The Anthropology Podcast: Human History, Tribes, Torture & Dictators | Abhijit Iyer Mitra | TRS

 The Anthropology Podcast: Human History, Tribes, Torture & Dictators | Abhijit Iyer Mitra | TRS

Author Name:Ranveer Allahbadia

Youtube Channel Url:https://www.youtube.com/@ranveerallahbadia

Youtube Video URL:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULqtrtdeZ9o

ఈ TRS పాడ్‌కాస్ట్‌లో Abhijit Iyer Mitra మానవజాతి చరిత్ర, ఉపదేశాలు, దౌర్జన్యాలు, దేశాల మధ్య వాణిజ్య వ్యవస్థలు, దుష్టతత్వం గురించి చాలా బలమైన, చివరికి నిందించే విషయాలు చెప్పాడు. తెలుగులో కీ points ఇవి:

### 1. మానవ స్వభావం చాలా క్రూరం  

మానవులు జంతువులలో కూడా చాలా “చెడు” జాతి అని అతను చెప్పాడు. చరిత్రలో కానిబాలిజం, మానవ బలి, సామూహిక హత్యలు చాలా కాలంగా ఉన్నాయి. ఇది “స్వభావం కన్నా برుచ్చి కంటె క్రూరమైన భాగం కూడా” ఉంది అని అర్థం. [1][2]

### 2. విద్య, మతం మాట్లాడే శాంతి కంటే చరిత్రలో ఉన్న హింస  

చాలా సమాజాలు తమను “శాంతియుతంగా, విశ్వాసం ప్రకారం మేలు చేసేవారం” అనుకుంటాయి, కానీ చరిత్ర చూపించినప్పుడు హిట్లర్, స్టాలిన్, మావో వంటి వారి కాలంలో సాధారణ వ్యక్తులు కూడా హింసకు పాల్పడ్డారు. ఇది మానవ స్వభావంలో ఉన్న “పిచ్చి కోడ్” అని అతను చెప్పాడు. [1][3]

### 3. యుద్ధాలు హింస కాకుండా మానవ అభివృద్ధికి కారణమయ్యాయి  

యుద్ధాలు తీసుకురావడం వల్ల మానవ హక్కులు, సాంకేతికత, మహిళా విముక్తి వంటి వాటి అభివృద్ధి కూడా జరిగింది. అంటే మానవత్వంలో ఉన్న “చెడు స్వభావం” కూడా కొన్ని మార్పులకు కారణమైంది. [1][2]

### 4. మానవ ఇతిహాసంలో ప్రీ‑కొలంబియన్ అమెరికా కష్టంగా ఉండేది  

యూరోపియన్లు రాకముందు అమెరికా ఉపజాతులు కూడా చాలా క్రూరంగా ప్రవర్తించాయి: మానవ బలి, దేవునికి వరద కోసం పిల్లలను బలిచేయడం, యుద్ధాలు గ్రామాన్ని పూర్తిగా లేదా చిన్నపిల్లలు లేకుండా చేయడం వంటి విషయాలు చరిత్ర లో నమోదయ్యాయి. అంటే “ప్రీ‑కొలంబియన్ కుంబయా/యోగా పార్టీ” అనే ఫాంటసీ కాదు, నిజం కష్టంగా ఉంది. [1][4]

### 5. ప్రాచీన వ్యవస్థలో లోహాల ప్రయాణం సంస్కృతిని మార్చింది  

- కాపర్ → బ్రోంజ్ → ఐరన్ అనే క్రమంలో మానవ సమాజాలు పురోగమించాయి.  

- బ్రోంజ్ కోసం టిన్ చాలా అరుదు; ఇది ఇండియా, బ్రిటన్, వంటి దూరపు ప్రాంతాల నుంచి వచ్చేది. ఇది అప్పటికి “పెట్రోల్ లాంటి వాల్యూబుల్ వనరు”.  

- ఇండస్ వ్యాలీ సివిలైజేషన్ ఈ టిన్ నెట్‌వర్క్‌లో ధనవంతంగా ఉంది; అందుకే అది “సోనే కీ చిడియా” అని అనబడింది. [1][4]

### 6. ఇనుము యుగం వచ్చినప్పుడు శక్తి అందరికీ సమానంగా వచ్చింది  

ఇనుము భూమి కొంపల్లా దొరుకుతుంది, తగినంత కలప, కొయిల్ ఉంటే ఎవరైనా ఆయుధాలు చేయగలిగారు. దీంతో కొత్త రాజ్యాలు, పెద్ద యుద్ధాలు పెరిగాయి. ఇది కూడా అంటే “టెక్నాలజీ డెమోక్రసీ” అని చెప్పొచ్చు (మొదట కొందరికే ఉండే శక్తి అందరికీ వెళ్లాలన్న లాంటి విషయం). [1][4]

### 7. అమెరికా, ఆఫ్రికా వంటి ప్రాంతాల్లో భౌగోళికత విస్తరణను ఆపింది  

- అమెరికా ఉత్తర–దక్షిణంగా చాలా పొడవుగా ఉంది, కానీ వాతావరణం మార్పులు కారణంగా సాంకేతికత, విద్య, వాణిజ్యం వేగంగా విస్తరించలేదు.  

