The Bastard Manifesto

In Episode 77, Robert is joined by Jamie Loftus and Producer, Sophie Lichterman for look into what Robert calls, Bastards 101. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
M hmm. What's Dick and Matador's. I'm Robert Evans hosted
Behind the Bastards and that is the intro. People requested
that intro, Sophie, I don't need to hear your guff
about it. I do want, you know, people's feedback, but

(00:21):
I don't need guff. Okay, this is a noun. I
don't agree with that. Alright, Well something was Inductor ZUFI.
I think that was, by the standards of my recent introductions,
one of the best ones I've done. I just don't
like Crimes against Potatoes. Well that's actually totally fair. Um,

(00:43):
but that introduction, uh does tie in, yeah, slightly with
with today's episode. Uh so you know, first off, Jamie Loftus,
you are our guest today. How you doing? Jamie co
hosted the Bechel Cast the the creative mind behind Boss
Whom Is Girl? Which is going to be in Edinburgh

(01:04):
probably by the time this episode drops. The most entertaining
show I've been to in like the last ten years.
Fly to Edinburgh. I've several times, and if you listen
to this years later and Jamie Loftus is not in Edinburgh,
fly to Edinburgh and demand that they take her back,
Like what happened there? Yeah, there's yeah, yeah yeah, force

(01:27):
it upon the town fathers of Edinburgh. I mean really
optimistic for you to even mention as a possibility as
a time period that will exist. Yeah. Well I'm an optimist.
I'm not I'm not well, I don't know, I'm a
I'm a mix of both, I guess. So today, normally

(01:48):
this is a show where I talk about the very
worst people in all of history. But today we're doing
something a little bit different. We are getting very much
behind the bastards because we're going into some prehistory about
where authoritarianism comes from, where fascism comes from, how it
might be kind of programmed into our brains to an
extent um. This is kind of a weird one, and
it's based on you know, I read about primarily dictators

(02:12):
and terrible unethical political leaders and corporate leaders, people who
abuse power, uh, basically as a more than full time job,
and having done that for a year and change, you
start to have some ideas about the nature of power
and the nature of authoritarianism and the possibilities of the

(02:32):
human race and stuff. Um, So this is like, uh,
it's not a half asked but it's maybe three quarters
of an asked attempt at me putting some of that
together and explaining some of the conclusions I've drawn, uh
from all of this research, and uh it's not ready
for public consumption, but I'm gonna put it out there

(02:54):
anyway because I'm a hack and a fraud. So that's
where we are. I've got Sophie and Jamie in the
room to tear me down if if what I'm saying
some nonsense, and Anderson and Anderson, this would be really
fun if your conclusions were actually I was being kind
of dramatic before power is actually really good and I'm
going to work for cook Industries. Bye bye. This this

(03:17):
ends on a on a pro Saddam Hussein rant, Robert
you know what, leave Yeah, I've become a Stalinist. Yeah,
oh god, I just want to hear you refer to
yourself as a bit of a drama queen. Turns out

(03:39):
this year I've just been a bit of a drama
queen and things are actually fine. He's like, I've just
been binging Mary Kay and Nashley. You know, that's my
new life. As I learned from Mary Kay and Ashley,
Everything's fine as long as you as long as you
light to your wait, Mary Kay, I was too busy

(04:00):
trying to remember exactly what had happened in uh in
that movie where they trick their parents into both getting
on a cruise ship with them to make their divorced
mom and dad get back together. Buddy gun one, isn't
that one? That that is? Isn't that uh parent trap?
Parent trap? Yeah? Not Mary Kane? Actually not actually twins,

(04:21):
that's double Lindsay Lohan. Yeah, and as I miss, wait,
was that Lindsay lohunt? That wasn't even Mary Kay? And Nactually,
goddamn it. I know I think about the such a
that I tried to mention Ariana Grande in casual conversation
last year, and you waited maybe a full ten seconds
by being like, I don't know who you're talking. I

(04:44):
actually bring that up thinking about it once a week.
I bring it up constantly with salespeople when they asked
me why Robert can't pronounce normal words, and I give
them the explanation that he can pronounce some crazy Russian
ship but cannot pronounce Ariana Grande. See this is frustrating
because I feel like if you, if you add up
the number of words that I read every week on

(05:06):
this show, I have above a pronunciation rate. Someone crunched
those numbers. Yeah, I mean we're talking about ten thousand
ish words a week. You know, you get a couple
wrong mistakes are made, but usually the words are like tree,
t look we I love tries and I pronounced them route.

(05:32):
Why did you let us come on the show together?
We're not going to get anything done. I needed I
needed some ship talking of my my, my philosophizing here,
because if I'm going to do an episode where I
unload of a half baked philosophy, somebody should be there
to like point out when I've made a huge logical
error or pronounce a name wrong. Okay, this actually will

(05:53):
tie in with something we talked about later in the episode.
I didn't plan that ahead of time, but it totally does.
And I'm very proud of myself of now. So let's
get into it. In nineteen eighty nine, Francis fuku Yama,
a political scientist and author, wrote an essay titled the
End of History Looking forward just a little bit. He
was able to see the fall of the Soviet Union

(06:14):
was on the very near horizon. To fuku Yama and
too many. At the dawn of the nineteen nineties, it
looked as if a new epoch in human society was dawning,
one in which the great historical shifts between empires and
modes of government that had persisted for EON's would cease,
because mankind had clearly arrived at the perfect system, liberal democracy.
So that's Fukuyama's thinking in like nineteen eighty nine. Now

(06:38):
he turned his essay into a book in nineteen ninety two,
after the fall of the USSR, when he looked like
he basically read the future UH in the end of history.
He wrote that humanity was witnessing quote not just the
passing of a particular period of post war history, but
the end of history is such that is the endpoint
of mankind's ideological evolution, and the universalization of Western liberal

(06:59):
demonocracy is the final form of human government. So a
bit of a bold claim to make UH and a
little less than thirty years later, in the Year of
Our Lord twenty nineteen, fuki Yama's theories have not aged well.
Rather than living at the end of history, we now
seem to be living through a period where these once
in vulnerable liberal democracies are dropping faster than fat beats

(07:21):
at a warehouse. Rave. Thank you, thank you for that, Jamie.
That's proud of that one. Under Victor Orban, Hungary has
transitioned to what he calls an illiberal democracy. Under tap
resign uh, Turkey has moved very close to an outright dictatorship.
The elections of JayR. Bolsonaro in Brazil and Rodrigo du

(07:44):
Terte in the Philippines hardly bode any better, But the
situation is actually even worse than it looks. Based on
all that, researchers with a German institute, Bertelsman stiff Tong
published a study back in March of two eighteen that
analyzed the quality of democracy, the market, economy, and leadership
of some hundred and twenty nine nations. They use this
to put together what they called a transformation Index that

