Welcome back to New Thinkery and with me is always my good friend, how are you doing? You got to see your name. My name is David Barr. You all right.
Hey Greg. Hey, how's it going? Bells. We got to keep a clean, tight ship today, tight on time.
And we got to keep it clean because David's daughter is in the room, right? He just turned around to yell at her. I mean, we're a girl. She's going to, she's going to end up with some kind of complex in a little while.
David, you with us? You with us? I'm with you. So we're talking about an important British writer, good writer.
He wrote Howard's End, passage to you, a room with the view. Much celebrated. Alex actually found a short story of his. Yeah, I never did it.
Shout out to Diana if she's listening. But it's a fantastic short story. I just taught it not that long ago. So I think it's a great story.
Tell us more about Forster, his life, his times. I don't really understand. He was born in 1879, died in 1970. So he's one of these long living briths.
The stories from 19 originally. So it's, it's important. Yeah, because it feels remarkably precious. I mean, it already has like, it has obviously a air truck, a common air truck, which is, when you think about 19.
Oh, yeah. I didn't think about that. That's pretty advanced. But then beyond that, so the technology rise of contemporary stuff.
Yeah. It seems like there's kind of almost like a podcasting, video podcasting element to this society where people give lectures over screens to one another. So there are only 10 minutes where as our podcast are, you know, an hour and 42 minutes and then Jake has added all the poop jokes and that. Yeah.
Yeah. They're watching podcasts. They're watching 10 minute lectures. Like you just getting emails.
And thanks for bringing up the date. It's over 100 years old. This is one of the most famous science fiction short stories, but full stop. Let's do some really text.
Do some really good stuff. What do you think? Why don't I do it and you, you pepper it because I'm not prepared to do it. So it was either three parts.
First part is called the airship. The second part is called the mining apparatus and third part is called the homeless. This takes place. It's some, again, I didn't really carefully some undetermined time in the future.
Is that right? Does it name the time? No, you can get a big sense by the generations of scholars. That's the best I could do.
Okay. But even then you don't really know how much time it's got. But it seems like not terribly distant, maybe like. Yeah, maybe 100, 200 years.
Yeah. Okay. So in this future, as I mentioned, there's three parts to the text which we'll go into. Just a moment.
Humans live underground and they live in sort of little apartments where they have every single need taken care of or able to be taken care of at sort of voice command. So even if you drop something, the floor will kind of catch it somehow and bring it back up to you. Everyone lives underground. No one goes above ground.
That's a little too hard because occasionally people are allowed to go above ground. But for the most part, humans have been their entire lives underground. They have no desire to go to the surface of the earth. There's a notion that everywhere is exactly the same.
So there's no real need to travel or desire to travel. Our story takes place in Indonesia, actually for the most part. That's where the main character resides. The first part of the text, the main character, what's her name, Bishta?
Vashti. Vashti. She gets a phone call or a FaceTime, I guess, from her son who wants him to visit her. So they knew about Apple products in 1909.
She doesn't want to go. They have a kind of argument. She finally relents and goes to visit him, which requires air travel and an airship, which requires some motion. Even basic exercise, apparently, is completely nonexistent in the future.
It's sort of seen to be laborious, even leave for a little pad to get on a plane. Then there's some question about there's actually something that has to happen on a plane, something that drops something and people don't know what to do. So she goes and visits her son, finds out her son has gone above ground and he liked it. And she's warning him that he'll be threatened with homelessness, which we don't learn about in this passage, but we learn later as a kind of expulsion from this underground living.
I haven't mentioned this yet, but all the underground life is managed by this machine, just referred to lovingly as the machine. We learned that this machine has failures occasionally and so has to be fixed. And so in part two, the mending apparatus we learn that there are these parts that go around and fix the various parts of the machine. So the machine fixes itself, basically.
And in the third part, not to give the main plot secret to way, but the machine actually stops, as the son says. And we see he's sort of forecasting that the machine's going to stop because he sees that it's breaking down and we ultimately do see a breakdown. That's kind of the plot. So there's a lot of questions like why her mother and child not together.
The child was taken away at birth, it seems, or very shortly thereafter. So it's a platonic kind of thing here. There seems to be no physical exercise at all. Nobody has any desire to see the world.
In fact, when people do see it, they're sort of unimpressed or underwhelmed. They just want to go back to having their little new ideas. Is that what she keeps saying? They want ideas.