- యూరేషియా‑ఆఫ్రికా తూర్పు–పశ్చిమంగా ఉండటం వల్ల సామాన్య వాతావరణంలో కొత్త సాంకేతికతలు త్వరగా ప్రసారం అయ్యాయి. [1][4]

### 8. దీక్షత్వం, రాజకీయ నియంతలు కూడా మానవ స్వభావంలో ఇమిడి ఉన్న వాటిపై ఆధారపడతారు  

నియంతలు లేదా దౌర్జన్యం చేసే పాలకులు (స్టాలిన్, మావో, షాకా జూలూ వంటివారు) చాలా సాధారణ మానవ భయాలు, అధికారం కోసం ఉన్న కోరికలు మాత్రమే కాదు, వారి సామాజిక‑సాంస్కృతిక వ్యవస్థలు కూడా వారిని “స్వీయ నియంత”గా మార్చాయి. [1][3]

### 9. చరిత్ర చదవడం భవిష్యత్తును అర్థం చేసుకోవడానికి దగ్గర మార్గం  

చరిత్రలో “హింస, నియంతలు, యుద్ధాల” వంటి భయంకర విషయాలు ఉన్నప్పటికీ, అవి చదివితే మానవ స్వభావం, రాజకీయ వ్యవస్థలు, వనరుల పంపిణీ వంటి వాటిని బాగా అర్థం చేసుకోవచ్చు. ఇది విద్యార్థులకు కూడా వ్యక్తిగత జీవితం, వ్యాపారం, పొలిటిక్స్ అంతా బాగా అర్థమయ్యే టూల్ లాగా ఉపయోగించుకోవచ్చు. [1][3]

### 10. చరిత్ర “పునరావృతం” కాదు, “తుల్యత”  

మార్క్ ట్వైన్ చెప్పినట్లు చరిత్ర “పునరావృతం కాదు, కానీ ఛందస్సులా మునుపటి సంఘటనలను చెప్పుకుంటుంది”. అంటే ఒక నమూనా కొంచెం మార్పుతో మళ్లీ కనిపిస్తుంది (ఉదా: పెట్రోల్ కాలం → లిథియం/రేర్ ఎర్త్స్ కాలం). [1][3]

