Daniele Bolelli joins Joe Rogan to dissect human aggression—from giraffes whipping each other in nature to Rome’s gladiatorial spectacles and modern societal excesses like obesity and processed food reliance. He argues that ancient conflicts, like North Africa’s decimated wildlife for entertainment, reveal deeper truths about resilience versus sensitivity, advocating for practical history over romanticization. Bolelli’s meticulous podcast research (200 hours per episode) and upcoming December book contrast with Rogan’s critique of academic detachment, while both push for urban food production to reconnect people with primal self-sufficiency. [Automatically generated summary]
Dude, I am loving, rather, I should say, your new podcast, History on Fire, and it's just wonderful to hear your sultry Italian accent waxing poetically on the path.
I think it's like during conversation sometimes you need that micro mental break to just see okay where do I want to go with next you know but you don't want to leave an awkward pose so you're like throwing something out there just go like okay this is where I want to go next.
Yeah and you also don't want someone to like Jump in thinking you want them to talk, and you're in the middle of trying to form the sentence, and if they do jump in, then you'll totally lose it.
Italy is painful that way because, you know, normally you give two seconds, pause between somebody starting and somebody beginning the next conversation.
Italy, there's no pause.
Everybody's just there waiting for you to not stop, but slow down so that they can jump in.
And then you see people take a deep breath, kind of like...
I don't know if it's a generational thing or not because I've been, I got there back on vacation, so I don't have the pulse of the situation anymore the way you used to.
It may be a generational thing.
It was that way.
Certainly when I was growing up, there was clearly more attention spent.
But then again, that was before all the 3,000 things that we used to distract ourselves all the time where it's like somebody's talking to you, but I'm like, ah, let me send this email.
Tripping me out the other day, Aubrey Marcos gave me a call, and within about a minute I was thinking, And I love Aubrey, but the vibe for me was like, okay, great.
Hi, hi, what's up?
Now, what do you want?
And then I realized that he wasn't calling because he wanted anything.
He just wanted to say what's up and chat.
And I was like...
I forgot what it's like to be that way.
It's nice.
I like it.
You know, that's a good feeling where you just...
We are just talking because we like to talk to each other.
It's not like, hey, I need something or, you know...
I'm so used to that conversation now that everything is for a reason.
I was listening to this TED talk on the nature of happiness.
I forget the gentleman who was doing the speaking.
He had developed an app.
In the app, it would hit you with reminders and ask you questions like, what are you doing right now?
Are you enjoying what you're doing right now?
Is this what you want to do?
Things along those lines.
Then they would gather data.
So they added all their data from all the people that use the app, and one of the things they found was one of the least conducive things to happiness, one of the indicators that people are not happy, is when your mind is wandering.
Like, you're just sitting around, thinking of nothing, just sitting, doing nothing, and in those moments...
But when you're in the moment and you're occupied in something, whether you're creating something or whether you're writing something, whatever you're doing, those are the moments where people feel fulfilled and happy.
Yeah, that's why a class, whether it's a martial arts class or a yoga class, is really good for people because someone's telling you what to do.
Like, okay, now we're going to work on arm bars from the mount.
Get to the mount.
Okay, shift your hips to the left, grab the arm, pin it down.
In going through those steps, you're forced to concentrate on that thing, and because it's so intense, you're forced to be in that moment.
And that, for a lot of people, is a real, not just the physical relief of exercise, which is fantastic for the mind, but the relief of focus and concentration alleviates a lot of the bullshit that builds up when the mind is wandering.
I know this when I finally had a chance to start rolling again the last month or two.
I was just like, oh my god, I forgot.
Not only physically, as you say, how good it feels, but in that moment, you know, if your mind wanders too much, the guy's choking you, the guy's arm barring you.
You can't wander.
You have to be totally present in what you're doing.
And it It's just such a mental break that I thought I had all these issues when I walk into class and I walk out.
I'm like, huh, those problems?
You call those problems?
That's a joke.
Come on, no big deal.
Because suddenly you have lightened up.
You got rid of this heavy load that you're carrying.
And there's nothing like it, you know, something that puts you in the moment, but also your body.
Just do something that you have to concentrate on.
If you're lifting something heavy, like if you're trying to bench press or squat or something like that, while you're doing that, that is what you're concentrating on.
Isn't that amazing, though, that that's what the mind needs sometimes?
Just one primary, singular thing to focus on, and to focus on it intensely, and it's almost cleansing in a way.
Yeah, it's kind of like when you're having sex for too long and then you'd wait and suddenly everything in your brain switches.
All this shit that I thought I had on me, all this tension, all this stuff that I thought were real problems, you just haven't had sex for too many days either, right?
I mean, I, to this day, think that that is, especially for men, the primary reason why a lot of men exhibit, like, really pathetic behavior.
Because they are trying so hard to get women to like them, and nothing is working, and so they have fallen into this trap of becoming this, like, She-male thing.
This super feminist sort of always identifying with women's issues and trying to get women on your side.
It doesn't fucking work.
Dave Rubin, a guy who was on the podcast the other day, by the way, great guy and great podcast.
I had a great time with him.
But he tweeted something the other day, and it was a billboard that some poor fool had put up, and it said, Dear women, on behalf of all men, I'm sorry.
It's Not that there's anything wrong with siding with women if you agree that they've been fucked over or looking out for them or sympathizing or empathizing.
That's not the point.
It's just the behavior.
It's also an anti-masculine behavior, an anti-male behavior.
Maybe it's because they identify those characteristics with bullies or with people that were mean to them or people that caused them pain or frustration.
But it's also like this, it's traitorous.
You know what I mean?
It's like you're a gender traitor, like in some ways.
And to me, there's that bullshit dichotomy there where you either have the tough, strong, macho asshole who also kind of doesn't care about anybody's feelings, but you're strong.
That's the good side.
Or you have the sweet, mellow, sensitive, but if you say boo, then you go hide in a corner.
And the problem is that in trying to get rid of the asshole male side, people have also gotten rid of the good stuff about being a man, about the strength, the determination, the stereotypical masculine quality.
And it's like, that's not what we're trying to get rid of.
That's the good stuff.
You want to keep that.
You want to get rid of the...
1700s, gender role, I'm the man, I'll slap you around, go back in the kitchen kind of thing.
Yeah, I can see how that would be less than ideal, but getting rid of that doesn't mean getting rid of the good stuff at all.
That social justice warriors will throw around toxic masculinity.
The real problem with men adopting this idea is that they ignore the negative things that women have done.
Because it's not about women.
It's not about men.
It's about nice people.
That's really what it is.
I mean, there's feminine qualities that are beautiful and there's male masculine qualities that are beautiful and there's There's people on both sides that are out of their fucking mind and batshit crazy.
And to side with women on every occasion just because you're a man, you're saying, I'm sorry for all men before me and my apologies.
And it's funny because when you don't come from a place of need, suddenly women like you ten times as much as before.
There was a period where I did not...
I wasn't running anymore on the typical scripts that I've had for most of my life where it's like, hot woman, I want your attention.
Look at me.
I'm great.
Because I want something from you.
There was a period where...
Things happen in a way where I didn't care.
I was just like, if we hang out, I hang out because I'm happy to, but I don't want, yeah, you're a beautiful one, that's great, but I don't want anything from you.
And of course, the second that my brain switched away, suddenly we meant like 10 times more than before.
But there's something about being comfortable in your own skin and just not constantly acting because you're trying to impress somebody or you want somebody to, whether it's sex, whether it's attention, whatever that may be, because you want something from them.