What does that matter for lectures? Yeah, I was very curious to me because they seem there's this weird sort of hunger for ideas, but they seem completely secondary or tertiary or even, I don't know, I don't know what they mean by ideas. Yeah, it's just, it's kind of like, it's like a lecture program. Like you listen, she doesn't use it.
So she listens to her music. She composes, she listens to past lectures. She composes her own lectures. They get scheduled.
People come, you expect. Yeah. It's a lot like social media, right? Like you're trying to get- I was thinking that a lot, yeah.
And it's, and it's, and it feels a lot like it's like YouTube, but it's more intellectual, which I think is an interesting thing. You would imagine- It was the part I didn't quite get. Yeah. Yeah.
So you would imagine that there would be a kind of, it would just be like, idiocracy or something like that, where you're just watching. Right. Right. It's garbage.
And I think part of this is that the way the machine justifies itself is that this is the peak of civilization. And so they have to be engaged in intellectual activity. It is a sort of mindless intellectual activity. Yeah.
That's the trick, right? Is that- Yeah. Is there any lectures, but they have no direct experience of the things that they lecture about. You're right about the fun you're about.
I just assumed it would be stupid because I was, you know, I was working out the gym this morning. This is where you say obviously you can tell, but, you know, they have like the TV's on everywhere. And one of them is always said to ESPN. And you know, when I was a young man, I used to watch ESPN fairly regularly in the mornings just for a few minutes.
I was getting ready because it provides some ways of athletic events, which is kind of neat. And now I feel like all it is is, you know, we just read this. This was on my mind. Like just these talking heads talking about things about sports.
Like they've made this whole apparatus around athletics to make it something interesting to talk about. Or the view or, you know, any one of these various talking, so where people aren't really talking about anything. And that's kind of what I had in mind, which is why I was curious about. It does seem to be about more serious things, music or art or whatever.
Although those, yeah, I don't know how you managed to maintain people's attention. There were some holes here I thought forced to really psychologically diagnose some interesting things here about modernity. But there were a few places where I thought he was off. One of them, I actually think, adiocracy is more apt to be, like, I have a hard time seeing most people, if they're living this comfortable existence, pretending that they're, and self congratulate themselves, that they're doing serious lectures, more like they just be doing entertainment, it seems to me.
I don't know, but maybe we have a different take on that. No, I mean, I'm the internal logic. I think is that this is the peak of civilization. And so there's been a lot of sensory perception.
But I mean, it all, it's like all the R are these pure minds, we should describe what they're like because they can't breathe outside, but it seems to me they can't breathe outside because they're so clear to me actually. Yeah. It takes some strength. So like, they're just a Vashis described as five foot nothing and a swaddle lump of flesh and she goes around a little scooter with a little hexagonal room.
So they're kept in a state and she's no teeth and no hair. Oh, I miss that. No teeth. This is, I can find.
So she just like stuck and stuff out of like a meet tube? Yeah, they eat like food that comes in the rooms are heavily odorized. Like everything is, if they say that they're like feeling sick, like a machine pops out of the ceiling and takes care of them. Right.
It says without teeth or hair. Everything is brought to them. I was thinking about this how podcasts, advertisements are all about how they can bring things to your house, like food comes to your house, like razors comes to your house. Everything comes to your house.
You don't need to leave your house at all. And it seems to be a much more advanced version of what we are, but except they're physically in females. In fact, her son, Koono, is said is denied reproduction, which is another thing we'll talk about. I'm sure a state control reduction is denied reproduction because he's too muscular.
But then when we hear that he's right, that he's like getting out of his room and looking like walking in buildings and also he can barely go anywhere. Right? He's like, I looked at my arms. I'm really strong.
He's barely physically capable. He's considered too strong. So this is a group of people that have been bred to be utterly dependent, right? And then console, this gets back to the intellectual.
Consulted by being told they are the peak of stabilization to these really derivative, uninteresting lectures. This is kind of a real life story. When I was 19 years old, 18 or 19, very first time I visited New York City, I stayed with one of my closest friends. He was running a room out from a lady who lived in New York City, who was a recluse, who had never left her home.
It's funny you mention this because New York City has thought in some ways to be kind of a peak civilization, right? I mean, that's where the most things happen. The University of Australia, New Zealand, all the origins. But I mean, it was never encountered anybody like that.
This was a long time ago back before Amazon drones were delivered food. So imagine if you will, without this technology, where in New York City, this was possible. This woman had her groceries delivered, had just usual home goods delivered. They'd never left her home.
