We all forget things sometimes. We leave the car keys in random places. We look all over the house for our sunglasses, only to find them already on our heads. And we’ve all experienced the angst of double booking, completely (or conveniently) forgetting about a dentist appointment booked for the time we were meant to meet up with friends at the pub.
Sometimes our brains just have enough stuff in there and there’s no room for anything new.
Kinda like how the world forgot about the time when millions of people died within a six month period from the Spanish Flu. Sure, we talk about it now but back then, when the pandemic was over, no one talked about it until the 1960s. 5 per cent of the population died, it sucked, let’s just forget about it…?
But how could a catastrophic event of this magnitude be collectively forgotten? And perhaps it’s not the only tragedy we’ve tossed into the black memory hole of history.
In George Orwell’s book, 1984, Winston Smith’s job in the government propaganda department was to find information that needed to be deleted and shove it into the ‘memory hole’ beside his desk. Now, in scientific terms, we refer to the memory hole as ‘collective amnesia’, ‘social amnesia’ or ‘collective forgetting.’ But whatever you want to call it, there seems to be a phenomenon with humans, either deliberately or inadvertently, forgetting (or in some cases, deliberately erasing) some pretty big things that happened in the past.
The Roman Empire for example, wiped hundreds of Emperors from history by chiselling their names off plaques. Poof! They no longer exist. The Soviets’ weapon of choice was airbrushing to remove people from photos… See? He never happened! And while the Chinese didn’t go so far as to completely erase the Cultural Revolution (when millions of people died) they did bury it pretty darn well, displaying only one photograph at the very back in one of their largest museums.
There are certainly known cases where people and governments have deliberately tried to erase historical events. But where it gets really interesting is when we as a society seem to have an unspoken agreement to forget something terrible that’s happened.
Although we know about these events now, this collective forgetting seemed to happen with the Irish Potato Famine, the 1857 Mutiny in India and maybe even the English Civil War. Even the Allied bombing of Germany, which killed 600,000 people, was barely mentioned by the Germans after the war.
This highlights the importance of communication and narrative to keep history alive. When battles are fought and won, we make statues to remember the bravery of our soldiers. For thousands of years, artists have created paintings, sculptures and songs to pay homage to important people and significant events throughout history so they will always be remembered.
But if something isn’t spoken about, we sadly (or perhaps conveniently?) forget. Good or bad, history seems to fall into a memory hole simply by neglect.
Is this what’s happening right now with the Covid-19 pandemic?
Pandemic? What pandemic?
previous episode mentioned:
SOURCES:
Building a collective memory: the case for collective forgetting, by William Hirst and Alan Coman in Current Opinion in Psychology
Collective Memory and Forgetting: A Theoretical Discussion by Cindy Minarova-Banjac Page 4 of 5
The rising of collective forgetting and cultural selectivity in inventors and physicists communities by Cristian Candia and Brian Uzzi
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[00:00:00] Will: There's a couple of types of memory hole people have called them collective amnesia or social amnesia or collective forgetting. The roman empire like they would chisel off the names of old emperors
[00:00:10] Rod: not subtle but yeah it's effective
[00:00:12] Will: there's another one like the dad was the emperor and then he appointed his two sons to be like junior emperors and then they became the emperors. One son killed the other one and said if you mention his name again you get death. I'm not mentioning his name. Don't do it.
[00:00:26] Rod: But that's clear. It's unambiguous. There's an instrument, a mechanism, and it's understood.
[00:00:30] Will: There's a long history. Yeah, the Soviets did it by airbrushing people out of the photos. Here's Stalin with his three mates, two mates, one mate. Oh, it's just Stalin.
[00:00:37] Rod: Solo portrait of Stalin.
[00:00:44] Will: So in the very final year of World War I, Somewhere between 17 and a hundred million people died of the flu.
[00:00:51] Rod: Fuck me. That's a lot.
[00:00:51] Will: So we just had a terrible war and then suddenly Spanish flu, as it came to be known, kicked off 1918, 1919. We don't know the exact numbers. Could be 17 million, could be a hundred million, but guaranteed this was the third worst pandemic of the last thousand years. And that list includes the black death. The other one was colonization of South America where they brought all those diseases. So, maybe up to 5 percent of the world's population died in this short period. Like it's literally a six month period.
