Afleveringen
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Did life develop on Earth, or did it come from the stars? Is outer space actually teeming with life? One of our hosts spent the week down the Chandra Wickramasinge internet rabbithole and has some Opinions.
The idea of panspermia is that life is everywhere across the universe. More specifically, if abiogenesis did happen, it probably happened elsewhere, and there is life on Earth simply because life is widespread. Fermi’s Paradox makes this feel unlikely - if there’s so much life out there, why haven’t we seen it? Well, the leading exponents of panspermia argue that in fact we have, in fact the world is being hosed down by protein chains all the time, driven across the void by the solar winds. We don’t notice them because they’re the same as the protein chains that are on Earth already. Obviously.
More intense exponents - Sir Frank Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinge - go further and argue that interstellar medium is not just filled with protein chains but is in fact riddled with bacteria and viruses. They’re everywhere, and the massive dust clouds we see in those beautiful false colour space telescope images are their desiccated corpses. Alarmingly, this seems to be backed up by spectrographic analysis (although we’re ill-placed to verify this), and high altitude weather balloons do get covered in bacteria. Now that SpaceX are getting Starship up and running and will be hitting Mars soon we might get some even stronger evidence about this soon - that will be the real test.
Why are scientists so against this? It’s nothing to do with the data, apparently - this is bias, an medieval Earth-centric prejudice. We used to believe that Earth was the centre of the universe, but then the Copernican Principle emerged and we now understand that from a cosmic point of view Earth is not particularly special. Nowhere is. Why can’t we apply this idea to life itself?
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What’s gone wrong with the Church of England? We read a Spectator article by Marcus Walker about the process of becoming a bishop, which has become highly bureaucratic and secular - you are put on a management fast track and then hilariously have to apply for a Bishop job when it comes up.
And this is what the Church of England has become - the way it is run is basically nothing to do with Christianity. An imperialistic and expanding bureaucracy infected with secular notions of management seems to sit badly with… faith. There is a major philosophical conflict between this bureaucracy and the people who actually go to church, and that’s before you get into the Church’s politics.
There’s an additional tension in the Church of England between those who want to focus on the individual’s direct relationship with God and build it into their everyday life, and those who want to set aside an hour of their week in a beautiful space to refresh their souls in a curated manner and send them back out into the world to do their best.
Perhaps this latter conflict is built into what religion is - is religion a revolutionary force, or a conservative one? Is it unstable or stable, informal or formal? Should our spiritual energy be untamed, or channeled? Within the Church of England, this conflict is instantiated by its two most vigorous branches - Holy Trinity Brompton-led evangelicalism and beautiful, formal Anglo-Catholicism. Basically, should we focus on the Holy Spirit or on God the Father? Well, the Trinity provides an answer: God the Son, Jesus Christ, the force that resolves this conflict and transcends the two opposites. He’s both Dionysus and Apollo, female and male, subversion and maintenance, life and death. This is Christianity’s secret sauce.
So in fact we need both wings of the church - having just one will lead to its own species of error. What we don’t need is the bureaucracy, and in the conflict between Christ and the scribes/pharisees/Romans we can even see Him as an anti-bureaucratic force.
We can take this lesson out into the secular world. Politics and corporate life have become bureaucratised, and while this does in its own way solve the messy conflict between revolution and conservatism, it does so in a way that destroys the benefits of both.
We also wrestle with the nature of the soul, how blacksmithing works, and awkward pauses.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Why are so many rocks in the Arabian desert covered in ancient graffiti? And why is so much of this graffiti lists of ancestors? We coincidentally both read the same paper by Michael C.A. MacDonald, a complete legend, and it sparked an interesting chain of thought.
An oral society is not less sophisticated than a literate one. You lose a lot of value when you switch to literacy. In particular, you lose flexibility - in oral societies, poems for example change constantly with each retelling. New bits are added, the fat is cut, the themes are updated for the audience being addressed. The Iliad shows the power of what this process can achieve.
As a desert nomad, hospitality and cooperation between strangers is crucial. In a series of one shot prisoners’ dilemmas in a hostile and remote environment, how do you make this happen? You need to link your identity to a wider body, a clan. When you establish this link, your clan becomes accountable for your actions, and you for theirs. Furthermore, individuals far from home can establish how their two clans relate to each other by looking back up the chain and using this to establish a basis for cooperation.