But the funny part was to speak the Civilizational component, at one point she remarked to me, well, you sound kind of smart for being from the South. And she sort of went farther that really only civilizations here in New York City and kind of concentric circles out more. That's a very New York. Point of view though.
I mean, I was kind of a kid, so I was kind of floored by it. But I was also like, in my head, I'm like, this is insane. This lady who never leaves her apartment thinks that she has more exposure to civilization than I do. Like, maybe if you live in New York and you actually get out and see things, but that kind of just blew my mind.
So that is a sort of real world example of this. Like, she's living in this place. She actually was pretty physically debilitated. She wasn't capable of doing much.
And here's you by the way, this is a peak society. Things are brought to you. She has the TV, everything's fine. It doesn't even get television, by the way, 1909.
Yeah. It's an equation of civilization with comfort, ease, and mild intellectual stimulation. A really funny book. That's made explicit, actually.
Yeah. So at the very end of the first part, as Vashti is finally giving in to Koono, her son, who says, please, please come visit, she's in the airship. The airship takes off in all around this like, vomitory thing that she used out the airship. It's all round, right?
And there's a little bit of grass and ferns, but out it goes. You don't really see most of what's going on, which I think is significant. But as she's flying over, she looks down and we just got to go. Admit day, she took a second glance at the earth.
The airship was crossing another range of mountains, but she could see little Owen to the clouds. Masses of black rock covered below her and merged indistinctly into gray. Their shapes were fantastic. One of them resembled a prostrate man.
No ideas here, remember, Vashti, and hid the caucuses behind a metal blind. In the evening, she looked again. They were crossing a golden sea in which may lay many island, small islands, and one peninsula. She repeated, no ideas here, and hid Greece behind a metal blind, which I think is a little bit more.
The small islands and peninsula, she sees Crete and all that, but she sees the palopinnesus and then the mainland, Greece. I think this is a forester's way of saying how divorced they are from the origins of civilization. It's a metal blind that separates them from the beauty, natural beauty, that inspired the Greeks. This is also another part that I found fantastic, to be honest.
The idea that humans would not look at the natural phenomena and be wowed in some way. There's one exception. There's one exception to sea. People do leave to look at the ocean.
The limitless expands and flow of the ocean. I don't know why, but it's sort of fascinating. This is on page 323. I don't know if this speaks to your question to sea.
When Vashti found her cabin invaded by a rosy finger of light, she was annoyed and tried to adjust the blind. The blind flew up altogether and saw through the small pink clouds swaying against a black background of blue. As the sun crept higher, its radiance entered direct, burning down the wall like a golden sea. Not the sea, but like the sea.
It rose and fell with the airship's motion just as waves rise and fall, but it advanced steadily as a tide advances. Unless she was careful, it would strike her face. The spasm of horror shook her, and she rang for the attendant. The attendant was also horrified, but she could do nothing.
It was not her place to mend the blind. She could only suggest that the lady should change her cabin, which she accordingly prepared to do. The sunlight even spooks her. I guess I just don't know.
We did that episode on the opening of the metaphysics, where humans by nature desire to see or to know or to have seen. There seems to be a complete, maybe this is what Forcers actually saying, that they've become so dehumanized that we no longer have this natural human desire to see. But like the blinds, they're little just closing up. They don't want to see anything.
I don't know. It just seems so easy. There's a bunch of the word. Go on, Drinks.
Go on. Go on. I was just saying there's only one mention of the word philosophy. Maybe we can get to that in just a moment.
But you mentioned of Sparta, and he actually mentioned one of the Spartan mountains. I do wonder if there isn't something. I mean, he could be describing this to show us that these aren't human actually after all. Not that this is possible, but that if you did this, this is the effect.
It would have it. And the effect would be extremely dehumanizing. Even the sunset or sunrise would cease to while people. I thought this is just an enhanced.
I thought that he was reading the Republic. And he spent time vloging classes. He was good friends with him. I was one thing when my daughter was interrupting.
I couldn't go into it. It just seems like an enhanced version of the cave. He looked around at modernity and he updated it for us. So in the same way that the allegory of the cave in the Republic isn't too shocking to us.
Just imagine it now with modern technology, but very modern technology. And you guys will have to remind me, should human beings exist outside the cave? I know somebody like a kuno in Plato's Republic tries to make it out. It's very hard because as soon as he gets outside of the audio of the machine, he starts to hear voices and then he sees a woman get her throat ripped out by the mending apparatus.