[00:01:26] Rod: Glad the war's over.
[00:01:29] Will: And I've mentioned this before, but the really weird thing is as soon as it happened, a hundred million people died, 5 percent of the world's population, we put the whole thing into the memory hole. We just went, you know what? I'm not going to talk about that.
[00:01:44] I'm not going to think about that. I'm not going to write about that. It just kind of didn't happen. And you know, there's actually concrete evidence about this. I looked at Google Ngrams where you can look at different things and talk about how much people talk about something over time. And it's like, literally no one talked about until 1960s. There's a bit of a blip and maybe in 2000 people really started talking about the Spanish flu.
[00:02:07] Rod: So you're saying, immediately after the spanish flu was over, no one on the internet was talking about it.
[00:02:11] Will: No, that's true. No one on the internet or in books or in newspapers or in anything. And it just suddenly you have a hundred million people die. Everyone just choosing not to talk about it, not to talk about. And of course, that's weird to think, why would we suddenly not talk about things? But then a little bit of me got me wondering that we've just been through a pandemic. We've just been through not the same level of experience, but similar. And I've been wondering, are we putting COVID 19 in the memory hole?
[00:02:52] Welcome to The Wholesome Show, the podcast that dives into the memory hole for you.
[00:02:58] Rod: I brought my snorkel.
[00:03:00] Will: I'm Will Grant.
[00:03:00] Rod: I'm Rod Lambert. I just have to, you know, correct you on one thing. We haven't just had the COVID pandemic, we're still in it. Have you forgotten?
[00:03:09] Will: Oh, maybe. Maybe some people have. Maybe I'm one of them.
[00:03:13] Rod: You're pre holing while in the hole. That's very meta hole.
[00:03:17] Will: No, this is my question. When do we decide to collectively forget about something?
[00:03:23] Rod: And how too? Like how do we agree?
[00:03:25] Will: Yeah, I went and did some research and I've had a look at, okay, what might be going on here? I got some examples and I got some ideas about what's happening. It's not a hundred percent concrete yet
[00:03:35] Rod: Concrete. That's for other people.
[00:03:36] Will: So the first one I just wanted to go is the name memory hole.
[00:03:39] Rod: Is that yours?
[00:03:40] Will: No, it's not. People have been using the term memory hole for things that we forget but you know, do you know where it comes from? 1984. Not the year 1984, the book 1984. The main guy, Winston Smith, you know, he works for the government propaganda department, the ministry of truth. And their job was either to put out the truth or to get rid of the not truth. And so his job, I mean, there's a nice example.
[00:04:04] The weekly chocolate ration was decreased from 30 grams to 20 grams. And the next day, the newspaper announced that the chocolate ration had not been reduced to 20 grams, but increased to 20 grams. And then the day after they were like, Any mention of the 30 grams is being deleted. And so his job was to memory hole.
[00:04:20] Rod: He actually dug, literally dug memory holes all day.
[00:04:24] Will: He literally went around and he'd find any mention of this in any documents or whatever. In his desk, like next to his desk, he would have like a little incinerator furnace that they called the memory hole.
[00:04:35] You just poke a fact in there and down it goes into the memory hole. And I like this. I mean, cause it's very 1984 where we're thinking about all these kinds of things but to just put it in the memory hole of we destroy this bit of
[00:04:48] Rod: whenever I think of that story, read it, watch it, whatever. I'm so torn because part of me goes, if you're going to bother, do it like that. Like just quadrupled down. But it also just, I get deep sort of, you know, existential horror at the idea that it's not impossible to go.
[00:05:04] Will: But it's not it's actually not that far off other totalitarian societies. No, but there's things like Cambodia in the Khmer Rouge, you know, they started in a year zero. They said, we have no history before this. And that's not far from big brother.
[00:05:18] Rod: And any mention of that will be severely, let's say reprimanded.