***

Transcript:
(00:00) As a species, we're one of the nastiest species around. That is the reality of human nature. Would you say cannibalism intertwined with the human story? People don't realize how brutal those times were. Resource scarcity, starvation, you kill what's around and you eat it. It's very clear evidence that they were eating human beings.
(00:20) Who is Shaka Zulu? Just a Zulu leader, killed his own mother. In fact, when his mother died, he ordered all mothers weakened. Everybody should know the pain of losing a mother. So, he was genocidal. >> Genocidal broom? In the American world, for the rain god, it was child sacrifice. To make them cry more, their fingernails would be plucked out and things like that.
(00:40) Why? Because the more the child cries, the more rain you have next time. [screaming] Papua New Guinea, that's the scariest god damn trip I've ever been on. They want you to marry your daughter or wife. And if you say no, they're ready to kill you in an instant. It was all friend or enemy, eat or be eaten. Everything that is good about mankind, human rights, women's liberation, technology, it has all come out of war.
(01:05) It is our worst instincts that have led to our best instincts. The greater the war, the greater the balance of good has been. Wow. Very brutal history episode is presented to you after a long time on TRS. Spoken about cannibals, human sacrifices, but moreover, we've kind of shed light upon the darkest aspects of the last 1,000 years.
(01:36) World history is a topic that's very close to my heart. I'm trying to present it in an entertaining way to the rest of the world. I hope you enjoy this very violent, very brutal, very insightful history special on TRS. Enjoy the episode. It's for those of you who enjoy some twisted podcasts. This one will genuinely bend your mind. It's our special with Abhijit Iyer Mitra on the brutal history of the last 1,000 years.
(02:09) >> [music] [music] >> Abhijit Iyer Mitra, welcome to another history special. Uh evergreen episode. Uh going to be one of the most brutal and violent conversations that we've ever produced on this channel. Uh I won't be engaging in a fight with you, but the conversation's going to enter some dark places for sure.
(02:46) Yeah, uh I think this is the kind of history that both me and you enjoy the most. Yeah. Uh because the human story has been an extremely violent one. Yeah. Why we not taught about the degrees of violence in history books? I actually think that educating yourself on the truths about human violence teaches you a lot more about the human species than just by hearting dates. Yeah.
(03:12) You know, I think history is not taught in the way that it should be taught in schools and colleges. I agree. And you know, the it it's probably the most interesting subject there is. And somehow they found a way of making it the most impossibly boring subject that there is, right? It's sad because they don't want you to focus on how violent and psychotic our history actually is.
(03:39) You know, have you noticed people don't like bad news. They want to hear how great they are, how special and unique they are, how peaceful they are, how their particular religion or civilization taught the world everything about peace and whatever. It doesn't matter who we are. You know, Muslims believe this, Hindus believe this, Christians believe this, everybody believes this about themselves.
(04:02) And the reality is we're really, really horrible people. Overall, as as a species, we're one of the nastiest species around. We're you know, we want to our collective consciousness wants to see ourselves as some Mother Teresa or Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. When in fact, every one of us is actually an Idi Amin or a Mao Tse-tung or a Stalin or a Hitler inside.
(04:29) Um it's How do you tell a kid and should you tell a kid that you're part of a psychotic species that can turn psycho at any given point of time? And the simplest example are things like the Holocaust or Stalin's purges or Mao Tse-tung's slaughters. Where very ordinary people good human beings uh that we think are good human beings great fathers, great mothers would land up to work round up people decide to torture them, kill them in some fashion.
(05:10) And in the case of the Holocaust, they did it even when there were no consequences. At least with Mao Tse-tung and Stalin, you can say, "If I did not do that, my family would have been killed and I would have been killed." You know, in Germany, there is not a one single example not one of a German refusing to carry out the killing of Jews or Gypsies and being punished for it.
(05:35) Sure, you'd get toilet duty, but really, you would rather not do toilet duty and kill a human being? No. >> [snorts] >> So, that is the reality of human nature. I think, you You this need to shield kids from it plays a big role in that, which is why we'd rather make it boring and try to push as many people away from it than push people into it and they realize how nasty we actually are.
(06:02) At least on behalf of young boys, I feel like this is why boys get into wrestling and video games. Cuz it's there in their DNA. They just don't know how to channelize it and you're not taught about this in school. Do you know how many girls I know who are into video games? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. In fact, most of the gamers I know are in fact ladies and girls.
(06:24) Right? So, it's actually there in women as well. If you go to the pre-Columbian Americas, for example, and immediate contact Columbian contact America, you'll find that with tribes like the Comanche and things like that who were in what is today the north Mexico-US border, so Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, parts of Texas.
(06:54) Um the men used to bring home the captives and it was the women doing all the torturing and the killing. Really? And they were far worse than the men when it came to torturing and killing, by the way. Right? So, it's there. It is actually a very gender neutral thing. The psycho gene runs in all of us and it is a genuine psycho gene. Mhm.
(07:17) Ah, [sighs] you know, I don't even know where to begin this conversation. I want to open up this tangent about Native America. I want to open up the tangent about human sacrifice that we spoke about outside. Uh, but maybe the right place to begin this is something hyper relatable, which is the nature of war when it comes to civilians. Yeah.
(07:38) We, other than people in Ukraine and uh the Levant, I don't think too many global populations have seen real hot war up close. But say hypothetically tomorrow, let's just take the case of India and Indian metros. If a large-scale war is to break out in our geographical region, what happens to the people in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore? You will be You will be tortured.
