00:00:00.000 Welcome to Topcast episode 54.55. Something like that. Chapter 17 anyway. Part 3 of unsustainable
00:00:26.880 from our beginning of the infinity series. Today's will be short and sweet. There will of course
00:00:31.840 be a part 4 in order to get through unsustainable being such an important central chapter, a kind of
00:00:39.520 crescendo of a sort, this chapter bringing together so much of what we've talked about in previous chapters
00:00:45.680 as I've said before in the other parts. I'm going to dive straight in today into the reading
00:00:51.360 where David says, in early prehistory, populations were tiny, knowledge was parochial,
00:00:57.760 and history-making ideas were millennia apart. In those days, a meme spread only when one person
00:01:04.960 observed another enacting it nearby. And, because of the statistic of cultures, rarely even then.
00:01:12.240 So at that time, human behavior resembled that of other animals, and much of what happened was indeed
00:01:18.080 explained by biogeography. But development such as abstract language, explanation, wealth above the
00:01:24.880 level of subsistence, and long-range trade all had the potential to erode parochialism,
00:01:30.960 and hence give causal power to ideas. By the time history began to be recorded, it had long
00:01:36.960 since become the history of ideas, far more than anything else. Though, unfortunately,
00:01:42.480 the ideas were still mainly of the self-disabling anti-rational variety. As for subsequent history,
00:01:48.960 it would take considerable dedication to insist that biogeographical explanations
00:01:54.160 account for the broad sweep of events. Why, for instance, did the societies in North America
00:01:59.760 and Western Europe rather than Asia and Eastern Europe win the Cold War? Analyzing climate,
00:02:05.600 minerals, flora, fauna, and diseases can teach us nothing about that. The explanation is that
00:02:11.520 the Soviet system lost, because its ideology wasn't true, and all the biogeography in the world
00:02:17.520 cannot explain was false about it. Coincidentally, one of the things that was most false about
00:02:22.960 the Soviet ideology was the very idea that there is an ultimate explanation of history in mechanical
00:02:28.720 non-human terms as proposed by Marx, Engels, and Diamond. Quite generally, mechanical reinterpretations
00:02:36.720 of human affairs not only lack explanatory power, they are morally wrong as well. Through an effect,
00:02:42.880 they deny the humanity of the participants, casting them and their ideas merely as side effects
00:02:48.400 of the landscape. Diamond says that his main reason for writing, guns, germs, and steel
00:02:54.560 was that unless people are convinced that the relative success of Europeans was caused by
00:02:58.880 biogeography, they will forever be tempted by racist explanations. Well, not readers of this book,
00:03:04.720 I trust. Presumably, Diamond can look at ancient Athens, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment,
00:03:10.000 all of them, the quintessence of causation through the power of abstract ideas, and see no way of
00:03:15.920 attributing those events to ideas and to people. He just takes it for granted that the only alternative
00:03:22.240 to one, reductionist, dehumanising reinterpretation of events, is another, pausing their just
00:03:29.200 my reflection. It seems to be the pervasive worldview of science-minded intellectuals who otherwise
00:03:39.680 have divested themselves of supernatural explanations for events, to fall quickly down a slippery slope
00:03:49.280 of complete literal physicalism, or in less fancy language, but they think that unless you
00:03:57.200 explain things purely in terms of physical forces and physical stuff out there, that then the
00:04:05.200 only alternative is a supernatural magical explanation. And as we've tried to emphasise here,
00:04:11.440 and David's theme running throughout the book very much is, knowledge being an abstract thing
00:04:17.680 has absolutely central causal power and effects within human civilisation, within the world as we
00:04:28.720 find it now. It's gradually becoming more and more a potent force of nature, to some extent.
00:04:37.200 Often I say the words, it's literally a force of nature. Knowledge creation is literally a force
00:04:42.000 of nature, of course, that's quite wrong. It doesn't mean literally a force of nature in the same
00:04:45.920 way that physicists regard forces of nature to be, but what I do mean is that increasingly the
00:04:56.560 effects of knowledge creation will have as dramatic effects out there in physical space as does
00:05:05.280 gravity, as does the strong nuclear force, for example, that in order to explain what we're going
00:05:12.480 to see in the future, an event that are going to happen in the future, we are going to have to
00:05:18.000 explain the causes in terms of people's abstract ideas, the explanations that they create,
00:05:26.960 and the choices that they make, and I don't try to sideline choice, and where choices originate.