Then you add the flexibility of an oral society, which enables cooperative fabrication - aha, that Diogenes in my family tree must be the same Diogenes that’s in yours. A link is established, the record updated. We can see genealogies shifting over time as the relationships between clans shifted, the record updated as a result of thousands of interactions and negotiations.
We propose that this is a proto distributed ledger, an ancestor of today’s blockchains. There is not a single source of truth, but instead thousands of nodes all holding part of the overall database. The power is in the overall consensus, the agreement between all the players in the system. In fact if you can get enough nodes to agree to change the record, they will outvote everyone else and the change will become the truth.
While a centralised database has enormous benefits to productivity, we lose flexibility, the ability to change and forget and collaboratively create an updated reality. This ability to be inconsistent, to develop and change, is part of our human advantage, and a permanent central record of everything we’ve done means we’ve lost something.
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We look at a book called The Roman Revolution by Ronald Syme, which tells the story of Rome’s transition from Republic to Empire - Octavian (“a cold and mature terrorist”) vs Mark Anthony (of Anthony and Cleopatra). It was written in 1939, a charged year for any discussion about dictatorship, and is now required reading for university classics courses. It also turns out to have high relevance to British politics.
Syme’s thesis is that every government is formed of individuals. The real decisions do not take place through official forums, they are made privately and informally through the interactions of these individuals. That is how power is actually exercised, how power is actually formulated, and anything else is a story told on top of this to give it respectability and prestige.
Doesn’t this feel contemporary? COVID-era decisions were not made by debate in cabinet, but rather by four guys in a WhatsApp group under a lot of personal pressure. Companies not lead by the org chart but actually run by small groups of people who get on.
Octavian in fact represented the interests of the populari, the populists - the soldiers, the dispossessed aristocrats, the urban plebians, the wealthy but alienated merchants. Against them were those who held property and existing political power and were therefore against fundamental change - the establishment, if you will, or the optimati as they called themselves.
Again, contemporary! Britain today is ruled by the optimati - those with a vested interest in the current bureaucracy and its proliferation, and those who own property and want it to retain its value, the two groups coordinating to maintain the status quo. In the background you have the populari, and on the rare occasions where this group in any country takes power it’s called a revolution.
Do we need a revolution?
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We’ve both had reasonably legit shoulder injuries recently. How do we feel about it? What have we learnt?
Well firstly it’s inconvenient. It turns out you use your shoulder for a lot of things. No more jiu-jitsu for a bit.
Secondly, it hurts. While it’s positive to get the occasional recalibration of our pain scales, it is remarkable how debilitating pain can be. It is much better being uninjured than being injured, in a way you don’t appreciate day-to-day.
But perhaps most profoundly, it’s confronted us with our mortality. We go through life with our minds filled with the mundane and abstract, careers and salaries and emails and politics. But sometimes something real, an injury or death, intrudes on it and for a time puts everything in perspective. Perhaps it’s no bad thing to get the occasional reminder of the fact we’re going to die, and to face up to it, if we’re going to live a good life. A memento mori.
So what have we changed? Fitness, for one. If we didn’t realise that our shoulders were important until we lost their use, what about everything else? Given that our bodies are going to fall apart eventually, are there steps we can take to keep our bodies working well for longer? And do these steps have positive moral externalities? Can you even have a powerful intellect without a powerful body? So one of our co-hosts has resolved to stare death in the face and get jacked (the other already is, can you guess which?).
Reading list: Baldwin in Brahman, The Wisdom of Mike Mentzer, Sun and Steel, The Iliad
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Not content with one hour of arguing that Britain should double down on a powerful navy at the expense of all other military spending, we’re back for more - plus lamentations about not having joined the navy ourselves, examinations of our youthful decision making, tales of naval derring do from our family mythologies, and the slightly heretical suggestion that we’d perhaps be better off as the 51st state of the USA.
So what’s so great about a navy?
It’s a more strategic weapon. Large scale warfare boils down to trade, getting the materials you need to keep fighting and being able to support your allies. Disrupt this and you win, much more comprehensively and quickly than via other means, and this is what warships do well.
It’s a lot more humane. Air power ultimately comes down to bombing civilians, while naval power tends more towards starving your opponents of the materials they need to keep fighting. Less collateral damage, but also a shorter war - and a shorter war is a more humane war. And even more humane is a war that never happens. If you can present a credible threat that you can take down an enemy’s trade network they are much less likely to start a conflict in the first place.