At the end, he says, oh, I've seen them. There are people outside. He had foresters own names says that when the machine breaks down, that's when humanity comes to an end. Now, so there's a little bit unclear whether there are actually people out there, I think.
It could be a hallucination. And there is forester saying, now he could mean by humanity comes to an end something ironic. He could mean like quote unquote humanity. But it is, I think ambiguous.
There are, I mean, but to go back to Greg's point about. What about the allegory of the cave in Plato, Alex? Do people exist outside of it? Only those who get out.
Like, right. So, it's like a return. Yeah. Kuno is the example of somebody, I think, who wants to see Greg's question, right?
He knows where he lives, which is in Wessex. He attends a lecture about Alfred and is repoly of the Danes, right? And then he goes out, he says, I want to see the hills of Wessex as Alfred said, as my ancestors. Now, there's no guarantee.
He's not like from Wessex. Like people are just dispersed wherever there's an open cell. And so obviously, you know, his connection to this place is only by means of organization. Yet there is this longing for connection to human ancestors who live there.
But it does seem like he is himself possessed of some kind of desire. And it seems like there are others, I think, who have done this, who are maybe a little stronger, but the machine breeds them out of existence as much as it can and produces these anxious, scared types like Vashti. Who don't want to leave, right? Who are extremely comfortable and even a client eventually to worship the machine as though God.
Yeah. David, did you want to press this cave and allegory more? Because I'm with you. This does seem like a sort of a modern version of the allegory of the cave.
But I wonder if it's intentionally modernizing and saying that the modern cave is fundamentally different from the ancient cave, if that makes sense. Like technology is a different kind of cave. Oh, no, no, sure. I agree.
And I think that some people, I remember reading it with some undergrads. They are horrified in Plato's version that our necks are chained to boulders. Right. People don't even have to be chained because they're just fat and lazy and hairless and toothless.
Exactly. Yeah. It's like he mixed Plato with the shruill bugs from our buddies. Yeah.
I read a passage I think might help focus this. That's 321 as she's traveling. It's in the first part. It says night in day.
Yeah. Night in day. Winden Storm, tied in earthquake, impeded man no longer. So we've conquered nature.
He had harnessed Leviathan. Capital. He's the old literature with its praise and nature and its fear and nature, where he falses the prattle of a child. So it's a sort of, it's an invocation of Hobbes, but then against Hobbes.
It's what if the fear of nature that leads to a sort of mass industrial society achieves such perfection that the fear finally went away. Like he no longer had anything to fear. But also nature would therefore be made obsolete. And so the praise and nature that you find in the Greeks is gone.
It turns out that now it turns out the fear does come back when the machines tops, right? People are just completely stunned. But it's like an almost like a third stage of human history past the eternity. Well, I mean, he says on page 335, but humanity and its desire for comfort has over reached itself.
So I do really see, it seems like what Forster is saying is that this is the natural outcome, not the natural outcome. This is perhaps the eventual outcome of the modern project that we will have so conquered nature, that we will live so comfortably that we will cease to recognize ourselves as human beings and maybe things would be far so that it does seem like Forster could be aligning himself like Swif did with the ancients against the moderns here. Can I introduce another kind of ancients moment when in the second part, when Kudo is telling his story about leaving, he says the following, he says, on page 326, you know that we have lost the sense of space. We say space is annihilated, but we have annihilated not space, but the sense they're out.
We have lost a part of ourselves. I determined to recover and I began by walking up and down the platform of the railway outside my room up and down until I was tired. And so did we capture the meaning of near and far. That's how immobile they are.
Don't they imagine if you're just they're described like bees in a little hexagonal room. Imagine if you're just being suited around there. You have no sense of like actual distance of what it means to walk miles. Oh, that bee thing is very good because it's sort of like right, there's only the one queen bee the rest are all work of bees or drones or whatever.
That's really good. So there's no human queen here though. Yeah. So there's the machine, the mining apparatus and then there are humans who need to manage it.
It cannot manage itself. But who eventually go away because they lose the memory of how to manage it. But yeah, it seems less problematic than our AI future that people keep predicting where the machines teach themselves, picks themselves or sentient, like increasingly intelligent. Here is like human beings.
It's like humanity. There was a leap in technology, at least our ability to manufacture it, but it couldn't self-sustain. And then we got lazy. We're all different.
Well, I think AI wouldn't be a self-sustain. That's the problem. All of these are made and a part of the larger context and are subject to material degradation. Right.