(08:06):
roughly analyze the overall levels of freedom, authoritarianism, and inequality
in those societies. They found that roughly one billion more
people live under dictatorships now than did fifteen years ago. Wow,
that's insane. Yeah, it's not a great statistic. I don't
like that. M hmm. That's all I have to say
about it. That's my only comment. Not into it. Okay, Sophie,

(08:29):
not a dictatorship fan, bold stance to take considering honestly,
brave of you. I mean we can add to that
because I feel like our relationship Robert is a dictatorship
and I am that dictator. Yes, in which direction nothing
would surprise me. And like Stalin, you regularly throw oranges

(08:50):
at me and make me watch Cowboy movies while you drink.
I've seen it. Yeah, absolutely, I hate to see it
and I see it. Yeah, but you are I mean
that you are my son, and I accept you for
who you are. Yeah, except for when I don't want
to watch Cowboy movies. Yeah, not acceptable. Then that's not acceptable.
So uh yeah. So these guys look into the number

(09:14):
of people living in dictatorships and how that's changed, and
they find out that there's a billion more people living
under such regimes now than we're fifteen years ago. I've
had a write up of this study in the Local,
which is a German newspaper. Quote. Well, the researchers concluded
that the number of people living in democracies rose from
four billion to four point two billion between two thousand
and three and two thousand seventeen. They also found that
three point three billion people lived under dictatorship last year

(09:36):
compared to two point three billion in two thousand three.
So the trends aren't good. Uh. It is said that
the number of countries classified as having exemplary standards of
free and fair elections had dropped from one in six
and two thousand six to one in fourteen last year.
And while seventeen of the hundred and twenty nine countries
were considered to have completely unrestricted freedom of press and
opinion in two thousand six, that was the case for

(09:58):
just ten countries last year. Okay, so we're not We're
not on a great trend line if you you want
to look at history that way. Um. Now, in every
era there are philosophers whose purpose seems to be to
reinforce in the minds of the great and good that
whatever systems put them in their lofty place are right
and decent and perfect. What would you, Francis fuki Yama

(10:25):
was that man cheering the victors of the Cold War
on and assuring them that their world order would persist
for all time, And now that mankind seems to be
sinking into a darker and more authoritarian era. A new
philosopher has arrived to praise the righteousness of this shift.
His name is Dr Jordan Peterson. Stand about, I was
having a perfectly lovely conversation. Yeah, we were having a

(10:48):
conversation while you were talking, and then I got the
Jordan Peterson momo and I had just had a sharp pain.
But before we get into that sharp pain, what would
all what would what would you sell the Lofty Place?
What would you sell at the Lofty Place with a
whole sorts of ship? I mean it would be and
also none of it would be It would be I
think probably a front for something else. Like it would

(11:09):
be mostly I don't even know. I'm not I'm not
a very good consumerwards, So yeah, it would be a
shop for Okay, no, it's just supposed to be a shop,
but it's actually a trap. Um so i'll, you know,
like lure in like sword guys and capture Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah, exactly,
like guys who own swords. And then it's really kind

(11:32):
of like a re education kind of thing, and the
doors snap and then I teach the sword guys a
thing or two about a thing or two, and then
they leave mentally healthier. I can respect that. Back to
Jordan Peterson, well, I mean speaking of sword guys, he
kind of ties in there. But he also ties into
authoritarianism because in his best selling book Twelve Rules for

(11:53):
Life and Antidote to Chaos, Dr Peterson argues that strict
hierarchies are natural and healthy, at least to some extent,
according to a write up in the conversation quote. To
prove his point, Peterson uses the example of lobsters, which
humans share a common evolutionary ancestor with. Peterson argues that,
like humans, lobsters exist in hierarchies and have a nervous
system attuned to status, which runs on serotonin, a brain

(12:15):
chemical often associated with feelings of happiness. But higher up
a hierarchy of lobster climbs, This brain mechanism helps to
make more serotonin available. The more defeat it suffers, the
more restricted the serotonin supply. Lower serotonin is in turn
associated with more negative emotions, perhaps making it harder to
climb back up the ladder. According to Peterson, hierarchies and
humans work in a similar way. We are wired to

(12:36):
live in them. So that's Dr Peterson, And as much
as I might personally find him frustrating a disagreeable. He's
not the only person making arguments like this, do we
have a sea? Do we have a second source? I
just don't like his We've got other sources and and yeah,
unfortunately we have other sources. Uh. There's a distressing amount

(12:58):
of data that reinforces the idea that strict hierarchy may
be more natural to humankind than the egalitarian future those
of us who grew up watching Star Trek the next
generation might prefer. In two thousand eight, a scientific study
on a hierarchy and the human brains started making the rounds.
Online websites like PBS News Hour summarize it with headlines
like this, social status is hardwired into the brain, study

(13:19):
shows The research this article and others like it discussed
was based on a study conducted by the National Institute
of Mental Health using an FMR I to measure the
brain activity of seventy two people playing a computer game
with financial rewards on the line. According to the press
release quote, there were assigned a status that they were
told was based on their playing skill. In fact, the
game outcomes were predetermined by the other players simulated by

(13:41):
computer participants intermittently saw pictures and scores of an inferior
and a superior player they thought were simultaneously playing in
other rooms. Although they knew the perceived players scores would
not affect their own outcomes a reward, and were instructed
to ignore them. Participants brain activity and behavior were highly
influenced by their position in the implied hierarchy. Now I
found a more detailed breakdown of that study by an

(14:03):
actual scientist, Dr. Kabiz Kamrani, writing on anthropology dot net,
and he notes quote Overall, this observation implies that social
status is highly valued in our subconscious minds, even as
much as money. The press is gorging itself on the
sound bite they just love it when something is complex
as social hierarchy and brain functions are reduced to something
as simple as gaining money. Another interesting observation involved subjects

(14:25):
that were presented a superior competitor in the game. When
that happened at triggered activity in quote, an area near
the front of the brain that appears to size people up,
making interpersonal judgments and assessing social status. A circuit involving
the midfront part of the brain that processes the intentions
and most motives of others and emotion processing areas deep
in the brain activated when the hierarchy became unstable, allowing
for upward and downward nobility. That it is the prefrontal

(14:48):
cortex is the judge bitch cortex. Y Dr Camrani goes
on to write, these results kind of thwart any utopian
anarchists out there. This data shows that are hierarchical consciousness
seems to be ingrained in the human brains so much
so that there are distinct circuits activated by concerns over
social rank. So like, so like, what what kind of

(15:09):
a study is this? Like did he how many? It's
an f M r I studies. So they're doing these
sort of things to try to make put people in
situations where they would be specifically like maybe lad to
think about their rank in a hierarchy, and they're also
measuring their brains at the same time, and they're finding that, like,
because of the way that people's brains react in these studies,

(15:31):
it suggests that parts of our brain are hardwired um
to view ourselves in part of a social hierarchy, as
opposed to like human beings inherently being egalitarian and social
hierarchy being something that's falsely imposed on us from outside,
Like the structure of our brain, uh, seems to reinforce hierarchy.