It would allow us to become the insurgents. Yes the Somalis and Yemenis have been projecting force hundreds of miles into the ocean with their tiny boats and embarrassing much larger powers, but that’s because the West has chosen to do nothing about them. We absolutely could smash them if we had the political will. Remember, the rules are a bit different on the ocean - you can’t hide. Well, you can, but you need nuclear attack submarines to do so - with these as the new capital ships, it would actually be the Brits who would be taking advantage of asymmetric warfare.
Finally, a major national project like this would provide Britain with a shot in the arm, a narrative to bring us together and revive our animal spirits. Everyone would get excited, believe in it, make sacrifices for it, and want to get involved - perhaps even turning down the high salary graduate job for a career on the High Seas.
As an aside, the record will show that we recorded this before the 2024 US election and called it perfectly... unlike some other podcasters we could mention.
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Get your four piece guitar band in a room, deliver a killer performance, capture it with expensive microphones and set the levels on your mixing desks and what comes out of the speakers will sound… terrible. Turns out that we need bearded men called either Butch or Andrew spending days in a room full of mysterious and expensive boxes to get things to sound like what you hear on the radio.
What are these men doing, and why? Perhaps their job is bridging the gap between reality and perception. When you’re in a room watching someone perform and having a great time, your brain is doing a lot of work to make it sound as great to you as it does. On the radio, the brain doesn’t have as much to go on - and so the engineer has to fill this gap.
This leads us down a path discussing the predictive processing performed by the brain. The brain is constantly running a model of the world around us, and most of the time our senses are merely providing confirmation that this model is correct - it’s only when exposed to something unexpected that we actually wake up and focus. The brain is less stressed when its model is correct, so if music is conforming to our internal models we feel better. Melody, harmony and rhythm all boil down to patterns, and some patterns are more in line with the patterns that our brain deals with a lot and so feel more satisfying. It’s the musician’s job, or the audio engineer’s job, to bring out those patterns, and express them as well as they can possibly be expressed. Or something like that.
We spend quite a lot of time talking about Steven Wilson, apologies in advance. Shout out also to our co-host’s band, Trees on Venus. The EP rinsed at length on the episode is here (plug).
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One of our co-hosts has started growing lion’s mane mushrooms at home. Is this the early phases of a midlife crisis? After all it’s all the fun of a veggie patch, for those who live in London and don’t have gardens. You get to deal with reality, with nature herself, which is a refreshing change for those of us with email jobs. But it’s also a lot more than a veggie patch - you get to buy all sorts of interesting things on Amazon, read volumes of dissident literature, and then feel like Walter White in your own kitchen. (This is still sounding like a midlife crisis, isn’t it)
The British are very hesitant around mushrooms - we’re an example of a mycophobic culture. We’ll eat button mushrooms if they’re presented neatly, but if it’s yellow and growing out of a tree we are highly suspicious. But, as Eastern Europeans and Southern Africans alike can tell us, this means we miss out on the good stuff - oyster mushrooms, lion’s mane, shitake. Tasty, and extremely good for you and your brain. And you can just grow that home!
This British hesitancy is likely because mushrooms at some point were seen as divine. Look at their place in our culture - fairy rings, gnomes living in toadstools. All highly supernatural, and that’s before you even start thinking about psychedelics.
Anyway, our co-host talks us through the process of growing mushrooms, from spore to fruit, from petri dish to plate. We discuss sterility, senescence, emergence, the general strangeness of fungi, and the value of artisanal knowledge in an increasingly connected, specialised and fragile economy.
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Why does everyone love the beach? We can think of no better explanation than us having evolved there. This theory is clearly ridiculous, but very hard to argue against - to our knowledge the scientific establishment has offered no strong rebuttal.
After all, it makes quite a lot of sense if you think about it. The beach is a great environment if you’re looking to escape the intense ape competition in the forest - lots of protein, and shellfish don’t even run away.
Our bodies seem to be well adapted to littoral life, too. Subcutaneous fat to keep us warm, large scooplike hands and slightly webbed fingers and toes for better swimming, large sinuses that make the head more buoyant, the mammalian diving reflex, no hair, the ability to hold our breath.
It also provides a narrative for some of our more difficult-to-explain developments. Breath control unlocked speaking. The protein, Omega-3 and iodine from seafood fed our larger brains. The support from the water while wading allowed us to unlock bipedalism.