(08:09) Uh you will be systematically killed, your children will be burnt alive. Um there is no depth to which humans will not sink. And at that point, all the morality fostered in you by religion and things like that stops. Uh you saw what happened with the massacres at the initial stages of the Ukraine war, right? Ordinary people being killed left, right, and center.
(08:34) The Ukrainians in fact doing a lot of crap to their own people. Like some of the massacres we know the Russians carried out, right? >> [snorts] >> But the Ukrainians uh taking out their own people uh just because they spoke wrong or they were Russian ethnically or whatever and killing them. Nasty ways. We've seen what happened in um uh uh on October the 7th where Gazans came in and even killed Israeli Muslims and Arabs and Bedouins and things like that, right? In very, very nasty ways.
(09:08) You saw the way they killed the Thai worker. What did Thailand have to do with that conflict? They took a spade and went on smashing his skull while he was alive, took a spike and went on poking it into his genitals and uh I mean, I'm not going to regurgitate that video, but they were doing this to everybody. 10 Indians died that day.
(09:30) Uh we don't talk about it. Um what is happening in Congo today? Uh you know, where the Rwandans are essentially doing to Congo what Russia is doing to Ukraine. Invading it massively. And they're literally chopping up albinos and pygmies and eating them. They're eating them. Yeah, today. >> 2025? >> Yeah, 2025.
(09:54) What's the context? Uh, the context here is albinos in Africa are seen as witches. Uh, they're demons who need to be killed and they need to be stewed and eaten. Uh, same with pygmies. It's meant to bring you powers and things like that. It's happening. We know there are documented cases of it. So, if this happens in India, you know, all this thing that we're a peaceful religion, no shanti shanti.
(10:18) Listen, why in the Vedas are there so many calls to shanti? See, you're saying peace peace peace. You don't ask for peace if there's peace all around, right? You only ask for peace when it's a very warlike violent situation. To be fair, in this day and age, surprisingly, we're a lot less violent than we were once upon a time.
(10:42) But the older the further back in time you go, the systemic low-level systematic violence, which actually kills more people than sporadic high-level violence, is insane. And the level of cruelty and brutality tends to be much more the earlier you go. And uh, the more primitive you are. Mhm. So, you know, there was this concept of Voltaire and Rousseau and people like that, the noble savage.
(11:17) You know, before modern times, people were very kind to each other. It was a place of love. You know, there was that particularly ridiculous sequence in Joe Rogan and that Graham Hancock. Where they were talking about, you know, how this pre-Columbian America was this Kumbaya land, you know, where everybody held hands and kissed and hugged and everybody was high on weed and it was one lovely weed rave party.
(11:47) Uh I don't know, weed, ecstasy, MDMA, whatever. Bro, it was horrible. Uh if if if we get into what pre-Columbian America was in terms of life, trust me, it was a hellhole. You would not be You would not want to live there. Let's open up this chapter by explaining what you mean by pre-Columbian in the first place.
(12:08) >> Okay, sorry. And and take it as far back as you can. Okay. In terms of when did the Americas geographically even get populated and what developed in that ecosystem over thousands of years? Right. So, depending on the theory you choose, um somewhere between 15 to 22,000 years back is when the Bering Sea, so the Russian Far East, people who are they could have been Inuit so the ancestors of the Chinese, maybe a common ancestor to all of them.
(12:43) Inuit are Eskimos Eskimos is a very um racial racial term, so you don't use it. But Indians don't know that, so Inuit. Um they crossed the land bridge over the Bering Straits, rocked up in extreme North Canada, and within about 3,000 years they'd gone to the extreme south of um the Americas. Uh you know, essentially, you can do it very easily.
(13:10) If you're walking a kilometer a day, which is nothing realistically, uh you can in a thousand or so years be all the way from the north of America to the south of America. Mhm. continent. Now, they rock up there, the bridge breaks, and the Bering Sea gets created. Uh the end of the dry ice, I guess. Uh >> As in water levels changed? >> Water levels changed very significantly.
(13:36) Uh a lot of areas that had land bridges are uh decimated. It becomes warmer, so the ice also melts, so ice bridges, as was the case in the Bering Sea, also melt. And it becomes isolated. You're talking about the Americas. >> Yeah, where Alaska was very close to Russia right now on the modern map. Uh the water levels were lower all over the earth.
(13:58) >> Yes. And at one point the water levels suddenly increased. Perhaps because of a cataclysmic event. >> Well, warming mostly because um then the polar ice caps tend to melt and the water levels rise and, you know, currents change and things like that because the salinity changes because it's fresh water freezing and then um anyway.
(14:19) So, the Americas are actually an exact almost exact time capsule of what we were 15,000 years back. Uh if we think that we were peaceful or whatever at that time, you just need to look at the Americas and see there was nothing peaceful about us. Far from it. You know, here in the modern age we say somehow it's okay to kill men.
(14:49) But you know, how can you do this to the women and children? Why men don't have human rights, is it? But you know, it's fine to kill the men, but spare the women and the children. Um but anyway, in Native American warfare, uh at least in the north, the targets used to be women and children for killing.
(15:09) You're talking about inter-tribal warfare. Inter-tribal warfare. It was all inter-tribal warfare because even at its biggest empires and things like that, it was a very tribal war in nature. Why? Because they always remained a Stone Age society. They knew how to melt and use gold, silver, and copper, but it was isolated copper up way up north.
(15:32) Uh it uh they never discovered how to mix They didn't have tin. So, they didn't know how to mix tin and copper to get bronze, so they never graduated to the Bronze Age. So, you know, for a long time we thought that civilization came about because of bronze and became stronger because of iron. We now know and and literacy mostly.