(15:53):
And do we know is there like are we pulling
from like a wide group of yeah, a sample, yeah,
not samples. This is this is just one study, um,
but there are other studies that have found similar things
that its specific study does, say the sample size of
the group that he did. Yeah, this one's I think
a seventy two persons study, this most recent one here. Um.

(16:15):
But there's like this is this is like sort of
emblematic of one sort of strain of research, and there's
a couple of other studies in it that talk about, um,
hierarchy and stuff. So it's not I'm not trying to
present this as like the end all be all, but
it is kind of a bummer to read stuff like that, um,
because it, Yeah, it would seem to push the conclusion

(16:37):
that we are to some extent, at least irrevocably chain
to hierarchy, to systems of inequality, uh and in other words,
to a world dominated by bastards. And while that would
mean eternal job security for Sophie and I, it's not
a worry that a world that I want to live
in particularly, so I dug a little bit deeper with
a little bit of desperation to it. Um, And I

(16:57):
found evidence to suggest that our primate ants sestors, or
at least many of our primate ancestors, would have been
beings with strict social hierarchies. Scientists think this is plausible
because many of our modern ape and monkey relatives show
evidence of this too. Gibbons are strictly monogamous, Chimpanzees have
elaborate sexual hierarchies, Silverback guerrillas don't exactly work out their
differences in mutual self criticism sessions. UM. I'm trying not

(17:20):
to be too absolutist with anything here, but I think
it's it's fair to say, based on a lot of
anthropological research, that many of the pre human primates we
descended from would have behaved in similar ways, which is
probably why we have brains that are to some extent
hardwired for hierarchy. UM. Now, this gets more complicated when

(17:40):
you also slot in the fact that an increasing body
of anthropological research suggests that many of our hunter gatherer
ancestors would have lived in egalitarian communities. Which is the
conclusion that scientists increasingly make as they study ancient man
and modern hunter gatherers, who sort of are seen as
kind of a stand in for our ancestors. Um. Which

(18:03):
kind of suggests that tens of thousands of years in
our past, at some point, you know, we sort of
evolved with this this like structures in our brain that
kind of function the same way as like an addiction
to hierarchy, and at some point in our past we
got over it for a period of like thousands and
thousands and thousands of years. UM. So yeah, that's interesting

(18:26):
to me. Now. In two thousan twelve researchers writing for
the Journal of Human Nature published the results of a
study into a sample of fifty three human societies in
which polyandrous unions were common. Um, I see where we're
going here, Robert. I don't know. This is just a
little bit but not for the most part, nack is

(18:48):
just just a little bit, just a little bit rounded
your lifestyle. I can't believe this. Now we demonstrate that
although polyandry is rare, it is not as rare as
commonly believed as found worldwide it and is in most
common in egalitarian societies. We also argue that polyandry likely
existed during yeah early human history and should be examined

(19:08):
from an evolutionary perspective. Our analysis reveals that it may
be a predictable response. Okay, here's the thing. It's a
predictable response to a high operational sex ratio favoring males,
and may also be a response to high rates of
male mortality and possibly male absenteees. Longer makes sense. No, no, no, no,

(19:29):
that's not what it is. Because men in ancient societies
would have died so often, it didn't make sense for
people to be strictly monogamous. So you should if you're
going to have men dying at a high rate because
they're out hunting stuff. It makes sense if everyone in
the tribe raises all of the kids, and if people
don't have strong bonds of monogamy. That's what they're saying. Um,
ancient people weren't polyandrous because they were making an ethical

(19:51):
choice about it being more ethical than monogamy. It's just
if there's a hundred and fifty of you and your
tribe and people are dropping all the time because they're
out fucking hunting wool and ship it doesn't make sense
to like have oh his her husband died, so now
her kids don't get food. Like, that's not a great
way to if there's not that many of you, you
just can't live that way. You gotta stay hornies, stay

(20:12):
frothy all the time. Yeah, Or it's it's more that like, uh,
Like one of the things that's really common in particularly
a lot of Latin American tribal societies is they have
these beliefs about sperm that once a woman gets pregnant,
every guy she has sex with after the pregnancy has
started contribute sperm that helps build the child. And so

(20:33):
kids have multiple fathers in the tribe and that means
that like if two or three of them die, you
still got three or four dads, and like they're all
responsible for teaching the kids certain things, which is a
really logical way to have a society if there's if
you're a hunter gatherer tribe, it makes sense logic. I've
never found more daddies to be I don't need there

(20:54):
to be like girls that have or boys that have
like more than one dad daddy, unless we're talking about
sugar daddy culture, in which case you do you Yeah, well,
I think you guys and your reaction when I started
talking about polyandry does make sense to me because like
I'm I'm polyamorous, and I'm I'm familiar with a lot
of frustrating people in that community who will make claims

(21:16):
that like, oh, it's more natural. Um, it's more ethical
because our ancestors did it, And it's important to not
that Like, No, our ancestors, to the extent that they
were polyandrous, didn't do it for ethical reasons. They did
it because it was like made logical sense for the
world that they lived in. Yeah, it's it's when it's
just something to tweet about. I love when I see

(21:36):
my polyamorous friends and I and uh, you know, I'm
they asked me how my monogamous relationship is going, and
I'm like, oh, it's good, and they're like, well, wow,
you're missing out over here, and I was like, okay, gang,
let's just play the board game, all right, just do
this front, just respectful of each other. And the other

(21:57):
thing that is important here is if we're talking about
like this book Sex at Dawn, which is a really
interesting book focuses a lot on one of like the
polyandrous species of monkeys bnobos, but ignores that there are
a lot of monogygamous species as well, So it's it's
entirely possible that, like, we descend more from monogamous types
of primates than we do from polyandrous types of primates.