00:05:35.600 They originate in the minds of people. This has come up recently and need to simultaneously with
00:05:43.440 the release of this particular podcast is, or are my remarks in response to Sam Harris. Sam
00:05:50.400 Harris has a wonderfully tight, neat defence of the illusion of free will, as he calls it,
00:05:58.240 the argument for pure determinism in the universe, and particularly determinism as applied to
00:06:05.280 the brains of people, and therefore to the suggestion that, therefore people are nothing particularly
00:06:11.680 different to the rest of physical reality, including other animals, and including any other
00:06:17.920 natural process that might happen out there like a hurricane, let's say. In all cases, the hurricane,
00:06:25.200 what the grizzly bear is doing, and what the human being is doing when they're engaged in
00:06:29.920 knowledge creation, are similar in a fundamental way on this view. That similarity comes down to
00:06:38.800 the fact that they are all the unfolding, the unworking of physical laws acting upon matter and energy.
00:06:49.120 And as I like to say, this is a true statement, it's a vacuously true statement.
00:06:54.160 It isn't really an explanation as much as it is a general purpose description of anything
00:07:00.720 that happens anywhere at any time, and anything that always has happened and always will happen.
00:07:06.240 It's a necessary truth, but it doesn't explain what is going on. And if we want to explain
00:07:15.040 what people are up to, what they're doing, referring to physical laws, or even to the goings
00:07:21.040 on within the brain in terms of the firing of neurons, is the wrong level of analysis.
00:07:27.920 What we need to refer to is the abstract creation of knowledge that then goes on to have
00:07:34.400 physical effects in the world. These are the true explanations of why, for example,
00:07:40.320 the enlightenment happened in one place and not another, had the effects that it did,
00:07:45.120 and not some other effects. It's the reason why, as David will go on to say, we can say
00:07:51.120 there is a stark difference between an open-ended stream of knowledge creation that occurs in
00:07:57.040 dynamic societies, and the explanation as to why it is that other societies
00:08:02.960 endured stasis and finally went extinct. People's choices, choices to create knowledge or not,
00:08:10.080 really are the explanation as to why certain civilizations exist, certain technologies exist,
00:08:19.680 and certain ways in which people either are able to come together and collaborate and work towards
00:08:26.880 a better future or not happens to be. This is all to do with ideas, not the motion of particles
00:08:34.160 and the void under deterministic physical laws. Those deterministic physical laws, acting on matter,
00:08:40.640 moving through a void, is just always necessarily the case, as a description of what is happening
00:08:47.760 anywhere cosmologically in the universe. But let's go back to what David says about this.
00:08:53.520 Quote, you're right. In reality, the difference between Spartan Athens or between
00:08:58.320 Sabinerola and Lorenzo Di Medici had nothing to do with their genes, nor did the difference
00:09:04.640 between the Easter Islanders and the Imperial British. They were all people,
00:09:09.200 universal explainers and constructors, but their ideas were different. Nor did landscape
00:09:15.280 cause the enlightenment. It would be much true to say that the landscape we live in is the product
00:09:21.280 of ideas. The primeval landscape, though packed with evidence and therefore opportunity,
00:09:26.960 contained not a single idea. It is knowledge alone that converts landscapes into resources
00:09:34.320 and humans alone who are the authors of explanatory knowledge and hence of the uniquely human
00:09:40.080 behaviour called history. Physical resources, such as plants, animals and minerals,
00:09:45.920 afford opportunities, which may inspire new ideas, but they can neither create ideas,
00:09:50.640 nor cause people to have particular ideas. They also cause problems, but they do not prevent people
00:09:55.680 from finding ways to solve those problems. Some overwhelming natural event like a volcanic
00:10:00.720 eruption might have wiped out an ancient civilization regardless of what the victims were thinking.
00:10:06.160 But that sort of thing is exceptional. Usually, if there are human beings left alive to think,
00:10:11.920 there are ways of thinking that can improve their situation and then improve it further.
00:10:16.960 Unfortunately, as I had explained, there are also ways of thinking that can prevent all improvement.
00:10:22.160 Thus, since the beginning of civilization and before, both the principal opportunity
00:10:27.440 of progress and the principal obstacles of progress have consisted of ideas alone.
