March 14, 2018 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:25:32
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Boom, and we're live. | ||
|
unidentified
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Daniele Bolelli, the man with the most beautiful accent in the world. | |
| I just read an iTunes review saying, it's kind of weird listening to this guy describing this horror story with the accent from, it sounds like he's making you pizza while he's talking. | ||
| And the thing they don't know is I am making them pizza while I'm talking. | ||
| That is what's happening. | ||
| Yeah, and if they could see you, you look like a professor that was kidnapped by a biker gang. | ||
| He comes in here with this red brotherhood jacket on, this leather jacket from these Native Americans with this big red fist on it. | ||
| He's got a bandana on. | ||
| You're missing a motorcycle. | ||
| That's all you're missing. | ||
| Right? | ||
| That's next. | ||
| You could be in some Easy Rider type movie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| I could see it. | ||
| Carrying a shotgun, too. | ||
| I dig that. | ||
| So, are you digging doing this podcast? | ||
| Are you kidding me? | ||
| History on Fire? | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| I'm loving it. | ||
| I'm having fun. | ||
| Well, let's put it that way. | ||
| I love doing it. | ||
| It's a royal pain in the ass, the research. | ||
| Your podcast, much like Dan Carlin's, is very different. | ||
| I always feel ashamed calling my podcast a podcast, because you sit down and talk, but yours is like, it's an audio lesson on history. | ||
| An in-depth audio lesson on, like, very extreme aspects of history. | ||
| Yeah, it gets... | ||
| And, you know, that part I enjoy because the storytelling part is awesome. | ||
| You get to spin a story, make it exciting, connect it with pop culture, do something that's fun. | ||
| That's the part that I love. | ||
| It's the month prior to that of just brutal research, just combing through boring historical book after boring historical book to find those little nuggets that are amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then spin it into a narrative. | ||
| That's the part that gets a little old sometimes, where you're like, man, do I really need to read 200 hours of stuff for this one thing? | ||
| It's like, that's a lot. | ||
| Yeah, I can only imagine. | ||
| Now when you do that, when you're going over, combing over all these different history books and all these different papers written on various times, do you, are you like extracting chunks and like putting them in Microsoft Word and then going over it? | ||
| And then like, how do you, do you form it? | ||
| Well, my question is kind of like, do you form it as a script or how much of it, so everything is Completely written out? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Not exactly, because otherwise then it sounds like you're a guy reading a thing and it's boring and it doesn't sound right. | ||
| I just take super extensive notes, kind of like if you are to give a lecture that you've never given, you're not going to sit down and read it, but you are going to, you know, you have something to keep you on track to make sure it's like, oh, where am I going next? | ||
| Okay, great. | ||
| There's that thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So it's as detailed as possible without turning it into a dry guy reading his page type of stuff. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, history is such a fucking awesome subject because people are crazy. | ||
| And throughout history, people have done so many crazy things that it's just... | ||
| It's such a great thing to know. | ||
| If you only had today, like if we only had our current era, and we're looking around at how fucking maniacal people are and how crazy the world is, we'd be like, God, how'd this happen? | ||
| How did we get here? | ||
| And then you just listen to your podcast, and you go, oh, this shit's been going on forever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Seriously. | ||
| This is the good topic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| This is... | ||
| In case you are wondering, it's good times. | ||
| And yes, there's much to complain about, and yes, there's much we can do better, without a doubt, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| But this is as fucking good as it's ever been, by far! | ||
| Yeah, the human psyche is a very weird place, because there's so much amazing stuff that human beings do. | ||
| There's just so much. | ||
| And then there's the amount of horror that can be unleashed throughout, that has been unleashed throughout history by people against other people. | ||
| It's just insane. | ||
| Yeah, what is like, when you go back and you go over history, what is the most confusing or disturbing era? | ||
| You know, to me it's not so much a particular period, because the same patterns emerge a lot of the times at different point in time. | ||
| It's more those moments, you know, when mob mentality takes over. | ||
| Because the reality is, the average person is not... | ||
| I don't have the worldview where I think the average person is evil. | ||
| I don't think that. | ||
| I think the average person is weak, which means that when in a conditions where everybody's pushing in one direction, it's very easy to jump on the bandwagon. | ||
| And in some cases, then a very ordinary human being can do horrible actions. | ||
| You meet them for dinner and you think, pleasant person, good enough, but you put them in the wrong context and everything turns to shit. | ||
| I just did... | ||
| I just finished right now this two-part series. | ||
| That's probably the most disturbing. | ||
| Now I want to do a podcast about flowers and puppies because this one was heavy, man. | ||
| I did this series on kind of compare and contrast on the Sand Creek Massacre of the Cheyenne in Colorado in the 1860s and then My Lai in Vietnam in 1968. And actually, I split it because I did Sun Creek and I had this guy, Daryl Cooper, who was the Martyr Made podcast. | ||
| He's an amazing podcaster and he covered Milai. | ||
| And then in the third episode, we're going to sit down and kind of chat about what does this all mean about the human nature? | ||
| Why do... | ||
| The reason why that particular story, those two stories, interests me is because it's a brutal massacre of civilians, but in both cases there are soldiers who refuse to participate or actually try to stop it. | ||
| They are not the majority, they are a minority, but they are there and they try. | ||
| So it's not just a story of people doing ugly stuff, it's like, What is that make one guy when older, hey, go shoot that three-year-old. | ||
| One guy goes, yes, sir, and does it. | ||
| And the next guy goes, no, that's not who we are. | ||
| Screw you. | ||
| I'm not doing that. | ||
| That's what interests me. | ||
| It's like the individual element of what make people in the exact same circumstances, one person go down a really dark path and somebody else instead of in the balls to say, no, that's not who I am. | ||
| That's not what we do. | ||
| With the Native American massacre, how many people were the ones that refused? | ||
| Because you never hear about that. | ||
| All you hear about is the horrific actions of the soldiers. | ||
| Yeah, which was the majority, but there was also, like, there was this one guy, what's the guy named, Silas Sol. | ||
| He was, talk about a guy with bolts of iron, because the guy, he and a couple of other officers refused to let the men under them, because they were divided in different companies, so... | ||
| Their companies, they say, no, we're not participating in this. | ||
| This is just straight up slaughter. | ||
| These guys are not even a real target. | ||
| These are a bunch of civilians. | ||
| They refused, and then Silas Soul testified against his commander at the inquiry, and then he was promptly murdered shortly after that. | ||
| So it's like, it's a crazy story. | ||
| But still to this day, there are people from the Cheyenne tribe who every year they have a ceremony for Silas Soul because they said it had not been for him. | ||
| A lot more of us would have died on that day, and he did a really brave thing and paid a price for it. | ||
| So, you know, if you're looking for heroism, you can do a lot worse than look at this guy's story because that guy was seriously, You know, stand up for his conviction under the most extreme circumstances. | ||
| So I can't tell, but I admire that. | ||
| Yeah, that would be incredibly difficult to just imagine What those people were doing. | ||
| I mean, when you hear some of the accounts of the slaughters of Native Americans, it's just terrifying that people can just look at someone and just decide that's not a person or that's not us. | ||
| This is the other. | ||
| They've got to be eliminated. | ||
| So we're just going to kill all these kids. | ||
| We're going to kill all these women. | ||
| And it happened all over the country. | ||
| I mean, there's two things that happen to Native Americans. | ||
| One, the big one, is disease. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And wasn't on purpose. | ||
| There's this big myth that people put, like, They put smallpox in blankets, and that's all bullshit, right? | ||
| It's pretty much been proven that they didn't really understand bacteria or diseases. | ||
| There's one story that's possible, is not a proven thing, because initially nobody understood bacteria and disease, or the first hundred plus years, completely unintentional. | ||
| There's one tale about the French and Indian War, where during a break, the British are talking about it, saying, one of the commanders saying, hey, maybe we should give them some blankets from the smallpox hospital. | ||
| But, you know, while we do know that he suggested it, we have no proof whatsoever that it was actually done. | ||
| So that's probably how the rumor got started, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Probably. | |
| But in most cases, what happened is just that the Europeans came over and just inadvertently introduced Native Americans' diseases and 90% of them were wiped out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's a crazy number if you really stop and think about it. | ||
| It's considered probably the most dramatic demographic disaster in human history because, you know, never before you had a situation where a whole continent was not exposed to a series of diseases. | ||
| And so, of course, there's no immunity the first time they're exposed. | ||
| Like, you know, you don't need to even have smallpox. | ||
| You can sneeze on somebody and the next day half the village is dead, you know? | ||
| Yeah, that's crazy. | ||
| It's amazing that if a group of people just has not come in contact with something that other people come in contact with all the time, and just, oh, we've got a cold, you'll be fine, just have some chicken soup, take a nap. | ||
| Meanwhile, these people are just dead. | ||
| It just kills them off. | ||
| That's probably why aliens don't show up. | ||
| It's like, those motherfuckers are dirty. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| If we show up, they sneeze on us and our whole planet will die. | ||
| Or maybe the opposite. | ||
| They know they'll kill us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| Maybe they have some super advanced diseases. | ||
| That's the other possibility. | ||
| I guess it's just an immune system thing, right? | ||
| If your immune system is not prepared for it. | ||
| That's how it is. | ||
| There's a great book by a guy named Dan Flores. | ||
| Well, he wrote two, but one of them actually was a paper that he wrote about the buffalo. | ||
| And he's saying that it's really interesting because he compares the Initial encounters that European settlers had and European travelers had before the Native Americans were wiped out. | ||
| And they talk about how many animals were on the plains and they make a direct account of it. | ||
| And then after the Europeans had come and 90% of the Native Americans had been wiped out, that's when the buffalo population increase goes through the roof. | ||
| And you're seeing these... | ||
| Gigantic herds, I guess, of millions and millions of buffalo. | ||
| And he said that's directly attributed to the lack of predators, which means lack of Native Americans, because they were preying on these buffalo. | ||
| Really interesting. | ||
| Yeah, that guy, you had him on the podcast once, right? | ||
| Yeah, I gotta get him on again. | ||
| I love that guy. | ||
| That was awesome. | ||
| His book, Coyote America. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, that one. | |
| That was great. | ||
| That book changed the way I feel about coyotes. | ||
| I used to be like, fuck those little rats. | ||
| I'll run them over. | ||
| Now I'm like, those are little wolves, man. | ||
| They're pretty badass. | ||
| Yeah, that was a great episode. | ||
| I enjoyed that one. | ||
| Yeah, they are so gangster. | ||
| One just stared me down the other day. | ||
| I stopped my fucking car and just, you know, because he was in, it was kind of a, not a lot of people in this area. | ||
| It was fairly late at night and he was on this road. | ||
| I said, let me just pull over and just see what this coyote does. | ||
| And he just fucking stood like 30 feet from my car just staring at me. | ||
| Just staring at me. | ||
| That's badass right there. | ||
| Just like, whatever, dude. | ||
| What are you gonna do? | ||
| I'm about to run into these woods. | ||
| You're never gonna see me again. | ||
| Or I'll stick around. | ||
| Maybe if you fuck up, I'll eat you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I'm just trying to figure out what to do right here. | ||
| Those guys don't mess around. | ||
| It's crazy that they just can live and be completely embedded in our society. | ||
| We had a biologist. | ||
| What was the gentleman's name that we had from the Department of Parks and Services? | ||
| See if we can find this guy. | ||
| He's actually a biologist who tracks coyotes, and he tracks them all over the state, and he even tracks mountain lions. | ||
| They tag them and put those collars on them and stuff. | ||
| But he said that there's a pack of coyotes that lives in downtown LA. Yeah, I believe it. | ||
| In the heat of everything. | ||
| They found some abandoned building, and they denned up in this abandoned building, and that's where they live. | ||
| Those guys are resilient. | ||
| They thrive in anything. | ||
| They thrive. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You like crazy animal stories, so check this out about a coyote. | ||
| My mom went for a walk with her dog, and her dog is a big, mean dog, right? | ||
| So they are walking, and they see ahead of them this little girl, probably 10 years old, with this tiny little five-pound dog type of thing. | ||
| And there's a coyote maybe like 20 yards behind her that's clearly stalking them and the girl didn't see it. | ||
| And he's obviously aiming for the five pounder and it's just... | ||
| And so my mom yelled at her like, hey, watch out. | ||
| So the girl freaks out, pick up her dog and she figures she's safe. | ||
| Coyote doesn't give a fuck. | ||
| She's still stalking them down. | ||
| And so at that point, my mom kind of let her dog go and the dog chased the coyote off and that was that. | ||
| But I was like... | ||
| Man, those guys, you don't want to leave little dogs. | ||
| You don't want to leave little girls around. | ||
| I know, it's like, why a ten-year-old is walking the dog by herself? | ||
| That's probably not the best idea. | ||
| There was an instance that happened a few years back where a 19-year-old girl was murdered, not murdered, killed, partially eaten by coyotes. | ||
| Coyotes? | ||
|
unidentified
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Serious? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I think they bit some chunks out of her. | ||
| Tore her apart and she died in the hospital. | ||
| 19 year old, an adult. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it was unusual circumstances. | ||
| And one of the unusual circumstances is that the coyotes in this area are very limited in terms of what game is available. | ||
| So much so that they've been known to go after moose. | ||
| That these little coyotes actually go after moose and have successfully taken moose out. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| Yeah, so these are gangster coyotes. | ||
| Yeah, because when you look at them, they don't look that big. | ||
| They're like 50 pounds. | ||
|
unidentified
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Exactly. | |
| They're really big ones, like 50 pounds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I watched a video the other day of a mother moose trying to stop these wolves from eating her cow or eating her calf. | ||
| Yeah, I've seen that same stuff. | ||
| It's horrific, man. | ||
| She's running around stomping these wolves, and they're circling her, and then they just grab the calf and drag it away, and she's fighting off the other wolves and stomping them. | ||
| She stomped the shit out of a few of them, though. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| She fucked a few of them up probably forever. | ||
| It's more satisfaction, though, as when... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I saw that one. | ||
| That one sucks. | ||
| There he is, Justin Brown. | ||
| That gentleman. | ||
| Very nice guy. | ||
| He gave us a lot of interesting insight as to what happens with biologists, how they track these animals and what some of the problems are. | ||
| But we're in such a unique place in Southern California because there's such a massive population of people, but there's all these predators that are sort of like entangled in our system, you know? | ||
| Like hawks everywhere. | ||
| Everywhere you look, there's hawks swooping down, snatching doves and shit. | ||
| Yeah, my daughter got a little dog. | ||
| I always thought little dogs were nasty rats, but I started liking these things. | ||
| I'm like, okay, I'm changing my mind about it. | ||
| This is a cool dog, but it's still like eight pounds or something. | ||
| So I'm like, you can't let him alone in the yard. | ||
| Not because there's... | ||
| Probably not coyotes in the yard, but there are definitely hawks around. | ||
| There's definitely owls. | ||
| That thing looks like a big rabbit. | ||
| They are going to snatch it in three seconds. | ||
| You cannot leave him in the yard like that. | ||
| Because, yeah, I mean, that's how it is. | ||
| That's when you have predators around. | ||
| You need to keep your eyes open. | ||
| Yeah, there's no getting around it. | ||
| There's no getting around it. | ||
| You know, and when we look at how horrific the wild world is, it's not a surprise that people who are just like recently civilized over the last, you know, like really realistically 10,000 years... | ||
| Yeah, everybody's like, there's this really dark thing in people's minds where it's an option on the table. | ||
| Most people are never going to pull the trigger and go down there, but that's part of who we are as human beings. | ||
| And I think that's why I enjoyed doing this, the Sun Creek Milai, because it's a story that's not trying to bash any side. | ||
| It's not like, oh, look at those bad Americans doing these massacres. | ||
| It's more there were horrible people there. | ||
| There were also great people belonging to the same side. | ||
| So to me it's not about one particular group of people that one nation or that one ethnic group or anything being the bad guys. | ||
| It's on an individual level what it is that makes one guy go down in these horrible directions and other people instead choosing. | ||
| Because that's what it boils down to. | ||
| It's choice. | ||
| Choosing not to be that person. | ||
| That's what fascinates me. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's just, there's a great book by Sebastian Junger called Tribe. | ||
| Have you read it? | ||
| You read that one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great. | |
| Wasn't it interesting when he talked about all of the people that were kidnapped by Native Americans that chose to live with them? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And then when they were taken back by the Americans, by the settlers, you know, they were like, fuck this, I'm going back. | ||
| I'm going back to the Native Americans. | ||
| And they went and lived with them again. | ||
| But no one went the other way. | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
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Not at all. | |
| Which is really crazy. | ||
| Say something not flattering about the Euro-American culture of the time. | ||
| Yeah, there's a great Benjamin Franklin quote. | ||
| I'm going to butcher it because I only remember the beginning. | ||
| Something about no European who has tasted savage life and then basically gone to can bear to come back to live in our settlements or something like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'm like, yeah, let's say something about... | ||
| Because it's fun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The way they're living, they're camping. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They're hunting and fishing every day. | ||
| And you go back and these assholes are wearing powdered wigs and banging a wooden mallet on a table for everybody to pay attention. | ||
|
unidentified
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Fuck off. | |
| Exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know? | |
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Hear ye, hear ye. | ||
| That's what I mean about cultures, right? | ||
| People sometimes will then romanticize native cultures. | ||
| It's like, oh, they're all, you know, hug trees and talking with the furry creatures of the forest. | ||
| And I'm like, well, yes and no. | ||
| There are, like what you mentioned, right? | ||