And so there's always the possibility that the maid thing will deteriorate just like. I think in AI it would find ways to sustain itself. I mean, sure, in perpetuity. I mean, I'm going to finish this quote because I think he gets us.
Neers a place to which I can get quickly on my feet, not a place to which the train or the airship will take me quickly. Far as a place to which I cannot get quickly on my feet. The vomitary is far. But I could be there in 38 seconds by summoning the train.
Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man's feet are the measure for distance. His hands are the measure for ownership.
His body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong. By the way, the machine makes human touch obsolete. So there's no sex. Right.
And that's also a quote for protagonists. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Then I went further.
It was then that I called to you for the first time and you would not come. Right. He comes to a kind of this is on the heels of the reference to the Greeks. Right.
From the end of one. And here in the second one, he goes and he comes to this protagonist insight that there's a kind of relative measure that undercuts the machine which wants to standardize all things. Right. But man possesses within himself insofar as he, you know, relies on himself a kind of separate measure from any measure of convenience, which is going to make the far near the difficult, easy, et cetera.
You can rediscover this primal sort of measure or roundness in there. So just real quick then, this sounds like there's one mention of floss. Which we should come to you with like velocity is gone. And so it seems like Kuno is rediscovering the philosophy.
It seems like he's a pre-secret of philosopher in the words, if that makes sense. And so it's not philosophy that understands itself well. So it's this very beginning point, man is a measurable things in a way. So it could advance farther.
But I don't know. I do remember one of the things I was going to talk about a moment ago and it's that I think fortune, I mean, this really is quite good. I think maybe fortune was more steeped in not just the classics, but modern philosophy than I would have suspected because I do think he's on to another Hobbesian project, which is to eliminate religion, which it seems like they have successfully done in a civilization. Right?
And the Vashti is completely, she blocks it, the notion of anything religious. She sort of who poosed that, like we've civilized, we don't have that stuff anymore. Even though already in part one on page three, nineteen, there's this like manual for the machine, I guess. So I'll just read this paragraph.
But later in the book, later in the short story, religion does come back. But here at the beginning, it's very forecasted that it's never really left. Because it says by her side, on the little reading desk was a survival from the ages of litter, a book. This was the book of the machine, book and machine are capitalized.
In it were instructions against every possible contingency. If she was hot or cold or dyspeptic or the loss for a word, she went to the book and it told her which button to press, the central committee published it. In accordance with the growing habit, it was richly bound. And so the fact that they're binding it and treating it like it's book with a capital B, they've, I think that Forster seems to be saying, he seems to be agreeing with the ancients here that religion is a is co-evil with human existence in a way.
And that human desire to get rid of religion will fail. So Hobbes thought we could get rid of it. And maybe that's being a little unfair to Hobbes, but at least seems like Hobbes thought we could get rid of it or at least radically diminish it. But then in 2023, you see the great emergence of things, spirituality and people more interested in zodiac prognostications and these kinds of things.
But you can't stand and is Forster this machine stops seems to get you can't stamp out humans desire for religiosity. It's sort of it will just manifest itself in a different way. People get to idolize them. They forget that the machine was created by humans and so they begin to kind of worship it.
That's later on. Can I just a funny joke here? It's just after what you read. Yeah.
Sitting up and then she took it reverently. She glanced around the glowing room as if someone might be watching her. Then half ashamed half joyless she murmured, oh machine, oh machine and raised the volume to her lips. The rice she kissed it, the rice inclined her head, the rice she bumped up the delirium acquiescence.
Her ritual performed, she turned to page 13. She said, 67, which has the airtime. So I'm like, wow, 1367. That's pretty long.
The next page, it says, she's consulting the machine, the book again, just says, parents duties of said the book of the machine, see at the moment of birth page 422327483. So turns out this thing is at least or coming close to at least half a billion pages long. I mean, so I don't know how thin the paper are. I mean, it can't be that big because she's so weak.
But it's a massive massive book, maybe it's like an ebook or something like that. This machine puts the Bible, the shapes in terms of theft and capabilities. But it seems so complex that you get a sense that it's so complex that of course it's going to break down. There is the Central Committee also to which I alluded, it seems like there does seem to be some kind of class structure.
There's not just a machine and this large swathe of humans. There's the Central Committee. So there is a kind of elite, it seems. And they must be engineers or something like this.
Yeah, and there are engineers as well who, you know, what happens is, and this is I think forced or working at the logic, what happens is is the duties of the people managing it get further broken up. You're no longer allowed access to the outside world, which includes the sea. The sea again is the only thing I think that people want direct sight on and they say they get their ideas from it. I wonder if the sea provides a sense of man's smallness, right?
