic church funding gap pretty well. And that'll be the last we hear of anybody. And what is a goo pudding but the best indulgence?

That's true. That's going to be the last. You can get it in the Vatican gift shop. I think now that we've gotten that problem solved solved that's the last we'll hear of those uppity burgers asking to fuel system imagine an uppity burger Anyway anyway I guess probably all we have time for so sorry Rome heads, but I'm afraid the crisis of the third century is gonna have to wait for the next time we talk to Patrick

I'm sure we could do a whole episode on it We could do a whole episode on the crisis of the third listen to me and Patrick Wyman talk about Rome options are available Yeah, specifically about the the or prestige TV MILF which is an a Repeated topic of conversation. So, absolutely. You can check out Milo and Patrick and Phoebe talking about both seasons of the series Rome. You guys are selling it on Bandcamp, right? Yeah, season two is not ready yet

because I haven't edited it yet. We have recorded it all. So it exists in theory. There is no fucking hurry. I can't stress this enough. It's not going anywhere Rome sort of in the way that you're thinking of did sort of go somewhere anyway, anyway

Do you check out sides of history because if I sound at all knowledgeable about history ever that's why So do check out tides of history. It is without a doubt my favorite podcast So do check out Tides of History. It is without a doubt my favorite podcast And I want to thank Patrick once again for joining us and securing his status as the ultimate VIP plus gold lounge member That's I mean it the seat is comfortable the seat is comfortable upgrades on TF Airlines. And you get a goo pudding. To thank you all for listening. When this episode comes out, it will be Easter in the future, or as you're calling it, Easter now.

Yeah. Yeah. Treat yourself to a goo pudding in honor of Easter. Getting to talk with you all is just my favorite thing. This is so much fun. Thank you for having me. Oh, anytime. Well, we love a bit of Wyman on the show. It's always a treat. Yeah, that's right. And we'll be seeing you in a few days on the first free episode after Easter or so. Bye everybody.

Bye. Bye. Bye bye. Thanks for watching!