| If you were captured, especially in the East when, like, French and Indian war or stuff like that were going on, If you are captured by it during a native raid, one of two things happen. | ||
| The good one is that they like you, and they decide to adopt you, and then you end up replacing one of their dead family members. | ||
| So like if they lost a brother or a father, then you become that person. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| That's a weird thing that they did. | ||
| It's very weird. | ||
| But the thing is, the adoption process was so thorough that they love you like you're the real deal. | ||
| And you end up feeling like you're part of this family and, you know, everything works out, everything is great. | ||
| If they don't like you, then they torture you to death over a three-day period. | ||
| And these are the same people, right? | ||
| They can be the sweetest, most awesome humans or really messed up. | ||
| Same culture, same individuals. | ||
| Do you think that's just because people have evolved dealing with tribal warfare and just we have to have that switch? | ||
| I think it's because the thing that's interesting about natives is that it wasn't a racial thing. | ||
| They adopted anybody, right? | ||
| It didn't matter what skin color you have. | ||
| That they did not have a barrier to. | ||
| But there is a big insider outsider. | ||
| You know, if you are part of our tribe and you may become part of our tribe, race doesn't matter. | ||
| You can become part of our tribe. | ||
| But once you're part of our tribe, you're one of us. | ||
| But if you're not part of our tribe, then the same rules do not apply to you. | ||
| You are the other. | ||
| You are an enemy. | ||
| And in that case, that's when it gets really brutal. | ||
| Yeah, even with other Native Americans, that's the thing that people need to really get in. | ||
| Especially people that only have a peripheral understanding of Native American culture. | ||
| The reason why Sioux are called Sioux is because that's a Native American word for enemy. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| They call themselves Lakota people. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| So all the other Indians are like, fuck these crazy assholes. | ||
| They're taking over. | ||
| They're the enemy. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| They were just dominating. | ||
| It's really fascinating when you consider that these people had these hunting grounds that they were trying to protect. | ||
| And one of the things that they found is that there are areas where wildlife thrived. | ||
| And the wildlife thrived in these, like, gray areas. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Because, like, this one area would be, you know, one Native American tribe, and then their hunting grounds went to a specified distance. | ||
| You know, obviously always in conflict. | ||
| But then past that was another Native American tribes. | ||
| But in the middle, that's where you'd find all the fucking animals. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Because they were like, I get it. | ||
| Nobody hunts me here. | ||
| They are worried about killing each other in the danger zone. | ||
| So, no, totally. | ||
| It's crazy that they figured that out. | ||
| It's like, have you been to Yellowstone? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's beautiful, right? | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| One of the things that's really crazy is if you go around the tourist center, there's elk everywhere, just lounging around. | ||
| They tell you don't get more than 20 yards closer to an elk because they will charge you occasionally. | ||
| They're like tired of people taking fucking selfies. | ||
| They're always the tourist guy like, hey, look at me. | ||
| Dude, I fucking did it, man. | ||
| I did it. | ||
| I was out there and I've seen elk in the wild, wild. | ||
| But they figured out that wolves don't come to the tourist center. | ||
| So they're like, I got an idea. | ||
| And then they realize these people are different than the people that hunt us. | ||
| Somehow or another, they put it together. | ||
| Like one day... | ||
| It all could go wrong, right? | ||
| Civilization could collapse, and you just go right to Yellowstone, go to that fucking tourist center. | ||
| There's meat everywhere. | ||
| Just mow down the elk. | ||
| You need food. | ||
| There's hundreds of them on the lawn at the tourist center. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| But I don't know what it is. | ||
| Like, what is the intellectual process that allows an elk to understand that these people are not going to try to eat me, and that the wolves are not going to be around these people. | ||
| It probably took some really stupid elk to stick around people before they realized those were the good ones and that everybody was looking back and like, oh, they didn't get killed. | ||
| Look at Frank over there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're feeding them peanuts. | |
| Look at them. | ||
| We can try too. | ||
| Yeah, I wonder what it was. | ||
| I don't know if we really know the mechanism that allows them all as a group to go, yeah, you could just chill out around these people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Just lie down. | ||
| They just lie down in front of us. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| It is fun. | ||
| In all the national parks, you see the most animals right there. | ||
| It's hilarious. | ||
| It's fascinating that there's never been a non-warring, successful group of humans. | ||
| Because it only takes, you know, you can't really be a pacifist around somebody who isn't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Because, yeah, you decide to go in this mellow, peaceful, happy society and you get your ass kicked by... | ||
| There's a great story about the origins of, not even before the United States, like British colonies in what will become the United States. | ||
| Everybody hears about Plymouth Rock, right? | ||
| There's the whole, the Puritans, they show up, all of that. | ||
| What usually people don't hear... | ||
| Thaddeus Russell played a little with this story in his book. | ||
| There was this other settlement called Marymount that was just down the street from Plymouth, but they were completely different. | ||
| Their interpretation of Christianity was pretty much a pre-Christian paganism mixed with a couple of Christian ideas. | ||
| They had the exact opposite approach of the Puritans. | ||
| They were Having drunken orgies with the native tribes. | ||
| They were the equivalent of like the hippies of the 1600s, just kicking back, having fun. | ||
| And the Puritans started getting edgy because when new people would show up on the coast, they would take a look at the Puritans, they would take a look at Marymount and be like, yeah, I'm going to Marymount, 'cause fuck the Puritans, these guys are whipping themselves, and life sucks over there. | ||
| And so of course, that was bad competition. | ||
| Even some Puritans were like, see you, honey, I'm gone for a couple of weeks. | ||
| And so the hardcore guys decided, well, we can't have that. | ||
| So they got their guns, showed up, and closed down Marymount. | ||
| And that's the problem. | ||
| Had the Marymount guys not been so damn lazy hippies and actually got their act together and trained with guns and stuff, they would have been able to keep their community going with those values. | ||
| You need a minimum of self-defense. | ||
| Otherwise, somebody else squashed you, which is exactly what happened. | ||
| Is that from the name Loyola Marymount? | ||
| Does it come from those people? | ||
| I dubbed it because, you know what? | ||
| I have no idea, so I'm going to lie. | ||
| But you know what the thing is? | ||
| Because, you know, Loyola doesn't strike me exactly as a drunken orgyist with natives. | ||
| No, not at all. | ||
| That's why I was confused. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I'd never heard of that before, but it makes sense that there would be someone that would deviate. | ||
| There's always someone who just looks at the way everyone else is doing it and just says, this is fucking not for me, man. | ||
| But it always goes bad. | ||
| Like, there's never been a cult where, you know, they got together, formed a commune, and just really were cool to each other. | ||
| I'm actually fascinated with exactly the thing you said. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Why can... | ||
| What's so damn hard about... | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's power. | |
| It's the one person in power. | ||
| The one person in the position of power is almost always abusive and they almost always use that power to their own ego gratification and dominance. | ||
| They always fuck all the other guys' wives. | ||
| They all father a bunch of children. | ||
| They take everyone's money, you know? | ||
| I'm fascinated by that kind of stuff because one of the things that you see if you become famous or if you do something that gets you a lot of notoriety is I know how I feel around certain famous people. | ||
| I've talked about the first time I met Anthony Bourdain, who I respect a great deal. | ||
| I was like a little school kid. | ||
| I was just such a dork. | ||
| I was like, dude, I fucking love your show. | ||
| And I love his writing, too. | ||
| So I was genuinely excited to see him and meet him. | ||
| And still to this day when I talk to him, I'm a little dorked out. | ||
| So when you take a person who's not... | ||
| And I'm used to being around celebrities. | ||
| I've been around a lot of them. | ||
| But... | ||
| When you take someone who's not used to being around someone who is in this position of adoration, and they don't know how to handle it, and they just give in to whatever, you know, beta tendencies they have, and this alpha just takes over, there's a natural thing that human beings do in these small, isolated groups that don't get checked, and it almost always is the man who is in charge of it winds up abusing everybody. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which again, it goes back to that part of human nature. | ||
| Why do you have to go down that path? | ||
| You can have a great life. | ||
| You can enjoy. | ||
| Be nice to people. | ||
| You are in a position of leadership. | ||
| Use that to make sure the whole thing runs smoothly. | ||
| Everybody's taken care of. | ||
| Never works that way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it pisses me off. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| I mean, I understand it and I don't understand it. | ||
| Because, I mean, I get it. | ||
| I've seen it enough times that I know you're exactly 100% right. | ||
| But at the same time, I really don't get it because you can still have a great life. | ||
| Nobody's denying you all the good things that you want. | ||
| Just be a semi-decent human. | ||
| It's not that hard. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| You would think it's not that hard, but when there's no one checking you, like you're in the Oregon woods and you've got this fucking yurt and everybody lives together and you just bang everybody. | ||
| And you make them give you all their gold. | ||
| People, for whatever reason, when there's a person that is the king or a person that is like some cult leader or whatever, messiah, whatever you want to call him, people just want that person to have the answers. | ||
| They gravitate towards that. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And I think that's precisely one of the things that bugs me about a lot of people who are willing to put themselves in that position of like, I am your big leader. | ||
| To me, there's a way to be a leader that's awesome. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| Sort of the Taoist approach where people shouldn't even feel that you're a leader, but you're like subtly moving things along to make sure everybody's taken care of. | ||
| That's a leader. | ||
| Because it's not obvious, most people need exactly what you said. | ||
| They need their father figure to lay down the law, to be very dogmatic and certain in their, I know it all, don't worry, I have all the answers. | ||
| This is good, this is bad. | ||
| And people love that. | ||
| They love that in dictators, they love it in religious cult leaders, they love it in Yeah, it seems like a pattern that just sort of... | ||
| It gets established in human beings from being a child and having your parents, don't touch that. | ||
| That's hot. | ||
| Come with me. | ||
| This is the way to go. | ||
| This is what you have to do. | ||
| This is how you put your shoes on. | ||
| This is how you tie your shoe. | ||
| This is how you get to work. | ||
| This is how you do this. | ||
| This is how you do that. | ||
| And then all of a sudden you don't have anybody telling you what to do anymore. | ||
| And then all along comes the cult leader. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Like, I've got the answers. | ||
| Guess what? | ||
| They're coming straight from God. | ||
| So fuck your parents. | ||
| Your parents didn't know shit. | ||
| But that's what's funny is that the same people who grow it up would be like your parents tell you, hey, tie your shoes. | ||
| And you're like, fuck. | ||
| Suddenly somebody come along when they are 20 or 30, tie your shoe and you're like, oh, you're so wise. | ||
| Let me listen to you. | ||
| This is the way to tie my shoe, oh great master. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| It was interesting. | ||
| I don't know if you have been following where Dan Carlin, the stuff that he has been saying about his other show, Common Sense. | ||
| I haven't listened to it lately. | ||
| Yeah, he hasn't been releasing an episode lately. | ||
| That's probably why you haven't, because he has kind of shut down with that. | ||
| It's not officially done, but And this thing is, my approach, meaning Dan talking, my approach is to be somewhat subtle, somewhat like play and not be overly dogmatic one way or another, to think on my feet, to mix things together. | ||
| And that's something that most people don't want in the current climate. | ||
| Most people want the very black and white type of approach. | ||
| Now, I disagree with Dan because I think that still there is an enormous need for what he provides. | ||
| And I don't think that just giving up is the solution. | ||
| But I do get it because it really doesn't take much. | ||
| You know, if you start screaming a very dogmatic, either super leftist or super conservative approach, you get automatically a bunch of followers. | ||
| If you are thinking on your feet and just going, hmm, this thing, yeah, you're right, but let's look at the other side and constantly having, you know, what any decent human being should do, just being intellectually honest and thinking things do not, people don't respond to that because it's not that easy. | ||
| Or rather, people do, some people respond, but number-wise, it's way a minority compared to what you get by being a black and white kind of guy. | ||
| Yeah, people desire very clear resolutions and very clear thinking in terms of like enemy, friend, this is a black and white issue. | ||
| But I think Dan also just felt overwhelmed by the times. | ||
| He's like, this just seems like everything's so fucked up, I'd rather not even talk about it and just sit back and see what is really happening. | ||
| We were on the phone. | ||
| I swear, I spent like an hour on the phone with you. | ||
| We were back and forth. | ||
| I was playing... | ||
| In my mind, I was played... | ||
| Remember the second movie of Lord of the Rings where there's Throttle carrying the ring? | ||
| He's all like, I can't do this anymore! | ||
| And there's Sam going, oh, come on! | ||
| You need to... | ||
| I think I need to step on my game. | ||
| I'm a shitty Sam because I was trying to do that for Dan and just kind of motivate him and I miserably failed, so... | ||
| I respect where he's coming from. | ||
| He said that when he was on the show recently. | ||
| He was talking about that sort of same thing that he's kind of put that podcast on hold. | ||
| As long as he keeps doing his podcast, Hardcore History is just so important I think. | ||
| I think him and you You guys are providing an entertaining and interesting history lesson that really wasn't available before. | ||
| I mean, before you could get a book on tape, and it was a really well-written book, and it was read by someone with good dramatic flair. | ||
| It was exciting stuff, but... | ||
| Nobody really got into it. | ||
| I bet the numbers, if you consider the numbers of people that have listened to his podcast and your podcast in comparison to like before you guys were around, there's probably a radically improved number of people that know a lot about history. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| Particularly things like the Mongols. | ||
| I never even thought about the Mongols until I listened to his podcast, which apparently right now, if you're in the LA area in Simi Valley at the Ronald Reagan Museum, The Reagan Museum or library, what is it? | ||
| There's a giant Genghis Khan exhibit. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, they have the bows and all the fucking stuff they stole and the textiles and all the different things they wore and their yurts that they slept in. | ||
| All kinds of crazy shit. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| I want to go. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that stuff's over a thousand years old, right? | ||
| Or close to it? | ||
| 1200s? | ||
| Yeah, 1200s, so close to a thousand years old. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, there it is right there, yeah. | |
| Check that out. | ||
| They had bows that required 160 pounds to pull back. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Who the hell were these guys? | ||
| Who pulls 160 pound bow? | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| They must have been animals. | ||
| They must have been so fucking strong. | ||
| Yeah, you pull 60 pounds and you're like, holy hell, this is heavy. | ||
| 160 is insane. | ||
| Well, I have a compound bow, and the compound bow, I don't have a regular, like a recurve like these guys. | ||
| I believe they invented the recurve, too. | ||
| They didn't invent it. | ||
| They were around in the era when the recurve was invented, which just by the design of the bow, it gives you more power, more energy gets released through the arrow. | ||
| But with a compound bow, there's a big let-off. | ||
| So it's only difficult... | ||
| So if you had a 60-pound bow, it's only 60 pounds for like the first six inches or so of pulling it back. | ||
| Then as you completely pull back, there's like an 85% let-off, so it's much easier to hold. | ||
| They were pulling 160 the whole time, and at the end it was harder. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| And they could aim perfectly on horseback while riding in full galop. | ||
| It's like, who the hell? | ||
| I mean, they apparently used to time the arrow release while the horse was in the air. | ||
| Yeah, because then you don't have the unevenness of it. | ||
| Fucking crazy. | ||
| Those guys were freaks. | ||
| That series that Dan did on the Mongols is one of the greatest series ever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of all time. | |
| Of all time. | ||
| I urge people. | ||
| I think it costs a dollar an episode. | ||
| Just go through iTunes, get it for a dollar, or I don't know what other app that you have if you're Android. | ||
| But it's a dollar an episode, and it's worth fucking hundreds of dollars. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| I've listened to it, no bullshit, at least six times. | ||
| You know, I need to stop bringing up Dan because by now people are accusing me of like, you know, you like Dan probably a little more than a heterosexual man should. | ||
| I always give praise to... | ||
| He's a beautiful guy. | ||
| He's awesome, man. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with it. | ||
| I love Dan. | ||
| He's one of my favorite humans. | ||
| Well, listen, your podcast is fucking awesome too, man. | ||
| And I really particularly enjoyed your first one because you talked about that one story that you brought up on here that freaked me the fuck out. | ||
| Right, when at the end of Spartacus' rebellion, they capture all the remnants of Spartacus' army and crucify every single one of them on the way between Naples and Capua, but next to Naples and Rome. | ||
| Every, whatever, 30, 40 yards, there's a new guy crucified, and 30 yards down, another one. | ||
| Kind of like lampposts all the way between these two cities. | ||
| And how many miles is that? | ||
| That's like 120, something like that. | ||
| 120 miles of crucified people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where you have at every 30 to 40 yards, there's a new one, and then another one, and then another one, and it's... | ||
| Yeah, that's an intense kind of story. | ||
| Since the last time you were on the podcast, I went to Rome. | ||
| Oh, yeah, I saw that. | ||
| I traveled. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Dude. | ||
| That's one of those things where you just have to, like, no one talk to me for a second. | ||
| Let me try to process this. | ||
| You know, like, we had a great guide who was a professor. | ||
| It was really cool. | ||
| He guides people in the meantime, and he was just so excited to talk to me because I was so into it. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Because most of the time, people are just barely curious about what he has to say. | ||
| But we talked about the significance of the pineal gland and the pine cone in the Vatican. | ||
| And he takes you on a tour of all the different artifacts. | ||
| That's a trip that I feel like... | ||
| But just going there, especially the Vatican, going there, the Colosseum was big too, but going to the Vatican and just seeing all that artwork and getting an understanding of what those people were really up to for hundreds and hundreds of years, just conquering the world for hundreds and hundreds of years and all this artwork, seeing it live in person sort of reset my perspective. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| Rome is a place that you have never, once in your lifetime, you got to do it. | ||