It's like...
This is who I am.
You dig it, you dig it, you don't, you don't.
I'm still comfortable with who I am.
That makes such a difference in the way people will relate to you.
I think also that regardless of the words that you choose and the way that you say them and the sentences that you structure, I think people can feel intent and there's something about it.
There's an intangible quality to a needy person that even if they do say the right things and do it in the right order...
I've seen some videos online where they're actually critiquing people's approaches and strategies for getting women to talk to them.
There's like videos on it where a guy will have a hidden camera and he'll talk to a girl and like then the guys in the comments will be like, interesting, like opening, great game, I like how he's doing this.
Like they have like...
Like, moves.
Like, it's talking about, like, jujitsu or something.
There are cases where somebody becomes a hooker because their life sucks, they are on meth, they are this and that.
That's clearly not...
But I've...
I know women who did become sex workers who speak multiple languages, graduated from UCLA. They have jobs.
They have money.
And their ways, they have the power in the exchange because the way they are going to play it is that they consider it kind of like dating except that I pick my clients.
So it's like I'm sleeping around a lot, but I get paid bank for doing that.
Yeah, I've met girls that have done that, that have actually, like, had, like, wealthy men that they've had sex with.
And then they only had a few of them, and they fucked them a couple times a month, and that was how they made all their money.
Right.
But they didn't take other clients on.
And I was like, that is just weird.
But why is it weird?
Because when you look at a really hot woman, like the Donald Sterling situation, that old troll-looking raisin man, and he had that girl, the one that ratted him out and made those recordings...
She was hot.
She was young and hot with a nice body.
What do we think is going on there?
Why do we think he bought her a multi-million dollar condo and a Bentley and all that?
Is it okay to just buy people so you can exchange gold coins?
And I think that is a big part of what's going on.
Part of what's going on with campuses where they have this massive amount of attention that's being paid to sexual assault is very good in a lot of ways.
Because sexual assault, actual real sexual assault is horrific.
When I was in high school, I had once, there was this pretty hot girl who was just passed out drunk, and there was two guys at the party who were clearly just moving in in that direction.
They were clear and obvious about what was going on.
That was like There was no ambiguity there.
It's like, that is, you're trying to rape somebody.
That's not...
So I remember just, I had my good Samaritan day of my life where I just kind of picked her up, walked her outside, help her throw up, and all the whole...
Because I was like, no, this is a bad scenario right here.
This is not a pleasant one.
And it's not, again, the one where everybody's drunk and it's different, there's no intent.
This is somebody who say, oh, vulnerability, I'm going after that.
Yeah, I would assume that when it's not something that's almost impossible to attain.
Because you think about it like the average guy who makes a good living, you know, maybe occasionally you could afford to spend $500 on a prostitute or whatever the hell it costs, but...
The idea of getting that prostitute to be in a sexual relationship with you voluntarily is almost out of the question.
Well, and about this stuff that we're talking about, the sex work, I find it hilarious when people look down on it, kind of like, oh my god, I don't I'm like, do you work the job you have?
Is that a job that you would have if nobody pays you?
Would you do that same stuff anyway?
And 99% of people would say, no, it's because I want to get paid.
So explain to me exactly how you're different from a hooker.
That's what people don't really, truly comprehend.
And I didn't truly comprehend until I got older.
Because when I was a kid and I was in school...
Okay, I graduated from school in 1985. That's when I graduated from high school.
And if you stop and think about that, 20 years before that was the height of all that freaky shit.
It was alive and popping in 1965. That's like...
That's not that long ago, man.
That's 1995 to us.
Like, 1995 seems like just a few years ago.
To think about 1995 just being freaks and hippies and Woodstock and chaos, and then the government just threw water on the whole thing.
Put that fire out!
And everything calmed down in the 70s, and in the 80s they gave everybody Coke, and then Miami Vice, and Don Johnson didn't have any socks on.
He's driving around a little...
Ferrari Testarossa.
And it all sort of got to this different place.
Like they took the drugs out of the equation and there was this big void and no one knew what to do.
And it just sort of like had this chaotic bouncing against the wall thing where it was trying to find its equilibrium and find its harmonious vibration to get back to where it would have been.
It's really amazing when you get older and you realize that 10 years is nothing.
It's such a, like, 10 years ago was 2005. That is exactly like today.
What is the difference between 2005 and today?
No iPhones.
Other than that, what's the difference?
We were all online.
Everybody had email.
I mean, there was less social media and things along those lines, but ultimately, there's very little difference between today and 2005. If you had a 2005 car, that's a nice car.
You could drive that around and be just like a modern car, or a 2015 car.
No different.
Not much difference in the music.
You know, you can listen to some music from 2005. It's pretty similar.
And if you were, you know, local, but, you know, you're on the ball, you get the Boston Globe.
I used to deliver all three of them.
The New York Times was very rare, and whenever I would deliver the New York Times, the dude always had like a BMW or a Saab or something like that, you know?
They always had like some cool car, and they lived in a cool house, and they just, they wanted to be more into, they didn't want to live in New York necessarily, or if they did, they didn't have the funds to move there, but they wanted to be worldly.
Like, I remember, you know, like, there was this guy that I knew that would, you know, he would read all the papers.
He'd read the Times, he'd read the Herald, and I would ask him, like, why, you know, why do you read all these different papers?
Why not just pick one and read them?
He's like...
To really get a sense of what's going on in the world, you really got to read all of them.
Like, the New York Times will cover some subjects globally that the Boston Globe won't.
The Boston Herald doesn't give a fuck about what's happening anywhere but Boston.
And there was, like, this thing where you had to kind of, like, search around to get a sound, like a distant sound of the Earth, of, like, what's actually going on on the planet.
When I was growing up, me being in Italy too, which was even further removed from some of the news, I love basketball.
And I remember when I was maybe eight, nine years old, I wanted to find out who won the NBA Finals.
There was the game on Sunday.
What happened?
And I literally would have to call the one magazine in Italy that dealt with basketball that would come out once a month.
And I would call them and they had talked to their friend in New York who had told them who won.
Otherwise, I would have had to wait probably three weeks until that next issue come up who tells you who won the NBA final a month earlier.
That's the world that I grew up in.
And so it's like, when you think about today, you can be on the top of the Himalaya, and if you find the right connection, you can watch the game live.
You're crossing a boundary, which is like the border to the city, the gates to the brothel or to the castle or to wherever you're trying to break into.
And they even had these, all the top schools were Ivy League, upper class, you know, super rich people.
And then one of the top schools was Carlisle Indian School, which was the lowest of the law, like poorest people in the United States, Indian kids who got sent there in boarding schools.
They had nothing to do.
They would play football.
And so what they would do is that they would study the rulebook, try to figure out what is that nobody's doing.
The technical is legal, but what kind of loophole can we play with?
And they would start using some tactic that nobody had used, kill everybody in the process.
So then the league goes, okay, we can't have them Indians beating Harvard, so let's change the rules.
There were some that were released, but basically they developed the game of football in terms of how, you know, this constant game between the league and the Indian school where these guys use some loophole, the league comes in, makes it illegal.
And then the next time they use a different loophole and then the league comes in.
And so a lot of the rules of football were shaped to start, okay, those guys do it, let's stop it.
And it's funny how the stereotypes change over time, because you had Thad Russell on the show, like in his book, how he breaks down how many of the early natural Jewish athletes, which you're like, what?