Or since maybe that's a big way in which people are nipping at the heels of kunos, paragorean insight that man is the measure. I don't know. But the machine starts, so no one's allowed outside anymore. And the machine starts to be worshiped.
There's a greater division of labor. And it turns out nobody really understands the machine and its largest sort of overarching structure. So that as things start to break down, it seems like there's a real lack of knowledge. I think that's, I think he's pointed to the internal logic that if modernity ever reaches this degree of advancement, eventually these systems will become entirely superior to human beings.
But when they eventually have some kind of programming era or they have some kind of hitch, they'll break down will be utterly dependent and will not be able to manage them anymore. That's the kind of, that's the dystopian element of it. And then people just seem to die and suffocate. It was first.
I think of cars in that regard. You know, 30 years ago, if something went wrong with your car, it was really easy to fix. Not really easy. Significantly easier.
Now everything seems to be managed by a machine and a computer. And so it's nearly impossible to do any kind of repairs to your own car, but unfortunately breaks and stuff like this. But like the computer systems seem to control everything. So you're just like, I guess we're just hosed.
Yeah, you're just, I know example I always think of with our dependence on systems is you remember that cold snap and Texas? Yeah. It went through and, you know, it took out the electrical grid. So everybody was freezing cold and a bunch of people died.
And, and what, you know, I always, I think like what would have happened if that happened a hundred years ago? What would have happened? People would have had fireplaces. They'd have said, yeah, golly gee, it's cold.
Get a jacket on, get some wood. They would have chopped up some wood or they would have already had some because they had gathered it before and then they would have burnt the wood and been cozy and had a cocoa. And like nobody would have died except for, you know, people in extreme poverty or homeless or something like that. And it's great to have those people good at it.
It's, you know, I'm much more sympathetic. But you look at that and you're like, it's way more convenient. I don't have to gather firewood. I waste less of my time, waste less of my time on that.
Same thing with food, right? Remember when the pandemic was like ending? Oh, yeah. There was no food except for like beyond burgers.
So, and you look and you're like, this is advanced that when the first time things get really difficult, we don't have food, we don't have heat and any systems. I don't know how to farm. I can't even grow like, you know, a vegetable, you know, any kind. You would be all dead if those systems broke down.
Yeah, that's right. I mean, it would be interesting that you lost your independence. Or your air for like breathable air. That's how in veebled you are.
I mean, you think about that. It's pretty depressing, right? That's it would be the end of humanity. Yeah, the air quality is really bad right now actually.
Alex has been in apps, metaphors since wildfires in Canada, all our friends in Canada. Yeah, it's pretty bad. I love it. It was pretty bad.
No, I can remember grocery shopping at the shortly after the pandemic broke out. And I wasn't really that worried or freaked out. I was like, I think things passed. But we went to the grocery store and there was like nothing on the shelves.
And I was like, okay, this isn't great. This is not great. But you know, fortunately I had a big bag of meals ready to eat in the basement next all my AKs and PR 15s. So I was good to go.
You got those dots, just in case, you know. They could make a nice stew. They could go a little far. They're only one second.
They're not the ones that cake dogs. That's right. On Twitter. I mean, they live way too long.
I don't understand these dogs. You go to people's houses, they have these 14-year-old dogs, they stink. They're blind. And they're just like, I love him.
He loves me. I'm like, this dog is just not moved for weeks probably. He's a fight that lies down. I mean, it's 13 Alex.
What's that? It's 13 doesn't have any teeth. Already too late. Yeah.
He's only eight and he's still pretty got a lot of energy in that. But I'm already looking at him like these are numbered tasks. Yeah. I'm going to go to the next series and show you what's this time.
You know, caught my rifle. I'm going to go to the back of this. You know, rifle is a hand. I at least forgot sick.
That's true. He does like 14 pounds. I'm trying to keep you. She's Louise.
I was going to put a pillow on him. No mercy. I don't get your books. No, no.
So you've taught this, Alex? I have taught it. Yeah. I think it's good for engineering.
I think I liked it. I mean, there's, you know, it's interesting teaching it to engineering students in Colorado because they're a bit more outdoorsy students who come here and really like to get out there. It'd be nice to teach them to some like, you know, I don't know. I believe it's sophisticated.
Oh, okay. Yeah. You know, the way we get Linda, or Linda, or Linda, or Linda, or Linda, or Robin. Excuse me.