| I don't know if you have been. | ||
| There's a place, Castel Sant'Angelo, which is kind of close to the Vatican. | ||
| But if you go to the top of this castle, you basically get a panoramic view of all of Rome from there. | ||
| It's so spectacular. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| You see the river, you see all the buildings, you see everything. | ||
| And then you climb back down and you just do your walks. | ||
| And what was I seeing here? | ||
| Oh, one scene that I saw in Rome that I was blown away by. | ||
| You know this artist, Caravaggio was the painter. | ||
| I love that guy because basically what happens with this dude is he was around in the end of the 1500s, early 1600s and Caravaggio was a straight-up gangster. | ||
| He was probably the best artist of the era. | ||
| To me, he's probably the best artist of all times. | ||
| You look at his paintings and it's just insane what he could do with paint. | ||
| But then he had his life on the street as a literal gangster. | ||
| He would just get, he at one point killed a guy in a duel, was wanted for murder. | ||
| Every time he would get close to power and he would be, yep, that's Caravaggio for you. | ||
| Look how amazing that painting is. | ||
| And what year was this made? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Around? | |
| 1599. Yep. | ||
| God, look how good it is. | ||
| I know. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| I mean, that is so close to photographic. | ||
| And you think that this is in the 1600s and these people, they couldn't even stand still for him. | ||
| I mean, how do you think he did that? | ||
| Did he have a guy pretend that he's getting choked? | ||
| Did he do this all from his mind? | ||
| No, I think he used models. | ||
| There was actually one of the scandals is that he was banging his models. | ||
| Well, of course, but that was not the scandal. | ||
| That was part of the deal. | ||
| Though the scandal part was the fact that, you know, the church was commissioning a lot of his work, but he clearly was not the most pious guy in their sense. | ||
| His view of Christianity was, hey, these guys were Jesus and his followers were poor men from the street. | ||
| They were not the... | ||
| Cardinal in purple robes. | ||
| So he used as models more than once for the Virgin Mary. | ||
| He used the hookers that he was sleeping with. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| And so the church was like, you cannot use a hooker for the Virgin Mary. | ||
| That's just not okay. | ||
| And he would be like, yeah, yeah, don't worry. | ||
| Okay, next time. | ||
| And again, he does it again. | ||
| See if he can get some of his paintings of the Virgin Mary. | ||
| Find some of them. | ||
| Yeah, that's amazing. | ||
| It's hilarious. | ||
| There's one, let me see if I remember the time, there's one where there's a naked baby Jesus with Mary squashing a snake. | ||
| See if that pops up. | ||
| That one is great because, you know, that was his big shot at making it big. | ||
| The church was trying, okay, keep it together, be a good boy because you're the best painter there is, but you're fucking crazy, so please just tone it down. | ||
| And he turns in this painting where the Virgin Mary has just big cleavage showing in a red dress. | ||
| Baby Jesus is butt naked, squashing these snakes, supposed to symbolize the devil and stuff. | ||
| And they were like, yeah, that's not what we meant. | ||
| So, yeah, that's the one. | ||
| That's the Virgin Mary? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She looks like a freak. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Well, she was his lover hooker, so yes, that was part of the problem there. | ||
| And the baby Jesus squashing a snake with his dick showing. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| The other thing that this guy was explaining to me was the penis sizes of the Roman statues. | ||
| They were all small because big penises were supposed to mean stupid people and aggressive animals that were just... | ||
| You know, not a part of the civilized, amazing culture that Rome represented. | ||
| So there was pride in the micro-penis. | ||
| Yeah, well, it wasn't micro, but it was definitely not optimal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's hilarious. | |
| Yeah, because I was asking. | ||
| I was like, what do you think that is? | ||
| We were trying to figure it out. | ||
| We were talking about it before the professor gave me an answer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I was like, maybe they just had littler dicks back then. | |
| Maybe that was just how it went. | ||
| And he's like, no. | ||
| I think they probably associated big dicks with rape. | ||
| With the barbarians and the Moors and all these people coming in and chopping people up and fucking the shit out of everybody. | ||
| And they're like, no, no, no, we don't want that. | ||
| We don't want that. | ||
| Little tiny dicks. | ||
| Sophisticated dicks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sophisticated dicks. | |
| Dicks are people who write poetry. | ||
| Vandalism, maybe? | ||
| No, they didn't steal the big dicks. | ||
| They were clearly made by the artists. | ||
| One thing they did do, though, in certain eras, they covered the dicks with leaves. | ||
| It wasn't initially what they would do. | ||
| And they went back on a lot of them and repurposed them and put new leaves over dicks. | ||
| I think you know right now that there are going to be about seven punk bands borrowing the name from you. | ||
| Like, Sophisticated Dicks will be the name of a new punk band coming out tomorrow. | ||
| That would be a good band, Sophisticated Dicks. | ||
| I like that name. | ||
| That's a good one. | ||
| Yeah, it's a weird thing that people have done throughout history. | ||
| It's like sort of trying to... | ||
| Trying to control artistic expression and trying to have it represent the time. | ||
| So you don't necessarily get a full version of what was going on then, but you do get a version of the suppression, which gives you insight into the full version of the times. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| That they're covering dicks with leaves and stuff. | ||
| So strange. | ||
| And sometimes they would have the painter giving the edited version of the painting for public consumption. | ||
| But then the same guy who commissioned, he was like, okay, give me one for my private collection. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So that's where they would have all the way more explicit stuff. | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I mean, they didn't have pornography back then, so they must have been beaten off to paintings and stuff. | ||
| It had to be. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, it had to be thought of as being... | ||
| Arousal inducing, so much so that, what was it during the Victorian era where they put legs of tables, they would put dresses on them? | ||
| Yeah, they would wrap the legs of the tables because, you know, they are legs. | ||
| If they are bare, they may give you ideas, which I don't know about you, man, but, you know, look at the leg of the table. | ||
| That really doesn't do it for me. | ||
| But there had to be something to it, where people got so horny. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| The table leg. | ||
| This moves, get... | ||
| But that's when you know you really have problems, right? | ||
| When you look at the leg of a table and you get all excited, it's like, man... | ||
| Yeah, that's not good. | ||
| No, you may want to revisit your life choices up until that point. | ||
| It's fascinating that people must have agreed to that, too. | ||
| What's up, Jamie? | ||
| I just looked it up. | ||
| It says that it originates from a satire that was written, and people, I guess, took it as truth. | ||
| Oh, so it's not real? | ||
| Yeah, supposedly not. | ||
| But they definitely did cover the legs. | ||
| Yeah, I think they did, but the reason why is exaggerated. | ||
| It says he was poking fun at Americans that did something like that. | ||
| Oh, come on, let's point the meat. | ||
| The meat is too cool. | ||
| Prosperous Farmhouse Parlor in 1900s. | ||
| And that is a cover. | ||
| This is 1900s, right? | ||
| This is the Victorian era is when they did this. | ||
| In 1839, an Englishman wrote a satire of American tour. | ||
| He wrote an American propensity to use the word limb in place of leg. | ||
| Though he says the English do it too. | ||
| Then he says that he visited a boarding school. | ||
| Young ladies, New York State, we saw a square piano fort with four limbs. | ||
| The mistress of the establishment had dressed all these four limbs in modest trousers with frills at the bottom of them. | ||
| He's exaggerating. | ||
| I'm not subject, uh, is exaggerating or not subject to speculation. | ||
| He is certainly poking fun, or whether, whether Marriott is exaggerating or not is subject to speculation, he is certainly poking fun at Americans, but I can attest that having page two dozens of books showing old black and white piano photos of Victorian interiors, I saw not one example of a table Piano or any other piece of furniture with skirts around the individual legs. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| I had always heard that. | ||
| I like the legend so much better. | ||
| Hadn't you always heard that? | ||
| I heard that from professors. | ||
| I remember hearing that from a history professor. | ||
| I'm all of the, you know, between boring history and a fun legend, always side with a fun legend. | ||
| Yeah, I would like to think that people were way more stupid than they were. | ||
| Yeah, sometimes. | ||
| Makes me feel good about this era. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| We're in now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, you look at the dresses that people had to wear, you know, that went all the way down to the ground. | ||
| I mean, it's not... | ||
| Really much different than what we see in the Middle East. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| It's very simple. | ||
| I mean, what we see in the Middle East, they have to cover their face, the hijab, and the whole deal, and the headscarves, and that's a little more extreme, but not much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| I mean, they wore shit that went all the way to the ground. | ||
| If you showed any ankle, you would lose their mind. | ||
| It's an ankle! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my god! | |
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you know, repression does it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I wonder if they were more hyper-sexualized than we are. | ||
| I bet not. | ||
| I bet because of porn, we're probably more hyper-sexualized, right? | ||
| There's, I think, different arguments there, because some people say the more you repress stuff, the more then you're going to obsess with it, so that's all you think about all day, whereas the one that's kind of indulged more in it is less likely to obsess. | ||
| Then again, there are lots of people who are so addicted to internet porn that I don't know if that idea works, but, you know, that's the... | ||
| Well, the problem with internet porn is the availability. | ||
| You don't even have to go somewhere. | ||
| At least back in the day, when you had VHS tapes or DVDs or something like that, you had to go to a store, you had to buy them, you had to put them in the TV, you had to sit back, you had to get the remote control. | ||
| It was a process. | ||
| There was work involved. | ||
| The minors of minor work. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Now it's just far too easy. | ||
| I mean, how many people that work, that have jobs, go into the bathroom, lock the door and beat off? | ||
| There's a lot of people listening right now. | ||
| We're doing exactly that. | ||
| Doing that right now. | ||
| You're beating off right now. | ||
| Stop it. | ||
| Go back to work. | ||
| Jesus is watching. | ||
| That's what I hear. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting. | ||
| I guess, if you have to think about it, they were trying to control those people and trying to control their urges because it was beneficial to society. | ||
| It was beneficial to society that these people needed to do their fair share and get to work and they couldn't just be staring at legs all day and engaging in pure thoughts. | ||
| You know, that's the problem with any kind of prohibition. | ||
| It's completely misunderstanding how the human mind works. | ||
| You do not say no to things as, you are not going to do this. | ||
| You are guaranteeing that people are going to obsess with this, right? | ||
| It doesn't work. | ||
| There's a Zen story that I heard once that I thought it was hilarious. | ||
| I can't remember where I heard it, but... | ||
| Like, guys go to a Zen master saying, hey, you know, you're equal at peace and happy. | ||
| I want to be just like you. | ||
| What do I need to do? | ||
| Zen master says, okay, just for the next 24 hours, don't think about monkeys. | ||
| Guy's like, monkeys? | ||
| Never thought about monkeys. | ||
| How is that going to make me enlightened? | ||
| Zen master's like, shut up. | ||
| Go away. | ||
| Come back in 24 hours. | ||
| Don't think about monkeys. | ||
| Kind of like, okay, well, becoming enlightened is going to be a piece of cake because all I have to do is not think about monkeys. | ||
| And of course, the next 24 hours become the most monkey-filled hours of his life because that's all he can think about, right? | ||
| Point being, the more you make something a taboo, the more you guarantee that people are going to obsess with it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even think of drinking at 21 in the US. Growing up, I don't even know if there was an age in Italy where you're supposed to not drink, but it's not that glamorous. | ||
| It's what your grandparents have for lunch, and you are maybe six years old, and you want to try a little wine, and they give you a tiny bit saying, If you have a little more, you got a headache, so just gotta... | ||
| And then one day you do got a little more, you got a headache, and you go, oh, shit, you are right, okay. | ||
| And you kind of learn how to drink, rather than being like, we got a weight, cool, now we got all these booze, and people drink, throw up all over themselves. | ||
| It's like, that's just gross, why are you doing that? | ||
| Yeah, I think there's definitely healthier attitudes than Americans' attitudes about alcohol. | ||
| But also, like, wine is a good way to start. | ||
| Like, you start off a kid with whiskey... | ||
| That's not the way to start. | ||
| That's too potent. | ||
| One of my first times I ever got drunk was on Jack Daniels, and it took years for me to smell Jack Daniels and not want to throw up. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| You get those triggers in your head where you smell it, like Jägermeister. | ||
| I used to smell Jägermeister and just be like... | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Because you just think about just getting violently ill where your body's trying to purge it from your system so you don't die. | ||
| To hide it from kids and tell them that it's taboo, but then you drink it, and then they're like, I can't wait until these fucking people can't tell me what to do anymore. | ||
| Get myself a nice cold glass of whiskey. | ||
| That goes also to education in general. | ||
| If a parent has to come to the place where you say, these are the rules, you live under my roof, you need to pay them, that's like raising the white flag and admitting, I've lost already, I lost control, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. | ||
| Of course all they are going to do is wait for you to turn around and do exactly the thing you're prohibiting because you're coming across as a dictator, you're coming across as an asshole. | ||
| If instead you can teach somebody, look man, You can do whatever you want. | ||
| The goal here is we want to make sure, we both want to make sure that you're happy and you're safe. | ||
| Simple enough. | ||
| So let's figure out a strategy to make sure you can be happy and safe, and I'm on board, whatever. | ||
| That's a lot easier for people to respond to being like, okay, so you're not just a killjoy who's trying to squash my life. | ||
| You're somebody who's concerned about me not ending up dead. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| We can work with that, you know. | ||
| Yeah, but parents have to work. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they don't have any time. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I don't have to tell you. | ||
| You're a parent. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You're like, just fucking listen to me. | ||
| Shut up. | ||
| I'm busy. | ||
| I'm writing my book over here. | ||
| I'm fucking getting my lectures ready. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And the kid's like, hey, hey, hey, what about whiskey? | |
| Don't fucking touch that shit. | ||
| Get out of there. | ||
| Get out of that liquor cabinet. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, I remember when I was a kid, I couldn't wait to drink. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| This is going to be fun. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| It's got to be. | ||
| It's taboo. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| It's forbidden. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| But that's the problem with forbidding stuff. | ||
| It never works. | ||
| Well, it's also Italian food and wine seem to go hand in hand. | ||
| And that used to be what they drank because they were concerned with getting sick, right? | ||
| And one of the best ways to not get sick was to drink wine. | ||
| The alcohol content? | ||
| Well, yeah, the alcohol content would keep the water from, I mean, like if you just drink water all the time, especially if it's sitting still, you could get some bad fucking water, right? | ||
| You can get bad water from a lake. | ||
| I mean, how many, they didn't know jack shit about parasites back then. | ||
| How many people got some terrible diseases from drinking puddle water and shit? | ||
| I'm sure a lot. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| You just find some water. | ||
| Like, oh, we're thirsty. | ||
| Time to drink. | ||
| Or even a creek. | ||
| You drink in a creek and you think, like, oh, this is a beautiful stream. | ||
| This is clear water. | ||
| Yeah, but a beaver took a shit just 100 yards ahead. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You don't know about it. | ||
| You get what's called beaver fever. | ||
| For real, that's what they call giardia. | ||
| They call it beaver fever. | ||
| Yeah, that can be good. | ||
| No, it's terrible. | ||
| So they used to drink wine to prevent what they would call traveler's disease. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Because people would take these, what are those things called? | ||
| The leather things that they would carry wine in. | ||
| I want to say flask, but it's not a flask. | ||
| What are those leather satchels that they would carry wine in? | ||
| I thought they used flask for that, but I'm not sure. | ||
| Might be. | ||
| There's a term, it's like a leather bag and it had like on the end like a cork and you just drink from that and that's how they would hydrate. | ||
| People must have been just hammered all day. | ||
| When you read the statistics of how much people used to drink, it's amazing that anything ever got done because it's just people were drinking morning through night. | ||
| And they must have been horrific to each other. | ||
| Just imagine a whole civilization that is a drunken bar at 1am. | ||
| Angry drunk. | ||
| You know, it's funny because I've seen it enough that I get it. | ||
| People get edgy and weird where... | ||
| When they drink too much. | ||
| But I never got it. | ||
| Because to me, if I'm drunk, that's when I'm happy. | ||
| I want to hug people. | ||
| Why would I want to be in a bad mood? | ||
| This is awesome. | ||
| Well, you're a nice guy. | ||
| That's what it is that comes out. | ||
| Yeah, if you're a fucking asshole, you get drunk. | ||
| Especially if you're just barely keeping that asshole under the surface. | ||
| You just want to fucking stab everybody and club them and steal their women. | ||
| And then you get a couple of drinks in you. | ||
| Alcohol is a great social lubricant, right? | ||
| It's great for releasing inhibitions and letting people communicate with each other more freely and have fun. | ||
| But it also removes doubt. | ||
| And that's not good. | ||
| I think doubt is critical. | ||
| Doubt is one of the pieces of the great puzzle. | ||
| The great puzzle has many ingredients, and one of those ingredients is doubt. | ||
| And doubt is important. | ||
| You should look at anything you're about to contemplate and go, hmm, let me think about this. | ||
| Let me think what could go wrong when you get a couple of drinks. | ||
| Fuck it! | ||
| Let's do it! | ||
| Let's go! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Woo! | |
| And then next thing you know, you're on an internet meme. | ||
| Hold my beer! | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| We talked about that yesterday, like some of the more ridiculous ones, but there's so many of those out there, and almost all of them have to do with alcohol. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| No, you're totally right. | ||
| And I think what you're saying about that, there's a great... | ||
| Alan Watts, the guy who popularizes Zen and Taoism and all of that stuff, he had this great line. | ||
| He called it the wisdom of insecurity. | ||
| You know, this idea of... | ||
| Thread real careful. | ||