Well, if you are used to, I mean, it's almost stereotypical, but if you are used to toughness throughout your life, then climbing in the ring doesn't seem like much.
If you are all sheltered and protected, climbing in the ring is scary as hell.
And it's also like the hunger that you have because your life has been like just filled with despair and Struggle and in a lot of abuse they're like violence becomes like some sort of an automatic response to reaching out for abuse you know reaching out and In response for the abuse you've suffered.
That's where a chip on your shoulder comes from, right?
It's like someone just waiting for someone to say some shit because you've just been dealing bottled up.
Like everybody that I know that grew up in a tough neighborhood, they have a sharpness to them, you know?
And there's a character that they have, that they possess, that the people that grew up super cushy and some, you know, Connecticut country club estate type situation.
More just like, you know, people who deal, people who rob, you know, that kind of thing, where it's like the guys who are some serious artists of just shoplifting, who just can go into a store and walk out, and they would do it pretty much professionally, where they make a living by, you know, stuff like that, where it's always like crossing, definitely doing illegal stuff.
Not...
I mean, I've met some guys who are probably more well-connected in a more formal way, but that was not the normal thing.
But the normal thing was guys who do a lot of illegal stuff, or maybe they are not technically against it in a strict sense, but people who get into a lot of fights, that kind of thing, where it's sort of outside of the normal rules of civilized society.
But to me, there are clear rules of what you do with those guys.
Usually, if you treat them with respect and you don't show yourself to be a wimp, they treat you fairly well if you know how to play the game.
If you don't, these guys will test you.
And if they smell weakness, then they'll clamp down on you.
Or if you look down on them, they will clamp down on you.
There's a very clear rule of the game that if you play it right, you can have very mellow, pleasant interactions.
Yeah, it was a heavy-duty movie, and the movie was all about these Mexican gangbangers, and apparently he had become friends with these guys, in air quotes, friends, while filming this movie, and just got way too close, and they just started extorting him.
And they started demanding money, and they knew where he lived, and it became a real fucking issue.
And that weakness right there, because if they smell that you want something from them or that you look up to them in some way, then that's weakness.
If they see you putting them down, that's also a challenge.
So you're kind of screwed if you do one thing, you're screwed if you do another.
There's sort of a narrow way.
It's not too narrow.
There's a way to do it, but if you step outside of it, yeah, you're fucked.
Yeah.
But it's the same thing as getting into fights.
If you are too aggressive, you will get into fights because you're challenging people and you're backing them in against the corner and they have to fight you back.
But if you are too mellow, then people won't respect you and they see you as weak and they come after you.
You kind of have to have that boundary where you're polite to people, you're nice, but the message is, look, I'm nice because I choose to.
If you decide to cross that line, I'm going to fuck you up right now.
And that vibe where it's like, you can bring up the goods when it comes down to throwing down, but you don't volunteer it.
You're not this macho guy who's like trying to get into a fight.
That's what usually people who are out for a fight tend to respect and bug away from.
It's like, that guy, I'm not going to pick that guy.
I mean, you think about like dogs, like certain dogs.
If you're around dogs and you panic and you run, they'll chase you and bite you.
It's like instinctive on their part.
They almost can't help it.
Whereas if you encounter dogs or even some wild animals, you know, and they say you have to stand your ground or yell at them, like mountain lions especially.
There's also a natural thing when groups of men meet.
It's almost like it's a tribal thing that's in our DNA back to when you would run into people, you know, out in the field, and it would turn into a war, almost like an instinctive bonding thing.
I wonder if that's where, like, because a lot of...
That human beings have ever created or committed rather they they've committed in the process of war right now They say that during the process of war like people are capable of horrific terrifying things they would never do ordinarily and then also they say that When you have like this mob mentality like people will do things like Gang rapes or gang murders gang beatings lootings lighting places on fire like
The behavior escalates to this really insane place that is very, very rare for someone to go to on their own as an individual.
I wonder if that's ingrained in us because of this It's a long history of war in the human race that when you get a bunch of men together and a bunch of men on the other side, we just immediately go to fucking scorched earth.
It's immediately cutting off heads and lighting bodies on fire and catapulting them onto rooftops.
Yeah, I tried to explain that to somebody once when I was talking about street fights.
And I was saying that, you know, if you get into a fight with someone, you're not just getting into a fight.
You're signing a contract that you will be in conflict with them back and forth until it's resolved.
It's not as simple as you get in a fight.
It's very rare that two people get in a fight and then after that fight's over, like, it's over.
We'll shake hands and walk away.
Even often in a contest, like a jujitsu match or a kickboxing match or something along those lines, After it's over, people are still upset if they lose, and they still want to get that guy back.
But a fight fight, like an actual fight on the street fight, oh my god, that can go on for years.
What was the famous feud in America?
The Hatfields and the McCoys, right?
These two wacky families killed each other back and forth for years.
Let's figure out a way, a mutually agreeable way, where we can walk away and have some dignity.
It's really fascinating.
I had this conversation with Duncan once, and it was the first time I ever thought this, but I said that the history of the human race is essentially military history.
Why is it that the stuff that makes the history book is all the horrible atrocity, massacre, war, set people on fire?
Is it that just we don't do anything else or that it doesn't catch our attention?
I wish there was a way to also put the spotlight in history on some more mellow aspects of people who figured out ways to live a good life in the middle of all the shit that was going down.
It seems so much of it is, as you're saying, it's all military stuff.
I mean, when you look at the history of the United States, what are the events that people talk about?
Well, arguably, the whole slavery, right?
Arguably, that's a war because it's a war on these people's sovereignty.
It's a war on their freedom.
And then a real war breaks out between the North and the South over the rights to this and then the economic aspects of it.
And then you look at World War I, of course, and World War II.
So we've got to fight the Nazis and then we got freedom and all this.
I mean, it's the entire country, like the history of this country is war.
And then you go back to Europe.
Well, the history of Europe is all war, too.
Now, other than figuring out the printing press and a bunch of different cool inventions.
One of the great podcasts that Dan Carlin did on history that's not necessarily about war is Riddled with Violence, The Prophets of Doom, about Martin Luther.
But I think a lot of it is there's a bias in the record because it's a cheap, easy way to get people's attention.
And so most of our history, it's an easy way for us to go down that path.
And I do it too, right?
If I look at 90% of the episodes I'm preparing for History on Fire, I'm like, oh, great.
It's another beheading of this, and it's another...
But why don't we—and I don't mean we as in—I mean in general.
It's like people who write history, our way of thinking.
Why—I'm not denying that part.
That's an important part, and we should look at it.
But why don't we also look at other things?
It's like, what's wrong with studying about, you know, putting the accent more on stuff about people dropping acid and having sex outside of marriage a lot more and listening to cool music and coming out with Jimi Hendrix?
And why is that that less important than the Cold War?
It's not.
To me, that just is...
I mean, how many people's life has it touched or has transformed that way?
A lot, as much as, you know, sometimes we think whose precedent is history.
In fact, in most of our lives, whose precedent is at most mildly important, at most, and there are so many other things that count for so much more.
But why is it that then when we write a history, it's about whose precedent and what war took place when there's so much other stuff in our lives that...
When we were talking about the 60s, isn't a big part of the 60s, though, the Vietnam War and the resistance to the Vietnam War?
And that sort of fueled that sort of crazy hippie behavior because they realized that these old assholes and their shitty, stupid ways had led us into the South Pacific in this crazy war that nobody wanted.
I mean, that's a big part, I think, of the rebellion of the 1960s.