00:10:33.520 These are the determinants of the broad sweep of history. The primeval distribution of horses
00:10:39.040 or llamas or flint or uranium can only affect the details, and then only after some human being
00:10:45.280 has had an idea for how to use those things, the effects of ideas and decisions,
00:10:50.720 almost entirely determined which biographical features have a bearing on the next chapter of
00:10:55.520 human history and what the effect will be. Mark's angles and diamond have it the wrong way around,
00:11:03.040 pause there just in my reflection on this. Notice also that dismissing the centrality of human
00:11:10.640 creativity, of the human being as being a causal agent in the unfolding of historical events,
00:11:19.040 and of the landscape we find ourselves in now, to sideline that, ignore it, dismiss it,
00:11:25.120 or just be completely unaware of it. Leads, in my view, inexorably to a kind of pessimistic
00:11:34.000 worldview, where people are impotent in their capacity to actually change the course of history
00:11:41.120 and to do something good. We see a strong theme running through the beginning of infinity
00:11:46.080 is that things are getting better all the time. It's not inexorable, okay? I've sometimes said
00:11:53.360 that erroneously as well. It's not like it necessarily must get better, but it is getting better,
00:11:58.000 and there's explanations for that, because people are improving their ideas, in particular,
00:12:02.320 they're moral knowledge, they're improving that, and so we are quickly finding ways to lift
00:12:08.000 everyone out of poverty. We are quickly finding ways of curing disease. We are quickly finding
00:12:12.480 ways to ensure that the environment we live in is less polluted, more comfortable, where there's
00:12:17.680 less suffering. So the story of human history is not merely a story of one where it is human
00:12:24.800 ideas, which have shaped the course of history, but that those ideas are causing people to improve
00:12:31.440 the universe in which they find themselves at the moment, only locally, but eventually,
00:12:36.080 cosmically. Now, if you ignore all that, and if you think that humans are kind of just waves
00:12:43.440 being washed upon the shore, they're just leaves being blown by the wind. They're just another
00:12:47.920 feature of the environment. And especially if you think that people are a dangerous
00:12:53.200 feature of the environment, then you will end up having ideas about how to control people,
00:13:00.080 about how to try and mitigate the dangers of people, and that usually comes through social control.
00:13:05.840 So it's absolutely no accident that people like Marx and Engels come up with social theories
00:13:12.480 of history, which lead directly to a political vision about how society should be arranged,
00:13:21.920 that are just engines of human suffering. But this is a pervasive, popular opinion even today,
00:13:30.880 no matter how many times these political ideologies are refuted by the simple fact that they've
00:13:38.000 been tried in history, and they've led to starvation and suffering and misery for the places in which
00:13:45.440 they've actually been tried, to the extent that they've been tried. Despite that, they
00:13:51.680 continue to survive. Just today, coincidentally, the philosopher, Ray Scott Percival,
00:13:57.760 if you don't know who I'm talking about here, look up Ray Scott Percival. He's written for
00:14:03.040 Quilett magazine and Medium magazine. He's a great expoiser of popularian ideas. But he
00:14:10.400 observed in an article I read today that the ideologies, bad ideologies tend to persist. Because
00:14:20.480 all your need is, even if people are being converted out of those bad ideas all the time,
00:14:25.280 you know, it seems to be kind of a one-way street in a sense that people come out of socialism
00:14:31.840 or out of Marxism and into capitalism. But those ideologies don't die because the rate at which
00:14:38.240 people are converted out and persuaded of better ideas about ideas about freedom and optimism and
00:14:44.480 how people don't need to be socially controlled in the way that Marx kind of thinks.