| There's a wisdom there in not being overly dogmatic, which doesn't mean... | ||
| The problem is that people take that concept too far and that turn it into having no balls and not being able to take a stand. | ||
| That's not the solution either. | ||
| That's the other side of the problem. | ||
| But there's a sweet spot in between where you can take stances, but they are careful stances. | ||
| They are stances that are very willing to be changed at the drop of a dime if you show the good evidence to change them. | ||
| That, to me, is what intellectual honesty looks like. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| I think it's good to be aware of all the possibilities. | ||
| I used to tell people that when I was teaching Taekwondo, like people that would compete, if they were really, really nervous, I'd be like, the really smart people are really nervous because you're aware of all the possibilities, of everything that can go wrong. | ||
| The people that aren't worried about it at all, they're usually dumb. | ||
| There's that, but also to me there are some people, like I look at some of the people who are able to keep it together in this Kind of like Chuck Liddell, right? | ||
| Take a nap right before a fight kind of thing. | ||
| I can tell by looking at those guys and just be like, you know something I don't know. | ||
| There's something there that you're doing. | ||
| Confidence, for sure. | ||
| I mean, Chuck had been knocking people unconscious for many, many years, and he knew exactly what to do. | ||
| And he knew he was good at it. | ||
| There's that, for sure. | ||
| And I think there's the other side is knowing that, okay, if I have decided to do it, fear is not going to help me now. | ||
| It helped me to make decisions earlier, but right now it's not going to help me, so let's figure out. | ||
| Man, it was hilarious. | ||
| My girlfriend fights MMA professionally. | ||
| Yeah, I've noticed that. | ||
| Yeah, she's wild, man. | ||
| I've been paying attention to your escapades online. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She's crazy, huh? | ||
| She's crazy. | ||
| She literally had that Chuck Liddell mode where she took a nap right before a fight. | ||
| And, you know, like 45 minutes before you have to wake her up going like, hey, ready. | ||
| And she's all like... | ||
| Okay, ready to roll. | ||
| And I'm like, I would not sleep for a week prior. | ||
| How do you manage to keep it together like this? | ||
| It's good to do. | ||
| I used to do that. | ||
| I used to sleep before fights. | ||
| It's good. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| Yeah, but you just can get yourself into a more calm state. | ||
| It's so much better than frantically running around and freaking out and fretting. | ||
| Plus, it freaks out your opponents. | ||
| I would sleep right in the bleachers. | ||
| I'd just go to sleep right there. | ||
| And everybody else would be nervous and shit, and you're sleeping. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You look at that. | ||
| I'm supposed to fight that guy? | ||
| The guy was sleeping right before the fight? | ||
| Hell no. | ||
| The first match she did was nuts because you're in the locker room and there's the guy sitting next to you, goes out for his match, comes right back, he said he's split open, covered in blood, and they're telling you, okay, you get ready, you're going next. | ||
| And I'm dying, right? | ||
| I'm just thinking, how the hell? | ||
| And she's all like, la, la, la. | ||
| Where'd you meet her? | ||
| At the gym? | ||
| No, she literally lived across the street from me. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Just random. | ||
| And it was funny because I used to say, this is where the universe has a sense of humor, because I used to say all the time, like, I'm kind of, I can get along with anybody, but I don't necessarily click with a lot of people. | ||
| So my thing was like, yeah, where do I find somebody I click with? | ||
| Across the street. | ||
| And I said that like 10,000 times, right? | ||
| One day I'm like, look at that. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| That's why I was looking at the universe going like, okay, that's funny, haha. | ||
| There's definitely little things that almost slap you in the face. | ||
| Yeah, there's a whole system going on, stupid. | ||
| Just pay attention. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I know you make fun of Oprah, but the secret might be real, motherfucker. | ||
| Oprah's got $3 billion. | ||
| Seriously, man. | ||
| There might be something to it all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it seems completely preposterous, but... | |
| Intellectually, I always want to say, nah, you know, things don't happen for a fucking reason. | ||
| You decide they happen for a reason afterwards because it helps fit your sense of order. | ||
| The funny thing is I completely agree with that, and I also completely agree with the fact that sometimes things click in a way that you're like, okay, you're fucking with me. | ||
| I think about people all the time, out of nowhere, I'll get an email from them. | ||
| Like, out of nowhere? | ||
| Like, I haven't talked to this guy in 10 fucking years, and then all of a sudden I get an email. | ||
| Or, you know, you run into them somewhere. | ||
| Like, what? | ||
| How is it possible I'm running into you at the airport? | ||
| This doesn't even make sense. | ||
| I know. | ||
| You reconnect. | ||
| It's very strange. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Those are the times when it really humbles you and makes you think, okay, the universe is such a weird place and what I understand is like probably 0.01% of what's out there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're connected in some other weird, bizarre way that we haven't figured out yet. | ||
| And maybe we'll never will. | ||
| Maybe we'll become symbiotes. | ||
| Maybe we'll become completely ingrained technologically before we figure out the biological connections that we share. | ||
| Because I think there's... | ||
| I think there's like the obvious senses that we all have, but I think there's some other stuff going on. | ||
| You think about someone and then boom, they're calling you on the phone. | ||
| That just to me is too coincidental sometimes. | ||
| Sometimes it's random. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Like say if it's someone that you talk to all the time and then they call you, that's just coincidence. | ||
| Yeah, no big deal. | ||
| But there's some times, man, where you just, you're talking about someone, and all of a sudden the fucking phone rings, and I go, look at this. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| You haven't talked to them in four years. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| They're calling you right there. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| There's something to that. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And you ask them, like, why'd you call me? | ||
| Just stop right now. | ||
| I'm not saying, like, why you calling me now. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| I'm saying, like, what was going on? | ||
| Like, what caused you to call me? | ||
| I don't know, I just had a weird feeling. | ||
| What the fuck, man? | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| I know, episodes all the time. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| You can also tell when people are creepy, too, right? | ||
| You can tell when someone's a creep. | ||
| There's something weird. | ||
| The vibe that you pick up. | ||
| Weird, vile. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| What's that? | ||
| I really do think that there's something that verbal communication is a very small way in which we communicate. | ||
| There's so much more to it. | ||
| Because there are times when you walk into a room and you already know who you're going to like and who you don't. | ||
| And the ones that you don't, then you need to spend the next whatever long it takes you to find the reason why you don't click. | ||
| But you already know it. | ||
| There's that something there is going on. | ||
| There's a smell. | ||
| And I think most people trust their perceptions. | ||
| So they're like, no, no, I need to find out the rational reason. | ||
| Why would I have this preconception? | ||
| To me, it's like, if you feel it, there's probably good reason for it. | ||
| If you have a strong feeling about it, I would trust it rather than not. | ||
| Fuck yeah. | ||
| Yeah, trust it rather than not is a good way. | ||
| And, you know, don't trust it like, that's definitely a witch. | ||
| Yeah, no, not that. | ||
| I knew it. | ||
| Do not burn your people at the stake. | ||
| That's a bad idea. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was a weird time, too, right? | ||
| It's just amazing to me that the United States is such a recent... | ||
| Sort of experiment in self-government and that no one has done anything like that since then. | ||
| That's what's kind of really amazing to me when I stop and think about all the wacky shit that's taken place in America over the last 300 plus years and then that no one else has done that. | ||
| No one else has said, look, we found a spot in Australia, and the Australian government has allowed us to carve off a big chunk. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Let's call it, you know, whatever. | ||
| Danielia Land. | ||
| I'm all for it, and I swear I'll be a good leader. | ||
| I won't. | ||
| Screw all your wives. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| It seems like what's also amazing is that the United States has managed to become the number one superpower in the world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| As a group of all crazy immigrants that all moved into one spot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Yeah, no, the story of the United States is fascinating because, yeah, you don't, and probably it's never going to happen again because, you know, that was the product of a war that did not know about, oh, there's this other con, you know, you find out, it's new, it's exciting, it's everything. | ||
| Now you know what's out there. | ||
| I mean, unless you go for space exploration, nothing like this will happen in the history of planet Earth. | ||
| It just, The only way it can happen is a reset, a civilization reset. | ||
| There would have to be like a bunch of people die, like most people die. | ||
| Apocalypse, most people lose the knowledge of what was going on before, then yeah sure, you can have a post Graham Hancock kind of story. | ||
| Yeah, post Graham Hancock, that's entirely possible too. | ||
| That's entirely possible. | ||
| Although I did read something very recently that they think What was the super volcano that killed most people on the planet 70,000 years ago? | ||
| They found one pocket of humans that actually survived and thrived in Africa. | ||
| But they think that the entire population of human beings at that point in time, 70,000 years ago, the entire population in the world was only around 100,000 people. | ||
| Yeah, and then it dropped down to 10,000. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| 10,000 people because of the supervolcano. | ||
| So the supervolcano blew. | ||
| It wiped out most life. | ||
| It wiped out most people. | ||
| It plunged the earth into some sort of a nuclear winter. | ||
| I forget where it was. | ||
| I want to say it was Bali or Indonesia? | ||
| Mount Toba. | ||
| Where was that? | ||
| Indonesia. | ||
| Sumatra. | ||
| Sumatra. | ||
| Killed literally 90% of the people. | ||
| And 10,000 were left. | ||
| So 70,000 years ago, we were down to 10,000 humans. | ||
| Which makes all the things about racism so silly. | ||
| Dude, that's a good show for Kevin Hart. | ||
| Not even. | ||
| That's a light crowd for Kevin Hart. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| 10,000 people. | ||
| It's like a fucking Blink-182 concert. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 10,000 people, man. | ||
| That's nothing. | ||
| You stop and think about that. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| I've done 10,000 people in a night before. | ||
| In Denver, I did two shows. | ||
| There are 5,000 each. | ||
| That's 10,000 people. | ||
| That's the fucking entire population of Earth. | ||
| And that now became 7 billion. | ||
| 70,000 years later. | ||
| It's nuts. | ||
| We're so weird. | ||
| We're such a weird animal. | ||
| Like, if you could study us without being us, like, if somehow or another you could remove all of your cultural conceptions and all the things that you've just sort of accepted and established as fact as a human and just look at it completely objective, you'd be like, what a nutty animal this thing is. | ||
| What the fuck are we doing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's why it never gets old to study the human psyche. | ||
| Like, what makes people choose this? | ||
| Because that's the beauty of human beings. | ||
| We have choices that, you know, a wolf is a wolf. | ||
| There are only so many things you can choose as a wolf. | ||
| You know, yeah, you could have a wolf that adopts one strategy, one another, but the range of choices is pretty limited. | ||
| As humans, we have this insane range of choices, and it's fascinating to see what it is that makes some people go in one direction and a completely different one. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| It is fun. | ||
| And what's fascinating to me about human beings of today is I've never seen a time where people are more interested in other people doing what they want them to do. | ||
| Other people thinking the way they want them to think, other people behaving the way they want. | ||
| People, it seems to me, are more concerned with controlling people's expression and thinking today than ever before. | ||
| And even more so on the left, it seems like I'm seeing this interesting trend today where people like, it's almost like we don't like where things are headed. | ||
| We don't like what's happening. | ||
| We don't like who the president is. | ||
| So people are being real adamant about enforcing certain types of behavior. | ||
| And that, in turn, just like we're talking about suppressing people from drinking alcohol, that in turn makes people rebel. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| I feel like there's more people that are leaning right today than ever before, and I attribute it entirely to the people on the left. | ||
| You know, the thing that's funny about it is that most human beings, even if you just look at the United States, right, most people are not the extreme right or the extreme left. | ||
| The overwhelming majority are not. | ||
| I think a lot of this stuff is also a little bit media created in the sense that it's like, let's find the most batshit crazy person on that side. | ||
| Let's put the spotlight on them, which make everybody go like, what the fuck? | ||
| Who are those crazy people? | ||
| And that's how—it's kind of like if you were to pick, you know, the Westboro Baptist Church and make it be representative of Christianity. | ||
| It's not, you know, but if you keep putting the spotlight there, you'll create this perception, will create a backlash, and it becomes this thing where— That's one of the funny things that I was noticing because I really don't like political correctness. | ||
| I really don't like academia. | ||
| There are 10,000 of these things where I'm like, yeah, I'm completely on board with not liking some of these things. | ||
| But then there's another side where, you know, I have been teaching a university since 2001. I don't think I've seen once a case of the kind of political correctness that I see in articles in media. | ||
| Not once, you know? | ||
| Like, I was doing the math. | ||
| I had probably maybe 11,000 students in my classes over the course of these years. | ||
| And I haven't heard one person ever defend hardcore communism or make an argument, even among my colleagues, which I have issues for other reasons. | ||
| That's never been one of the things. | ||
| So I'm like, I keep hearing about it, I read it on papers, but why is it that when I spend, you know, that's how I make my living, I'm on college campuses all the time, I hardly ever see it. | ||
| And so I'm thinking, I'm not saying that it's not true. | ||
| Of course, these stories are true. | ||
| There's no argument. | ||
| But what I'm wondering is how much do they get blown out of proportion because you get clicks, because it makes for an interesting narrative, which then some people also leave off that kind of narrative. | ||
| And I'm like, how much is it something where you are putting the spotlight on a rare exception and make it the norm versus how much it's a real thing? | ||
| Because, you know, you would expect, I mean, I teach in Southern California and some of the most, you know, Santa Monica is one of the most liberal places around. | ||
| If this thing was as dominant as advertised, I should be running into it all the time, right? | ||
| And I don't like that stuff, so I would be sensitive, you know, I would be paying attention, and yet I don't see it. | ||
| So I'm like, hmm, what's going on here? | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Well, I think the instances are more frequent than ever before, but I also think if you put it into perspective and think about how many universities there are across the country, I mean, there are hundreds and hundreds of universities. | ||
| And if you have one incident that breaks out one month in one place... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| And it was about one conservative speaker that's going to give a lecture, and everybody freaks out and goes crazy, and all the people with green hair fucking bang on the windows. | ||
| It becomes something that people are worried about spreading. | ||
| And so I think that's one of the reasons, because I'm sure you're familiar with the story from Evergreen State. | ||
| That was a fascinating story. | ||
| And for people who are interested in it, Google Brett Weinstein and Evergreen State College and you can listen to him on my podcast. | ||
| I had him on right after it all went down. | ||
| What had happened was there was a thing called the Day of Absence that had traditionally been people of color would stay home just so that people would recognize that, like, oh, when they're not there, we miss them and we miss their contributions and they're an important part of our community. | ||
| I think that's a little silly to stay home to do that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I agree with you. | |
| But I think it's not a bad... | ||
| It's a good thing for people to recognize that everybody plays a part, and if these people feel marginalized, give them a little extra juice, that's fine. | ||
| But the real hardcore social justice warriors decide that's not enough. | ||
| Instead, what we want is all white people to stay home. | ||
| And like, you can't do that. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Because now you're telling people to stay home versus allowing people to stay home in which case you miss them. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| This is the opposite. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You're telling these white people to fuck off. | ||
| So Brett, who is like a fiercely progressive person, was telling people like, you are making a mistake here. | ||
| You're getting out of line. | ||
| This is not the way to do it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then they went crazy and they're fucking looking for them with baseball bats and they You know, they literally kidnapped classes. | ||
| They held the principal or the president of the school in this room. | ||
| And even when they went to the bathroom, they escorted him to the restroom and then brought him back to the room. | ||
| They wouldn't let people leave. | ||
| The stories are amazing. | ||
| No, I mean, in fact, that stuff is complete batshit crazy line, right? | ||
| Complete batshit crazy. | ||
| We completely agree on that. | ||
| It's like, that is ridiculous. | ||
| That has no place anywhere. | ||
| That's bullshit. | ||
| That you don't do stuff like that is just... | ||
| Same thing as the Jordan Peterson thing in Toronto. | ||
| That policy was a stupid policy and he was right in arguing against it. | ||
| So I'm not arguing that they are wrong. | ||
| No, I know you're not. | ||
| They're completely right. | ||
| My issue is from there to arguing that this is this super prevalent thing. | ||
| It's like from one story or one story there to say instead there's a communist conspiracy to brainwash us all. | ||
| It's like, okay, we're... | ||
| We are starting from a completely understandable premise and taking it like 25 steps too far. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| I agree, but I think that what's happening is more of these unusual situations are occurring, and so people are terrified of this spreading like wildfire across the country. | ||
| Because... | ||
| Kids are very easily influenced, you know, and they're also idealistic, you know, they want to change the world. | ||
| Maybe they grew up with a father who was an asshole and a racist and like, fuck this, no racism, no fascism, and they're calling everybody a Nazi and running down the street. | ||
| And in fact, I have it as a question, not as something I'm sure of, but what I wonder is how much of this is media-fueled and how much is real? | ||
| I mean, some of it is real for sure. | ||
| My question is how much is some? | ||
| Well, most certainly, media influences people, and it influences people in a bunch of different ways. | ||
| It shows that you can get attention for doing certain things. | ||
| It shows that other people are in support of maybe what you thought were your radical ideas, and that you find other radical people as well. | ||
| But, I mean, that's also the argument for not publishing the name of school shooters, right? | ||
| It's because a lot of these people think that this is media fueled by people that are seeking attention. | ||