(22:19):
And if that's the case, then this period of time
in which most human beings were polyandrous isn't a return
to It wasn't like natural for them. It was something
that they evolved to do, and no more natural than
like a cell phone, and like a cell phone was
essentially like an adaptation people developed over time in order
to increase their odds of survival, which is what I'm

(22:39):
getting to here. It is a bigger point than polyandry.
What else can increase your chances of survival? Products and
services it's an ad break, Damn they will, especially if
it's dick Pills, which fits right into what we're talking

(23:01):
about God, but also fun cook Industries, Fox News right, yeah, right, yeah,
fuck like monkeys. Thanks to Dick Pills products, we're back,
and I'm I'm continuing to build to my larger point,

(23:24):
which is gonna keep going on. So there's a two
thousand fifteen study by the University College of London, which
put forward the same suggestion that men and women in
pre agricultural human society has likely lived in relative equality.
Mark Dibble, lead author and the study, said sexual equality
is one of the important changes that distinguishes humans. It
hasn't really been highlighted before. So again, this guy is

(23:45):
saying this is a change it was. It's not a
thing that came naturally to us. It's something that we
adapted to for specific benefits. So these two studies are
part of an surprisingly large, to me, pretty convincing body
of research which makes the case both at the now
standard nuclear family has not been the norm for much
of human history, and that human society in the days

(24:05):
when life was nasty, brutish and short was also a
lot more equal and less exploitative than it does today,
not just for reasons of the kind of sexual bonds
people had. I'm gonna quote from a Guardian report on
the matter. The first real splash in this arena came
from the anthropologist Lewis Morgan and his book Ancient Society.
In the book, Morgan presented the results of his study
of the Iroquois, a Native American hunter gatherer society, and

(24:28):
upstate New York. The Iroquois Morgan observed lived in large
family units based on polyamorous relationships, in which men and
women lived in general equality. Morgan's work had a broader
audience when it was taken up by Friedrich Ingle's, most
famous for being the co author of the Communist Manifesto.
In his book The Origin of Family Private Property in
the State, Ingles drew on Morgan's data, as well as
evidence from around the world, to argue that prehistoric society

(24:50):
has lived in what he called primitive communism. Other anthropologists
now called this fierce egalitarianism, societies where families were based
on polyamory, in which in would people lived in active equality,
i e. Equality is enforced. And that's the key part here.
Enforced In our society, rules are enforced unevenly and imperfectly

(25:11):
by law enforcement of varying stripes. But we all accept
that most of the things we consider crimes will not
be punished. Most drug users won't be busted, most men
who beat their wives won't go to jail. Roughly of
murderers get away with their crimes. And I probably don't
need to point out to this audience that the number
of rapists who don't get punished for their crimes is
way higher than UM. So we can understand that statistic,

(25:36):
and that's you can. You can you can have a
society that more or less functions with those statistics when
there's hundreds of millions of you, and there's way more
food than everyone needs to eat, and the margins of
survival for our social groups are pretty wide. Primitive hunter
gatherer humans, however, lived in small bands of several dozen

(25:57):
to perhaps a hundred and fifty or so at the
large end of things. They lived in a world in
a time in which the margins of life and death
were much thinner. Their tribes could not survive people stealing
food from each other or committing multiple murders. This is
one of the reasons why some scientists suspect polyamory was
so common among humans in this period. And um or

(26:17):
do I miss it? Did you say the average lifespan
around this time? That's not a super useful statistic because
of of of infant mortality. Like one of the mistakes
a lot of people make when they think about the
past is like, oh, the average lifespan was thirty five.
That means that thirty year an old man. No, if
you make it to thirty, you're probably gonna live to
fifty or sixty at least, and seventy wouldn't even be crazy.
It's just that so many fucking babies are dying back

(26:39):
then that it drops the average a lot. Yeah. Yeah,
it's not at all weird for people who make it
to thirty to live to like sixty even back then.
You know, maybe fifty would be a lot more common.
Sixties still really old then, but people aren't. It's not
the norm to die at thirty. It's the norm to
die as a baby. I mean, yeah, it's like I mean,

(27:01):
by the time you're thirty, you're on a roll in
terms of being alive. Yes, you're probably a pretty tough
son of a bitch if you make it to thirty
in that kind of world, or daughter of a bastard um,
although there would not have been a lot of bastards
back then because societies couldn't survive them, which is the
point I'm building too. So yeah, So, ancient tribal people

(27:23):
had a huge number of what are called leveling mechanisms
that's the anthropological term, to defend themselves against dangerous members
of the group and This is where I get to
tell you, guys, one of my very very very very
very favorite stories. Have you ever heard of the shaming
of the meat? No? No, it doesn't has nothing to
do with sex. It has something to do with gender,

(27:45):
but nothing to do with sex whatever. Richard borche Lee
is a Canadian anthropologist who has spent a huge amount
of time living with and studying and writing about modern
hunter gatherer people's like the and the ju Juanci, both
of which I'm sure I've mispronounced the names of. Like
the you have to do like a weird I I can't.

(28:06):
I just I'm not gonna be able to. But they're
the Ekong people. Uh. These are people who exist today
in our modern, connected world, but the rhythms of their
lives and tactics of their societies are seen by anthropologists
as sort of a window into the human past. Uh.
Studying them is not a perfect look at our ancestors,
but it's about as good as we can get. In
the nineteen seventies, Richard spent time living with the Kong,

(28:28):
and near the end of this period embedded with them.
It just so happened to coincide with Christmas and out
of a sense of festivity and a desire to express
his gratitude towards the tribe for hosting him. Richard Lee
bought a gigantic ox to present them so that everybody
could have a sweet ass feast. Now, the ox he
picked weighed twelve hundred pounds, which meant that it was
enough meat for every man, woman and child among the

(28:49):
tribues with to get like four pounds of meat. So
he's like, this is fucking awesome, Like I've made this
is gonna be a great gift. This is a great
way to show my gratitude to them. They're gonna love
this ship. So I go a quote now from what
he wrote about this experience, which is a basically an
article titled Eating Christmas in the Kalahari, which you can
find online. It will be in the source notes. It's

(29:09):
a great read quote. The next morning, words spread among
the people that the big solid black one was was
the ox chosen by Unta my bushman name. It means
roughly whitey for the Christmas feast. That afternoon, I received
the first delegation. Binnah, an outspoken sixty year old mother
of five, came to the point slowly where were you
planning to eat Christmas right here, I replied, a loner

(29:32):
with others, I expect to invite all the people to
eat Christmas with me. Eat what I have purchased. You
have as black ox, and I am going to slaughter
and cook it. That's what we were told at the well,
but refused to believe it until we heard it from yourself. Well,
it's the black one, I replied expansively, although wondering what
she was driving at. Oh no, ben A groaned, turning
to her group. They were right. Turning back to me,

(29:52):
she asked, do you expect us to eat that bag
of bones? Bag of bones? It's the biggest ox here, big, yes,
but old and fin. Everybody knows there's no meat on
that old ox. What did you expect us to eat?
Off it? The horns? Everybody chuckled at ben as one
liner as they walked away. But all I can manage
was a weak grin. Are you wondering where this is going?
You're gonna fucking you. You're gonna fucking love it. Okay,

(30:15):
I'm excited great. Over the next several days, tribesmen and
women and children would make repeated mocking gibes to Richard
about the scrawny size of the enormous ox that he
bought them. No, I don't know, Lee, but reading his
writing you get the fielding. He's a very open minded,
friendly and hard to rattle sort of dude, which you'd
expect from an anthropologist who spent his whole life like
living among different tribal groups around the world. But even

(30:38):
he started meat story, yeah, it's it's frustrating. Will they
keep harping on him? Dozens and dozens of of Like
everyone in the tribe is making fun of him for
days about this, So he starts to get frustrated and
even angry as this goes on, and eventually some of
his good friends among the tribe explained to him that
this was common behavior, particularly from other members of the
tribe towards their young hunters. You you just make fun