(15:55) We now know that it is possible to be completely illiterate, to still remain in the Stone Age, and still build enormous empires like the Inca Empire, which was massive, the Aztecs, which were not massive, but still powerful, um this place called Teotihuacan, which is outside Mexico City. Uh totally illiterate, but a superpower that was able to project power 1,300 km away into the Yucatan Peninsula.
(16:25) Right? I'll just have to pause you here a little bit. Now, you're saying that basically human beings migrated from Asia into the Americas. Yeah. And perhaps very quickly spread all over America. And this is pre-10,000 BC. Yeah. All this happened. >> Way before, yeah. Way before. We don't even know how far back it goes.
(16:45) Could be 50,000 BC. Could be, but yeah. Uh then the water levels rise, that Bering Land Bridge gets cut off, it gets flooded, so it's very difficult now to cross over to America. Therefore, that whole set of people that occupies America gets kind of isolated from Asia, Africa, and Europe, which is another land mass now.
(17:03) >> Exactly. But in Asia, Africa, and Europe, because they're connected by land, uh they kind of simultaneously develop as a human species. Exactly. Uh can you just take us through that timeline as well? How did the human species in that geographical part of the world go from Stone Age to Bronze Age, etc.
(17:25) ? So, you know, very surprisingly, this happens when everybody is at the same latitude, but not on the same longitude. Okay. So, if you are a vertically oriented continent like North and South America, they are much longer than they are broad. Mhm. Uh North They're more North-South oriented than they are East-West oriented. You have these climate zones which become impossible to cross.
(17:52) So, the crossing of technology, knowledge, and everything becomes a lot tougher. Mhm. Whereas, you know, if you take Eurasia and North Africa, it's got very similar There is snow in the temperate area, a huge green belt, and desert belt in between, and then a cold belt up north, right? So, technology, because it's moving East to West from similar climate zones or adjustable climate zones, it happens much easier.
(18:23) I have a tiny movie recommendation here because this will add a lot of context. I think every listener who's enjoying this conversation should watch a movie called Kingdom of Heaven. Not very accurate, but his It's not a historical >> Terribly inaccurate. The Balian of Ibelin family [laughter] were really nasty characters, by the way.
(18:40) They You know hero, huh? But the way they've shown that movie, they're really trying to uh create a time capsule from that phase in history. I'm sure they've taken actually 300 years and crunched it down to one human being's life, but the way they've shown European migration to the Middle East, the Crusades, uh you know, interreligious warfare, a very nice time capsule from that phase of human history.
(19:03) Uh and that's a great example of what you're saying about East to West migration of knowledge. >> East-West migration of knowledge, people, uh it's it's very, very common, right? On the other hand, why does it move up to North Africa, but it never moves under the Sahara? Because the Sahara represents a huge break in a geographical break, which becomes impossible to overcome, which is why the southern half of Africa >> [snorts] >> um takes very, very long to catch up.
(19:35) In fact, till the last century, they don't really catch up with the rest of uh Eurasia, North Africa. You want to talk briefly about Shaka Zulu? Sure, man. Just just as trivia. Yeah, yeah. Go ahead. I mean, classic Idi Amin-esque genocidal whack job, right? And like What timeline? Uh literally the 1800s. Mhm. Literally the 1800s.
(20:00) I mean, this is when you know, the metro would have probably come online in London. Mhm. Uh late 1800s. Uh we had discovered steam engines and things by the mid-1800s. But because the Sahara Desert cut off civilizational education, Yeah. therefore, whatever sub-Saharan was cut off to a large degree. To uh almost completely.
(20:25) In a way that it probably should not, because you know, we know there was maritime trade happening. We know that Indian sailors from the Chola dynasty around 900 to 1200 AD were going crossing the Cape of Good Hope and going all the to Namibia and places like that, right? Uh they definitely crossed the Cape of Good Hope.
(20:46) Um and yet, there was no absorption. Uh and in most cases, it was it remained extraordinarily brutal and primitive. Shaka Zulu being a classic example of this. Who is Shaka Zulu? So, just a Zulu leader. Now, you know, he's talked up so much, you think he had this huge empire, right? When you actually look at it on the map, it's not very big.
(21:12) It's actually quite small. This is in South Africa. >> in modern-day South Africa. Uh what was still not created as South Africa by then. Mhm. Um [snorts] and it was very interesting that way because this was documented. Europeans went and saw what was happening and documented what was done. There are African accounts of Shaka Zulu which are not complimentary at all.
(21:39) He killed his own people in large numbers. In fact, when his mother died, he ordered all nursing mothers and nursing cows to be killed. Out of sadness? Yeah, because he's like uh every everybody should know the pain of losing a mother and crap like that. So, he was genocidal, bro. Like uh the uh the process, I forget what it's called called the umfecane or something like that.
(22:06) What's the bubblegum version of Shaka Zulu? The bubblegum version comes because of the South African Broadcasting Corporations um 1970s or 80s TV show about this. Where they want you to think he was this major military thing. He was not. He was extremely primitive. That he was this wise just ruler. He was not. He was a psycho.
(22:31) He was militarily superior to the tribes that surrounded him. And that was all that there was. Okay. He took on the British. No, he never took on the British. He never took on the British. It was his successor Dingane. Uh he was killed by his own people. Shaka Zulu? >> Because yeah, because Shaka Zulu had gone mad.
(22:52) Especially after his mother Nandi died. Uh um they decided enough is enough and his own family killed him. One of his killers was his nephew Dingane who became his one plus successor. He was the one that came into conflict with the Boers and the British and I think the Boers. Like locals versus Europeans. Europeans.
(23:14) >> That's that's what I thought Shaka Zulu was. Oh, yeah. No, Shaka was never anti-European. Never ever. Uh he adopted some firearms from the Europeans, but he never attacked the Europeans. He he was entirely black on black massacres. Um much like what's happening in Congo today. Mhm. Uh right? Nobody wants to talk about the Congo Civil War.