One thing that I think you read these stories, they're celebrated science fiction accounts. People that are in the tech industry are huge fans of these kinds of works and as Moff, I mentioned earlier, and yet, and yet they seem to have a fundamental inability to just check progress or progress is sick. So any time you say, well, guys, I think, you should put the brakes on it. Do we understand what we're creating?
No, no, no, no, no, no, just just push forward. Push forward with the creation. But then, you know, they'll say, oh, wow, these are really instructive tales, but it's like the tales don't hit them as viscerally as they do people outside the industry. And I suppose I understand why that would be the case, but it's always been kind of a curious thing how these dystopian futures are popular in that community, but it's like the lesson falls flat on them.
Yeah. I mean, you think about certain types of things that might take this as sort of, you know, like a cautionary tale, but maybe like we need to make humanity more self-sustaining with their machines. That's a good point. Yeah, they would read it.
And unlike I say, well, clearly they built an ineffective machine. We'll do better here at Google. That's the modern answer to modern, like the modern answer to modern problems, right? We just need to make the technology better.
Right? So New Orleans, Alex is once home flooded in 2005 with Katrina before him. I mean, the response was really American, right? Like, we need to build better levies.
I can't believe this happened as a failure of the government, a failure of technology. I mean, very few people were saying, maybe you shouldn't have a city below sea level. Are you Nancy Field good? Yeah, really?
Yeah, he had an article. But the gods don't like us living here and they would have moved. Right, right, right. I'm reading that article.
But that's exactly, okay, the most of them were like other things. That's exactly right. That's the ancient response, right? You're like, you're flying too close to the sun.
Your wings are going to melt and you're going to die. Like, it's a pretty clear answer here. Do you think there are any notes of Dostoevsky's Underground Man? I mean, we mentioned the Republic.
Are there any other books here you think he's drawing off of? Hobbes for sure. I don't know the Dostoevsky. I mean, Hobbes, yeah.
I mean, Hobbes, yeah. I mean, the Republic. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. Oh. One of you has formed that he can kind of survive in this little, it's like a little, what is it called, a glen or something like that? That's formed.
So enough of it is accumulated there. And so he's able to climb up and kind of maybe look around a little bit before the mending apparatus. Apparently, notices the hole, goes out, grabs him, pulls him back in, kills this woman that's apparently there. It's not clear.
And then, so that's like one part. And then, apparently, he's threatened with homelessness. And apparently, we don't hear much about what he's up to between then and when the machine stops. But it seems like he's one of the first to notice it.
And I wonder whether he finds his way out, but he knows to cover his steps a little bit better. And he's had sort of contact. But maybe he's noticed, because when he's out there, he sees the mending apparatus pulling in sticks and shrubbery and like killing this woman. I wonder if he notices that the mending apparatus isn't doing that.
And he kind of sees that it's going down hill. And I think that's interesting to think about, you know, like sometimes when your phone dies, like unexpectedly, or you're in an area without servicing, you realize you don't know the roads anymore, you don't know where the next gas station is, how to find one, like you're kind of utterly dependent on these systems. It's kind of interesting to think about how we'll start to notice this if we get to this. Right.
The food starts coming in bad, the music isn't working well, there's like loans or groans over it. But you do wonder if if at a certain point, what it'll be like to live with the dilapidated version of the technology we have, right? Where, yeah, I don't know. It reminds me of the movie Brazil, which we should do at some point.
Like it's a former it's a future utopia where yeah, and all the technology falls apart. It's just I think it's a comedy of errors in that way. Hey, Greg, you're just usually with the school, does cuno mean anything? I was trying to read like dogs are Indian names.
It's yeah, so cynicism, maybe, but I mean, dog maybe he's relying more on instinct like something doesn't feel right about this. I don't know, this is a reaching a little bit there, but I mean, if it's a reference to the republic, then dog would be kind of interesting. Right. Well, actually, it was a dog.
How do you pronounce it? An ancient Greek Alex? What dog? Who knows?
Yeah, but does it just dog like we would think about it? Or is it a kind of describe a kind of type of dog, not breeze, but a dog or a searching dog, a house, kind of dog. If it's a reference, there would probably be sort of these more euotic and sort of nobler types, right? Oh, yeah.
Within the text, you may be right, but within the text, look at his red rocket, right? What? The rocket they took to get from a point at a point B in the airship machine. That's right.
Okay. I wouldn't mind seeing that one. I don't know it was red. I assumed it was like metallic or silver.