| I think they're probably right in certain ways. | ||
| In a certain respect. | ||
| But it's also just a part of who we are, and I think it makes us really consider and take into responsibility what is significant about broadcasting ideas and how much influence these ideas have on people who absorb them, people who take them in. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| I think my issue with some of these things is that often it becomes a partisan thing. | ||
| When your guys do that and they show those totalitarian things, then boo, bad totalitarians. | ||
| When my guys do it, I'll turn the other way and pretend it's not true. | ||
| To me, in fact, it's not one particular ideology or another. | ||
| It kind of goes back to what you were saying about human nature in general. | ||
| Totalitarianism, you know, this idea that you want to control what people think their choices is horrible, regardless of who's doing it. | ||
| And in that case, nobody has a monopoly on this because you have seen hardcore religious fundamentalists push totalitarianism. | ||
| You have seen, you know, atheist ideology like communism pushing totalitarianism. | ||
| Completely, right? | ||
| You see people on the political left, people on the political right. | ||
| It's a virus. | ||
| It's a virus of the mind that when it takes over, there's this desire to squash all other choices. | ||
| And I find it equally horrible regardless of who's doing it. | ||
| I'm a little suspicious when the narrative becomes, look at those guys doing it, and you're only picking one side. | ||
| There are some guys where I see Even they desperately try to be like, no, I'm fair. | ||
| Look, I pick on my... | ||
| I was listening to somebody doing this thing. | ||
| I think he was more right-wing oriented and he was saying, oh, this time we are wrong. | ||
| And I was like, oh, look at that. | ||
| That's kind of a self-criticism. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Let me listen. | ||
| We are wrong because we are just like the left and you should hear what the left... | ||
| And then for the next half hour, he goes on about the left. | ||
| I'm like, that's not self-criticism, motherfucker. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's just... | |
| You're still a partisan shill, you know? | ||
| That's like not being honest to me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that, I think, what bugs me is when it's an ideological battle when you want to score points as opposed to saying, look, there are certain things that are fucked up that are evil. | ||
| Totalitarianism, regardless of which adjective it's attached to it, is bad. | ||
| How about we agree on that? | ||
| That's kind of where sometimes I feel a little sketchy in the way the narrative gets pushed, that it becomes a my tribe versus your tribe thing. | ||
| Well, you would probably know better than most because you've been teaching in universities for so long. | ||
| I mean, you would see that you're on the battlefield. | ||
| I think a lot of what it is is a lot of what you were talking about before, about people doing horrific things, is that they're cowards. | ||
| And they just give in to the whims of those around them and the mob mentality. | ||
| And I think that happens with the right-wing ideology that you see expressed in horrific ways, like, you know, whether it's... | ||
| I mean, fill in the blank. | ||
| It could be Charlottesville. | ||
| It could be any of these horrific things that have happened where right-wing people got together and protested versus what happens with the left. | ||
| I think it's a lot of it is just people wanting to be a part of a group, people wanting to be a part of this thing that gives them – they have this feeling of being in a tribe and solidarity, and they go along with whatever the ideology is that tribe's pushing. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And that to me is such a danger because it's, you know, that sense of belonging is something that all human beings crave to one degree or another. | ||
| And so it's the same thing that make people join cults. | ||
| It's the same thing that make people join some hardcore political position. | ||
| It's the same thing that make people join biker guys. | ||
| It's the same mentality, right? | ||
| We need to, as our tribe, our group, with the same clothes, with the same ideas, we stand for... | ||
| Because it feels good to have other people who embrace you as one of them, who treat you well as a result. | ||
| But of course, the price to pay is your individuality. | ||
| Because you have to kind of sacrifice the complexity of who you are in order to fit in neatly into this box. | ||
| Yeah, and you kind of have to shut out objectivity, because if you look at things objectively, you're going to say, well, we're fucked up too, and this doesn't make any sense, and these aren't my enemy. | ||
| They're just people that are on a bad path. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I could have gone down that road too if I lived over in that community. | ||
| I've found myself in this one spot that leans left, and so I'm leaning left too. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, how does that stop, though? | ||
| This is my question about all that kind of stuff. | ||
| What could ever happen? | ||
| What could you foresee happening in history where people could look past that and sort of figure it out and go, you know what? | ||
| There has got to be a better way to behave and think, and this is probably one of our main concerns. | ||
| Because if you really look at If you ask people, what's our main concern? | ||
| Well, war. | ||
| Okay, sure. | ||
| The economy, that's big. | ||
| And then, you know, there's a host of other things that bother people. | ||
| Crime and education, all these different things. | ||
| Well, what is causing all of this conflict? | ||
| What is causing it? | ||
| Well, a giant percentage of what we're talking about is some sort of a weird tribal behavior. | ||
| Or you get a... | ||
| Get a group, you become a part of that group, and then that's what you identify with, so that's what you reinforce, and then you get some sort of brownie points for reinforcing the ideologies of that group, and you know, if you're the most rabid person, you're the Steve Bannon of that group, everybody rises up and gets behind you, this motherfucker's at the front of the line! | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Supporting our values! | ||
| And then, you know, you find these communities online where people just, they're constantly signaling to all these other people in that group that they're supporting this ideology, and they get all these likes. | ||
| I feel like likes... | ||
| On Twitter and on Instagram and stuff like that, I feel like that's shaping people's opinions and behavior way more than anyone has taken into consideration. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Totally. | |
| I mean, even the fact that, you know, the algorithms make sure that you only see the stuff that you already click like on, so you start seeing the same threads over and over the same topics. | ||
| It really is creating echo chambers, and that's really not good. | ||
| It's fucking horrible. | ||
| You know, it's weird. | ||
| And it's weird what people like and what people don't like. | ||
| A lot of what people like is just really stupid. | ||
| I mean, how many girls are getting fake asses just for likes on Instagram? | ||
| I know. | ||
| It's probably a lot, right? | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| A very, very interesting time for human beings. | ||
| I feel like for you as a person who is deeply knowledgeable about history and you study history and you have this history podcast, when you look at today, do you ever try to look at today in a perspective of someone in the future trying to teach about today? | ||
| Yeah, and the thing is that as much as there are obviously cycles in history and there are patterns that are recognizable and all of that, today is also so damn unique because if you look at just Forget everything else. | ||
| If you look at the way just technology has shaped us, the last 150 years are unlike the previous 200,000 years. | ||
| You know, the stuff that has happened in the last 150 years from electricity, the refrigerator, internet, radio, TV, it's like... | ||
| The pace of technological development is something that nobody has ever even come close in human history before. | ||
| So we are in a place where we're really in uncharted territory, where the human mind has evolved so much from where Happy Monk is running around, but now we have these tools to do stuff that we are really not prepared to deal with to a large degree. | ||
| And so it's... | ||
| Kind of a big open question. | ||
| Where do we go from here? | ||
| Because there's no previous model that you can say, well, that one time, 3,000 years ago, when they invented the Internet, they handled it this way. | ||
| There's nothing like it. | ||
| The tools we have at our disposal are unlike anything that has ever happened before. | ||
| So, that's one of the cases where, you know, usually history, you can see, oh, you learned this lesson. | ||
| You can definitely learn about human nature and how the human mind works, but then from there you have to predict how the human mind will be applied to a context that's unlike anything, any other context that I've ever faced before. | ||
| And then the big concern is that the human mind will create an artificial mind that won't take into consideration any of the previous cultural ideals that we've supported and will just go run rampant. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| DARPA has created a robot that I've been raving about. | ||
| It drives me crazy. | ||
| It's called the Eater Robot, E-A-T-R. It operates on biological material, meaning it is fueled by eating bodies. | ||
| Okay, what could possibly go wrong with that? | ||
| The idea is that on the battlefield, I'm sure, they're not talking about this, they've conveniently left this, like, one of the things that Well, maybe you could eat plants. | ||
| Maybe you could eat a rabbit or something. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or maybe you could eat fucking people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| My number one concern with all this stuff is that I think it's happening so fast and so many things are taking place in so many different realms when it comes to innovation that this stuff will just catch up to us before we even recognize it's happened and it'll be too late. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Forget everything else, even just the whole atomic bombs issue. | ||
| Ever since we started from the 1940s to today, there have been some seriously close calls. | ||
| Remember the one? | ||
| There was one in the 1980s, I think, right before the end of the Cold War, where there was, in Russia, the guy goes to his boring job where they are supposed to look for missiles from the United States, and nothing ever happened day after day after day. | ||
| And then one day there's a bleep on the radar and they're like, oh shit. | ||
| And it's the guy's job to call his superiors. | ||
| And then if he does, the odds are they are going to press the button and he's like, no, no, no, wait, let's calm down. | ||
| Maybe it's wrong. | ||
| Americans are not that stupid. | ||
| They will not send one atomic bomb. | ||
| If they do it, they send a bunch. | ||
| So this must be a mistake. | ||
| Let's all relax. | ||
| Three minutes later, another bleep, another bleep, another bleep. | ||
| He's like, oh shit, they are sending a bunch of atomic bombs. | ||
| This is the real deal. | ||
| And the guy still doesn't do what he's supposed to. | ||
| He feels like, if I make this call, nuclear war starts, I need to be 3,000% convinced. | ||
| The evidence in front of me is pretty solid, but I still don't feel it. | ||
| And then five minutes later, all the bleeps go off. | ||
| It was a mistake on the radar, and there was like some random bleep. | ||
| And the guy promptly drank a bottle of vodka straight because he was like, He almost caused World War III. Exactly. | ||
| And, you know, most of us owe their lives now to some Russian dude in the 1980s who decided not to do what he was supposed to. | ||
| And then all because of a stupid mistake, a stupid bug in the radar. | ||
| That's when you know that the technologies we have are way too much for our decision making. | ||
| Or way not enough, because it should be better detection. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's the other side, right? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| I mean, what was it? | ||
| A flock of birds? | ||
| What was it? | ||
| I don't even know what the real thing is. | ||
| Yeah, that kind of shit terrifies me. | ||
| The ability to do something like that without the understanding or the discipline to create it is really nuts. | ||
| I always liken it to giving a baby a gun. | ||
| The baby didn't figure out how to use that gun. | ||
| They didn't invent it. | ||
| They don't know how to load a round, but they can just fucking pull that trigger. | ||
| And people can die. | ||
| That can happen. | ||
| People get killed by toddlers all the time. | ||
| People leave their purse in their bag. | ||
| Toddler picks it up, shoots himself, shoots someone else. | ||
| It happens. | ||
| All the time. | ||
| All the time, yeah. | ||
| Human beings have access to all sorts of technologies that we would never be able to figure out on our own. | ||
| With the great responsibility that comes with using those things, There should be some sort of great knowledge that you have to acquire about the thing itself. | ||
| Some reasonable facsimile of what it took to create that thing. | ||
| Some deep, intensive program. | ||
| Like, hey, you want to learn how to drive a car? | ||
| This is how an engine was developed. | ||
| This is how brakes work. | ||
| You can't half-ass this. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The same should be said about guns. | ||
| The same should be said about everything. | ||
| We just have access to too much shit that we would never be able to figure out on our own. | ||
| And we're like, well, just fucking try it. | ||
| Press that button. | ||
| See what happens. | ||
| The old my beer approach to six, right? | ||
| It's like, learn how to use it, then we can talk about it. | ||
| And they keep coming up with new ones. | ||
| Didn't Russia come up with some new supersonic missile? | ||
| Like just a few days ago they announced it? | ||
| I didn't hear about it. | ||
| Better off. | ||
| You're better off not hearing about it. | ||
| Scary stuff. | ||
| Will all the guests on the GRE will be here now in your compound with float tanks and stuff to survive the apocalypse when the zombies attack? | ||
| You don't want to be a survivor. | ||
| I mean, you maybe want your ancestors to survive, so you should survive, but your ancestors might get raped and eaten. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The process of surviving doesn't look like a fun one. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, if you were around in Indonesia 70,000 years ago when the big one blew, and you were one of the survivors, and you're picking through the wreckage of... | ||
| Civilization. | ||
| Not good times, definitely. | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| But then again, if it wasn't for them, we wouldn't have Disneyland. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Which is a very important point, yes. | |
| If it wasn't for them, no Netflix. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nope. | |
| If it wasn't for them, no iPhone. | ||
| All because of people in Indonesia, yes. | ||
| All because those people did eat those dead people. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| All because those people did figure out a way to somehow or another get enough nutrients from whatever the fuck they ate to compensate for the fact they were involved in nuclear winter. | ||
| That's nuts, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| But it makes you realize, just we, the people that are listening to this, the people that are live today, we're not going to make it. | ||
| We are not going to make it. | ||
| Everyone's so hopeful that the human race is going to make it. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons why we have offspring and loved ones and friends. | ||
| And even if I'm gone, I want everyone else to be happy. | ||
| I had a great time while I'm here. | ||
| Don't cry for me. | ||
| But no one's making it. | ||
| They're not going to make it either. | ||
| You're just prolonging their life. | ||
| Everyone's life is going to come to a wall. | ||
| Everyone. | ||
| That's how the game works. | ||
| But we're cool with that. | ||
| We're cool with Grandma dying. | ||
| Grandma died, but she was 97 years old when she died. | ||
| She was a wonderful woman and she was loved by many. | ||
| Everybody's cool with that. | ||
| You know what we're not cool with? | ||
| Everybody dying all at once. | ||
| The end? | ||
| This is the end of the experiment? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is the end of the process? | ||
| Fuck! | ||
| No, it's not the end. | ||
| It's just, everyone's going to die, and then we're going to restart with monkeys. | ||
| It's going to take another few million years, but the chimps will eventually become people again. | ||
| It's kind of what Graham says, that if anybody's going to survive, it's going to be the people who are living close to hunting and gathering conditions today that are seen as the most backward people in the world, are the ones who actually have a shot at making it in an apocalyptic situation. | ||
| Yeah, like people in the Amazon or something like that. | ||
| They're probably the only ones that have a chance. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| What's the matter, Jamie? | ||
| You see this going around the story about this new company that can upload your brain but it kills you. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is 100% fatal. | ||
| I think they're taking people that are already terminal patients and whatnot. | ||
| That's their first sort of... | ||
| And they're going to upload their mind. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| They're going to give you some bullshit, scrambled version of what you're... | ||
| It's going to be all swastikas. | ||
| Like, we found Grandpa's brain, and we're going to upload it now, and you'll be able to look into his thoughts. | ||
| Oh, it's all dicks! | ||
| Grandpa's all dicks and Nazi memorabilia. | ||
| Preserve your brain and upload a company. | ||
| Its chemical solution can keep a body intact for hundreds of years, maybe thousands, as a statue of frozen glass. | ||
| What? | ||
| The idea is that someday, in the future, scientists will scan your bricked brain and turn it into a computer simulation. | ||
| So they don't even know how to do it yet. | ||
| This is bullshit. | ||
| That way, someone a lot like you, though not exactly you, will smell the flowers again in a data server somewhere. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What? | ||
| Okay, the story's a grisly twist, though. | ||
| For Nectome's procedure to work, it's essential that the brain be fresh. | ||
| The company says its plan is to connect people with terminal illnesses to a heart-lung machine in order to pump its mix of scientific embalming chemicals into the big cartoid arteries in their necks! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Well, they're still alive. | ||
| They're under general anesthesia. | ||
| Thank God you put them under before you kill them. | ||
| Because we don't want them to experience any pain before they go into the great frozen glass statue beyond. | ||
| There's a waiting list. | ||
| Of course there's a waiting list. | ||
| A bunch of fucking idiots. | ||
| Jesus Christ, people are stupid. | ||
| You know, hundreds of thousands of people signed up to die on Mars. | ||
| Do you know that? | ||
| To have the opportunity to be one of the first people to die on Mars? | ||
| Hundreds of thousands of people signed up. | ||
| Yeah, you don't want to be the first. | ||
| To be locked in a spaceship for six months with a bunch of other people so fucking stupid they're willing to die on Mars. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Then you get there. | ||
| They're just talking about social justice the entire way. | ||
| All the way over. | ||
| They're talking about veganism and social justice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, man. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Elon Musk on first Mars Explorers. | ||
| Good chance you'll die. | ||
| Good chance. | ||
| How about 100%? | ||
| You're going to die whether you stay here. | ||
| Stay here. | ||
| Good chance you'll die. | ||
| You're dying. | ||
| Everyone's dying. | ||
| You're going to die. | ||
| That's the fucked up thing. | ||
| We just don't want everybody to die all at once. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| We're cool with small groups of people that are brown that die in caves on the other part of the world. | ||
| If we could be convinced they're primitive. | ||
| They hold these ridiculous beliefs, and we don't even know them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So we're just going to kill them with robots. | ||
| It's somebody out there. | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| It's not us. | ||
| I think just the rate of change... | ||
| It's happening so fast. | ||
| There's going to be a lot of dumb shit like this. | ||
| It happens along the way. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Like the bell bottoms of technology. | ||
| It's like, what the fuck were they thinking? | ||
| And it's going to keep happening like that. | ||
| I mean, think about even most of the stuff that we do today, like which foods are okay to eat and which ones not. | ||
| How many people like to go, oh, look at that. | ||
| Greg is gone. | ||
| He ate the wrong plant. | ||