It's almost unavoidable because that's the worst thing that can happen.
See, the worst thing that can happen is someone kills you or kills your loved ones, right?
So when that happens en masse, you know, like in war, well, those become the biggest blips on the social radar.
Well, what's unavoidable, it seems like, at least historically, I'm not saying about for the future, but war seemed unavoidable.
Because it was never avoided.
I mean, it's hard to argue that war is avoidable when it's never been avoided.
It's like, you kind of, at a certain point in time, you know, if a girl acts like a cunt all the time, she's always screaming and yelling and clawing and pulling chicks' hairs, and she's like, I'm not a cunt.
But as soon as you get more than three, As soon as you get more than 10, like if there was 10 of us, if it was 10 of us living on an island, man, the odds of somebody getting jacked, it goes up.
Because one of the cool things about giraffes is that they're an animal that's so universally gentle that you can have babies feed them.
Like my daughter, when she was two years old, they give you lettuce and you hold out the lettuce and the giraffe comes over with this crazy tongue that's like an arm and they reach out with their tongue and it wraps it around the leaves and it pulls it.
But they're so confident in their behavior around people They let babies feed them.
But you get these two motherfuckers together and they fight over some pussy.
It's like they'll stab each other, and they put these horrible gashes in their body, and then like a week later, it's like completely sealed up, and they're just walking around like nothing happened.
Like, a lot of people will kill an old deer, and then they open its mouth up, and they go, wow, he would have never made it through the winter, because their teeth are gone.
They just have a very finite resource with those teeth.
The inbreeding began up to 200 years ago as European settlers pushed into southern Ontario and cleared the animal's habitat for farming and killed a large number of wolves that lived there.
It also allowed coyotes to spread from the prairies, and the white farmers brought dogs into the region.
Over time, wolves began mating with their new, genetically similar neighbors, and the resulting offspring, which had been called the Eastern Coyote, or to some, the Coy Wolf, now number in the millions according to research of North Carolina State University This is really interesting stuff, man.
An analysis of 437 hybrid animals found that the coyote DNA dominates its genetic makeup with about one-tenth of its DNA from dogs, usually from a larger dog such as Doberman, Pinchers, and German Shepherds, and a quarter from wolves.
That's always where you wonder about evolution going wrong.
When you see those animals, you know, you think about wolves and then you see some of the dog species today, I'm like, how the fuck did you come about?
They did a study on foxes, a really interesting study that they highlighted in this Radiolab podcast.
But they were talking about genetic diversity in foxes where they only allowed the foxes that were timid and more accepting of human touch and to be around humans, they only allowed them to live.
And they sort of like bred Let those breed with other ones.
And over like 10 years, they had completely changed the fox DNA. They had completely changed to the point where their ears were no longer pointed.
Well, that's what they're finding now more and more, the more they study life, is that life can evolve and change and shift and adapt incredibly quickly.
So, like, there's this BBC documentary on the Congo, and one of the cool things is seeing this swampy, crazy rainforest, and then seeing these deer run through the water of the rainforest.
These antelopes.
And you're like, whoa!
They're supposed to be in grasslands, and they're just trapped in this insanely dense rainforest.
It became something that adapted to that environment.
They can eat fish.
But they found that deer eat birds.
They didn't know that until really recently.
And one of the ways they found it was through camera traps.
Because they have these trail cams that people put up when they're hunting.
And when they put up these trail cams, as the trail cams got more and more sophisticated, they started using video trail cameras.
And as the video trail cameras started, you know, they get the data back from them, they started finding, like, occasionally birds, like deer would eat ground-nesting birds.
It's like where I live, there's regularly, almost on a monthly basis, there's like some cute little birds nesting, the eggs are hatching and everything, and the hawk regularly come by and just rip the shit out of them, and I find Pieces of birds everywhere, and it's pretty nasty.
I saw, not so long ago, I was coming back home and I hear this bird just yapping away, just making this crazy noise.
I'm like, what the hell?
And I look up in the tree and I see this one bird just...
Just mad, just going...
And then I see that right next to it, like maybe 10 feet away, there's this hawk that has another bird in his mouth that looks exactly like the one that's yelling.
So this one is probably like saying, you son of a bitch, you are just eating my wife.
There's a crazy video online from Alaska of this kid and his whole family.
Their lawn is covered with bald eagles, and they were throwing out fish.
They had some salmon, so they had filleted the salmon, and then they had the bottoms, the ribs and the heads and all that stuff, and they had thrown it out for these eagles, and their fucking lawn is just overwhelmed with bald eagles.
So we like to think of bald eagles as being something extremely endangered and protected.
And they throw these buckets of fish out for them.
But they have eagles all over the place up there.
In California we have some eagles still.
We have golden eagles.
They still find them.
But they're just not, for whatever reason, not nearly as common as they are up there in Alaska.
I guess it's also probably because they have a lot of food up there with all the salmon.
The salmon runs.
This is just one part of the video.
This video is pretty long.
But see, they're sitting around waiting for this guy to chuck fish heads for them.
It's just an amazing animal.
This animal, this flying raptor that really is probably exactly like what the dinosaurs are like.
It's fascinating when they find more and more evidence that many dinosaurs had feathers.
And I think there's really probably not much difference between some birds...
Like eagles, and some dinosaurs.
And then they know that some birds, even birds that lived fairly recently, like the terror birds, They were these large, flightless, six-foot, seven-foot-tall birds.
If I see some sparrows or something like that, I think we can relate more in the sense of, you know, as human beings, we have, you know, hunting and gathering has been, what, 95% of the time we've been around.
It's what we did.
It's what has been the norm for human beings for the longest period of time.
And like I said, this is like real close to where the studio is.
And this is a guy had a chicken coop and this thing figured out how to get in his chicken coop and was eating one of his chickens in his coop and found it.
And ultimately, I mean, I can see that point where it's probably better to have a lot of mountain lion than it is a lot of Lyme disease from ticks and a lot of deer slamming into cars like you do in places that don't have high mountain lion populations.
You know, like Michigan or something like that, where they have a lot of them.
Where I took like, they have, you know, the irregular roads that you can take with the car.
Then they have some dirt roads that you can still take with the car.
So I was kind of off the beaten path.
And all of a sudden, I find myself in the middle of like probably 300 buffaloes.
So I kind of stop the car, wait there, and they are going everywhere around me, right?
There's like one side to the car, the other in front of me, behind me.
And they are big, powerful animals.
You know, you see them, you're praying not to piss them off because they are solid, you know, they don't mess around.
He was awesome, though.
I mean, once I figured, okay, these guys don't want to fuck with me, they just want to move around me and they don't care, he was great because you see all the calves running after them.
They're beautiful.
They're really awesome animals.
And, yeah, that's the thing with all wild species that are cooler than, you know, all the domesticated species tend to be dumber, tend to be a lot like, Oh, somebody's going to bring me food anyway.
Well, when chickens brood, you have to remove them from their regular nest because they'll sit in the nesting box and they'll pull their feathers off and they get sick.
And they can do it for like a month and a half at a time.
So what you got to do is you got to put them in a small cage for a couple days where they have to stand on a rail.
They have to clutch and sit on this rail.
And you do that for a couple days and then they'll get over their brooding instincts and get normal again.
I thought the only way that a chicken makes an egg is if she gets fucked by a rooster, and then an egg comes out, and then they sit on the egg, and it becomes a chicken, and you just got to get the egg before the chicken hatches, and you cook it.