We try some pushback. 1) Any theory that claims to explain everything is bound to be flawed. 2) This one in particular rests on a grossly simplistic, narrative-based understanding of evolutionary theory. We argue these points for most of the episode. Is the main argument against the Aquatic Ape hypothesis that it’s too good a hypothesis?
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This is not an episode about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. We’re talking about games. We have racked up literally thousands of hours playing the Total War series, and countless Sundays spent staring suspiciously at each other over a gaming board. Why do we do this? Why do we enjoy it?
Games sometimes have a reputation of being antisocial, but that’s not true at all. In fact you have to develop pretty robust social skills to be locked in battle with someone (friend or stranger), humiliate them or be humiliated by them, and at the end not hate them or be hated by them. The goal, after all, is not to win - it’s to be invited back, to be able to play further games. The real game is infinite, not finite, so there is a subtle blend of competition and cooperation.
Of course playing Total War: Thrones of Britannia or Hearts of Iron IV on ones own is a bit less social, so what are you getting out of that? Well what is a game? A tightly controlled, limited simulation. Tightly bounded by rules, space and time, simulating an element of the world that we experience and have to contend with. It sections off a bit of reality, decides what’s important, sets a framework, and then the aim is to try and win. This gives you a safe space in which to hone skills that are useful - rational analysis, situational awareness, risk management, resource allocation, tactics. A dojo, if you will. “Drillers are killers”. But this is not an episode about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
We must not forget the aesthetic aspect, though. If you play a game as if it’s a spreadsheet, it’s not much fun - we get quite enough of that in our day jobs. There’s got to be some “fluff” (narrative, vibe, aesthetic) to balance to “crunch” (rules, mechanics), else there’s no reason to play. But anyway, crunch without fluff isn’t how the world works. The reason humans respond so strongly to aesthetics is because aesthetics are an abstraction of the complex underlying mechanisms of the world - if something is beautiful, it’s because it has some adaptive value, however oblique. In the very best games, and in life itself, the fluff and the crunch are the same thing.
Board games mentioned:
Twilight Struggle (reliving the Cold War one unfair defeat at a time)Spartacus (fighting and trading in ancient Rome… but toxic)Dominant Species (an evolutionary race for up to five players)A Victory Denied (ten hours if you’re quick, pushing chits around a map near Minsk as your choice of the Soviets or the Nazis either defending or attacking Moscow)Navegador (you’re rival Portuguese explorers, exploring the world and setting up trading posts)Scythe (vibe heavy conquest of nineteenth century Eastern Europe, plus mechs)Settlers of Catan (gateway drug)Bananagrams (Scrabble, but more stressful)Roger Penrose’s party game that explains how the physical laws of the universe came to beWarhammer (no introduction necessary) -
Do you have the feeling that Christmas is just a LARP? Do you worry the perfect Christmas is always happening elsewhere? Do you find the pressure to have a good time overwhelming? Would you rather just be on your own?
Well you’re doing Christmas wrong.
What we need to do is establish and maintain a ritual space that sits outside the mundane, and to achieve this we propose the following steps:
Go to church, either the night before or in the morning - it is no surprise that Christmas without Christ feels a bit weird and emptyFollow this with some healthy outdoor activity, working with your hands, getting muddy and uncomfortable - a feast if you’re not hungry is weird, and it’s great for male bonding and general communing with the seasonsIf possible, have a critical mass of people present to keep the revelry going throughout the day - people peaking and crashing at different times, and on different points of the alcohol cycle, general chaos. Perhaps it’s even worth reaching out to your extended family…Don’t overthink the lunch - a roast lunch is actually pretty simple to pull off, so focus on the basics and enjoy yourself, and even if you screw it up everyone’s drunk so won’t notice or, at worst, will find it funny. But also don’t suffer alone - people want to help with the cooking, and it’s actually another great social bonding tacticAccept tradition, don’t fight it. Christmas needs rituals. In fact, it needs:Leadership - someone has to stand up and say what everyone’s doing, what the rituals are, and then everyone else will slot in behind that, relax and have a great timeConfidence - don’t keep second guessing yourself or apologising. Do what you’re going to do, do it your own way, and do it with confidence.Interestingly we hardly mention presents at all.
Selected Wikipedia references: Beer can chicken. Chibuku. Lady Day. The Rites of Passage.