[00:05:21] Will: So there's a couple of types of the sort of memory hole. People have called them collective amnesia or social amnesia or collective forgetting. Now, what I don't want to explore is the Khmer Rouge sort of deliberate erasure. Plenty of examples of that. And there's cool examples.
[00:05:38] Rod: The mechanisms of it are less interesting.
[00:05:39] Will: No, totally. Like, like you've got like the Roman empire, like they would chisel off the names of old emperors.
[00:05:46] Rod: Not subtle, but yeah, it's effective.
[00:05:48] Will: There's another one. Like the dad was the emperor. And then he appointed his two sons to be like junior emperors and then they became the emperors and then one son killed the other one and said, if you mentioned his name again, you get death. I'm not mentioning his name. No, don't do it.
[00:06:03] Rod: You got too much to live for, but that's clear. It's unambiguous. There's an instrument, a mechanism and it's understood.
[00:06:09] Will: There's a long history. Yeah. The Soviets did it by airbrushing people out of the photos. Here's Stalin with his three mates, two mates, one mate. Oh, it's just Stalin.
[00:06:16] Rod: Solo portrait of Stalin.
[00:06:17] Will: Or, you know, there's there's other sorts of things where A Chinese museum that it's like a history of China museums, like 2 million square feet, one of the biggest museums in China. It's got like one photo on the whole cultural revolution in the great leap forward.
[00:06:31] Like you can imagine a giant office blocks office block size thing, history of the Chinese people. And this thing that where millions of people died, it gets one photo, which is we acknowledge it.
[00:06:41] Rod: We're not monsters. Come on.
[00:06:44] Will: It's there. So, I mean, there is a long history of this sort of deliberate and that's terrible, but not what I wanted to explore. I want to know what is it when people sort of go, all right, let's just forget about.
[00:06:59] Rod: Do you remember when? No, not really.
[00:07:01] Will: So, yeah, I mean, the first thing is thinking well, can we find examples of this? So we've got the Spanish flu
[00:07:06] Rod: Pretty difficult given we've forgotten.
[00:07:08] Will: That's the challenge. It's actually kind of hard to find examples and I'd love to, if you can think of any, and listener send them in later. I started with the Spanish flu. And I looked on Google Ngrams, the Google Ngrams is a site where it shows how much people mention it in books. So it's not perfect, but it's something to say every year you can track it and no one's talking about it until the sixties and then 2000, suddenly it really takes off.
[00:07:32] Rod: So it's not only memory holes, it's memory exhumations.
[00:07:36] Will: Yeah. Like, it, it disappears. But I got our programmer astrophysicist friend, Brad Tucker, and said, buddy, can you find any of these?
[00:07:43] Rod: You got the boys in the lab on it.
[00:07:44] Will: I got the boys in the lab onto it. I said, can you find me some examples? And so he went and I looked, and there are, there is a few potentials that I found, and I'm not sure if they're true or not. There's a weird effect, the black death. Now, we know the black death, but there may have been a period in like the 1700s, 1800s, you can look at this. We talk about it now a certain amount, but in the 1700s and 1800s, they didn't talk about it.
[00:08:08] Rod: I mean, honestly, were they just sick of it? There were, there's other things to think about, like this amazing new invention about how to feed horses.
[00:08:14] Will: Might be. I'll come to that in a bit but that's a possible example. There's the English civil war.
[00:08:20] Rod: This is where I say, the what?
[00:08:21] Will: Same sort of period. They might've not talked about it for ages and then it became more common to talk about it in the 20th century.
[00:08:27] Rod: But was that a specific war between two bits of England? I thought England was always in little bits until it became one bit.
[00:08:33] Will: It's the bloods in the cribs, I think.
[00:08:35] Rod: That's right. And then someone brought in a ninja stars and it tipped the balance of power.
[00:08:39] Will: No, it's people with bad haircuts versus people with good haircuts was the centerpiece of the English Civil War.
[00:08:45] Rod: I honestly don't remember something being called the English Civil War. I'm an example. I've been in a memory hole
[00:08:49] Will: I found a couple of others. Potentially the Irish potato famine. Now, remember these are things that we might know about now, but there were periods where people went, ah, I don't want to talk about that.