There's a video of this guy hiking and he's hiking and as he's hiking this mountain lion just sitting there staring at him watching him.
He's on this trail and he starts making noise and smacking sticks against the ground but it's like that guy probably came super close to getting eaten.
They track quite a few of them, but I guess when it comes to large, big predators, it's probably one of the best ones to have around because they have plenty of shit that they eat.
They keep away from people for the most part.
But it is weird that we just...
Not only do we want to help them, they're setting up these...
They're like bridges that go across the highway because one of the ways that mountain lions die is trying to cross the highway.
I like to go to Big Bear because, you know, it's only two hours away from me or something, but it's awesome.
It's like a whole other environment.
It's beautiful, the trees, everything.
So I like to go out there.
And the place where I usually go, I was chatting with some neighbors and they were telling me, yeah, you know, these days bears have stopped coming around.
I'm like, why?
What's up?
He's like, oh, because a mountain lion moved into the neighborhood and even they are freaked out by him.
I mean, the bears in Big Bear are not this huge They're black bears.
Exactly.
And appearing to this mountain lion is extra aggressive and the bears decided, let's move to a nicer neighborhood.
Yeah, even just because they are hunting doesn't mean they're going to be successful because, of course, a bunch of times you fail.
And I think that's part of the interesting conflict is something's going to happen and the two sides, whoever the two sides are, are trying opposite things.
So there's this conflict of will and somebody's going to get their way and somebody isn't.
So there's that element of excitement that almost makes you want to bet on it like, Who's going to win?
Who's going to step up with their A game and succeed?
Who's going to fall miserably?
It's cool when you watch fights.
It's cool when you watch anything.
Even if it's not a fight, if it's the lion chasing the gazelle, it's like, can the gazelle speed leave the lion in the dust and just leave him pissed off and hungry?
Or is it going to...
There's that question there.
It's like, let's see how they play their cards when life is on the line, you know?
Yeah, and that contemplation of how the outcome's gonna go down, like, that, for whatever reason, is one of the most compelling things that people can watch.
We're so strange in that regard.
That is, like, one of the most interesting things for people.
I mean, that's why the Romans, I mean, when they were feeding lions or Christians, that's what that was all about.
It's like to see how long that guy can last in there.
So one thing that would happen was after they would have the beasts either fight each other or they would have the lions eat Christians or something, then a typical thing is that after the end of the day when a whole bunch of these animals have been killed in one fight or another, The Roman emperors, to kind of look cool and popular with the crowds, would then distribute the meat to all the poor people of Rome.
So all the animals killed in the arena would then be eaten by all the poorest people in Rome as a freebie.
Because you're a poor person, and you're more likely than not, a lot of people in Rome were pretty close to starving a lot of the times, nothing got to be thrown away.
You eat anything, right?
You eat the whole animal.
Whatever they give you, you eat it.
So what does that mean?
That means that among other things that would end up as weird exotic dish on a Roman table, sometimes you get also the interiors of animals that have just been eating people.
So through via second hand you're also eating people since you're eating stomach contents of a lion that just got killed in the arena and that lion just finished feeding on a Christian so you're having a lion Christian burger for yourself.
That is the civilization that we always point to when we talk about excess leading to chaos, leading to...
The decline of civilization.
We always talk about Rome, but isn't the United States way more fucked up and decadent than Rome ever was, except for feeding Christians to lions?
Other than that, if you look at the overall numbers of death Yeah, there's a lot of strange stuff going on.
The shit that we've done to the environment, shit that we've done, I mean, just a sheer number of human beings you're dealing with, 350, what is it, somewhere 350 million?
Because they were killing thousands upon thousands of them, that they literally, they drove some species extinct in North Africa, at least in that part, you know.
Remember when Pride was on and there was this wacky Japanese matchmaking where they would have like, let's throw the 600-pound hood against the 150-pound.
Let's see what happens.
You know, it's like...
Roman's matchmakers were like Japanese matchmakers.
They had those ideas.
It's like, I wonder what happens if we throw a lion and a bear.
But yeah, either case, it started out probably as a religious thing, and then it evolved into, oh, this is fun, screw the religion, but just let's have a good time.
Well, we always point to the decadence of the Roman Empire as being like the pinnacle of excess, right?
Yeah.
That's how we look at it.
But then you go to Disneyland and you see people on scooters everywhere you go where they've eaten themselves into these gelatinous beanbag style human beings.
I was just at Disneyland.
Every time I go, there are more scooters.
There's more and more people just getting so big that they can't walk.
Yeah, let's make it easier for people to lead themselves to that because that's what we want.
One of the reasons why I think it's interesting for many people in the U.S. to study Rome and there's this fascination for Rome is because the parallels are not that hard to see.
You see that super powerful civilization that keeps growing and growing in power.
And eventually hit the tipping scale of excess gets more and more.
People have a confier life, so they do get softer.
And then you are getting ready for the fall in the face of somebody else, tougher and stronger, who comes from a harsher life, who's going to It's the same stuff as the Roman Empire, right?
No, it's a tough balance between living too harshly, where, yeah, you become this war machine, but that's a sucky life, and living too softly, when it's a real delicate game.
And I mean, you know how it is.
With your kids, you want things easy for them.
You want to make everything as easy, as pleasant as possible, but if you make it too easy, you turn them into wimps.
And so if you make it too hard, they'll hate your guts because it's like, fuck you, you're needlessly making my life hard.
So it's like that very delicate game of making feel people loved, giving them support, helping them when needed, but then also teaching them how to be strong.
And that does not happen through softness.
It doesn't happen through making everything easy for them.
Yeah, I wonder if that's the only way to create someone or to engineer the life of a human being that has character.
There's got to be ways that you can teach them through difficult tasks or through athletic endeavors.
I mean, my life was definitely fucked up up until the time where I was in high school, but all of my, I think my real character development, who I became, The harder parts was when I was in a really nice neighborhood.
I lived in Newton, which is like a really nice suburb of Boston.
But that was when I was doing martial arts.
That's when I was competing.
So I... like consciously or Purposely did something really difficult because that was what I was interested in I wasn't thinking oh this difficult thing will make me a real You know interesting man when I grow up and this will provide me with all this character development No,
it's like that was what I really wanted to do for whatever reason I was compelled to it and then the byproduct of that was I developed character I developed the ability to push myself and discipline and But I did it without having to go through horrible neighborhoods.
I mean, people beat me up in the gym, but nobody beat me up in the street.
Nobody robbed me.
I didn't get shot or stabbed.
But I developed character in a way that's similar to what someone would probably go through if they went through some really bad, violent times.
And I think you nailed it right there because you're bringing up something that's not...
You're going to get tough because we're going to throw you in the street and you're going to fight every day against some crazy kids with knives and you survive.
You're going to be tough.
It's like, well, that's a little.
But at the same time, it's not let's have you sheltered.
And I think martial arts in that regard is perfect.
You know, combat sports are great because they do teach you toughness, but they're still within a relatively protected environment.
Nobody's going to pull out a gun on you.
Nobody's going to, you know...
It's tough, but it's civilized stuff.
It's not throw people to the walls and pray for the best.
So it's a nice medium.
And I think the more we make our life easier, which we want to, we do need to engage in things that keep the toughness alive, at least to some degree.
You know, it's like you're not gonna be tough the way the one guy who survived out of a hundred was being thrown to the wolves, but at the same time, you still have that muscle there.
It's not completely gone because you are just all about...
Because then now you end up with people who are very pleasant, very nice, very sweet, and complete wimps and don't have a spine, and then it's like...