| So let's make a note that we do not eat that plant. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are we sure that's all Greg ate? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| He's like, well, maybe we should still eat it. | ||
| Let's try it one more time. | ||
| Yeah, get Mike to eat it. | ||
| He's got an iron stomach. | ||
| That dude eats old carcasses and shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, man. | |
| They had to, like, express it somehow or another in a way that everybody would remember it, too. | ||
| Probably in songs and shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, because exactly. | ||
| That's the other thing. | ||
| How do you pass information in a society that's not literate? | ||
| And yet, people did it. | ||
| I mean, when you think about things like the Iliad or the Odyssey, you know, these long-ass compositions completely passed on orally, you know, without... | ||
| You know, by the time they wrote them down, it was centuries down the road. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| That's some pretty insane thing that humans were able to do and, like, memorize all this stuff. | ||
| Yeah, really insane. | ||
| You know, I was thinking the other day about songs, like how crazy the technology of remembering things through songs are. | ||
| Because if, like, you think of all the songs you could sing along to the words, now think of how many poems you could recite. | ||
| It's like very few, or stories that you can... | ||
| Well, poems, maybe because they rhyme, but reciting a story verbatim, almost none. | ||
| Very few, but... | ||
| Like, we were at the comedy store the other day, we were talking about grammar and sentence structure and stuff like that, and I brought up those ABC after-school things, like, Conjunction, junction, what's your function? | ||
| Hooking up words and phrases and clauses. | ||
| Like, you know what it is. | ||
| Like, you know, I'm just a bill sitting here on Capitol Hill. | ||
| And, like, they explain these things in a way that you could remember fucking decades later. | ||
| You would never remember. | ||
| You would never remember if it wasn't for those things. | ||
| There was a guy named Arius who was like one of these... | ||
| Like back when they had the Council of Nicaea and they kind of decided what is real Christianity going to be and what we decide to be the fake stuff... | ||
| Arius was on the losing side, but part of the thing that made him insanely popular is that he put on all his theologian songs, exactly like what you're saying. | ||
| So there would be this super complicated thing about, you know, Jesus, he's kind of like God the Father, but not really, and da-da-da, like really brainy stuff, put on like a silly song that the guy would sing while he's baking bread and stuff, and so he was ridiculously popular because he figured that's how people pick up stuff. | ||
| It is how people pick up stuff. | ||
| You know, I mean, to this day, right? | ||
| Like, pronouns. | ||
| I think of that song. | ||
| Pronouns take the place of a noun, because saying all those nouns over and over can really wear you down. | ||
| Somebody didn't miss too many days at school. | ||
| Good job. | ||
| That stuff, for whatever reason, sticks. | ||
| Of course. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I wonder why. | |
| Like, making things rhyme. | ||
| And putting them in song has a particularly profound effect on your memory. | ||
| Yeah, it is funny because even when you look at babies, you know, they respond to music so much. | ||
| They have that immediate, like some sounds that click with the developing mind of a baby. | ||
| You don't need to have culture. | ||
| You don't need to have knowledge. | ||
| You don't need to have... | ||
| As a baby, you can still pick up things and remember them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or sometimes, you know, somebody put some music and one note goes and the babies immediately recognize it. | ||
| It's like, I know what it is. | ||
| this is right that's the one I enjoy and is so if you do it the other day by the way is fucking hilarious in in Italy this is this little kid is probably two or three years old and that keeps trying to play like children's song and the baby's pissed off but he's like no no no and it's like what do you want and he say something and the dad is like okay fine we'll do this again and whole lot of love by Led Zeppelin started the baby just lights up He's so happy. | ||
| He's like, yes! | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| That's what we are talking about. | ||
| It would be amazing if that kid grows up to be like a big rock star. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Can you imagine? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Get him into a whole lot of love when he's a baby. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| That, to me, is like... | ||
| I kind of did that a lot with my daughter, because I'm like, I hate to do this to you, but you're my daughter, and I want to listen to good shit. | ||
| I don't want to listen to stupid baby stuff all the time. | ||
| So it's like, even to this day, like, she goes to bed with Hendrix. | ||
| Like, there's Hendrix as a lullaby. | ||
| Of course, the mellow Hendrix, because the hardcore stuff is for the day. | ||
| But, like, at night, when she wants to go to sleep, I'll put on, like... | ||
| The more mellow things, like when Andrew's playing acoustic guitar or Little Wing or something like that. | ||
| That I can tolerate. | ||
| Don't give me any baby shit stuff because I just... | ||
| I mean, right now she's not a baby, but even when she was little, I'm like, sorry, I can't do that. | ||
| They like it, though. | ||
| The thing about baby stuff is babies like baby stuff. | ||
| Or even little kids like little kid stuff. | ||
| My kids like a lot of really fucking dumb shows, but they love them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's like, what can you do? | ||
| Can you say, no, you can't love that because it's too fucking stupid? | ||
| But it's not stupid to them. | ||
| I can tolerate it if we balance it with something else. | ||
| I'm like, okay, watch it. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| It's part of your developmental stage. | ||
| Good for you. | ||
| But give me something here, okay? | ||
| Let's find a middle ground here where we can listen to the same music or watch something. | ||
| And that's where I recognize I may have done irreparable damage to my offspring because I realized, like, the other day we watched a movie and My daughter's comment to basically say, this is the coolest thing ever, was like, it's as good as Conan the Barbarian. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I was like, yes, I'm glad you're my daughter. | |
| Was she talking about the books or was she talking about the movie, though? | ||
| All of it. | ||
| She loves the, you know, the one Conan that was good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Arnold. | |
| Arnold, the original, the 1982. And, of course, I read her old Robert T. Howard stories. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Wow. | ||
| You know, I change the language slightly because sometimes the language is a little like you need to really have a crazy vocabulary for an eight-year-old. | ||
| You're not going to pick it up. | ||
| So I kind of tweak it a little, but then, you know, all the good stuff is there. | ||
| I feel like the best Conan could have been Jason Momoa. | ||
| They just gave him a shit movie. | ||
| Yeah, the script was... | ||
| Like, Mamo is so good. | ||
| He's very good. | ||
| And he looks like a fucking barbarian. | ||
| Like, you believe it. | ||
| Perfect. | ||
| Big, giant guy. | ||
| And he's also not built like a bodybuilder. | ||
| He's just built like a guy who's in really good shape, which you would think Conan would be. | ||
| There he is. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think he was the best Conan. | ||
| He seemed to me to be the most realistic. | ||
| Maybe could he use a little bit more gym time, but nothing crazy. | ||
| But the problem here, the scripts. | ||
| That's something that sometimes frustrates me when you see all the elements are there and the screenwriting sucks. | ||
| You're just like, come on, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sucks. | |
| Screenwriting is just straight dog shit. | ||
| But he was fucking great as Conan. | ||
| Like, you believed it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| He just looked evil enough and it looked like a guy who really was a sword fighter who Really did live in that era whereas Conan Played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. | ||
| You're like, wait a minute. | ||
| This guy's got no armpit hair. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| He's fucking... | ||
| Completely shaved down. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Built like a brick shit house. | ||
| Like, it just... | ||
| He was freakishly big. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's actually a picture. | ||
| He looks fairly reasonable there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But he said, you know, now that I think about it, he was actually quite a bit leaner in those days than he was in his bodybuilder day. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that one was just awesome. | ||
| But he was still... | ||
| This is definitely the dude who had been doing some bench pressing. | ||
| It wasn't someone who just swung club bells around and... | ||
| You mean he didn't get those muscles just by pushing the wheel of pain? | ||
| That was part of it, too. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It was definitely that. | ||
| A little bit of that, too. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| On that note, I've been... | ||
| The last couple of years, I've been playing a lot in that world with screenwriting and stuff. | ||
| I'm so excited with that. | ||
| I'm just getting... | ||
| Because, you know, the thing that I enjoy in History on Fire and stuff like that is storytelling. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| And I realized I end up doing that in whatever field I'm, you know, when I'm teaching, most of it is storytelling. | ||
| When I'm history on fire, it's storytelling. | ||
| And so I started playing a little with screenwritings because I had good hookups. | ||
| Man, I'm having so much fun. | ||
| What are you writing? | ||
| Well, there's the stuff that looks There are a few, like they are all mostly historical fiction kind of stories, and one of them right now looks really damn promising, but they have threatened me to chop off my balls and nail them to a tree if I talk about it, so I can't really bring it up because that one actually has a shot at making it. | ||
| There are other scenes where much more kind of early development, like for example, oh I saw you got outside the Frank Frazetta painting, right? | ||
| So Sarah, the granddaughter of Frank, wants to develop one of the characters. | ||
| Is she one of the Frazetta girls? | ||
| Yeah, she's the one who does it all. | ||
| Shout out to Sarah. | ||
| Yeah, she's awesome. | ||
| She's super sweet. | ||
| And she started asking, you know, I showed her some of my writing, we were chatting, she liked it, and so she wanted me to develop one of those characters into a create a world around it, like a Game of Thrones meet Conan kind of thing. | ||
| And I'm like, That's what you're asking me to do? | ||
| That's like the dream job ever. | ||
| It's like, hell yeah, I want to play with that. | ||
| That sounds like fun. | ||
| It would be epic. | ||
| I think those movies and those shows, when done correctly, when executed correctly, are some of the most entertaining and compelling things. | ||
| Whether it's Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings. | ||
| The Conan ones were just... | ||
| Arnold did a great job, and those are fun, but they're campy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, the first one was good. | ||
| The other ones were painful. | ||
| They were really bad. | ||
| They don't represent Robert E. Howard's work. | ||
| Robert E. Howard's work has still, to this day, never really totally been captured. | ||
| I heard that Amazon is going to be doing a Conan series. | ||
| They're going to fuck it up! | ||
| I'm just kidding. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| They're not going to fuck it up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| Maybe they are. | ||
| If they're doing it, who's going to play Conan? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| I don't think they picked it yet because they would have announced it. | ||
| I think they were just saying it's in development. | ||
| They are going to try to stick to Robert E. Howard stories. | ||
| So who knows? | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| They got the shackles. | ||
| They could pull out the big money and get Jason Momoa to get back in the hunt. | ||
| I know. | ||
| He's the Conan, I think. | ||
| You meet the guy, he's like 6'3", he's built like a brick shithouse. | ||
| He looks like he would be a barbarian. | ||
| Like, he looks perfect. | ||
| Like when he played Khal Drogo. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that was perfect, man. | |
| Shit, he was perfect. | ||
| Yeah, you buy it. | ||
| You see him playing that role, you're like, oh, I buy that. | ||
| He's a savage. | ||
| He would be awesome. | ||
| If they did that, man, that would be epic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They are doing a bunch of stuff. | ||
| They're doing that. | ||
| They are doing a prequel to Lord of the Rings on Amazon. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| That Jeff Bezos guy's got a little too much cash. | ||
| Hey, I'm all for it. | ||
| Like, do one more. | ||
| Yeah, do it all. | ||
| Look, I mean, they have that really good Billy Bob Thornton show, too, that people keep telling me about. | ||
| I haven't seen it either. | ||
| What is it called again? | ||
| That Billy Bob Thornton show on Amazon? | ||
| Jamie will find it. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I don't know what it's called, but I know that people keep raving about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Goliath. | |
| Goliath. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| A third of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's supposed to be really good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, the problem with those... | ||
| Here's what's weird. | ||
| More than half the households in this country have Amazon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| I think Amazon Prime, right? | ||
| It's like 51% of the households. | ||
| But how many people are actually watching those Amazon videos? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| I think once they start putting this kind of money on some of these big shows, the odds that that percentage is gonna grow is pretty damn high. | ||
| Let's find out this. | ||
| I don't know if Amazon releases their numbers. | ||
| They don't? | ||
| Probably not, but... | ||
| Do they do it the same? | ||
| Well, you don't know. | ||
| Google, see if... | ||
| How many people watch Goliath on Amazon? | ||
| Maybe we'll find out. | ||
| Because no one has any idea how many people are watching things on Netflix other than Netflix. | ||
| And Netflix, they just don't tell anybody nothing. | ||
| And clearly it must be a good number because they keep producing shows, putting a ton of money in it, so you know that it's working for them. | ||
| Well, what they do know is how many people have subscribed to Netflix, and that's an insane, huge number. | ||
| But the actual number of people that watch everything, they don't tell you shit. | ||
| Like, I have a comedy special on Netflix, they don't tell you nothing. | ||
| They go, great job, we like it. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| You have no idea. | ||
| Well, you like it? | ||
| Why? | ||
| Oh, it's great. | ||
| People love it. | ||
| Okay, well, how many people love it? | ||
| Oh, lots. | ||
| They don't give you any data. | ||
| Which, they don't have to. | ||
| And maybe that's good. | ||
| Maybe people concentrate too much on the numbers. | ||
| Someone was saying that the Oscars this year are down by 5 million people. | ||
| They still got watched by 25 million people! | ||
| What are we doing here? | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| Why is that even a thing? | ||
| Why are we even concentrating on that? | ||
| I can't find the viewers, but this is the kind of information they give out. | ||
| Is the top-binged first season of a US-produced Amazon original series ever over its first 10 days? | ||
| I don't mean shit. | ||
| No other season one had a higher season completion rate through 10 days. | ||
| Well, that's interesting. | ||
| That must mean it's a really good show. | ||
| So people binged it the first season. | ||
| Can you get Amazon Prime on Apple TV? Is that a part of Apple TV? Or do you have to get one of those fire sticks? | ||
| I can watch it through my TV. My TV has a thing. | ||
| It has a smart TV app on it that I can get through there. | ||
| And it says it arrives on Apple TV in over 100 countries as of December. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| So last December? | ||
| December of 2017, yes. | ||
| Okay, so we have it now. | ||
| But still, Netflix is just so much more popular. | ||
| It's like Q-tips. | ||
| Once it becomes the name, like, give me a box of Q-tips. | ||
| Do you want cotton swabs? | ||
| No, motherfucker, I said Q-tips. | ||
| You know, it's like, do you want to watch streaming video? | ||
| I want to watch Netflix. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But we have Amazon streaming video. | ||
| Bitch, netflix. | ||
| Did I stutter? | ||
| Yeah, but Netflix only took over that recently, right? | ||
| Give me a fucking iPhone! | ||
| I don't want your bullshit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Fake smartphone nonsense. | ||
| iPhone! | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty recent. | ||
| Yeah, it was just mail before. | ||
| Like, they took over Blockbuster first, and then they're like, and now it's all streaming. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You can still get DVDs, I think, but I don't know how many of you need that. | ||
| I do, because I'm a nerd. | ||
| You get DVDs still? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Because they don't have the same offerings. | ||
| There's stuff that they do have on DVD that they don't have on streaming, and vice versa. | ||
| So, like, for example, what was I watching? | ||
| There was... | ||
| I think the last season of Vikings, for example. | ||
| I think that's what I was trying to watch. | ||
| Yeah, I watch Vikings. | ||
| Dude, I've been watching it now. | ||
| I'm on season two. | ||
| It's good. | ||
| That's the good... | ||
| You know, it kind of... | ||
| Oh, don't tell me that. | ||
| Don't tell me it goes downhill. | ||
| I'll fucking go crazy. | ||
| First two seasons are awesome. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Son of a bitch. | |
| You get Game of Thrones that way, through Netflix, for instance. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So you can rent the DVDs of Game of Thrones and watch it, but you can watch it through their streaming app. | ||
| You can only get Game of Thrones DVDs? | ||
| Yeah, but you're paying an extra $10 a month to rent those. | ||
| That's what Netflix was when it started. | ||
| One, two, three DVDs a month. | ||
| That's weird. | ||
| So Netflix DVDs has Game of Thrones. | ||
| Netflix streaming does not. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They buy everything for any DVD you can get. | |
| That's weird. | ||
| Yeah, they have a lot more on DVDs than they have just streaming. | ||
| There's a bunch of stuff that I want to watch. | ||
| Case in point, Game of Thrones, Vikings, some of that stuff is... | ||
| I used to freak out at not having a physical DVD player in my laptop. | ||
| Like, this is ridiculous. | ||
| So I bought one of those ones that plugs in and never used it once. | ||
| It just sat there. | ||
| Because by now you're just watching all on streaming all the time. | ||
| Yeah, or I download them from iTunes and they sit on my laptop. | ||
| This is all so new, but yet we're so convinced that this is the future. | ||
| This is it. | ||
| Netflix, period. | ||
| Everybody else, fuck off. | ||
| It's locked in. | ||
| I think they're doing comedy specials on Amazon as well. | ||
| I'm pretty sure Amazon Prime did Bob Saget's new special and a few other people. | ||
| That's one of the cool things, because Amazon is trying to compete with Netflix, so they are trying to come up, so they're going to put an insane amount of money in shows. | ||
| And it's great for content, because today there's probably more possibilities for people doing stuff than ever before. | ||
| Before you had only so many studios producing only so many movies, now there's so much more. | ||
| Brian Cowen's on there, Joey Diaz is on there. | ||
| Brian's on Netflix, Jim Brewer's on Netflix. | ||
| Who else? | ||
| Tom Papa. | ||
| Tom Segura's old one. | ||
| Yeah, Eddie Pepitone. | ||
| Greg Fitzsimmons. | ||
| Wow, Greg Fitzsimmons. | ||
| So there's quite a few specials that are available on Amazon. | ||
| Jim Norton. | ||
| Very interesting. | ||
| That might be where the... | ||
| What was that one that just closed? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, CISO. Yeah, maybe they just have a lot of them on there now. | |
| Yeah, I bet that's exactly what it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Interesting. | ||
| It says continue watching or watch from the beginning. | ||
| That means that Jamie Vernon was watching it. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Yeah, I hope it works. | ||
| I mean, I would love to see a bunch of different viable outlets for people to release films and TV shows and stuff like that. | ||
| God knows Netflix has enough money. | ||
| I know. | ||
| And so does Amazon. | ||
| They have a ton of fucking money. | ||