[00:09:00] The mutiny in India. These are just things I found, you know, this was a rebellion in 1857 where a lot of people were like, fuck off British. And yeah, the British said, we'll fuck off by being more here.
[00:09:11] Rod: Yeah. What if we don't? We decided no.
[00:09:15] Will: There's a couple of others that I found that people actually talked about, like, there's this German writer, like, he writes literature he reckons people don't talk about the Allied bombing of Germany very much. 600, 000 people died.
[00:09:27] Rod: You know what? I don't think that's untrue. Because when you say like, there's a new series out, Apple TV, I think masters of the air. You know, re imagining very glamorous looking world war two fly boys, you know, Americans flying from England into Germany, et cetera. But whenever I've seen it and I'm kind of getting a little bit obsessed with war movies at times.
[00:09:45] You don't see a lot of that. It's true. Like you kind of go, Oh yeah, here we are fighting Jerry, but you don't go into it at all. Much like, what was it like for the Japanese in Japan during world war two? Very hard to find comparatively speaking, English versions.
[00:09:57] Will: And there might well be a chunk of, all right, so we lost and so we don't get to tell those stories? The thing about the Allied bombing, I mean, it was like 600, 000 civilians died. Like this was just carpet bombing of German towns. And I, you know, of course it's total war. And in some sense, the civilians are supporting the war machine or whatever, but it's like it's targeting towns. And it's 600, 000 people, which is a pretty classic definition of mass death and people in Germany don't talk about it.
[00:10:26] Rod: But it's could also be the classic thing, you know, the victors write the history or whatever it is, history is written by the winners. So we've beat the black death therefore we don't talk about it. That might be it.
[00:10:34] Will: The final one I found, which is a very different one was from the podcast search engine where they were describing cockroaches , that in the seventies and eighties houses would be chock a block with cockroaches. And then we fixed it and we don't even talk about it or know about it or think about it. We've just forgot.
[00:10:50] Rod: Is that what happened? Cause I've always been amazed that people get so upset about cockroaches. I'm like, well, they're around
[00:10:55] Will: did you have cockroaches in your house as a kid?
[00:10:57] Rod: Like, not really. That's what I mean. I'm like, why are people so hysterical about it? And maybe this is it though. There were places where they really were a thing.
[00:11:03] Will: But I can imagine if you've fixed a problem and you can't see it anymore, then you don't notice it. So these are some examples. And as I said, listener, please send in more. Cause I'm really interested to find what are things that we've collectively forgot? I think we can point to the Spanish flu as being a pretty clear one. You know, these others, I don't know. I don't know. There's a variety of ways of finding it, but I think there's actually, not erased, they're just things that we've decided to. We just let them dissolve or disappear.
[00:11:32] Rod: I suppose we're kind of doing it with COVID. Actually, no, not kind of, we are doing it with COVID.
[00:11:35] Will: I think we are. I think we are. So there's a couple of papers that I've been looking at that gives some explanation of what's going on. Let's try and fit them to the examples and see if there is a thing and if it's happening with COVID or not. So a couple of papers, I just wanted to shout them out. So this is a building a collective memory, the case for collective forgetting by William Hurst and Alan Coleman. Collective memory and forgetting by Cindy Minara Maniak and the rising of collective forgetting and cultural selectivity in by Christian Candia and Brian Oetze.
[00:12:05] They got some ideas. So the thing about collective memory is it's not like individual memory. So of course, you know, we have our individual memories of whatever we keep them in their head and they're real or manufactured or whatever. But collective memory is more something that we share with each other and so it requires communication. It needs to keep circulating. We've gotta talk about it or we've gotta write it down in books or write it down in newspaper articles.
[00:12:29] We've gotta make movies about it or make statues about it. Anything that keeps it going. And so there's a chunk of things that suggests, okay, maybe the reason we might have forgotten the Spanish flu is a little bit about both the communication and the not shared memory of it.
[00:12:45] Rod: Coldplay didn't write a song about it, therefore it didn't stay in our minds.
[00:12:48] Will: If they had done, then finally we would have known.