00:14:48.400 Nonetheless, young people tend to be born into thinking these are good ideas. They're raised on
00:14:56.240 mothers' knee quite often. They're raised by a school system, they're raised by an education system
00:15:01.280 in order to endorse these terrible ideas. And so the traditions within education are very much
00:15:08.880 about inculcating, indoctrinating, people with these bad ideas. And it takes time to be persuaded
00:15:15.840 out of them if you've been indoctrinated into them. No one is naturally born into being a Marxist
00:15:22.400 of course. But there are religious ideas that are similar. There are political ideologies that
00:15:28.800 drive certain educational theories. And so the work is kind of infinite. The work of
00:15:36.000 freeing, liberating people from these tyrannical notions that take over their mind about how
00:15:42.320 we people are evil. And insofar as we're not evil, we're impotent to do anything to improve the
00:15:49.760 world. When we do improve the world, if we improve the world, a lot of people think we don't
00:15:54.160 improve the world, we're just here immiserating other species on a planet and hurting the planet
00:15:59.040 insofar as we can actually hurt the planet. The work of trying to eradicate these bad ideas
00:16:07.360 seems to be unending and probably possibly will be unending. That's me being a little bit
00:16:11.040 pessimistic. But because the era becomes deeply entrenched so early on in the lives of people and
00:16:18.080 because governments have invested interest in ensuring that these kind of ideas that the government
00:16:25.280 needs to be front and center and important in people's lives, there's a lot of forces arrayed
00:16:32.960 against anyone who thinks that the individual, the individual person, the individual knowledge
00:16:38.720 creator can make a true difference in the world and that people, generally speaking, can make a
00:16:44.560 positive difference in the world. And in fact, are the only thing, the only entity actually doing
00:16:49.840 the work of trying to improve the world, literally the planet, literally the lives of other people,
00:16:56.320 it is just other people doing that. And the exception is the people that are causing harm to
00:17:03.360 one another. They're the exception to the rule. Funnel harm is done by the environment to people.
00:17:09.520 That's worse. If nature was a person, they would be the worst serial killer. They would be the
00:17:17.200 worst torturer, the worst sightest that has ever lived because nature is constantly, as I've said
00:17:23.920 before, flooding or starving or blasting or burning, etc, etc. The innocent people
00:17:33.280 that exist on this planet, the universe is hostile. If not out to get us, but at the same time,
00:17:40.640 it's not providing a very nice environment for us to live in. Instead, we have to
00:17:46.880 eke out an existence on inner hostile universe. Okay, back to the book. After that cheery note,
00:17:56.000 David writes, quote, a thousand years as a long time for a static society to survive,
00:18:00.960 we think of the great centralized empires of antiquity, which lasted even longer. But that is a
00:18:06.640 selection effect. We have no record of most static societies, and they must have been much shorter
00:18:11.520 lived. A natural guess is that most were destroyed by the first challenge that would have required
00:18:17.600 the creation of a significantly new pattern of behavior. The isolated location of Easter Island
00:18:24.160 and the relatively hospitable nature of its environment might have given its static society a
00:18:29.440 longer lifespan than it would have if it had been exposed to more tests by nature and by other
00:18:34.960 societies. But even those factors are still human, not biographical. If the islanders had known
00:18:41.280 how to make long-range ocean voyages, the island would not have been isolated in the relevant sense.
00:18:47.840 Likewise, how hospitable Easter Island is depends on what the inhabitants know.
00:18:54.480 If its settlers had known as little about survival techniques as I do,
00:18:58.400 then they would not have survived their first week on the island. And on the other hand,
00:19:01.920 today thousands of people live on Easter Island without starving and without a forest,
00:19:05.840 though now they are planting one because they want to and know how pause their just my reflection.
00:19:11.360 David kind of hints at this elsewhere, and he mentions Oxford in the UK as well.
00:19:18.240 But you can say it about anywhere on the face of the planet, everywhere is inhospitable.
00:19:22.480 Almost everywhere is entirely unsuited to human beings. We are this special kind of species that
00:19:31.920 well, we don't have much, we have some inborn knowledge, but our inborn survival capacity is
00:19:39.520 pretty limited. I mean, we're born as helpless babies, unlike, you know, the giraffe or the horse,
00:19:45.680 which is walking within a few hours and able to look after itself more or less within a few hours.
00:19:51.280 We are completely helpless for the first few years of our lives. And then we have to create knowledge
00:19:57.440 in order to survive. And there's nowhere on earth that is really a wonderful nursery for human
00:20:02.800 beings in its natural state. Only our houses and our towns and our cities are able to really do
00:20:10.800 the job of properly nurturing young children and bringing human beings to the point of
00:20:15.760 being able to survive themselves within those cities and towns and houses. But plunk the average
00:20:23.680 person, like me, anywhere in the natural environment here on earth, and I'd be dead within
00:20:31.600 weeks, maybe days, even if it's a place which is where we supposedly evolved. Subs
00:20:39.520 a higher in Africa is not going to be somewhere where I'm going to survive. The great rift valley
00:20:44.160 is not going to be somewhere where I'm going to be able to find food and clean drinking water.