(23:42) We all talk about the Rwandan genocide. But the Rwandan genocide is kind of very similar to what Shaka Zulu was doing to his own people. So, you have to turn back and ask, Shaka Zulu killed more Zulus than the white man ever did. So, why do the Zulus then consider him a hero? Why does black American culture treat a man who killed more of his own people as a hero? He was very nasty in the way he went around killing people.
(24:14) There was human sacrifice and things involved out there. We know much more about that from say Benin and Togo where you had these rituals which involved the sacrifice of thousands of human beings literally. Capital of voodoo. Uh yeah, original voodoo. Yeah, before it uh I mean, voodoo becomes popular these days because of Haiti, but that's where the original voodoo started.
(24:36) Um So, this is very common. You know, this thing of anti-colonialism, they want you to think that European colonialism was something unique and unprecedented in history. Slavery was mostly black on black slavery. The Europeans were just the last They were all around the coast. They never penetrated the interior of Africa.
(25:02) They were just doing the transatlantic transport. And you know, America got very few slaves compared to most of the other countries. Haiti, Jamaica, uh Brazil in fact was the most. There were something like about 8 million slaves who ultimately went 8 million, I think yeah, 8 million who ultimately went to Brazil.
(25:21) Uh even though the Portuguese empire had banned slavery. It was never followed in practice. So, it it was blacks on black violence, which nobody wants to talk about. Uh you're meant to believe it is the white man that did all of this. And in fact, it was the end of slavery and industrialization that actually brought about African colonization.
(25:43) Because then, slaves became bad. Uh once you know, you can do away with free labor. And industrialization requires quality. Quality is a function of labor. Uh you don't need slaves anymore. You can be very moral about these things. But it was more than morality. They want the Europeans also want you to believe that it was deeply moral of Britain to go around sinking slave ships because they were so morally appalled by slavery What it was was Britain had a competitive advantage in industry.
(26:20) It needed resources. Others who had not industrialized as quickly as Britain had were becoming a threat to Britain. So, how do you squelch their economies? They are so dependent on slaves, you get rid of the slave trade. So, you use lawfare. I have an advantage, you don't have that advantage.
(26:42) I use the law to declare that what you are doing, which I was doing till 20 years back, is now illegal and I'm going to wage war on you to end this. And colonization, they want you to believe they went in and started colonizing the deep interior of Africa out of the goodness of their hearts because they did not want slavery. No. That was the excuse.
(27:00) They wanted resources because industrialization requires industrial quantities of minerals, gold, diamonds, whatever you uranium of late but not in those days. Metals and minerals which Africa was very rich in and that's what they went in for. So, isn't it surprising peak colonization in Africa and India actually starts at the end of the slave trade.
(27:25) Let's dial it back to east to west migration versus north and south. That's where we began. >> Yeah. Uh and you said that the Sahara desert cuts off uh the spread of information basically. Uh but Asia, Europe they're all able to learn from each other. So, we go from being stone age humans to to bronze age humans to iron age humans very rapidly from it starting in one side of the continent, right? So, for example the moment the bronze age starts in the Middle East in Iraq and uh what what's the fertile crescent? So,
(28:08) Syria and Israel. It very very rapidly spreads to Egypt, to India, to uh China within a few hundred years, not even thousand. Within a few hundred years it spreads. It spreads north to Germany. What timeline are we talking about? So, we're talking about 5,000 BC. Uh well, five 5,000 years back so 3,000 BC-ish.
(28:31) You can go back to about 7,000 in some cases but that's more chalcolithic so that is copper without tin. Now, what happens is the unique innovation that happens is copper is very abundant throughout. Tin is extremely rare. And you know, you can't even figure out Copper mining leaves archaeological traces.
(28:55) Tin mining does not leave archaeological traces. But we know tin was rare and so a whole trade network developed around it. So you know, in Egypt, they were literally getting tin 5,000 years back from Britain. Mhm. And you know, Britain became a major supply route so that to cross around Spain, come and supply to places like Greece, Cyprus and places like that.
(29:22) Greece had a direct supply route of tin from the North Sea. So Germany, Denmark apparently think. They certainly had amber trade from the North Sea to Greece and Egypt and places like that. One of the apparently major suppliers of tin till it was discovered in Cyprus apparently was Harappan civilization. So one of the reasons of the wealth.
(29:45) So tin in those days was like petroleum in the last 50-60 years. Wow. >> Yeah, so Harappa was probably the Saudi Arabia of its times. What because it had access to tin? >> Yeah. Wow. And this is what was the precursor to India being Sone Ki Chidiya or the golden sparrow? >> Exactly. This is what fueled the money. This is what fueled the money. Wow.
(30:04) >> Yeah. Damn. And on the basis of tin uh the Indus Valley civilization started trading a lot of luxury items. One was this red stone called carnelian which is actually very common in So you know, if you look at the Egyptian treasures of Tutankhamun and things like that, you don't see rubies and diamonds and emeralds and sapphires.
(30:31) It's turquoise, lapis lazuli and carnelian. >> And I have all of them on this shelf behind me. Right. >> It's crazy to think that this was treasure once upon a time. >> Yeah, it was treasure once a >> But on what basis? Because it was rare, very rare. Lapis lazuli is fairly rare. Uh it's become semi-precious now. >> what's it used for? Like beauty? That's it. That's it.
(30:53) In the same way that we value diamonds today. Yeah. And uh technically diamonds should be semi-precious. De Beers is artificially controlling the supply of diamonds and making it a precious stone. From one point of time after stones became common, the most expensive stone was amethyst. >> [snorts] >> It's a bunch of amethyst behind you.