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Onto the third Discworld book, and we can see Terry Pratchett starting to hunt bigger game. This book is about magic and sex, as in biological sex, and really goes in on exploring a theme in a way that none of his later books do. It does this by looking at male magic vs female magic. Neither is seen as superior, but they are different.
What is female magic? “Magic out of the ground, not out of the sky.” Nursing and psychology. It’s therapeutic in nature, it puts the world back together, it keeps things on track and keeps things moving. It’s concerned with the mundane, with everyone’s journey through life. Healing, supporting, reconstituting, sympathetic - it’s not always clear that there’s any magic going on at all, but it is.
And male magic? More like maths and physics, the sort that creates nuclear weapons. Transgression. Crossing boundaries. Ideas. Power. Prestige. Legibly impressive and grand.
As Granny Weatherwax puts it: “books and stars and jommetry.”
The two come into conflict, and out of the conflict comes synthesis. The witches learn that brute force magic is useful sometimes. The wizards learn that it isn’t always the best option.
“The best book I have ever read for exploring the difference between the sexes” - Echoes Underground Podcast, December 2024
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So our co-host has cast aside his smartphone, and has bought a £25 Nokia ripoff. No maps, no Whatsapp, no social media, no internet. It’s terrible. It’s transgressive. It’s the future.
In this episode, he defends his life choices. This isn’t about the hazards of social media, he claims - this is about the addictiveness of the physical device itself. Being bored is actually great. Daydreaming is great, your mind wandering is great, and this is not something that can happen if you compulsively reach for your phone when there’s nothing much going on. The phone anesthetises you, mutes your thoughts, it’s nice, hours can pass and it’s fine but nothing has changed, nothing has moved forward, and you realise later that you’ve lost two hours of your life.
Imagine being a child and not daydreaming. Not being bored and creating your own fun. Not struggling to create something that reflects your subjective experience. Not having time to reflect on your experiences and integrate them into your personality. Not using language to describe experiences to your friends and what they meant to you.
Imagine being an adult.
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Controversial opinion of the day. Winston Churchill famously said that democracy is the worst way of running a state apart from everything else we’ve tried. One of our hosts rejects this, and says that actually we know of and have tried far better ways of steering the ship of state.
We talk of the original, some say ideal, democracy - Athens. Did Athens do better over the long term than its non-democratic neighbors? Probably, but the timescale is short. Did democracy lead to better decision making in the detail? No. Democrats killed Socrates. And then the Sicilian expedition, mentioned in Thucidides, shows the assembly of a radical democracy being persuaded to make a terrible geostrategic error by a demagogue whipping them into a frenzy.
What are we looking for when we’re choosing a system of government? Perhaps 1) high average quality of ruler, 2) stable transitions of power, 3) legitimacy, and 4) a method of selecting leaders that is consistent with the stories the nation tells itself.
And the latter is most important. While we can argue about how to steer and trim the ship of state, deciding where to sail it is most important, and here vibes and aesthetics start to matter more. Sacral kingship has undeniably better vibes and aesthetics than democracy. It reflects a desire for struggle, greatness, agency, the overcoming of obstacles, and this contrasts with the passivity, complaicency, stasis, security, and safety evoked by democracy.
ALL WE WANT, IS TO SERVE A GREAT KING, WITH MUCH HONOUR
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We make our way chaotically through The Light Fantastic, the sequel to the Colour of Magic. We don’t concern ourselves too much with the plot, for what it is - a frenetic chase across the Discworld culminating in a special effects extravaganza in Ankh Morpork - and instead talk about Terry Pratchett’s philosophy.
Gender relations: are wizards to masculinity what witches are to femininity? Hierarchy, rituals, titles, institutions, ruthlessness, all these are present at Unseen University, but with a twinkle in their eye. Extreme competence worn very lightly, which is a masculine ideal of sorts. In fact is the librarian (an orangutan) peak masculinity? An ordered mind, bordering on autism, chilled but very strong and capable of extreme violence, motivated mostly by a desire for bananas.
The terror of the mob: Terry Pratchett really hates mobs. He’s pro the individual, he cares about the idea of the individual being sovereign and thinking for themselves. He hates groupthink, and a recurring motif in his work is that nothing is more horrifying than blank eyes. He’s aware how lucky we are to live in a society that does not have mobs, and aware that we need to always remain vigilant against them.
This and much more. Not bad for a writer of baroque fantasy parody.