| So does Apple. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Apple's not doing that, though. | ||
| Are they going to try to do that? | ||
| Create original stuff? | ||
| They have stuff. | ||
| They have that one Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon show that's coming out soon. | ||
| Look at me. | ||
| Blah! | ||
| They had a game show, or not game show, but Planet of the Apps with Gwyneth Paltrow, Will.i.am, Gary Vee was on that. | ||
| Again, they're trying to get me to throw up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Not Gary Vee. | ||
| I mean, they haven't all necessarily been successful, but they're trying. | ||
| I'm just kidding about throwing up. | ||
| If you're a gal and you're into those ladies, just don't listen to me. | ||
| I'm just fucking... | ||
| Just make it fun. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's good. | ||
| I mean, I would like to see more. | ||
| I just think in terms of your ability to sit down and do absolutely fucking nothing and zone out for days, there's never been a better time. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| There's so much stuff available. | ||
| Apple is reportedly investing $1 billion in original video content. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Okay, so Apple is added to the mix. | ||
| And that's Gary Vee with a big old smile on his face. | ||
| How does that guy sleep? | ||
| I don't think he does. | ||
| Where does he have the time? | ||
| Planes. | ||
| I'm pretty busy. | ||
| Yeah, but that's exactly what people ask about you. | ||
| It's like, how does he manage to do like 72 careers in one and go hunting and work out and do this and that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think human cloning, there are like really three Joe Rogans going around and there are like You have downloaded your consciousness in three different bodies who are doing some of this one of them would fuck up Hardcore if I did that like it's it's hard enough to manage my insanity with one life, right? | ||
| If I had three lives going on and one of them I'd definitely go off the rails with I Think it's what I'm do is it's more of a it's an illusion that I'm as busy as people think I am It's not as busy. | ||
| It is busy But It's less busy with work than people think. | ||
| Because the podcast is sitting here with a friend like you and talking for a few hours. | ||
| It's pretty easy. | ||
| That's not really that hard. | ||
| And then the working out, well, that's just mandatory. | ||
| You just have to do that. | ||
| And then there's the stand-up comedy. | ||
| Well, that's kind of a passion project, and it's interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I do it all the right, like I know I have a time down. | ||
| Like I'll hang out with my family until my kids go to bed, which is usually like, you know, eight-ish. | ||
| And that's when I leave. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I go to the comedy store. | ||
| Like I know, I have it pretty much locked in. | ||
| I get my podcast done before the kids get home from school. | ||
| So I'm hanging out with them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I know how to do it. | ||
| I'm working out while they're at school for the most part. | ||
| That's pretty impressive, though, because realistically, you do have so much stuff on your plate, and the way you make it flow, that's something in terms of time management. | ||
| I think there will be people willing to take courses from you on how to put it all together, because that's a skill right there. | ||
| You have to be... | ||
| Really steadfast in what you want to do and what you don't want to do. | ||
| And when you don't want to do something, just don't do it. | ||
| But I wasn't able to do this until I really started working for myself. | ||
| Like, working for myself and the ability to... | ||
| Like, if you have a bunch of different jobs, but you're beholden to other people's schedules, it's almost unmanageable. | ||
| Yeah, it sucks. | ||
| Then you can't do it. | ||
| But that's one of the things I'm trying to do. | ||
| As much as I enjoy being in the classroom, I'm trying to be in the classroom less and less and just do more online and do more podcasts and more... | ||
| Because I'm tired of being in somebody else's schedule. | ||
| No, I imagine. | ||
| I don't feel like driving. | ||
| It's like, I don't mind if you put me in the classroom, that's great. | ||
| But if I have to drive an hour and a half to get there and then be stuck in traffic, it's like, fuck this. | ||
| This is just not fun. | ||
| Do you feel like there's opportunities, like real viable opportunities for people now to get an education online? | ||
| I got legitimate full education. | ||
| It's definitely emerging. | ||
| I mean, I think it's... | ||
| Part of the problem is that universities kind of have a monopoly on the diplomas, which is something that people sometimes need for their job. | ||
| It's not that they choose, oh, I want to be educated. | ||
| there are ways to do it is also they need that piece of paper and of course so far only the official universities have that but otherwise yeah there are a bunch of ways there's like even when was he on like Thaddeus Russell had it on that he's starting to do his own thing yeah Thaddeus has got something called I told him to change the name. | ||
| He's calling it Renegade University. | ||
| I'm like, stop! | ||
| Stop. | ||
| People are going to think you're a douchebag. | ||
| I'm probably going to do a thing because he asked me to do this about the history of martial arts. | ||
| And I'm like, oh man, I've done... | ||
| Actually, that's a course I've actually done at UCLA and it was so much fun. | ||
| You taught it at UCLA? Oh, no kidding. | ||
| Check this out. | ||
| This was hilarious. | ||
| I only had an MA and at UCLA, you need a PhD to teach. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And I was a white guy going into an Asian American Studies department going, you know, yeah, in case you haven't noticed, I'm not Asian American and I do only have an MA and I've never taken a course in Asian American Studies, but I would love to teach for you. | ||
| And here is why. | ||
| And by the time I was done with the pitch about history and philosophy of martial arts, they were like, yeah, you're hired. | ||
| Let's go do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| I was like, okay. | ||
| Now, why would they want you to be Asian because you're teaching about an Asian subject? | ||
| I mean, they don't want you to. | ||
| It kind of works that way because of the way most of the people who's taking a bunch of classes in ethnic studies, usually people who are from that particular ethnic group. | ||
| In fact, I'm kind of... | ||
| People always look at me like, huh? | ||
| What's going on here? | ||
| Because I do teach in an American Indian Studies department. | ||
| I have taught in an Asian American Studies department. | ||
| But when you look at everybody else, usually they are people who are from that particular ethnic group who are passionate enough to dig in that much to be... | ||
| Is that an issue? | ||
| Is there like pushback if you're not? | ||
| I mean, it's kind of, to be fair, people have been really cool about it because, I mean, I've even had the situation where I taught as part of an ethnic studies class where there were like four people, right? | ||
| And there's the... | ||
| African-American studies guy is an African-American guy, and the Chicano-Latino is Chicano-Latino. | ||
| And that was the odd one out, right? | ||
| I was teaching the American Indian Studies section, and they're like, huh, you just replaced my friend, the native lady, who the fuck are you, white guy, kind of thing. | ||
| But, you know, the thing was, they want to check you, and then once I did my thing, the first few lessons, they were like, no. | ||
| He's cool. | ||
| We like him. | ||
| It's all good. | ||
| And then there was no bullshit. | ||
| I would have expected to run into a lot more pushback, but it really wasn't. | ||
| One thing in your favor about when it comes to martial arts, although it is mostly Asian in origin, it varies so widely. | ||
| There's Chinese martial arts, Japanese, Korean. | ||
| I mean, it goes on and on. | ||
| Thai. | ||
| There's so many different styles. | ||
| And then, of course, South America, once Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu got into the mix. | ||
| I mean, they, in my opinion, have revolutionized martial arts more than any other group. | ||
| I think that one part of the country, in South America and Brazil, they had more of an impact on martial arts, I think, than anyone, because they essentially started, I mean... | ||
| They started the Ultimate Fighting Championships just to see if their martial art was superior. | ||
| And they proved it to be so, at least on its own, by itself. | ||
| At first, you know, before anybody knew about it. | ||
| I think that stuff was, there's that whole period from When Japanese martial arts were kind of crashing because nobody was dressing as a samurai anymore, you know, doing that stuff didn't make sense anymore, and Jiu Jitsu was seen kind of as low-class activity for gangsters, and, you know, there was less and less popularity for that field. | ||
| And then when Jigoro Kano, the creator of Judo started, he was this nerdish upper-class guy, but he was very passionate about Judo, so he transformed the Jiu Jitsu curriculum into Judo. | ||
| Gave it a whole new spin. | ||
| He's like, no, it's not this thing to beat people up like all the thugs you've seen so far. | ||
| We're using judo as a form of education. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| Yeah, it's a super cool story. | ||
| And then he starts sending people all over the world to spread it. | ||
| And so they go to Russia and then mix with Russian thing and they create sambal. | ||
| And then come out here and then with Brazilian jiu-jitsu when Maeda goes down to Brazil and all of that. | ||
| So he's like... | ||
| That whole story, how it spins, is awesome. | ||
| And then you end up with the joy of globalization, where, like, when you see, like, Hoyce going to fight against Sakuraba, and you have, you know, Brazilian dude trained in what originally was an Asian martial arts, transformed into this Brazilian thing, wearing a gi, going against Saku, was more of a catch wrestler who had studied more through Western wrestling a whole lot. | ||
| It was hilarious. | ||
| It's like, you have the Japanese guy who has a more Western wrestling background than... | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| That is crazy. | ||
| The Japanese, especially Sakuraba, were way influenced by catch wrestling, which is American folk-style wrestling. | ||
| Now, I didn't know that jiu-jitsu was used by thugs. | ||
| Yeah, that was the... | ||
| The reason why it was crashing in popularity is because it used to be sort of the samurai arts, right? | ||
| You do that stuff. | ||
| But then the samurai ended, you know, by the 1870s or so, that was the collapse of the samurai. | ||
| So there really wasn't a function for this stuff anymore. | ||
| And the only people who trained were mostly gangsters and kind of rough guys who trained because they got into fights on the street. | ||
| And then Kano, because he was this kind of sickly child, they put him into training in jiu-jitsu to kind of build him up, give him some strength. | ||
| And he was a complete nerd, but he loved jiu-jitsu. | ||
| And so he's like, no, no, no, don't put it down. | ||
| It's a great art for other reasons. | ||
| And he had this whole way of... | ||
| Spinning it around to say, that was the old stuff. | ||
| Yeah, to beat people up. | ||
| What we do today is a form of education, is a relationship with your body. | ||
| And he basically invented a new function for it. | ||
| So the Japanese society went, oh, shit, we can still do that stuff. | ||
| And now there's a better reason for it that's fitting the times, that's not... | ||
| The same reason why we would train in the 1700s. | ||
| These actually fit the context of our time. | ||
| Okay, let's do judo and then... | ||
| Do they have texts where you can see the techniques or where you can see what similarities? | ||
| Yeah, there are both ancient jiu-jitsu manuals where there are the drawings and stuff like that. | ||
| And then by the time Kano comes around, they even start having footage after a while. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Footage of actual films of utilization? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Or drills? | ||
| They look goofy as hell because they are sped up and they move funny and stuff. | ||
| But yeah, there's great stuff. | ||
| And some of these guys are just badasses from day one. | ||
| I mean, some of the old judo guys, they got the reputation for just being killers, you know? | ||
| Yeah, well for sure Judo. | ||
| I wonder how much Jiu Jitsu has changed since then to now because obviously in putting so much emphasis on the ground the Brazilians really refined all the submission techniques to a razor sharp edge and really changed a lot of the original setups and the way people enter into submissions. | ||
| I would love to see what it used to look like. | ||
| Even that's funny because if you look at like some old Judo like Kosen Judo where they have this very ground oriented, those guys do leg locks. | ||
| It's like you see these Japanese guys from the 1920s leg-locking each other, and you're like, oh my god! | ||
| So the stuff that today is hot, some of these guys were doing, and it probably wasn't as refined, but it was like, man, they were doing it. | ||
| Well, catch wrestling. | ||
| Catch wrestling was all about leg locks. | ||
| They were leg-locking when, you know, Americans were really into Brazilian jiu-jitsu and stuff. | ||
| Is this, what do you got here, Jamie? | ||
| 1600 AD? The history of Jiu Jitsu or Yawara. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| They dressed up in like Aikido kimonos with the big flowing pants. | ||
| And the guy's like doing some weird sort of wrist lock. | ||
| Stop scrolling. | ||
| Go right up there. | ||
| Was it? | ||
| Yeah, it looks like... | ||
| Yeah, his wrist locking and getting the elbow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| And then the other one, it looks like he's got... | ||
| Looks like he's setting up a full Nelson. | ||
| Yeah, he has a half Nelson on one side. | ||
| And he's got an underhook on the other side. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Probably going to spin around and slam him right on his face. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Crazy that they have... | ||
| You get to look at it in these images. | ||
| They were just trying to figure out... | ||
| Like, what's the best way to manipulate the body? | ||
| It's just amazing to me how much of it came from Japan. | ||
| I mean, Japan, so many interesting techniques, and that one area was so vital and so important when it came to the development of martial arts. | ||
| Japan is that weird. | ||
| Like, the story between China and Japan is very similar to ancient Greece and ancient Rome. | ||
| A lot of the developments came from Greece. | ||
| A lot of the developments came from China. | ||
| But then both the Roman and the Japanese took those ideas and then ran with it and systematized them, gave them a lot more of a structure, made them way easier to learn and to teach, and then popularized them as a result. | ||
| And it was like, yep, now this stuff works. | ||
| It's a lot easier to own. | ||
| Interesting, too, that they brought it to other countries. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Yeah, that was part of Kano's vision, because Kano was not a nationalist. | ||
| He did not have this Japan, fuck you, everybody else. | ||
| He had this idea of, like, this universal brotherhood of mankind, so we need to bring our stuff so that everybody can benefit from it. | ||
| And so he sent, yeah, he sent people all over the world. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| I did a three-part series in History on Fire about Theodore Roosevelt because he was just such a crazy motherfucker, right? | ||
| He's like the one American president that's the wildest dude out there. | ||
| And he, in like 1905, somewhere right around there, he had a guy sent by Kano that taught judo to the United States president. | ||
| And so Roosevelt was one of the very first Americans ever to learn some judo. | ||
| He was such an important president, man. | ||
| If it wasn't for him, we wouldn't have the national public lands we have today. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| He was awesome. | ||
| He's the... | ||
| You know, I generally speaking, when you talk about U.S. president, it's like different degrees of what I don't like. | ||
| It's like, okay, I hate this guy. | ||
| I mildly hate this guy. | ||
| I really hate this guy. | ||
| Theodore Roosevelt was one of those dudes who I... I mean, there's some stuff that he didn't say that you're like, oh, shit, okay, that wasn't so good, but so much of it is awesome. | ||
| What did he say that you don't like? | ||
| Well, I mean... | ||
| You got to give him a pass for when he lived, but of course, his idea about race compared to what we would consider cool today, he had some pretty heavy race. | ||
| He started a lot more races than he ended, so I also give him credit for that, for being very adaptable and cool in that regard. | ||
| But clearly, some of his writings was pretty freaky. | ||
| And also, he's one of the guys who just never saw a war he didn't like. | ||
| He's like... | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Well, he was an adventurer, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The art of jiu-jitsu is worth more in every way than all of our athletics combined. | ||
| President Theodore Roosevelt, 1905. I agree! | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| Me and Teddy Roosevelt. | ||
| Same page. | ||
| Good old, you even seem like he lost sight in one eye while he was president because of sparring too hard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| He hit way too hard because he boxed all the time, right? | ||
| So he lost his vision? | ||
| Yep, he lost vision in one eye. | ||
| Somebody thumbed the president. | ||
| Probably. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Turn one in there, you motherfucker. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's a gangster-ass president. | ||
| He did a lot of big game hunting, too, man. | ||
| That guy went all over the world. | ||
| Yep, he did. | ||
| A wild guy, really, when you think about it. | ||
| My favorite Roosevelt story, speaking of badass, is in 1912, he's running for president again as a third-party candidate, which was cool in itself, right? | ||
| because he was challenging both the Republican and Democrats. | ||
| He is in his car waving to the people, and somebody shoots him from just a few feet away, just straight in his chest. | ||
| But at the time, he had this 50-page speech he had prepared, so he had all the written notes in his pocket. | ||
| He had his glass case in his pocket. | ||
| So the bullet did hit him, but it was slowed down by going through the glass case and the speech. | ||
| But still, you just took a bullet to the chest. | ||
| You're bleeding and stuff. | ||
| And so everybody's like, oh my God, we need to take him to the hospital. | ||
| And Roosevelt coughed in his hand. | ||
| He sees that there's no blood coming out. | ||
| So he said, okay, my lungs are intact. | ||
| They haven't been pierced. | ||
| So what are you talking about, hospital? | ||
| I got a speech to give. | ||
| So he shows up with his shirt covered in blood, and he goes like, yeah, ladies and gentlemen, I don't know if you know I have been shot, but it takes more than this to kill a bull moose. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And then deliver a 90-minute speech before some of his attendants finally are like, can we now go to the hospital, please? | ||
| And they're like, okay, sure, now we can go. | ||
| What was the hospital back then? | ||
| You're probably better off not going. | ||
| I know, exactly. | ||
| What the fuck did they do? | ||
| They rubbed a dead chicken on your hole. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| What could they possibly do to fix that back then? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, hard times, right? | ||
| Hard times create hard men. | ||
| Soft times create a lot of the weak bitches we're seeing. | ||
| Flopping around in our streets today. | ||
| And that's exactly one of the things that Roosevelt hammers on over and over. | ||
| He had this whole idea of the Streno's life, the idea that, you know, he came from an upper-class, super elitist background, and he realized, and a lot of people back then were thinking, you know, our kids are growing up to be a bunch of wimps because they are too pampered. | ||
| And so his solution, since he was a teenager, was boxing, wrestling, hunting, just these very tough, manly things. | ||
| And so that's what he thrived on. | ||
| This whole idea of like, yeah, you need to... | ||
| He had a great quote about you have to keep your barbaric instincts in order to go along with civilization. | ||
| And I was like, that's perfect. | ||
| You know, that's like the best of both worlds. | ||
| And yeah, that guy's... | ||
| I had a blast. | ||
| I mean, I knew about him, but once you get to do a series, you really need to know your stuff in and out. | ||
| So it was so fun to study his life because... | ||
| Well, to stand out like that in the times that he did in the early 1900s, I mean, really, really pretty significant. | ||
| That's actually one of the things that I dig about, that I do a little different from the way Dan approaches hardcore history. | ||
| Dan tend to look at things from the big picture. | ||
| You know, he's telling you big picture stories. | ||
| And I love that. | ||
| But I also like jumping into... | ||
| I like biographies. | ||
| I like sometimes telling the story of this one guy and what it really meant to be this individual in this story. | ||