[00:12:52] Rod: Well, you know, I found that like relate to that. There was a, there's a song I remember it's kind of this lame, boring 70s song that I never used to understand why people cared, but the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. It's this droning kind of song, but I heard it repeatedly in my youth.
[00:13:04] Will: And now you need to know it.
[00:13:05] Rod: Well, one day I was reading about something else and that is about this boat that exploded in one of the great lakes in America, blah, blah, blah. It was like, and that's where that famous song came from. And I thought, what the fuck? This is a big boat disaster.
[00:13:16] Will: We did an episode a little while ago about an asbestos mining town in Western Australia and as I was thinking about that episode over and over again, the midnight oil song, blue sky mining that stuck in my head. And it really does say collective memory does require us talking about it and communicating
[00:13:35] Rod: reinforcement, like all good memories.
[00:13:36] Will: So there is one, a good memory requires reinforcement in your own head. And so if you remember something, you probably actually, there's a reason that you're remembering it. So either it's a concrete fact, you know, how do I get to work or it's a concrete memory? You know, how did I meet my partner or something like that?
[00:13:52] Rod: It's useful. Like if I remember this, it'll get me laid.
[00:13:54] Will: It's useful. And so, there's a component where collective memories have to have some sort of thing where we're rehearsing it out in public whether it's a song or a movie, we've got to be saying it and it's probably because it's useful to talk about it. There's a couple of other things. We naturally pay selective attention to different things and our selective attention makes us forget other things.
[00:14:17] Rod: You've got to nudge something out to nudge something in kind of thing.
[00:14:19] Will: It's almost like there is a limit on how much we can remember. There's a study that people were looking at this and it's called, well, first they did a study within individual people, so looking at your own memories. You give people a list and say practice the list and I want you to remember these components of the list, but not everything, then they become much more likely to forget those other bits, even to the point where you go back and say, so list has 10 items and say, I want you to remember the first, second and fifth item or something like that. People forget the rest of the items more than if they were
[00:14:53] Rod: just extremely focused on the task
[00:14:56] Will: they become more focused and forget the others. And it happens socially as well. If you're, you know, let's talk about items one, three, and five or something like that, focus on them. Everyone forgets the other ones. So there's sort of an effect where we focus more on the effects that's happening and then we forget other things. So potentially could be that as well.
[00:15:17] Rod: We're going to bring up something you told me years ago about what olden time villages sometimes used to do if they really wanted everyone to remember an event.
[00:15:24] Will: This is the idea of inducing trauma To get people to remember something and the classic was you know You have a court case and you get the eight year old kid to watch the court case and then you chuck them in the river afterwards
[00:15:37] Rod: Let him half drown
[00:15:38] Will: and so they remember the whole day like it's chiseled into their brain
[00:15:42] Rod: I'm guessing when people weren't as literate as they are now, like, at least someone in the village will now have a strong connection to that.
[00:15:47] Will: And I don't doubt that's plausible.
[00:15:50] Rod: Why is he shaking in the corner? Oh, he remembers that court case.
[00:15:52] Will: So I guess the point is that's a useful memory for the town. And it's strongly wired into the kid and it still comes back to it. So. The question I want to think is, what are the components then of the Spanish flu that might have made us forget it? And what are the components that might be having in COVID now? There's some that says collectively, there's not much point in talking about it.
[00:16:15] Rod: What more bang for buck is there if we keep talking about how bad COVID was two years ago. What do we get out of it?
[00:16:20] Will: And you magnify that with Spanish flu. So, what would they be saying? 1922, 1923. So there's lack of utility to talking about some of these things and maybe we're going through that with COVID as well. The second one is we're not doing the cultural memory and you can imagine come after world war one, everyone's like statues to the soldiers. Cool. Let's do all of the statues to the soldiers, but they didn't do any statues to the people that died of Spanish flu. They didn't do any
[00:16:46] Rod: bad statues, but it's children lying in bed, dying. Let's put it outside. There's more,
[00:16:55] Will: but then think about that, you know, As we emerge from COVID, A, less point in talking about it and B, are there any statues, any recognition?