I guess it does. I will say a small point that's not very serious is the characters are both from like East Asia. And he also is the author of a passage to India. So I do wonder what the significance of that is, if any.
Eastern dust with this movie. Why don't you look at it up in your significance inside? I'll be a Greg. Greg has a billion page book called the book of significance that he kisses three times every day.
The book of numbers. He consults at any time we have an episode on anything. It's just his Esotearica. Can I say how proud I am of Alex for not in the passage where he read where the woman says, Oh, machine, oh machine, oh machine embed and kisses it three times.
I'm very proud of him for not taking that to just a body's sexual window joke. I appreciate that. I'll get it. I don't get it.
Seriously. I'm lost. Yeah. I don't get it.
Yeah. Oh, I'm in a bed. Very happy with the machine. Very hard.
Let's elevate this. That's what I was proud of. We're not doing that much time in the hexagonal room. Swat, swaddle looking at his videos.
Okay. Vashti, Vashti, no joke. I just look this up. Queen of Persia.
So Alex is great, great, great, great, great grandma, actually. So that would be interesting. It does seem right. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. Very good. She was the queen of the king in the book of Esther, actually. Isn't that Artes Xerxes?
It's a sherryus. Is that Artes Xerxes? I don't know what to forget. I think that's hypothesized something like that, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Xerxes or arteserxes. Okay. Anyway, sorry. Yeah.
He's sometimes identified with Arteserxes. Yeah. Persian and Greek. That is interesting.
So let me point out a detail or two details that I think are helpful. In the very first paragraph, he says, there are no apertures for ventilation yet. The air is fresh. There are no musical instruments.
And yet at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is thrown in with melodious sounds, right? He says it's in a the very first line. Imagine if you can a small room, hexagonal in shape like the cell of a bee. At the very end, this is our page, 339.
And if anybody wants to... Why can I not imagine that, honestly? Like that's a weird... Imagine if you can a hexagonal room.
Like, why couldn't I imagine that? Yeah. Just a weird turn of phrase. Anyway, sorry.
And so in 339, he says, when Vashis knew it was then that she opened her prison and escaped, escaped into the spirits. At least so, it seems to me, air my meditation closes. So at both the beginning and he refers to his meditation. And then when the machine breaks apart, very last paragraph, he says, as he spoke, the whole city was broken like a honeycomb.
So all these hexagonal shapes. So there's this reference to bees and like the honeycomb at the beginning and end. And it's a very kind of life in which you spend all your time with this being like fed your honey, right? And then there's also a reference to his act as a meditator.
So it seems like what he's what he is doing here is putting into his own mind and putting it into our minds. This thought about human organization reaching such a level that... And this might be another reference to Aristotle Antipops, because Hobbes picks up on this image from Politics 2, right? And I forget which chapters are.
One of the earlier chapters of Olav Ivan. But he picks up on this image of man as a social animal more so than a bee. There is a kind of, I think, reflection on us creating this perfect hive. And then it kind of self-destructs.
And this is this sort of... I don't know, it struck me strange that both at the very beginning of that very end, there's this reference to bees and to his meditation. Maybe what he's thinking about is that there's sort of... Man has a tendency towards these kind of synoptic reflections on the whole and on the human whole, right?
The whole of human relations and human organization. And that gets reduced in this future to managing the machine as the kind of honeycomb. That if it's ever fully attains completion or perfection, loses this meditation and therefore cracks and falls apart. And we just die exposed like bees.
I don't know. I think there's something to this... And that might be the answer to the question of philosophy. Where's the one place that you said it was mentioned once?
I didn't know it. 333? 333? Yeah, sure.
Real quick. And what's my point on the bees? I took aerosol, I'd be saying humans are like and unlike bees. And that if humans ever became as...
If human sociability were modeled on bees, it would be... We would cease to be humans. Yes. Okay.
Good. This is on page 333, the final paragraph there. Beware of first-hand ideas. And just real quick, by the way.
So this passage, as far as I can take it, is saying that basically primary sources are forbidden here. Like you're not reading here, so you're not being science, you're not being learning, you're not reading, you're reading scholars, or these lectures. Beware of first-hand ideas. Exclaimed one of the most advanced of them.
This is lecturer. First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are about the physical impressions produced by love and fear. And on this gross foundation, who could erect a philosophy or a rhetorical question?
Let your ideas be second-hand and the possible tin pan. But then they will be far removed from that disturbing element. Direct observation. I think that's a good place to stop.