| And so I did, you know, I did Ted Roosevelt. | ||
| I did one on Crazy Horse. | ||
| I did one on Caravaggio, the painter we're talking about before. | ||
| I gotta catch up. | ||
| I gotta catch up on some new stuff. | ||
| One that you'll dig. | ||
| I did Jack Johnson, you know, the first black heavyweight champion. | ||
| That one. | ||
| Jack Johnson is so fun. | ||
| You know what my favorite Jack Johnson story is? | ||
| He got pulled over speeding. | ||
| Yes! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course! | |
| Tell it! | ||
| Tell the story. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Tell it. | |
| You know what's funny? | ||
| That's exactly... | ||
| I was telling Doug Carlin, oh, I'm going to do Jack Johnson. | ||
| And he said, word by word, what you said. | ||
| He said, you know what's my favorite Jack Johnson story? | ||
| I wonder if that was... | ||
| Well, tell the story so people know. | ||
| So what happened was he got pulled over in some southern state. | ||
| I believe it was Georgia at the time when, you know, being... | ||
| I think it was Texas. | ||
| Might have been Georgia. | ||
| Not many people had cars, and Jack Johnson was one of the guys who loved his fast cars, and he was speeding, so they pulled him over, and the cop is like, hey, boy, this is going to cost you. | ||
| You owe me $50. | ||
| And back then, you could pay your ticket on the spot in cash. | ||
| And Jack Johnson pulled his cash out, started, it is $100, and the cop is like, I don't have change for that kind of money. | ||
| And he's like, no, no, no, no. | ||
| Two hours from now I'm going to be driving back the same way and I'm going to be doing the same speed. | ||
| So I'm just paying you a hand. | ||
| I hope that was true. | ||
| I refuse to listen to anybody that tells me any different. | ||
| Fuck that story about the Victorian table legs. | ||
| I'll give you that one. | ||
| I'll let you take that one. | ||
| But I want to keep that Jack Johnson story. | ||
| Well, there are too many that he did in public that fit that persona to think. | ||
| It fits. | ||
| It's how it was. | ||
| He was a dude in 1905, 1906, around that time, was making a living as a black guy beating up white guys in the ring and sleeping with white women. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Whew! | ||
| And he figured it out. | ||
| He did it. | ||
| And he didn't get lynched, amazingly enough. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, how did they keep that from happening? | ||
| How'd they keep that guy alive? | ||
| I mean, with the racism that existed back then? | ||
| I mean, you're talking about just a few decades after slavery. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| His parents were born in slavery. | ||
| He was the first generation of somebody who was not born in his family. | ||
| And, you know, they say that at times he did sleep with a gun under his pillow. | ||
| At times? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, you're amazing. | |
| You didn't do it every fucking time. | ||
| How the fuck could you? | ||
| I mean, how could you even sleep back? | ||
| Imagine being a black guy at the turn of the century back then who was just in the kind of racism that I don't even think we can comprehend today. | ||
| It's something, guys. | ||
| I mean, think about the civil rights movement and all the, you know, the hosing of the protesters and stuff like that. | ||
| That was 60 years later. | ||
| That's the mellow stuff. | ||
| Yeah, everybody had chilled out by then. | ||
| There was... | ||
| Theodore Roosevelt had Booker T. Washington for dinner at the White House, and it was the first time ever that a black guy was officially invited for dinner at a White House, right? | ||
| After he had the dinner, there was such a backlash, like some senators from the South started flipping out, and I forget the exact quote, but one of the guys at one point said, you know, after the president did this thing, we are going to now have to lynch a thousand niggers in our state to put them back in their place. | ||
| And they're like, I'm sorry, try that again? | ||
| That's the U.S. senator from... | ||
| And he was pretty accepted. | ||
| That was just a... | ||
| The LA Times about Jack Johnson said, you know, why didn't Jim Jeffries kill him? | ||
| That brutal beast that, you know, the stuff that you read, the quotes are like, come on, somebody must have made it up because they couldn't be that racist. | ||
| That was in the LA Times. | ||
|
unidentified
|
God. | |
| What year was that? | ||
| Johnson won the title, I believe, in 1908, I want to say. | ||
| But even in the previous years, he was making a reputation for being this badass fighter. | ||
| It's just amazing that 110 years ago, we were that fucked up. | ||
| That's so recent. | ||
| Well, when he had the fight with Jim Jeffries, who was the old undefeated white champion, you know, because when he won the title, and then he started throwing a bunch of white guys at him, that he crashed as the great white hope. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Then eventually the writer, Jack London, started this campaign to bring Jim Jeffries, the undefeated white champion, back from retirement to redeem the white race. | ||
| And Jim Jeffries was a beast, right? | ||
| He was a hulk of a man, strong, and knocked out all of his opponents, but he had been retired for a while. | ||
| And so he comes back. | ||
| They have this fight in Reno, Nevada on July 4th, 1910. By the time the fight is over and Jack Johnson crushes him and wins the title, you know, defends his title easy. | ||
| There are riots in 25 states in 50 different cities, and by the time the riots are done, like, dozens of people are dead. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Because Jack Johnson had beaten Jim Jefferies. | ||
| And were they listening to it over the radio at the time? | ||
| There wasn't even really, like, they had, like, telegraph news sent to the newspaper, and there would be a guy in this public square screaming, Johnson just landed a left hook! | ||
|
unidentified
|
And... | |
| That's how they did it. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| That's crazy! | ||
| In San Francisco, they had two boxers reenact the news sent by telegraphs of what was going on. | ||
| Everybody just walked around back then. | ||
| I mean, look at these people just wandering through the streets. | ||
| Even when there was a fight going on, there's no announcers, so there's no commentary. | ||
| You just sit down and watch. | ||
| There's no TV. This is Jeffrey's training. | ||
| This is clearly Jeffrey's training camp. | ||
| There it goes. | ||
| And back then, you could clinch a lot in boxing, which was kind of Jack Johnson's full style. | ||
| He would get, like, double bicep control, usually. | ||
| He would keep you there so you can't hit him, and then once in a while, he would break free, throw an uppercut, and go back to clinching. | ||
| Dude, he was fucking jacked for the time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you think about this time, like, people back then... | ||
| You know, there was no fucking supplements. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They barely knew how to work out. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You know, even when he's punching, like, his technique is very different. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And also, they had to be really concerned about breaking their hands, because they were fighting with these little tiny-ass gloves. | ||
| They're basically like MMA gloves with thumbs. | ||
| And some of these fights, like, they were scheduled for insane things. | ||
| Like, I believe this one was scheduled for 45 rounds. | ||
| How many rounds did it go? | ||
| I think 15. Fought at 2 p.m. | ||
| in July in Nevada under 110 degree weather. | ||
| It's like, who does that, you know? | ||
| 110 degree weather in fucking Reno? | ||
| Yep. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ugh. | |
| Crazy. | ||
| Everyone in the crowd is wearing the same hat. | ||
| That's a good point, Jamie. | ||
| Look, they all wore those goofy-ass fucking hats. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Like, why did everybody like, I want to look sexy. | ||
| I want to wear a nice hat. | ||
| While I watch the white race succeed! | ||
| Like, how many black people are in the audience? | ||
| Not many. | ||
| You can count on that. | ||
| They say that the band, before Jack Johnson came onto the ring, shortly before they announced him and he came on, the band was playing this popular song of the time called All Coons Look Alike to Me. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| That's right before he comes on. | ||
| So this is like one of those things where people are hoping that the bad guy loses. | ||
| So they're there, millions of people are paying attention because they want Jack Johnson to lose. | ||
| It's not that they are hoping a good fight takes place and let's see who wins. | ||
| They wanted to get this guy off the throne. | ||
| This wasn't even about boxing. | ||
| This was about race. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Really kind of amazing that it went as long as it did. | ||
| And here they are, they're in the 13th round. | ||
| You ought to be a different kind of human to fight with those little gloves for as many rounds as these people fought. | ||
| No, those guys were... | ||
| Fascinating stuff. | ||
| Who else have you covered on your podcast? | ||
| Biographies? | ||
| Let me think. | ||
| That you really like, it changed the way you feel about them. | ||
| Jack Johnson was awesome. | ||
| I had so much fun studying that. | ||
| You know, all the biographies done are some of my favorites. | ||
| Did you see Unforgivable Blackness? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| That was the first thing. | ||
| When I started the research, that was where I started. | ||
| I started watching the Ken Burns documentary, which was great. | ||
| And that kind of gave me the basics of the story. | ||
| And I'm like, okay, I see where all of it is going. | ||
| Now go back, do the tedious stuff of read every damn book about him and plug in all the information and stuff. | ||
| But yeah, the documentary is great. | ||
| I love that one. | ||
| So who else have you done that really stood out for you? | ||
| So the big ones have been Crazy Horse, Caravaggio, Theodore Roosevelt, Jack Johnson. | ||
| Those are the biographies I've done. | ||
| Crazy Horse is a fascinating one. | ||
| Are they still doing that crazy South Dakota sculpture of him? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I don't know how quickly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They've been doing it forever. | |
| Yeah, because the guy who started the project is long dead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And they depend on private money, so they are not really moving at any kind of speed. | ||
| Well, it's also, isn't it kind of fucked because there was no pictures of Crazy Horse? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| We literally have no idea what he looked like. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| None whatsoever. | ||
| If you're doing this, you're just essentially guessing. | ||
| I mean, they could use your face. | ||
| Completely, yeah. | ||
| I think they should use my face. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Why not? | ||
| But yeah, that's a badass story right there. | ||
| Because that was a guy, he's almost like watching a Marvel thing about Wolverine. | ||
| He has this superpower. | ||
| The guy was a beast in warfare, but everyone he loved around him died. | ||
| And so you have this kind of tragic figure of the guy who is a beast, but for all his powers, he can't protect the ones he loves. | ||
| Well, he fought naked and cut little pieces of his body off, like he cut chunks of flesh off all over his body. | ||
| Like his entire body was like a mosaic of scars. | ||
| There was, yeah, there was even before, like a couple of weeks before the Battle of the Little Big Horn, which is the famous battle with Caster and all of that. | ||
| There was a sitting bull, one of the other main Lakota leaders participated in his Sundance and one of the things they did was kind of cut like 50 flesh offering on his arm where you kind of cut this like pin-sized needle of your flesh but still and the whole point is to go into this trance partially from the pain, partially from dehydration, partially prayer and all of it And the story is that Sitting Bull then had this vision that they were going to be attacked, the troops were going to reach their camp, but they were going to get crushed. | ||
| And so the vision was... | ||
| They even had a battle shortly thereafter and Sitting Bull was like, yeah, this wasn't it. | ||
| This wasn't close to our camp. | ||
| The vision is they are attacking our camp. | ||
| And that's when supposedly the whole Little Begorn thing... | ||
| That's why they were feeling kind of like, we can handle it. | ||
| We're good with this. | ||
| Don't you wish you knew if that was true? | ||
| The whole, you know... | ||
| The vision? | ||
| Yeah, there's... | ||
| The thing about that kind of a culture where the stories that they say, like a lot of the time, in order to get a reputation for being the guy who can say, hey, I had a vision and people actually believe you, you need to have proven something along the way. | ||
| You need to have... | ||
| Because, I mean, anybody can say, I had a vision, and he's like, yeah, that's great. | ||
| Show us. | ||
| Can you now heal that dude? | ||
| Yes or no? | ||
| If you can't, shut up. | ||
| You're just hallucinating. | ||
| Well, can you say, I have a vision, and then it comes true exactly as you said? | ||
| Well, in that case, people are like, okay, now we're paying attention. | ||
| Next time you have a vision, please tell us. | ||
| But if you say, I had a vision that this happened and nothing happened, everybody's like, shut up. | ||
| I just wish we knew that him going into a state of mind where he was almost dying. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What was that, A Man Called Horse, that movie where they do that thing where they put the barbs through your nipples and hang you from the ceiling? | ||
| That's the Sundance. | ||
| I've been actually to, because that was illegal for a really long time, right? | ||
| Then they brought it back in the opening in the 1970s. | ||
| And I've been to, I think, seven sun dances where they do that. | ||
| You've watched people get suspended by their nipples? | ||
| They usually don't get suspended, and it's not nipples, it's just the chest muscle. | ||
| Well, they don't go under the muscle, it's just skin, but they go up on top. | ||
| So they usually don't get suspended, but they dance attached with their rope to the tree, and then when they want to break loose... | ||
| They just rip right through and you know you got like this quarter sized scar out of it and which you know when you think about the whole idea of sacrifice is something that they do in all religions pretty much to different degrees you know back in the day animal sacrifice was huge that was one of the things and you know these guys have it as You shed blood, | ||
| because that's your energy, that's the one thing, and that will give strength to your prayers and all of that stuff. | ||
| But, yeah, first time I ever saw it, I was like, holy shit, this is intense. | ||
| Don't you think there's probably also something to that where they're trying to put people through something to make them stronger? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| There definitely is that aspect that is like, yeah, this is not something that somebody does willy-nilly. | ||
| Like, oh, I'm going to Sundance tomorrow. | ||
| It's like, no, you don't mess around. | ||
| No, that this ritual, in fact, is probably to strengthen their resolve and make them better warriors just by having experienced such a horrific ritual. | ||
| Ritual practice of ripping meat off your tits. | ||
| The one story that they said about... | ||
| Is that legit? | ||
| That looks legit. | ||
| Looks like a wet guy, though. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know. | |
| Ow! | ||
| Yeah, it looks like a guy who's pretty annoying. | ||
| I bet he's on Venice Beach right now. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| There's a story that they say about Crazy Horse, that when he was a kid, to toughen him up, his dad had killed a turtle that they were going to eat. | ||
| But the story goes that the turtle heart keeps beating after it's dead for a while, and carved out the turtle and pulled out this steel-beating heart and gave it to Crazy Horse to eat it through. | ||
|
unidentified
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And... | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Raw turtle heart? | ||
| I don't recommend it. | ||
| Still beating. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Meanwhile, what kind of fucking diseases do you get from turtle hearts? | ||
| I would say cook that well done. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's the only way to have some good turtle heart. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, what kind of parasites and shit are in turtles? | ||
| Turtles eat everything, right? | ||
| But that's also what's funny. | ||
| It's like when you think about like wolves or you think about people who live super close to nature. | ||
| They could eat stuff that if we try today, we're dead in 30 seconds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And they were fine. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| It's beating. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Googled it and it came up right away. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Turtle heart just going off. | ||
| Did you hear about that guy who just got fired? | ||
| I think he was in Iowa. | ||
| He was a school teacher. | ||
| He fed a snapping turtle a puppy in the middle of the class. | ||
| What the hell? | ||
| No, I did not hear that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| He's currently suspended. | ||
| That's what I wrote. | ||
| You think? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, this guy, he had done some other dark shit in class before. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| Teacher investigated for feeding puppies to snapping turtles in front of school. | ||
| Go see the image of the guy in the beginning of the article again. | ||
| Go back to the video and pause on his face. | ||
| They had a... | ||
| There he is. | ||
| Look at that fuck. | ||
| Why doesn't it show his face again? | ||
| Let me see his face. | ||
| That goofy prick. | ||
| He looks like a fucking complete psycho. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There he is. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, well, you know, if you leave a puppy with a snapping turtle, he will eat it. | |
| He will. | ||
| He will. | ||
| I'll show you. | ||
| I'll show you. | ||
| Okay, don't tell your mom. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Don't do that, dick. | ||
| We have animals that we like more than other animals. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a fact. | ||
| And we like poppies a whole lot more than we like those dirty, fucking, stinky, hard-headed turtles. | ||
| Yeah, leave us our hypocrisy alone. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| That's how it is. | ||
| Some animals are cool. | ||
| Others, fuck them. | ||
| We have a profound hypocrisy. | ||
| Fine by me. | ||
| Don't you think... | ||
| You're probably more aware of that than the average person because of your study of history. | ||
| I mean, the hypocrisies of the human race are most exposed by going over them and watching these patterns repeat themselves over and over and over again. | ||
| Yeah, no, I mean, that's why to me I'm completely fascinated by the inner workings of the human mind, because the way that people can spin stories to themselves to justify stuff that in another context would be considered completely insane, that kind of goes back to that, like, the average person is a flag in the wind that can go any way, you know? | ||
| How ridiculous is it that, like, 200 years ago, If you tell people slavery, overwhelming majority of people will be like, of course, slavery is cool. | ||
| What's wrong with slavery? | ||
| What kind of a freak are you? | ||
| You're anti-slavery? | ||
| Are you insane? | ||
| And if you say today, you know, you're going to have like 0.01% of the population would be cool with it. | ||
| And yet, we're the same people. | ||
| 200 years have gone by, but suddenly what was completely normal at one point is considered batshit crazy today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, it is weird. | ||
| It's weird, and it's constantly changing. | ||
| You know, constantly evolving, and it doesn't always need to make sense. | ||
| It's just, this is what's the new thing. | ||
| This is the new way of being. | ||
| And you know, there's always a small percentage of our population that's not gonna go along with the program that's gonna be like, no, this is a stupid idea, but the average is just gonna go wherever critical mass is tilting, they are gonna go with it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, listen, man, I gotta wrap this up, but always a beautiful thing to talk to you, my brother. | ||
| You can go check out Daniele Bolelli's podcast. | ||
| It is called History on Fire. | ||
| It's available on iTunes, and you're on all the social media things. | ||
| D Bolelli on Twitter. | ||
| Are you D Bolelli on Instagram as well? | ||
| Instagram is the only one I don't do. | ||
| You don't do that at all? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Good for you. | ||
| I do Twitter and Facebook. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Fuck those shallow assholes like me. | ||
| Alright. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| Appreciate it, man. |
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