[00:17:05] Rod: What do you think? What should it be? A giant syringe?
[00:17:08] Will: But no one wants to do it. No, no one is saying we should memorialize the fact.
[00:17:12] Rod: Well, it's not heroic, is it? It's not like we're united against COVID because we had some kind of, Righteous cause like it was inflicted upon us. There was no specific enemy, so to speak. There was no specific under trodden and over treaders. So it was like, what do you memorialize other than death?
[00:17:28] Will: And so the final bit is a narrative template and it's interesting when we say a narrative template, you know, things are easier to remember when they fit into a narrative, you know, you know, simple and, but therefore, or you could go, you know, there's a hero and there's that, you know, they're doing their duty or something and coming off world war one, you know, there's narrative everywhere. We fought the baddie, we won against the baddie, that kind of thing. Spanish flu, they're like, a lot of people got really sick. A lot of people died. It sucked. There's no narrative and there's no use for talking about it at all. I think it's going to be weird, but I feel like COVID 19, it went for longer. It didn't kill as many people as the Spanish flu. It sucked for all of us, but you can imagine post all of this, What is the thing that we say to each other about it? We might say during the lockdown, I did this or whatever, but are we really going to focus on it that much?
[00:18:21] Rod: I'm going to say probably not.
[00:18:23] Will: Yeah. Walter Benjamin argued that silences about public horrors can permit human societies to cope with collective recovery and go on to progress.
[00:18:32] Rod: Walter Benjamin's the lawnmower manufacturer.
[00:18:34] Will: Yes. And famous critic. But I think the thing that's going on here is it's not useful to talk about. It doesn't gain us anything in terms of pushing an identity or building relationships. It's not useful to publicly memorialize. No one is saying we should do these things and it's actually probably beneficial for us all to forget, but doesn't that feel wrong? Doesn't it feel wrong that we're going to forget
[00:18:58] Rod: Feels wrong and right. I mean, like there's a big part of me, like when you first started talking about this, I was like, this is outrageous. And then I thought, but why? It's not like we said, ha, suck shit, people died or, you know, fuck you, your economy crashed, that's hilarious. We're just saying like, yeah, what do you want me to do? What do you want me to do? What do you want me to do with that? Yeah, it happened. It was shit. Hope it doesn't happen again. The only thing I see is people going, we must keep the memory alive so it doesn't happen again. I'm like, I've got news for you. It'll happen again.
[00:19:23] Will: It'll happen again no matter what. And that's the thing that sucks. We'll remember this in the sense of, you got to do some science and you got to do your microbiology. You got to do your virology and your immunization. It will happen again.
[00:19:34] Rod: When the next one happens, you will go back 10 years after that and look at the Ngram spike on COVID 19.
[00:19:38] Will: Right back into the memory hole
[00:19:40] Rod: where we belong.
[00:19:41] Will: No, we don't. We don't belong in the memory hole.
[00:19:48] Rod: Have you been looking at other things this week? What do you mean pondering? What do you mean looking at other things we might talk about one day?
[00:19:54] Will: You know, you know, Australia is like, Oh, submarines. It's fricking great. You know, but you know what is undersung about submarines is their history and potential future as a cargo vessel.
[00:20:06] Rod: Really?
[00:20:06] Will: Yes. There are people out there who reckon we can do some submarine cargo vesseling. There are also people, heroes, no, not heroes, cause they supported the baddies who did a bunch of submarine cargo vesseling a long time ago. I'll tell you that story. okay, there's smugglers. Yes, and also wartime moving people.
[00:20:25] Rod: Yeah, but there's not like you get on Amazon they say, would you like a, like, Pick up, car delivery, aeroplane, or submarine.
[00:20:31] Will: You know, if it said, okay, there's a limit to how much I'll pay for this
[00:20:35] Rod: Your wife would get home and go 8, 000 for a book? But it came by submarine. It came by submarine. It's not even wet. All right here's one that I came across. You know, we may have done an episode on this, but I can't remember. Memory hole. Retroactive precognition. Does this ring a bell?
[00:20:53] Will: No, yes.
[00:20:54] Rod: Bottom line gist was Retroactive precognition.
