Daniele Bolelli’s History on Fire blends storytelling with pop culture, like comparing the Sand Creek Massacre (1864) and My Lai (1968), where soldiers resisted civilian killings despite overwhelming peer pressure. Rogan highlights Europe’s smallpox-induced Native American collapse—the deadliest demographic disaster in history—and debates modern tribalism, noting Mount Toba’s eruption 70,000 years ago nearly wiped out humanity, making today’s conflicts seem trivial. They critique totalitarian ideologies, from Jack Johnson’s 1910 fight backlash (sparking riots in 25 states) to DARPA’s "Eater Robot" and Nectome’s fatal brain-uploading, warning tech may outpace human adaptability. Bolelli’s martial arts teaching at UCLA—despite not being Asian American—and BJJ’s evolution from Japanese Judo show how culture reshapes even self-defense systems, while Roosevelt’s 1912 shooting resilience and Johnson’s survival under extreme racism reveal humanity’s shifting moral landscapes. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.