(31:01):
of people for the shittiness of whatever they hunt, regardless
of how big it is, when it's time to like
help them clean and cook it. So, in frustration and confusion,
Lee asked one of his friends, why insult a man
after he has gone to all that trouble to track
and kill an animal, and when he is going to
share the meat with you so that your children will
have something to eat. Arrogance was his cryptic answer. Arrogance. Yes,

(31:22):
when a young man kills much meat, he comes to
think of himself as a chief or a big man,
and he thinks of the rest of us as his
servants or inferiors. We can't accept this. We refuse one
who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody,
So we always speak of his meat is worthless. This
way we cool his heart and make him gentle. So
this is like the meat version of like humility. Yeah,

(31:46):
this is how you enforce humility among a hunter gathered. Try.
This is how you attack and fight the male ego
when you can't afford to let it go out of
control like it gets to do in our society. Wow. Yeah,
that's kind of beautiful. I mean, you like to text
me all the time telling me that you're embarrassed by
your gender, which I just wanted to bring up for

(32:07):
no reason. I get frustrating a lot. That's nice, I mean,
I do think it is also funny that it's like, Okay,
how do we get through to the men. It's like, okay,
let's just rap a moral and a bunch of meat
and maybe they won't taste it on the way down.
This is kind of very Texas by any means necessary.
I like dream texts. This story is so Robert. Now.

(32:33):
There are some scientists who theorize that sarcasm and humor
itself evolved in human culture as a leveling mechanism, as
a way to cool the hearts of arrogant young men
before they went mad with power. So that's like why
we have humor. That's why we have deadpools things, things
have gotten mutated, but like that was its initial purpose,

(32:54):
is to allow us to because like humor is a
making fun of somebody, Insulting somebody is a way to
attack them without physically fighting and getting into a physical
battle where people die and are injured. So that's sort
of the theory that like maybe this is kind of
the evolutionary use of a sense of humor or at
least one of them. If being good at insults is

(33:17):
just uh not attacking someone I'm a you know, fucking samurai.
Well yeah, I mean there's a reason why in so
many cultures around the world, like it's pretty common for
people's grandmas to be like both kind of in charge
of the family and also talking shit about everybody all

(33:38):
the time, like, um, yeah, we the evolution of sarcasm
is what what a what a dark road to go down?
Target the other day, I said, sarcasm, it's how I hug.
I think it really speaks to your point. Uh. And
also a funk that shirt and anyone that's ever worn it.

(33:59):
It's gotten out of hand end in the modern era,
but we can see where it started. Yeah, dead Pool
Robert mistakes are made. Yeah. So there's a body of
scientific research that suggests possessing power impacts the brain and
manner similar to brain damage. Dr Keltner, a psychology professor

(34:20):
at u C. Berkeley, is one of the scientists on
the forefront of this field of study. From the Atlantic quote,
subjects under the influence of power, he found, in studies
spanning two decades acted as if they had suffered a
traumatic brain injury, becoming more impulsive, less risk aware, and
crucially less adept at seeing things from other people's point
of view. Uh. Suke Vender Opie, a neuroscientistic master University

(34:41):
in Ontario, recently described something similar. Unlike Keltner, who studies behaviors,
Opie studies brains, and when he put the heads of
the powerful and the not so powerful under a transcranial
magnetic stimulation machine, he found that power in fact impairs
a specific neural process, mirroring that maybe a cornerstone of empathy. Now,
before we take too much out of this, there's a
lot of debate about the validity of this research and

(35:02):
the extent to which it can tell us anything about
the real world. I found an interesting neuroskeptic article that
points out that power priming, which is the kind of
studies that were conducted to get these results, power priming
studies have real flaws when we try to apply their
lessons outside of a research context. But I think the
lived experience of the I Kung and other hunter gatherers

(35:22):
seems to support at least the conclusion that a lot
of people who live on like traditional more hunter gatherers
societies kind of understood that power was bad for people
and it made them more dangerous to themselves and others,
and that they needed to be like egalitarianism was then again,
not an ethical decision. It's a defensive reaction to the

(35:46):
dangers of power. So I find it that interesting. I think, yeah,
that that definitely tracks with a lot of That's part
of why I do think that like powerful people using
social media is so extremely interesting, as you can almost
like see the rot on the edges of their brain.
And like even like Trump aside, there's like there's so

(36:09):
many examples of just like you can just see in
real time the brain rot forming the famous people. Yeah yeah,
but I mean just like influential people who have too
much money for your own good, Like you can even
like social media influencers your corrosion. Well, they're chaotic, evil.
I don't even include them. But like I think, like

(36:30):
the best example of that I've seen recently is Elon
Musk's bizarre crusade against crediting artists, which is like if
you had sat down with him, if he'd never gotten
on Twitter, and you just sat down with him be like, oh,
if you share the work of an artist you like,
you should add their name to it, he would have
been like, oh, yeah, of course that makes total sense. Yeah,
but because of the way social media works, somebody says

(36:53):
that on Twitter and he just immediately attacks them. It's
like this, why are you having this fight? Elon Musk?
I mean, his entire online presence like it should be
there should be a thesis paper on it, because it is.
It's like you you can just see his brain turning
to dust its very eyes, yeah, like and interest seeing.

(37:15):
And I'm sure that that's an extension of things that
have been going on, you know, since the beginning of time,
but like actually getting to observe it and having people
volunteer that information to you is fascinating. I suspect I
don't I can't know this, but like, if we can
imagine a world in which Donald Trump never had Twitter
but also still got elected president, my suspicion is that

(37:37):
he'd suck less. Not I don't think you would have
been elected without never without Twitter, But yeah, I think
it's been bad for him. Yeah, I think that I
had worked in his favor during the election, and then
during his presidency it's been just like a giant Yeah. Yeah,

(37:59):
You're welcome swners for that sound effect. Back to my
my theory here that I'm still building towards. There's a
lot of like I'm taking you on, like the journey
of just ship I've been thinking about for the last
year and a half. So this is kind of like
the pattern my brain has taken it as best as
I can recreate my brain rot that's what we're touring.