[00:20:59] Will: Isn't that just present thinking?
[00:21:00] Rod: Yeah, it's like now, you mean now? Does this mean now? No, it's it's this idea that these people did some research where they got people to do like memory tests or a particular skills based test you had to learn. They got people to do these tests and then A period of time later, they trained them how to do this stuff or got them to memorize the things before, like after the fact.
[00:21:19] And they went back and looked at the results and it turned out the people who trained in it afterwards did better beforehand than the people who hadn't trained in it afterwards. What? So they were saying the thing they did in the future made them better at doing the thing in the past.
[00:21:30] Will: No, it didn't. It didn't.
[00:21:32] Rod: That's what they say.
[00:21:33] Will: Science doesn't work. Time doesn't work like that.
[00:21:35] Rod: Maybe it does. Retroactive precognition.
[00:21:39] Will: Oh, I like that. That's interesting. Okay, rage farming
[00:21:43] Rod: rage farming. I know you're fucking angry. I'm gonna put some corn in.
[00:21:46] Will: No, not fucking angry I'm gonna put the corn in and not it's like farmers grow things corn, cows, whatever. There are people out there whose job really is to rage farm, to grow rage, to make people angry and it's a way of thinking about social media to think, okay, actually what you're doing is producing rage.
[00:22:08] Rages is like, well, that's the number one emotion because it is one of the most productive emotions. And if we can stimulate that, we can get some eyeballs.
[00:22:17] Rod: Can we get a job in there?
[00:22:19] Will: Oh, we're trying. But not rage, cause, cause we're lovers, we're like hippies, we're like the hippies that are doing boutique joy farming. Is it joy? What do you get out of this, listener?
[00:22:27] Rod: Modern stowaways, I was looking at that.
[00:22:29] Will: Oh, that's gonna make me sad.
[00:22:31] Rod: No, they're not all bad, that's the thing, people who stowaway on boats, trains, and even planes, and they don't all die, some of them actually stowaway and survive somehow.
[00:22:40] Cause whenever I hear the word stowaway I think cabin boy, Jim, stand there and you hold my stump and I'll walk around. Therefore, your passage is paid nearly.
[00:22:50] Will: All right. There's a long history of this and I don't know how far it's going to go back. So this is of politicians eating and drinking things to demonstrate that they're safe.
[00:22:59] Rod: Oh, fuck yeah.
[00:23:00] Will: Most recently, there was people in Flint, Michigan. Wherever it was. Water's safe, I'll have a drink. My favorite example is during the the mad cow crisis in the UK, where not only the minister for agriculture, but he got his four year old daughter to eat the burger as well.
[00:23:16] Rod: Yeah, she's dead now.
[00:23:17] Will: She is not dead. But there's a long history of politicians going yep. It's safe. Yum. Yum. Yum. Yum. Yum
[00:23:23] Rod: Look my kids eating it. Fucking monster
[00:23:26] Will: you monster and I would just like to go through and see what all of the examples are because you know, just the narrow set that I've got, I don't think that's even everything
[00:23:35] Rod: I bet it isn't. The only other one I was rummaging around with because it's close to my heart when bureaucracy is actually Good bureaucracy, helpful, progressive, useful bureaucracy.
[00:23:44] Will: All the time.
[00:23:45] Rod: Some of the time.
[00:23:47] Will: Well, listener, you know, send them in. We wanna know what you wanna explore. Or if you have comments or suggestions for any of those. Or, other ideas for things we memory hold or other politicians that ate some dumb stuff. Send them in.
[00:24:01] Rod: cheers@wholesomeshow.Com
[00:24:04] Will: Or, in a comment. Under there.
[00:24:06] Rod: You've been very attractive listeners.
[00:24:08] Will: Most beautiful listeners ever.
[00:24:10] Rod: We can hear your ears.
[00:24:11] Will: Do you know people can?
[00:24:12] Rod: Can hear other people's ears?
[00:24:13] Will: No, but we can be identified by the sound in our ear holes.
[00:24:17] Rod: What?
[00:24:18] Will: I'll tell you about that one day.