00:20:49.120 So this concept of hospitable of how hospitable a place is, like Easter Island,
00:20:57.680 depends, as David says, precisely on what the inhabitants know.
00:21:02.800 So how hospitable the environment I find myself in here in New South Wales at the moment,
00:21:08.320 also is not merely about my personal knowledge to a large extent. It's about the knowledge
00:21:14.320 that other people have. Thank goodness. Because it's only by virtue of the fact that someone
00:21:20.320 else has been able to build this house, but I don't have knowledge of how to build this house.
00:21:24.080 I don't have knowledge of how to generate electricity. I have some understanding of the
00:21:29.920 physics of electricity generation, but if you put me at a power station where it's actually going,
00:21:33.840 I know I wouldn't have a clue. I wouldn't have a clue about how much coal needs to go into the
00:21:38.640 burner, at what rate, at least sort of technical details. But thankfully someone does.
00:21:45.200 And overall, the civilization is hospitable because the knowledge instantiated, not only in people's
00:21:51.520 minds, but in the physical artifacts, the technology is there to make this place hospitable.
00:21:58.720 It's not the natural environment that makes it hospitable. Because the natural environment
00:22:02.960 is not hospitable. It's very unreadly. Like, of course, now and again, there are times where me,
00:22:08.160 personally, I love going for a walk in nature into inhospitable nature to get away from
00:22:14.400 civilization to some extent. Because I just like to have some extra fresh air or to feel a different
00:22:21.840 temperature on my skin or to see the wild animals that are out there, the nice green trees
00:22:28.320 or perhaps the nice beach and so on and so forth. But that's the exception to the rule. I often
00:22:33.600 can't wait to get back home again to where it is warm and dry and there's food or plenty.
00:22:39.760 So the hospitability is very much overall depends upon the knowledge that exists in those places,
00:22:47.920 not merely my personal knowledge, although that's important. I have to know how to
00:22:51.200 switch the lights on and offer, example, and get the food from the fridge. That's not much that's
00:22:54.960 expected of me. But the knowledge of fridges is contained within fridges and, thankfully,
00:23:01.680 people who construct fridges and can repair fridges and so on and so forth, repeat for every other
00:23:05.600 bit of technology that keeps my house, my town, my city, my country, hospitable. Okay. Let's keep
00:23:13.680 going. We'll just read for a little bit more today. It's going to be a short episode and I can
00:23:17.840 promise you, part four, again, very soon. David writes, quote, the Easter Island civilization collapsed
00:23:25.440 because no human situation is free of new problems and static societies are inherently
00:23:31.200 unstable in the face of new problems. Civilisations rose and collapsed on other South Pacific
00:23:37.360 islands too, including Pitcan Island. That was part of the broad sweep of history in the region
00:23:43.120 and in the big picture, the cause was that they all had problems that they failed to solve.
00:23:48.640 The Easter Islanders failed to navigate their way off the island. Just as the Romans failed
00:23:53.120 to solve the problem of how to change governments peacefully. If there was a forestry disaster
00:23:57.440 in Easter Island, that was not what brought its inhabitants down. It was that they were chronically
00:24:02.720 unable to solve the problem that disraised. If that problem had not dispatched their civilization,
00:24:09.280 some other problem eventually would have. Sustaining their civilization in its static,
00:24:14.240 statue-obsessed state was never an option. The only options were whether it would collapse suddenly
00:24:20.000 and painfully, destroying most of what little knowledge they had, or change slowly and for the
00:24:25.440 better. Perhaps they would have chosen the latter if only they had known how paused their
00:24:30.880 my reflection just on that. Importantly, people might easily re-pass that, not noticing the word
00:24:38.640 slowly. David has said there that the only option is Easter Island could have very quickly,
00:24:46.640 suddenly painfully destroying the knowledge that's the way in which the society could have collapsed.
00:24:52.800 The only alternative was to change slowly and for the better. The slowly is important.
00:24:59.920 I guess another way of saying that is incrementally. Incramently, in other words, making a small
00:25:05.440 change, a small improvement at a time. I like to say that this is a digital way of viewing
00:25:12.880 civilization. You want to have incremental improvement. Continue as an ascent. You want the
00:25:18.960 increments to just keep accruing all the time. You want it to be a constant kind of state of
00:25:25.760 improvement. That's what you want, but you won't get that. What, of course, you'll get is you'll
00:25:30.720 have an incremental change that sometimes will be for the worse. But luckily, it was only incremental.