(38:22):
So there's a tendency and progressive thought, and it's something
that I fight against a lot to look at groups
like the Iroquois and other research into our egalitarian ancestors
and make the point that such forms of social organization
are more natural and thus healthier than the supremely hierarchical
societies we live in today. But I tend to think
the evolution of leveling mechanisms like the shaming of the
meat suggests kind of the opposite, well, at least not

(38:44):
about the healthy thing, but about it being natural. Hierarchy
is natural for human beings. It's something our brains slide
into without careful vigilance. Our ancestors were not egalitarian because
it felt natural. They evolved to enforce egalitarianism with great
vigilance as a defense mechanism against the dangers of power.
And this presents perhaps a less utopian view of man's

(39:06):
inherent nature, but I think it also posits a more
optimistic picture of our future, because if Homo sapiens beat
the problems of ingrained hierarchy once, then we can fucking
well do it again. Yeah, thank you. And that leads
pretty naturally to my next question. If our ancestors once
lived free, fucking egalitarian lives, sleeping under the stars, probably

(39:26):
taking hell of mushrooms and not enforcing strict gender hierarchy,
wh whoa who went wrong? How did we go from
all that to the last you know, ten thousand years
or whatever of human history, which you know has kind
of been a ship show. But but do you know
what is not a ship show? Ship the products and

(39:47):
services that support the show. Oh I was I was
about to drop the ball yet again and be like,
how do you mean? What do you mean? I'm Robert,
thank you, product X. We're back. So we're talking about

(40:09):
why this egalitarian order of the human race that seems
to have existed at a point in the distant past,
what made it fall apart? Uh? And I found a
good rite up on this subject in New Scientist magazine
by a researcher named Deborah Rodgers. She cites social anthropologist
Christopher Bohm, who believes the suppression of the dominance hierarchies

(40:32):
of our primate ancestors was a quote central adaptation of
human evolution. Bom thinks we would not have spread across
the world without the adaptation of egalitarianism. He notes, inequality
did not spread because it is a better system for
our survival. So why then, did inequality eat the world? Well,
that's a question that's been posed by a number of histories.

(40:54):
Great thinkers. Jean Jacques Rousseau theorized in seventeen fifty four
that inequality started with the idea of prime at property.
Social Darwinists in the eighteen hundreds thought that inequality was
the inevitable result of the struggle of survival of the fittest,
in which the more fit and almost inevitably white people
formed a natural aristocracy by dint of their evolutionary success.

(41:14):
But this thinking has continued to evolve in the twentieth century.
According to Deborah Rogers quote, by the mid twentieth century,
a new theory began to dominate. Anthropologists including Julian Steward,
Leslie White, and Robert Carniro offered a slightly different versions
of this following story. Population growth mean we needed more food,
so we turned to agriculture, which led to surplus and

(41:34):
the need for managers and specialized roles, which in turn
led to corresponding social classes. Meanwhile, we began to use
up natural resources and needed to venture ever further afield
to seek them out. This expansion bread conflict and conquest,
with a conquered becoming the underclass. The more recent explanations
have expanded on these ideas. One line of reasoning suggests
that self aggrandizing individuals who lived in lands of plenty

(41:56):
ascended the social ranks by exploiting their surplus, first through
feasts or gift giving, and later by outright dominance at
the group level, argues and argue anthropologist Peter Richardson and
Robert Boyd. Improved coordination and division of labor allowed more
complex societies to outcompete the simpler, more equal societies from
a mechanistic perspective. Others argued that once inequality took hold,

(42:17):
is when uneven resource distribution benefited one family more than others,
it's simply became ever more entrenched. The advent of agriculture
and trade resulted in private property inheritance and larger trade networks,
which perpetuated and compounded economic advantages. So it's like when
you're in college and you have to do a group
project and you have some people that are either like

(42:39):
not available or like bad or and then you have
the people that are busy bodies and want to do everything.
And then you have the people that you know, have
the special tutors, so they know how to do everything
because they have help. And then you people get a
better grade and then things, people get jobs, people don't
get's like college. It's like college. It's a group. Or

(43:04):
do you leave sad and in debt and you may
or may not get a job, and you probably are
not getting a job in the thing you studied. Or
it's like college, and that the people who didn't go
wound up without tens of thousands of dollars in debt,
and so uh wind up a lot wealthier again, so

(43:26):
they benefit from the fruits of the labor of others.
And then the higher I see, Okay, it's so it's college.
It's like college. Yeah. Now, if we find this new
school of thought credible, then hierarchy and authoritarianism itself seemed
not like the natural order of things, but more like
a virus, one that was forcibly beaten down and almost

(43:46):
wiped out for thousands of years, but persisted in some
isolated corners until the development of agriculture and the evolution
into larger, more organized societies provided it with a chance
to escape and replicate on a mass scale. Once more so,
we always has had these sort of tendencies towards hierarchy
and authoritarianism programmed into our brains, and for a long
time we fought it in these tiny societies. But once

(44:08):
we started building these larger societies, it's sort of escapes
and kind of runs wild. It's almost like how measles
was nearly wiped out by vaccines until enough dumb people
stopped vaccinating their kids that it was able to spread
and get a toe hold again. Thank you, Jessica Bille,
Thank you Jessica Bile. Some people might argue that hierarchy

(44:29):
and authoritarianism and Jessica Bile make for stronger and more
competitive societies, and that's why these forms of organizations spread
across the globe. Yeah, that's certainly an arguable point. Deborah
Rodgers and other researchers, however, have found in their research
some data that would seem to argue against that point.
Quote in a demographic simulation that ohm Car desh Pondi,

(44:51):
Marcus Feldman, and I conducted at Stanford University, California, we
found that rather than imparting advantages to the group, unequal
access to resources is inherently to stab realizing and greatly
raises the chance of group extinction and stable environments. This
was true whether we modeled inequality as a multi tiered
class society or what economists call a Peretto wealth distribution,
in which as with the one percent, the rich get,

(45:12):
the lions share. Counterintuitively, the fact that inequality was so
destabilized and caused these societies to spread by creating an
incentive to migrate in search of further resources. The rules
in our simulation did not allow from migration to already
occupied locations, but it was clear that this would have
happened in the real world, leading a conquest of the
more stable egalitarian societies, exactly what we see as we

(45:33):
look back in history. In other words, inequality did not
spread from group to group because it is an inherently
better system for survival, but because it creates demographic instability,
which drives migration and conflict and leads to the cultural
or physical extinction of egalitarian societies. And it's interesting if
you look into like who a lot of the Europeans
who sailed to the New World, as they called it,

(45:56):
were there were a lot of second and third and
fourth sons of wealthier emilies who like weren't going to
inherit the family wealth and so had to go make
their fortune elsewhere. So like this seems like a really
strongly arguable point to me. And it also it also
feels more like this comparison that I keep making to
a virus, because like the way virus is spread, they're

(46:18):
not viruses aren't sustainable, they're not stable. They need to
continually like destroy populations of of living things and need
to spread to new populations in order to stay alive.
So like I think authoritarianism, comparing it to a virus,
I think there's a lot of Uh. I think it's
a useful way to look at it. Um. Yeah, yeah,

(46:41):
so it's it's kind of weird that, Yeah, you don't
really hear like social movements or trends ever referred to
as a virus. I mean, I've never heard that comparison before.
We talk about virility a lot when we talk about ideas,
But yeah, I think looking at authoritaryianism virally um can

(47:03):
spread much like a meme of a cat. Yeah, it does.
It spreads just like a cat mame. Yeah, fascist dictatorships
spread like a cat mat a dictatorship. Right. Yeah. So
uh obviously, like you know, we could try to like
argue at which points in history authoritarianism hit its peak.