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We go through Terry Pratchett’s first Discworld book, the Colour of Magic, with a particular focus on the first six pages. A turtle swims through space to an unknown destination, a great city burns, and in the middle of it all the Discworld’s first tourist receives an inept guided tour from a failed wizard.
This is a science fiction book written in a fantasy world - the Discworld is entirely logical, it’s just logical about the wrong things. For Tolkein, magic was perfect, serious and could never be made fun of. For Pratchett, on the other hand, it’s inconvenient and annoying and doesn’t work properly and in this it’s like everything else in our lives. By making it mundane and poking fun at it, he’s making magic actually feel realistic - and as a result showing us how absurd our own world is.
On the subject of inept guided tours, we actually prepared for this episode in defiance of our normal approach. We had a plan, written out in a Google Doc, and it lasted almost exactly as long as Rincewind’s plans tend to. But it’s all for the best - we end up arguing that pulp fantasy is a truer descendent of Homer than the Great Literature of the last two centuries.
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Terry Pratchett has had an enormous intellectual impact on both of us, and we discuss how a man from the eighties who wrote frenetic novels about wizards and dragons could have that effect.
We find one answer in a speech he gave about folklore. Pratchett’s stories are deeply grounded in the myths and legends of Olde England, and this allows them to draw on the wisdom of millennia to bring clarity and good sense to our present day concerns.
And then there’s fantasy. What used to be the primary form of literature (think of the Odyssey and King Arthur) became a bit embarrassing due to the Victorian fashion for naturalism, but we argue that fantasy allows us to play with ideas and see the everyday through fresh eyes. Plus it's more fun than Dickens.
This is an introduction, the first in an occasional series where we’ll go through each Discworld novel in turn to see what it can teach us about human life. And if you’re sceptical, or have been put off by mediocre television adaptations, give Terry Pratchett a go - you will find him sophisticated, deep, and above all human.
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We have both invested thousands of hours into activities with no obvious utility. Music, sport, photography, travel, poetry, writing an entire unpublished novel… starting a podcast. Is this all just a hubristic waste of time, a shallow self-indulgence, or is there some value to these activities that goes beyond the fact that we enjoy them?
There is satisfaction in mastering a skill, there is value in expanding your comfort zone, and there’s a human drive towards capturing and communicating a subjective experience. But the ancients suggest that there is more going on here, that our hobbies could be essential to being able to live a good life.
Aristotle tells us that virtue lies between two vices - recklessness on one side, and cowardice on the other. To be virtuous is to conquer both of these, and to hold this middle course when dealing with difficult situations and the extremes of life. The challenge for modern man is that the classical virtues can only be forged through experience. You can’t learn them from a book, you have to live them, to actually face difficulties and extremes. But how can we do this when we work 9-6 writing emails in an artificially-lit office and then go home to watch Netflix? The answer, we argue, lies in our hobbies.
We also talk at some length about West African religiosity, and how if you want a feel for Classical religion it’s African animism you need to study or experience.
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A riposte to our earlier episode on how the UFO phenomenon is best understood as the faeries of old viewed through a modern lens. Aliens are not faeries, they are portents.
Carl Jung wrote a book about UFOs that functions well as an application of his broader theoretical work. When we observe a phenomenon, he argues, we apply the myths and narratives from our collective unconscious, so what narratives are we applying when we see a light in the sky?
UFOs are a mass rumour, and they’re an end of days rumour. We’ve seen these before - portents in the heavens, signs in the sky, one epoch ends and a new era is born. The star above Bethlehem, Halley’s Comet before the Battle of Hastings. Can it be a coincidence that UFOs in their moderm form begin to appear just after WWII, often around military sites at the beginning of the cold war? This is a new epoch, a new metaphysical era, one with nuclear weapons that could destroy the whole planet.
We also talk about tulpas.
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Baby naming ceremonies, except in the nude and with gifts of cuttlefish! Wandering shamans preaching the mystical power of numbers! A living oral tradition that goes back to the last Ice Age!
Behold, the Ancient Greeks! In the face of some scepticism, it is argued that they were stranger and more interesting by far than we now imagine.
Also featuring a whistle stop tour of the Mycenaean Age, the Bronze Age Collapse, Homer, the Persian invasions and the birth of classical antiquity and all that came with it - philosophy, history, drama, democracy, athletics, and everything else that makes us think the Greeks were more relatable than they actually were.
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