(31:09) Okay. Great. Uh but today it's a semi-precious stone. Because they found huge amounts of it. Diamonds again, we know there are huge amounts of it. It is going to become a semi-precious stone at some point. But De Beers did a very good thing by, you know, cartelizing it and controlling it.
(31:30) So, it's going to remain precious for a while. Right? Uh so, carnelian, turquoise, and lapis lazuli. Lapis lazuli we knew came from Afghanistan. Which was part of the Indus Valley continuum. Carnelian came from the Indus Valley proper. They had very special ways. They would take long stones and they had this expert thing where they could put a hole right in the middle of a long stone so you could make a really lovely necklace out of it and things like that.
(31:57) So, it started off supplying the petroleum of the Bronze Age, which was tin. And it became a luxury trade. So, it was called palace economies because only the very rich could afford it. So, the palaces of Greece, which was then Mycenae, used to trade with the palaces of Crete, of Cyprus, of Turkey, of the Egyptian pharaohs, of Mesopotamia, what's Iraq today, and things like that.
(32:25) And the Chinese formed a completely independent economy of their own without trade because they had both tin and copper in great quantities out there. So, that kind of forms an isolated separate unit. The western unit west of the Himalayas was a completely integrated trade system.
(32:47) Very risky, very dangerous, and that is why the dockyard at Lothal on the Gujarat coast is such a huge dockyard because the number of ships coming out here is almost 1,000 ft. You know, for those days that's massive. Uh internal flooding dockyard where you come in completely shielded from the elements and things like that, advanced technology for that trade going to Egypt and Mesopotamia.
(33:12) Let's go back to history because we're talking about uh how tin was the petroleum of that >> Of the Bronze Age. This is what I love about history that when people 200 years from now will look back at our times of the 2000s and they realize how rich the Gulf became. >> Mhm. And then they tie that to oil money. Yeah.
(33:34) But oil money is a reflection of our times because the earth needed oil in order to build infrastructure at this stage of the human story that we were at. >> Exactly. Uh and you're saying that tin was the requirement at that point in the human story. Exactly. >> Which perhaps tells me that there'll be something that people are not even thinking about right now which will become the requirement in the future.
(33:55) Which probably seems to be lithium right now. Possibly. It's possibly going to be the rare earths, possibly. Uh by the way, you know, rare earths aren't all that rare. >> What are rare earths? Rare earths are these new age minerals that you need for microprocessors and chips and things like that. So, uh lithium amongst other I mean, there's lots of these new age materials.
(34:16) I've lost count of them now. But uh lithium is one important thing. They are not rare. It's just that China has done a cartel, they've done a De Beers Mhm. trick on rare earths where any anytime anybody else tries to mine rare earths which are actually very plentiful. What China ends up doing is they undercut their pricing.
(34:38) And they can afford to because they don't operate to market principles. So, those companies go bankrupt and then China has market monopoly. This is why it's important to study history. This is exactly why it's important to study history. If you want to make money in the future, if you want to understand human nature better, please deep dive into history.
(34:55) >> Exactly. Uh because, you know, as Mark Twain said, history does not repeat, it rhymes. Wow, what is this? Uh so, you know, people say history repeats itself. Mark Twain says it doesn't repeat, it rhymes like a poem. So, it's not the exact same, but it's similar. Mhm. The skill lies in seeing what patterns What What is the variation on the pattern repeating? Because it'll never be the exact pattern that repeats.
(35:22) It'll be a variation on the pattern that repeats. So, it's In the Bronze Age, they knew we know for a fact that they knew how to smelt and work iron. There's very clear evidence of it. Uh most famous is Tutankhamun's meteorite dagger. It's a gold handle, but the uh uh blade is made of metal melted from a meteorite. Iron melted from a meteorite.
(35:56) In those days, the iron would have been more expensive than the gold. Mhm. Because the kind of extraordinarily high temperature for those times required to melt that gold was a secret. It required huge amounts of wood and coal and whatnot to burn in very specialized chambers, which then means that you have to expend a lot of money, effort, and expertise into melting that gold, which made it more more into melting that iron and shaping that iron, which made it more expensive than the gold.
(36:31) But you know what happens when in 1177, that's the that's the exact date of the Bronze Age collapse. All these trade systems are overstressed. There's a full system of systems collapse. Possibly climate change driven. The trade systems break down. Now, imagine a world that is so dependent on tin. When the trade systems Today, if petroleum stopped tomorrow, Mhm.
(37:01) Mhm? What do you think is going to happen? We're going to shift towards hydrogen cars or battery cars very, very quickly before anything else. And the shift that happened was to iron. And they discovered that iron was actually much more democratic and egalitarian than bronze was. Why? Because tin was rare and had to be transported from India or Britain.
(37:26) Long, arduous, very expensive journeys, which made the metal so expensive. With iron, it is abundant across the Earth's surface, without exception. And all it really required was trees and coal. As in? You just need to chop down enough wood and have enough coal. So, the innovation was coming up with new furnaces. Mhm. Okay.
(37:55) So, it was actually apparently the introduction of air, bellows and things like that that they discovered, which meant that they used less wood and less coal than they did during the Bronze Age to smelt the same amount of iron. Okay. Just to get this clear, I'm going to ask you some rookie questions, okay? So, when we're talking about this progression of stone to copper to bronze to iron, you're primarily talking about making harder materials, right? Stronger, more durable, harder materials.