(47:23):
It's probably more apt to say that it ebbed and
flowed in different places across distance and time, and every
now and then individual societies would evolve like ancient Athens
or the Iroquois, who established, you know, cultures that were
more egalitarian than those around them, but in a global sense,
strict hierarchy and authoritarian means of rule where the order
of the day for the majority of people across the
last several thousand years. And again I'm I'm gonna oversimplify

(47:47):
here because I'm not a historian and like this is
not a historic like like like an academic paper, but
I think it's fair to say broadly that the last
eight hundred years or so have seen a major push
back towards egalitarianism and against authoritarian means of control across
the globe. And if you're going to pick an arbitrary
start point for this, you might choose the signing of
the Magna Carta in June of twelve fifteen, and there

(48:09):
would be a variety of other dates that would be important,
like seventeen seventy six, uh, like eighteen sixty five, like
nineteen really patriotic for a second there. And my my
dates picked are very Western centric because I don't know
as much about like Chinese history, Japanese history. But you know,

(48:30):
I think nineteen seventeen the Russian Revolution would be another
point in that. Uh. And of course nineteen forty five
would be another big moment in the sort of eight
hundred year or so push back against authoritarianism. Um. And
if we're going to keep rolling with my viral authoritarianism analogy,
we might look at the global defeat of the ACCESS

(48:50):
in World War two is equivalent to a max backs
in mass vaccination campaign. Uh. And if we want to
extend the analogy even further, we could compare people like
Cia or actor Alan Dulas and has been shant for
authoritarian regime changes in Latin America to the anti vaxers
like Jessica Bial people who saw socialism. Yeah. So Jessica
Bill and Allan Dulas, who're the same fucking guy. Yeah damn.

(49:14):
I would read that piece on medium dot com. Thank you,
thank you. Medium dot com is where it would put
this if I weren't such a narcissist with a podcast.
Um but he's dictatorship. You must put your call. You
guys got to shame my meat. I'm calling hr Anderson. Yeah,

(49:42):
so you've got like this. Uh so. Yeah. The last
several decades of creeping authoritarianism in our own society have
been driven in large part by the fact that decades
of American leaders have supported dictators and strongman across places
like Latin America. The crisis of the Border, which provided
such fuel to the American right, has been driven largely
by refugees fleeing from places like Guatemala and El Salvador. Well,

(50:04):
the US supported and trained death squads and assassinated democratically
elected leaders. Um you could also make a point about
our failure to intervene in Syria, all the refugees who
fled from Bashar al Assad's fascistic campaign of extermination, and
how that fueled the far right in Europe and in
the United States. Um So, the plight of those refugees,

(50:25):
in their decision to flee the safety of the US,
has invigorated a right wing movement that has grown stronger
and more dangerous over the decades, starting with KKK border
patrols in the nineteen seventies and ending with concentration camps
in Texas and Donald Trump in the White House. Um, now,
I'm not the only person thinking along lines similar to
this when I was doing my final research for the

(50:45):
War on Everyone. The audio book that I swear is
coming out soon. I just finished reading it. It's being edited. Yeah,
it's being edited right now by the audio people. So, Daniel, Yeah,
it is coming out. I came across this, Hey, Daniel,
this It actually might be up at the time people
listen to this episode. I don't know. Um. I came
across a study of how fascists were using the internet

(51:07):
back in the late nineties and early two thousands to
keep their movement alive. The starting study was written up
by a researcher named Less Black, and in it he
cites a book called A Thousand Plateaus Capitalism and Schizophrenia
from six Now, the book was written by a pair
of philosophers to Lose and Guitari and I don't pretend
to understand the overall thrust of the text because I
am so bad at reading political theory. But Black cites

(51:28):
a piece of that book that seems to be making
a similar argument to the one I've been making, albeit
with a slightly different analogy. Quote delusing Guitari argue that
part of the nature of fascism is a proliferation of
molecular focuses in interaction which skipped from point to point
before beginning to resonate together. This comment might well have
been made about the lateral connectedness found in cyberspace, rather

(51:51):
than seeing fascism and shrined in a totalitarian bureaucracy. They
argue that fascism was and is manifest in the micro
organization of everyday life. The power of fascist culture here
is in its molecular and supple segmentarity, with flows capable
of suffusing every cell. What makes fascism dangerous is its
molecular or micro political power, for it is a mass

(52:14):
movement of cancerous body rather than a totalitarian organism. Yeah,
m all right, So I don't even really want to
comment on that. I think it's it's deep. Yeah, yeah, anyway,
that's what I got so far. Robert presented your worldviews

(52:36):
very suctinct. This was like Robert's ideology on life more
or less Yeah, it's a fascism isn't something that's imposed
from the top down. It's something that bubbles up from
within groups of human beings. And if you're going to
stop it, it requires constant vigilance, like the vigilance of say,
a group of kung who makes sure to keep an

(52:56):
eye out for a young man who gets too big
of an idea of his own importance because it brought
down a fucking gazelle. And like a virus can move
and change and and and go away, but you can
come back, I mean, and you can you can basically
erase the metaphor at that point of like, how like
fascism is spreading like a virus now, because it's spreading
like a virus in the Internet sense, to like it

(53:18):
is truly one and the same. I think I will. Okay,
So Robert, how do we how do we fix it? Yeah?
And uh, not hearing any answers. Well you know I didn't,
you know, I only had so much time to comprehensive Well,
you know, it does. That is a little bit of it, Sophie.

(53:39):
Like one lesson we can take out of human prehistory
in terms of how we fight fascism is that It's
not something we fight by voting for the right person.
It's something we fight on a day to day basis
in our daily lives. It's something we fight not just
by keeping an eye out on other people, but by
fighting the fascists within our own cell, by fighting like

(54:01):
those authoritarian impulses and urges that we all have because
it's coated into our brain. Um, it's it's a constant
battle that starts at the bottom. And if it doesn't persist,
and if there isn't discipline at every level of society
to watch against it, it will come back terrifying. Okay,

(54:21):
so the call has been coming from inside the house
the whole time. Call the fascism has been coming from
inside your brain this whole time. Yeah, Okay, good gat
good by, bolt Cutters. It's one tool that you can
use against fascism, only brain out. I think that's really
a good answer. Yeah, if we could just yank out

(54:43):
the judge bitch cortex from our brain, Cutters, that's you're
pretty close to some things. Kurt Vonnegutt was theorizing about
near the end of his life. There he was like,
if we were all just dumber, this would work so
much better. Yeah, it's like it's just everyone, just us
to just get a light bother me. Yeah, being smart
is not worth it. I don't happen to hold to

(55:04):
that idea, but I'm willing to admit that Kurt Vonnegutt
was way smarter than I will ever be, and he
might have been right. So it's I mean, base level.
I haven't revisited that phase of Kurt Kurt Vonnegut in
a while, but sounds fun. But Robert, you wouldn't agree
with that because you are not a judge bitch. Well,
I try not to be, but I will admit that

(55:26):
I think when Kurt Vonnegutt was a judge bitch, he
was right to be a judge bitch. Fair. I mean, yeah,
I choose your moments. I'm constantly yeah, I mean constant
suppression of the judge bitch within is necessary. I keep
her loressed up. Yeah, I keep her locked up until necessary. Yeah,
But there are moments where it's like, oh, there she is. There,

(55:47):
she's coming out wearing that outfit sometimes right, and doing
that superhero pose, ready to save the fucking day. Well yeah,
and it's it's like she has bolk cutters, she's got
bold cutters. Yeah, they can be used for good or evil.
Much like authoritarianism. It's not always the wrong thing like
we have it. Like, it's useful in certain situations. Um.