00:25:35.920 If you're doing the right thing in a modern Western democratic society, you try out a policy
00:25:42.240 which is a bit of a change from the previous policy, and it may well go wrong. But because it's
00:25:47.680 an incremental change on what was there before, you can correct it. You can undo it, go back to
00:25:53.040 the previous state, and then try something different again, which hopefully this time will be
00:25:57.360 an incremental improvement. You always want the increment to be central there. This slow kind of
00:26:03.840 improvement so that when things inevitably go wrong, problems are inevitable, you can then turn around
00:26:12.000 on a dime, hopefully, and go back to the way things were before and start again, essentially,
00:26:17.840 without too much damage. This is why evolution within the political sphere, evolution within
00:26:25.440 social change is so much more important than revolution. We're here now, speaking in 2021,
00:26:33.680 I often don't invoke contemporary matters in politics, but there's something going on called
00:26:38.880 the Great Reset. The Great Reset is where rich and powerful people are deciding that we need to
00:26:46.560 give up private property, that we have to completely revolutionize the way in which trade is
00:26:53.040 conducted, we have to revolutionize the way in which we think about political institutions,
00:26:57.440 they want the Great Reset. They want revolution, and there's always been people calling for
00:27:04.320 revolution. I mean, how good things are and how good things have become recently and how much
00:27:10.880 the pace of improvement has increased recently. There are people, the naysayers are still out there,
00:27:16.480 saying how terrible things are, and therefore, we need to have a revolution. We need to
00:27:21.600 undermine the very thing that has given us such great wealth and health and success and improving
00:27:29.840 everything from our physical environment by removing the pollution, removing illnesses that
00:27:37.680 were previously killing in a sort of far greater rate, as well as improving the individual lives
00:27:44.720 of people around the world, through increased freedom, wealth, trade, etc, and so forth. But these
00:27:51.920 changes must remain incremental, and if we start to follow the advice of people who want revolution,
00:28:00.400 then we end up undoing institutions that contain, as we've talked about throughout this series,
00:28:06.720 in explicit knowledge about how to keep a society stable, under great change. It is only the
00:28:14.960 Western civilizations following enlightenment traditions that have been able to maintain this
00:28:22.160 dynamism, this ability to just slowly improve the situation for everyone within that society
00:28:30.640 over time, and we don't know all the ways in which it works. We know some of the ways we can point
00:28:34.880 to different institutions and say the reason why we've been able to remain stable over time is
00:28:39.840 because often democratic, free and fair elections, a court system, an illegal system which is
00:28:47.440 blind to whoever the person is that it is accused of a crime, capitalism and the ability to
00:28:53.680 freely trade with people one to another. These things are part of the story, but the entire
00:29:01.200 story is not well known and well understood. We struggle to understand simple systems like
00:29:07.600 atoms and matter. Very, very clever people become particle physicists and trying to understand
00:29:14.080 the complexity of matter. But matter, the structure of matter is simple, compared to a civilization
00:29:20.800 and how societies actually maintain their stability over time, I would say we know more about
00:29:26.960 the standard model of particle physics, then we know about the conditions required in order to
00:29:33.600 maintain a stable civilization over time. Civilisations are the most complex thing that we know
00:29:41.360 about, the most complex thing that we know about, the most complicated structures that human beings
00:29:47.200 have ever come up with are these social civilizations. More complicated than Boeing 747 or an
00:29:53.840 Elon Musk rocket or a great ocean liner, you can compare civilizations to these things,
00:30:01.040 but then think orders of magnitude more complicated, more complex, the moving parts,
00:30:07.440 phenomenally complicated, and we don't know what they all are. Okay, so that's where I should end
00:30:13.920 it today. Coming up is one of my favourite anecdotes that David tells in the entire book,
00:30:22.000 or two, two, two great anecdotes in the book, one about how when he was at school there was
00:30:30.400 someone, one of these people who was saying the heavens are falling of course, there's going to be
00:30:35.520 great climate change and it's coming, it's coming just you wait, but of course it was the great
00:30:41.200 ice age that was coming when David was at school. And then of course the European story about
00:30:47.440 cathode ray tubes and how colour television would be coming to an end, I've told that story once
00:30:52.240 before as well, but finally we get to it in the book. It's a short one for today, but until