They don't have any experience in overcoming difficult situations.
I oftentimes think about that when I think about animals.
Because, you know, I have dogs and I have cats, and my animals have zero...
I mean, I guess they would kill something, but they're not mean at all.
But if you see a wild animal, an animal that has to Get its own food.
They're so different.
And the only way you can get an animal that's tame is you have to provide them with all their food and that you have to bypass all of their natural predatory instincts that every dog has and every cat has.
And there's a way to bypass it.
You just got to give them steady food and love, steady food and love, steady food and love.
And in doing that, you quote unquote, domesticate them, right?
And that's kind of also what's happening with people.
You know, what we are doing with human beings is turning people into these fluffy sort of kitty cat type people.
And the balance is not 50-50, maybe 90-10, but you still need to have a little of that other side.
It's always that there's a...
Once you go 100-0, then you really lost something.
It's like, where exactly is that balance in a desirable place, where you are a strong person, but you're also pleasant and sweet and nice, and you can do all the things that we want in a civilized conversation without you being weak?
Because that's the other aspect.
When people lack the tough side, Then I don't buy their niceness either because it's like you're nice because that's the only thing you can be.
You don't even have the option not to be nice because you don't know how.
You don't know what it takes to instead step up and be extra assertive and extra tough.
If someone is generous because they want to be generous, not because they have to be generous.
Yeah, it's a strange fine line.
Why I've been focusing on this and obsessed with this lately is...
I've gotten this weird idea in my head.
Not necessarily weird, but this inescapable thought about human beings domesticating themselves with supermarkets.
And that supermarkets are in many ways a lot like serving a cat a bowl of cat food every day.
And that in removing the equation of having to go out and cut the wheat and pick the vegetables and kill the animals that you eat and instead just show up at the supermarket, buy it, throw it in the cart, that what we've done is we've developed like a system of domestication and the supermarket or the fast food restaurant or wherever you're getting your food in a lot of ways serves the same purpose that a master does to a pet.
And that we're slowly domesticating the human animal in that way.
I think there's a lot of parallels there.
And that's one of the reasons also I think why people get angry.
Even people that eat meat when they find other people hunt.
I think that they're reacting to this path that they're on and it's a path of domestication.
Even if it's irrational, even if they eat meat, and I've had the most irrational, which is people that are strict vegetarians or vegans, but they have animals they feed meat to.
But the rationalizations, I feel like they form such a common pattern that you almost have to take into consideration the fact that those rationalizations may in fact be natural protective mechanisms for this domestication process to take place.
And I think that as we become more and more peaceful and more and more civilized, like, I would say, and I think everyone agrees, that this is probably the safest time for human beings to live ever.
I mean, when you look at so much of human history, there's always the guys from over the hill who are going to come up and slaughter your family at the drop of a dime.
So now the fact that most people in many countries in the world are not in that situation, it's kind of unique.
It's awesome.
It's not something that in most of recorded history you can find evidence of.
It is amazing that this is one of the only times that we've ever recorded where people show up in places where they don't know anybody and they're welcome.
Yeah, I know Chris, Ryan, there are many people who have the theory that, like, Way, way, way in a distant past, in hunting and gathering time, people were not more mellow.
There was less war.
And then there's the other campo that argues, no, no, hunting and gathering times were a crazy conflict.
It didn't happen that often because there were few people, so they don't run into each other that much.
And the reality is, I don't know who's right.
I don't think either one is completely right in the sense that I don't think it was a peace and love scenario because that's not how human beings operate.
And I don't think it was this model that only states can save you from violence because otherwise everybody's always killing each other.
I don't necessarily think that's either...
But clearly, I mean, we do have evidence that people bash each other's brains forever, you know, for a long time.
How frequent that was, that's the question, and there are different schools of thought in that regard, and it's kind of hard to come up with a conclusive answer.
But other than that scenario, which is so far in the past that we don't have that much solid evidence on, for much of the history that we do have records about, yeah, people do nasty shit to each other all the time.
Which exists right now in some parts of the world, you know?
I mean, that's how some indigenous cultures still operate to this day.
But yet there's also indigenous cultures like the ones in New Guinea, which are the sperm warriors of New Guinea, which is, you know that story, right?
No, that's why, in fact, romanticizing it is silly, but at the same time, demonizing it is...
And I don't mean this, because yeah, this is fucked up, but I mean tribal culture.
There's great stuff there.
There's awful stuff there.
There's human stuff there, right?
There's the whole spectrum of it all.
And I do like what Chris is doing in terms of I don't know who's historically 100% right in that debate about how cool or not so cool ancient tribal societies were, but I do like where Chris is going with it in terms of what is that we can learn either from the actual history or from something that sounds cool that may not exactly have happened away, but it gives us an idea.
Because ultimately, who the fuck cares what they did 10,000 years ago?
It's about what you can do now.
So if that gives you an idea of what you can do now to make life better, I don't care whether it really happened or not.
And that goes back to the stupid stereotypes of masculine and feminine, of what it means to be a man or a woman.
Of course there are genetic stuff, and that's a given.
There's not even an argument that some of it is natural.
But then there's also a bunch of it that is nurture and that is also how you raise.
And somebody may have a tendency going one way, but if you teach them, you can balance it out in other ways.
To me, even the most interesting people are the ones I have both, that have the stereotypical sensitivity from the supposed to be female, but they are also tough.
And who the hell said that being...
Emotionally sensitive is only for women or that being tough is only for men.
I get bored with both people.
Unless you have both, unless I can relate to you on multiple levels, it's boring.
The typical girly girl is like, Jesus, I'm out of here in three seconds.
It's like this is killing me.
It's so boring.
But also the typical guy who breaks a beer bottle off his head, burping, watching football, that's not exactly, okay, that's great for about 10 minutes and then I'm out.
To me, it's like develop human beings that are strong and sensitive.
Yeah, that's why one of the biggest problems growing up is if you're stuck in a neighborhood.
If you're stuck in a neighborhood, and the people in your neighborhood are all stupid, and there's no one interesting to draw from, there's no one to find that you can relate to.
Like, I remember being a kid, and, you know, you have a few good friends that you really enjoy hanging out with, and when they weren't around, you would hang out with dummies, and you'd be like, oh my god.
It's so taxing.
If you have the wrong...
Just by a roll of the dice, find yourself in a neighborhood where people are prejudiced or ignorant or aggressively ignorant or aggressively prejudiced.
You can just have a terrible time.
You just want to stay home and be locked in your environment.
And I think until the internet came around, that was the biggest issue in children growing up.
You were a subject to your environment or a victim of your environment sometimes, a product of your environment.
That's why even what we're doing right now, the idea that somebody in Sweden can download and listen to what's happening, That's pretty...
I mean, shit, I would have loved to have grown up with that possibility of listening into conversation so that I'm not trapped into the immediate world that is in the few miles for where you are born and where you are raised, but you get access.
And then you realize, well, there are people out there who have a different way of thinking other than...
I mean, think about even when TV came around and somebody in the middle of the United States in a town of 5,000 people suddenly could see people who look different, hear different conversations.
It must have been the most freeing thing in the world.
But he said that funny that in the 1950s, all the advertisers, all the programmers thought, in order to attract people, we need to make the content as Not controversial.
Like, the most uncontroversial thing possible.
We make it very square.
We make it very safe.
No sex.
No violence.
We make it no...
And you see what we are attracted to today is like 180 completely.