(56:08):
You know, if you've got well, if you've got like
a wildfire, you need one person being like okay, you
go here, you go here, you go here, Like this
is what we're going to try to do, like our podcast,
like our podcast, or like a military unit, where to
some extent there's certain kinds of hierarchy that you want
in a military unit like our podcast, like our podcast,
or like uh uh, that's that's about it. Um. I

(56:32):
don't think it's useful nearly as often as we use it,
but it's not useless, but it has to be carefully controlled.
Yeah okay, yeah, so like maybe if we're going to
keep having presidents, we execute every president after they finish
their term of office, and that way only people who
are truly selfless take the job. Now we're out in

(56:57):
the crazy crazy town. Yeah, it was like, well, now
we're just shull. It's not the Hunger Games if you're
just killing the person at the top. True true, true,
still not still not. Um, I've only seen the first
one does it end well, that's right. Are the Hunger Games?

(57:17):
A good idea for society is that the conclusion should
get a shot, should give a shot, should be hunger
someome games, but instead of children, it's like members of
the cabinet sick love it great? Oh now that would
be amazing and at the end of like a presidential
because like then I'd be really excited about some of
the people who have been in Trump's cabinet because I

(57:38):
would love to see Steven Miller and Steve Bannon fighting
with like homemade spears over a pit of lava. Like
it would be a blast. That would be the fucking greatest.
Jared Pushner would hide the whole time, and then somehow
Win would hide the whole time five ft beneath the
ground and which is zombie out of just a Banka
Trump and the Betsy Divos just throttle each other with

(58:00):
like fucking scarves or something. Yeah. That that that's fun.
That's fun to think about. Reference It's almost like he's
already got the graphic novel storyboarded. Yeah. I don't have
more detailed solutions than that, but this is where my
thinking's gone in the last eighteen months or so. Of

(58:22):
doing this podcast. So now you all have to deal
with it too. Sorry, I know I think it's good.
I think, well not the takeaways are dire. But yeah,
I've never heard it put succinctly like that. Well, I
don't know if i'd call it succinctly. I've been talking
for fifty nine minutes or so. But I did my best.

(58:46):
It was only one part. Yeah, it was only one part.
Only one part. Well, I would not agree to do
two parts, Jamie. Wow. Yeah, no, I was forced into
doing this one part. Well, I'm glad that you were
unlike too, because this is just a whole new experience
of Sophie've never had were we can just make eye

(59:06):
rolls to each other directly and then say what we're thinking.
I know, can you measure if Robert was here, Oh,
I'd be I'd be I rolled into a coma by
this unconscious. You would just be tied up. Yeah. We
would have gone out onto the the Poisonous spell cat

(59:27):
for sure. Yeah, the poison room. I would have cracked
it open with my podcasting machete, can't Yeah, you do
have a machete. That's like that has says podcasting on
the Blade. I am wearing my throwing Bagels behind the
massa T shirt right now, so I need to get
one of those. I have one for you. Oh yeah,

(59:47):
I'm wearing my what if Fraser were a part of
the Fantastic four T shirt today? I love what if
Frasier were a part of the Fantastic Four. Well, that's
the very question this T shirt explores. Everyone think about that,
and also, how do we fight against the monster coated
into our brains? Hitler is almost inevitable? Yeah, both of

(01:00:10):
those things, Yeah, in that order. Please have have the
answers on my desk by Monday. If there's a better
symbol for creeping authoritarianism in the human spirit than the
television show Frasier, I haven't found it. Yeah, all right, Jamie,
you want to plug your plug doubles. Sure you can

(01:00:32):
listen to the Bechdel Cast every Thursday Feminist Movie podcast,
or follow me on Twitter at Jamie Loft His Help,
or come see my show at Edinburgh Fringe Fest in
Scotland all August. Yeah, and uh, Sophie, you want to
plug my plug doubles because you're on the thing too

(01:00:52):
and we have the same podcast. Well, um, I didn't
agree to that in my contract, but follow Robert on Twitter,
I write, Okay, thank you didn't discussing. I mean, I
just think we could have titled it better. Um at
bastards Pod on Twitter and Instagram behind the Bastard's dot

(01:01:13):
com for the sources for this pod t public. We
have t shirts, we have totes, we have phone cases,
we have um not bolt cutters but soon to be
bolt cutters. We have we have, we have, we have
a couple. We have a couple of new new designs
up there, so check it out. Good stuff and they

(01:01:36):
have sales like all the time. Yeah, and you can
find Sophie on Twitter at at Bastard's pod because she
runs the Twitter So if you want to tell her
to be less or more mean to me, you can
let her know the direct channel. But in reality, don't
do that. Don't do that. Uh and but do yeah,

(01:01:58):
maybe get some bolt cutters, um. Certainly keep an eye
out for creeping authoritarianism in your own daily life and
try to shame some meat on your way home. If
you'd like to humble Robert, please find me on Instagram
at so underscore right Underscore up Underscore Sunshine and let
me know your opinions on Robert, so I can tell
it to him to its face and make sure that's

(01:02:20):
great that he doesn't know the size of his I
don't want to say meat because I don't instagram and
get or shame shame. Let's go shame, Let's go shame.
I don't want to say I don't like I just
don't enjoy the phrase size of meat in general. No,
I think that a meat shaming T shirt is called
for at this point. Yeah, yeah, there was serious Robert

(01:02:44):
influences here. The meat shaming story really is? That is
gonna so Texas. It's fucking amazing. Yeah. Yeah, one of
those things I read a while back and has stuck
with me ever since. They should turn it into a
children's book. They should the shame of the meat with uh,
what's that? What's that? Curious chimpanzee? He seems like the

(01:03:05):
right character for that. Yeah, are you referring to George? Yeah, George,
if you'd like to keep my meat big, please message
me and tell me how cute my dog is there.
All right, Well, this has been a rambling enough exit
the episodes done, go yeah, buy it? I love you.