 I prepared a little photograph to demonstrate what might be possible with other systems of technology, i.e. other systems of ritual. Ritual isn't just like these symbolic mumbo jumbo things, it is the primary way, again I'm going to emphasize it, is the primary way that human beings alter reality. Ritual is our collective creative tool, otherwise all you have is your own hands. So here's a picture, I'm going to share the screen and show you a picture from Egypt. When I was in Egypt, let's see here, there it is, okay so what you're looking at here is a ruin of an ancient temple from the dynastic period, the Old Kingdom I believe, so this is like 5,000 years old and you can see the size of these blocks. The Egyptian ruins that are from the Roman era, the Greco-Roman era, are made with limestone blocks that weigh a few tons each. Limestone is much softer than these, these are granite and they weigh the blocks in this picture away anywhere from 70 to 120 tons and were procured from a quarry, I think something like 150 kilometers away. This is before the invention of the wheel and even before the invention of bronze, so the only metal that they had was copper, granite is harder than steel, yet they were able to quarry these and you can see how precise they are, how well they fit together, they were able to quarry these without wheels, without animal power, without tools harder than copper and built these incredible works of architecture. There's some, and there's some that are even larger than this, we saw an obelisk that was something like 300 tons from a single piece of granite and how did they do this? We saw one where it was this underground shaft, like I think it was 40 or 50 meters underground, you go straight down this shaft and then underground there are these gigantic sarcophagi made from basalt and red granite that are again from one piece of stone that they somehow got down this shaft that was barely bigger than these pieces of stone and then moved into these small chambers that are in some cases just like a foot or half a foot bigger than the sarcophagus itself, like how do they lift that? I mean it's just this flagrant artifact that demonstrates that they had some kind of capability that is beyond our understanding, I mean there's only a handful of cranes in the world that can move 300 ton objects so today, you know, anyway I just, when I was, you know, I, when I was in Egypt and was faced with these things, it's maybe it's not so evident from the picture but when you see this thing, like my mind just quailed, it was like my mind melted with the sheer physicality of this object that it was almost like a message from the past saying we knew something that you no longer know so I'm going to return here. Yeah and so the narrative like part of our mythology is the narrative of ascent, I call it the narrative of progress that has a triumphalist tone and as I said before lends itself very much to colonialist and imperialist thinking that is really wavering now and I don't know, you guys are assuming that you're philosophy students, you're, you know, at a prestigious university you're highly rational and perhaps quite invested in the current system of knowledge production and its encompassing paradigms so you know this might be seem rather triggering or you know even irresponsible to some of you and it would have seemed that way to me too before I had had direct experiences that demonstrated unequivocally to me that reality that I had been, the reality that I had been offered was too small but I would say nonetheless that the, that normal reality is wavering having been breached on multiple fronts by scientific anomalies, social breakdown, political breakdown, economic breakdown, ecological breakdown, the story, especially the triumphalist tone, the story isn't working anymore, we no longer believe in it so wholeheartedly, we no longer believe that civilization is on the right track and that the future is going to unveil one wonder after another after another bringing us into technological paradise, curing every disease, ending crime, ending poverty, ending all suffering through the means and methods of reason, evidence and science as we have constituted them, we don't believe in that so much anymore, or at least I don't, I don't know about you guys maybe some of you have personal lifelines that do confirm that or maybe you believe it and don't believe it at the same time so I think I'll I'll end with that for the moment