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It's like, give me Spartacus with, you know, orgies and violence and that, you know...
Like, if someone's listening to Howard Stern in the morning, right, and they're hearing all this crazy shit, that's the same person that might watch the Big Bang Theory or America's Got Talent at night, and it's squeaky clean.
Especially with nudity, where it's like if you show any kind of nudity, automatically it's the highest possible restriction because that's going to fuck up your brain, right?
If you see a boob, now you're going to be screwed for life.
And just like, you know, a guy who just decided, look, I'm going to take a crazy chance.
Like, look, we have these Quentin Tarantino movies where guys are getting their ears cut off, where they're taking these crazy chances with violence and Pulp Fiction, where the guy gets shot in the head and the brains splatter over the back seat and there's all these racial slurs being thrown around by white people to black people.
This is all fine.
But a guy getting his cock sucked in a movie.
You could see, like, if she dropped down to her knees and you only saw the back of her head and she was sucking his cock, that would be okay.
I don't remember if I mentioned that to you before or not, because it cracks me up so much.
But there was a study in Utah a few years ago, because the way the Supreme Court had set up the obscenity laws, they basically said that it boils down to the standards of the community, of whether the community finds obscene or not.
So in Utah, they were saying, well, we are a very conservative community, so we want all the hotel chains in Utah to not be able to allow to use porn.
They cannot sell, you know, porn is the number one thing on the pay-per-view in hotels.
They're like, nope, because it offends the standards of our community.
So then they did this research and found out that porn consumption in Utah is actually way higher than in most other places under the file.
What people say and what people do are completely different things sometimes.
And that's what I find.
It goes back to that thing about being comfortable in your own skin.
To me, it's like, look, you like porn.
Embrace it.
Just accept it.
It's who you are.
As long as you're not killing people, as long as you're not doing anything horrible to other human beings, Don't put forward this image of what you think you should be when you're not that person.
If you're not that person, there's a reason why.
It probably is not that healthy for you.
It's not the way you're built to be.
There's something there.
Deal with the reality.
Deal with where you're at.
And if you want to change yourself, then take a few baby steps away from that.
But start accepting the fact that this is who you are, this is what you like, this is what you don't.
Then if you decide you want to change, you can work on the edges.
You're not going to change dramatically because you don't change the essence of who you are, but you can smooth the edges if you really, really want.
But that never happens unless you start with realizing what it is that you are and you stare at it and accept it for what it is.
I mean, I think I realized I had this really stupid idea for a long time that I could get a regular gig in academia as a good, serious professor, and then I could have also the space to do all the other stuff.
And then I realized...
This was actually...
I remember being in my office one day after the realization that most academics don't like me sunk in.
Because, A, students like me, which if they don't like them, that means, oh, you must be too easy or too something.
Or so the fact that I get along very well with students and that's not always the case with them, that's usually strike against me.
And also, when I was having this, oh, why is it that I don't like me?
I don't understand.
I kind of step outside and saw it from above.
And it was, I mean, my office hours, I'm playing Eminem in my office, and around my neck are strapped gloves that I just used to spar with one of my students during a break.
In my hand is my medical marijuana renewal, and I'm wondering...
But why don't they like me?
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I don't understand.
I'm just like, well, if they like you, there would be something weird in this way.
It's also probably indicative of the sheer numbers of people that are in school.
It's like, did you ever see that old Bill Hicks bit?
Bill Hicks had this really funny bit about CNN, about how you, every time you turn the news, murder, death, rape, pit bulls.
And he goes, and then you go look out the window and you hear chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp.
He goes, where the fuck's all this shit happening?
Yeah.
But I think the sheer numbers of human beings that are in school, if you're dealing with how many millions of kids are in school, I don't know how many there are, but out of those, you're going to be able to cherry pick some extreme examples of social justice warriors, political correct thinking, progressive thinking run amok, diversity run amok.
But that tells you how insulated that word is, where it's about what's in the footnote on page 357 of the monograph that has been read by four people they may know about.
And Dan did bring that up in one of his podcasts, where he said, look, in the past, history was a bit more holistic in nature, where good historians were also good storytellers.
And they may have not been quite the same level of researchers, but they were really good storytellers.
History has moved more and more in the direction of good nerds who hit the library, or now you don't have to go to the library, you do it online, but that are hardcore into research of primary sources, and you need it.
You know, of course you need that skill, because otherwise you don't have the data to spin a good story about it.
But if that's all the history that's out there, you can have the most accurate history in the world and nobody want to hear it because these guys can't tell it.
You know, you need the hardcore researcher with dicks out little tidbits here and there.
And then you need the ones who can spin it in a way that can communicate with other human beings, that people, that can make them care, that can make them interested, that can...
And these are often not the same people because it requires very different talents, you know?
The problem with academia is that they've made that guy the only...
that's the measuring stick of what a historian is.
That's one side of it.
It's an important one, and I give you that.
It is an important one, but it cannot be the only one.
There's a reason why every single one of the best history books I've ever read It's always written by a journalist.
It's never written by a historian.
Because journalists, they are paid to know how to tell a story.
The reason why you're paid is because you need to hook a reader in that doesn't have to read that story, that makes you want to.
Then, his background was as a journalist.
It's about people who...
Nobody owes you their attention.
Intrigue them and so they want to pay attention.
That's that skill.
Most of the people who are professional historians in a traditional sense That talent is not encouraged.
You may have it by luck, because that's how you are as a human being, but it's not something that you are encouraged to develop as part of being a good historian.
That's seen as, ah, that's popularizing it.
What's wrong with that?
To be able to make something accessible to people.
It's one of the most important things for human history, or for human beings rather, is to understand history because then you can learn from the mistakes of the past and then understand the parallels of what's going on in the current time.
When you look at the Roman Empire and you talk about the Great Excesses and how that civilization crumbled under the weight of its own excess, You look at us now, you go, well, there's some parallels here.
I mean, it might not be feeding Christians to the lions, but I mean, there's definitely some fucking crazy shit going on right now that they're going to look back on.
When you look at the average American diet and the fact that...
I was in Disneyland the other day, and I told you they were on scooters.
But one of the other things is they had to change the boats out in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.
This is one of the most disgusting stories that I've ever heard or said.
I told you to Duncan once on my podcast.
It's so gross.
But since my wife had told me when she was working in hospital, she said, oh man, I got pulled over by a colleague.
They told me this story.
It's scarred my brain ever since, so we'll gladly scar the brain of everybody listening right now.
So this couple went in to the doctor and they were complaining about how, you know, they keep trying to get pregnant and she's not getting pregnant.
And, you know, the woman was like probably a good 500 pounds, something like that, just rolls of fat everywhere, the whole thing.
And the doctor was like, okay, you know, let's see what's up, let's see what's going on.
And lift the fat folds left and right, and suddenly he realizes, oh shit, these people thought they were having sex, but based on the residue I'm seeing here between the fat folds, they weren't exactly having sex.
The guy was fucking the fat folds, thinking that he was in when he wasn't, and then they were wondering why they were not getting pregnant.
I've talked about this a bunch of times on the show, but in the...
You know, at the possibility of overindulging this thought, I stopped eating sugar.
Well, I didn't stop, but I cut it.
I cut it out completely for two weeks, and then I cut it way back since then.
And I will occasionally, every few days or so, allow myself one thing, like a piece of, I like this chili mango, you know, mangoes of chili that has sugar in it, but very, very little sugar.
I lost like 8 pounds from that.
Just doing nothing but that.
Working out the same amount.
My energy level is completely different through the day.
I don't get tired towards the end of the day anymore.
Well, it's supposed to taste good in the form of fruit because it comes with the reward of vitamins and fiber and all this other good stuff that's in fruit.
But we've somehow or another hijacked that, extracted it from the fruit and shoved it into a liquid that comes in a nice aluminum can.
You pop the top and you get that corn syrup deep into your heart.
But the average American diet is just overflowing with sugar and these poor people are just becoming bigger and fatter and corn syrup and simple sugars and they're just overwhelmed with this excess sugar and it's that's the I think that's the primary issue that people have when it comes to weight loss sugars and and simple sugars and carbohydrates and And,
you know, simple carbs like pastas and breads and all that stuff which converts to sugar.
You know, something is not because you cannot, if it was just the carbs, then that should do it.
Then everybody should be huge.
And that's not the case.
So something is going on.
I mean, I've seen it even with, like, if I eat tomatoes in Italy versus tomatoes out here, tomatoes in Italy are awesome tasting and they are filling it.
You know, you eat some tomatoes, you feel like that can be a big chunk of your lunch right there.
I eat tomatoes here.
I feel like I'm drinking water in a red package.
They taste like nothing, and they don't fill me.
I'm like, it's theoretically the same fruit, but clearly something has been done different in the way they have been.
I was going to say, but, you know, in other ways, like things like golden rice, like genetically modified rice that is much higher in protein, that's helped a lot of people.
The thing I don't like is when one model becomes the only model that you don't let anybody else have a choice.
Well, there's a problem there.
I don't even care which one is winning.
The point is if you start having one model only, there's a problem there.
So you do have the people who want none of this shit and we outlaw it or the opposite is like we're going to saturate the market so much that we squeeze every other possibility out.
Well, one of the things you notice if you go to LAX is the restaurant choices have gotten dramatically better.
Like, you can get really good food at the airport now.
Like, really cool restaurants.
They're not chains.
And, like, this is a brilliant idea.
There's a food truck there.
It's got a truck of face.
And then, you know, there's a little restaurant behind it.
But the idea is they're going to give you food like you would get from a food truck.
And so they're establishing this...
New sort of a place to get, which used to be like you'd get Chili's, you know, you'd get like Applebee's.
It was like chain restaurants or McDonald's, stuff like that.
But now you get like a really nice salad.
You get a kale salad with like real cucumbers and stuff on it and stuff.
I think people are realizing that just because this is the only way we've had before, that you don't have to have it this way.
You know, I saw this thing, one of Anthony Bourdain's shows was on San Francisco.
And one of the guys that runs this really nice restaurant was going to open up an all-vegetarian healthy food option, a very cheap place, in the Tenderloin, which is like one of the worst places in San Francisco.
And the menu was going to vary between $2 and $6.
That's it.
And everything on the menu was between $2 and $6.
And they had like a really healthy veggie burger that actually tasted good, like Bourdain ate one.
And it's like, this is actually good.
I would actually order this.
And they're going to try to provide healthy, semi-fast food for people.
There are options where you can eat delicious meals that, I mean, you like to cook.
I've done times where I cook at home and I think about what I just spent and it's nothing and it's fucking delicious and it's good food and it's nutritious and I'm like...
What's wrong with that plan?
Why is that?
And I think with what you were saying earlier also that intrigued me, something I've been obsessing a bit, the distance that goes from people eating the food to the food being produced, and I don't mean just how far it travels, but even how disconnected we are.
I don't care even if it comes from three miles from here.
I mean, it's better, of course, but I'm into the idea of people having, at least to some degree, some contact with the food you eat, so you do have...
I remember you had it on the show, the image of the guy that in Milan did the vertical woods or whatever they call it.
It looked like a skyscraper where they put a bunch of trees all over it.
One of his plans now was trying to figure out how to put on all rooftops, put gardens, so that people can have their vegetable gardens, even on top of like four-story buildings or something, that there can be the building garden that everybody goes.
Now, I don't know how it's going to work in terms of, that was my tomato, fuck you, I'm going to kill you.
But having that idea where it may not be old, you're not self-sufficient, it's not all of your food, but you have some contact with the food that you end up eating.
I think everybody should have it to one degree or another.
And partially it's hard because most people don't have the space, the situation to do it in their backyard.
But figuring out ways on the cheap to make that happen, figuring out ways on an architectural standpoint, on multiple ways to try to make the link between people and eating food a direct one so that people...
Have a sense of where food comes from, that they raise their own food to one degree or another.
I think that would be awesome.
I don't know how realistic that is or how practical, but why not take a few steps in that direction?
Yeah, I mean, everyone who has a backyard should have a garden.
It's not that difficult to grow something.
And just even if you only grow a meal a month...
Just a salad.
There's something particularly satisfying about picking a cucumber that you grew, chopping it up, putting it in a salad, cooking a squash that you grew.
Yeah, I mean, seriously, like any major American city, or for no matter, most cities in the world are this far away, like they are one big blackout away from everybody turning into the walking dead.
This is a book about Caravaggio, the Italian painter.
I'm doing...
Because I prepare a bunch of the research.
For History on Fire, I prepare a lot of research ahead because otherwise what Dan Carlin ended up doing is that you do need to have these humongous gaps between one episode and the next to research because it takes...
I was doing the math the other day just because I was bored and I figured it...
Take me to produce a two-hour episode for History on Fire.
It takes me probably about 200 hours of work of preparation and research and read the book and take the notes and do this and that.
So, I mean, that's a full-time job.
I can't release episodes often if I'm doing other things.
So what I did is for the last two years, I basically prepared to start History on Fire.
Now, you don't want to script it, because of course then it doesn't sound natural, but you want to have it pretty clear of where you are going, and so if you have the quotation that you need to quote, it's right there.
You know exactly where it's going, so it's semi-scripted, but then you do it where you can.
It's kind of like if I deliver a lecture in class.
I'll take a peek at my notes, and I'm like, oh, that's where I need to go next.
But then you deliver it in a more natural style.
So I'll write a good chunk of notes, but then of course you don't read the notes, you just have them there to keep you on track so that you know where you're going next.
That's the phonetic differences between the way letters, like that's a big issue obviously with Portuguese to English too, with the Brazilians or the R's or H's and everything gets very weird when you try to translate it back and forth.
Well that was one I wanted to ask you earlier, but I had actually forgotten.
When we were talking about translating, when you're talking about the difference between learning English and seeing how short and abrupt the sentences are as opposed to like the Italian, How difficult is it when they're translating ancient historical texts?
Some translators are awesome, and who knows if they are really true to the original language, but some translators can produce something amazing, and some don't.
I love Tao Te Ching, you know, when you read Taoism.
Some translations are painful.
I don't give a fuck.
It's like, this is boring as hell.
I don't know what they are talking about.
And you read the next translation, it's the best book you've ever read.
Yeah, it's translation from one culture to another, one time period to another, and all those combined, like ancient Italian literature, translating that into modern American English.
Well, it's got to be one of the most difficult aspects about history, too, because it was written by people who decided how they wanted people to remember the turn of events.
There are cases where there's, like, the Egyptian guy who left the record of, like, oh, we met the Hittites, and we kicked their ass, and we wiped them out, and the pharaoh is the best, and then you read the Hittite account, and it's like, whoa, that does not look like the same battle they're talking about.
You know, we make it sound like it's this super hard science, and, you know, you want to be as scientific as possible, but there's a lot of guesswork at the end of the day.