(38:26) Uh and all these materials were used for weaponry as well as infrastructure. >> Yes. That's why these phases of history are called X age and Y age and Z age. >> Yeah. Correct understanding? >> right. Uh and this is what determined all of the world's trade networks as well. Uh why do you say that 1177 was the date? Well, there's a famous book by Eric Cline called uh 1177 when the world collapsed or whatever.
(38:56) It's It's an arbitrary date, but it's a fairly accurate date. Uh you look at it, all the civilizations collapsed simultaneously around uh 30, 40 years before or 30, 40 years within a 30, 40-year range of that exact date. >> This is AD? Uh BC. This is BC. 1177 BC. >> Bronze Age collapse, yeah. So, after this, Egypt is a Bronze Age phenomenon.
(39:20) After the Bronze Age, Egypt is nothing. Egypt never enters the world stage ever again. It was the preeminent power of the Bronze Age. It was an also-ran in the Iron Age. So, by a thousand BC, for example, Egypt is nothing. 700 BC, they try some stunts, but they get hammered very badly by the Assyrians and sent right back.
(39:45) So, uh you see all the empires, the Mycenaean Empire, they were the ones that who went went and sacked Troy. I mean, the Trojan War is based on them. They collapse. Um the uh all the Phoenician city-states, so what is Israel and Syria, they collapse. The Hittite Empire in Turkey collapses.
(40:05) Mesopotamia at this time, Sumeria not Sumeria at this point, it's Mesopotamia. Uh they collapse. Um it's uh and there are two Bronze Age collapses. There's an early Bronze Age collapse, which is where Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Valley collapse. That's around 1,900 3,900 years back. And there is the later Bronze Age collapse, which is 3,100 years back.
(40:33) As in it's replaced by another civilization? Well, it's it's the dark ages for a while because literacy goes down. Why? Because literacy was concentrated in palaces. It's the palace economy we're talking about, right? In order to get wood, you just literally need to walk 20 m outside your house and there's a tree out there. In order to get iron, maybe you have to walk about 2-3 km outside your house and you'll get the iron in some rock deposit or something like that.
(41:00) But to get tin, it comes from a minimum of 5,000 km away. Mhm. It has to be prospected. It's rare, so you need to know where it is. The person around it needs to know what it is. Learn how to extract it, transport it all the way to a coast. Then a long 5,000 km journey. Super duper expensive. So, metal bronze was not commonly accessible to the people in those days.
(41:29) It was very expensive. Iron was only expensive because they didn't know how to smelt it and the amount of energy it took. Suddenly, because of technological innovation, why? Because tin is no longer available, petrol is no longer available today. They put a huge amount of brain power into seeing how less wood or coal they can use to smelt iron.
(41:55) And suddenly, it becomes available to everybody everywhere. It's like, you know, how computers were once I You're much You're half my age. When the first computer I saw was when my mom took me to her office in the Tamil Nadu government. The computer was the size of a whole room. Mhm. It didn't even have a keyboard.
(42:16) Each alphabet and digit and comma and full stop had to be punched on a machine individually and fed to it. By the time I got into school, it had you had a keyboard. Today, you know, this one phone it has more processing power and communication power than the president of America had in 1980 at his disposal. Uh and even then what the president of America had to do the same things in 1980 would take about three to four jumbo jets, Boeing 747s.
(42:55) Today, I'm literally holding it in my hand. It's worth $1,500 or something like that. It's affordable. So, this is the democratization of technology. It's exactly What happened with iron is exactly that. Everybody could then use a metal that was harder than bronze, much cheaper than bronze, available to everyone.
(43:16) Right? Which means it is not just the big players who can monopolize empires. Everybody can create empires. So, more war? More war. More war, more tribal invasions and things like that. Uh and this is when the steppes start becoming really, really, really important. Uh remember our own so-called Aryan invasions happened somewhere in the middle Bronze Age.
(43:52) And I don't agree with a lot of Western Indology. I think it's a whole load of misread But if you accept this theory that the theory we were taught in school was that the Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilization was conquered by invading invaders from Central Asia who wielded iron weapons. So, iron proves that crucial tilt factor.
(44:27) Uh, it equalizes everybody. Uh, empires start popping up everywhere, but literacy also then starts spreading. Hm, right? Because empires like require literacy. Like in the Americas they don't, but here they do. And all this while the Americas are cut off from the rest of the world. >> Yeah, completely.
(44:49) For 15,000 years they're cut off. >> They've not even reached the Bronze Age. >> They've not even reached the Bronze Age. >> Hm. So, if there were were a world war to happen at that time, Asia, Africa, Europe would probably destroy the Americas? >> Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. First of all, we would have destroyed them through diseases. Hm.
(45:08) Uh, because remember this notion that the white man went and conquered America through the force of arms, 90% of the native population had died because of old world diseases. So, we were essentially conquering I I talk as if I'm white, but I'm not, but let's just say us old world types uh, conquered America after 90% of them were already dead.
(45:31) >> Hm. It's effectively like the Earth had two different stories going on parallelly. >> Yeah. It was literally that. It was literally that. The Americas were a time capsule Hm. where cannibalism, human sacrifice continued right up to 500 years back, bro. And you know, there were two instances of contact of Europe.
(45:53) First was 1,000 years back when the Vikings made contact with uh, northern America, but whoever they met were so hostile and so poor that they didn't see the value of trade with them. And the hostility wasn't worth the effort. And then there's Columbus in what 1492 uh who discovers the Americas and at that point it's worthwhile.
(46:24) It's worthwhile because he's after gold. He wants the gold. He thinks there's a he thinks he's come to India. Which is why the the Native Americans are called Indians. What what happened after the Iron Age? So in the Iron Age itself uh so in the Iron Age you see that there's a huge sophistication of language that suddenly develops.
(46:45) Religious ideas become much much more sophisticated. So it's called the first axial age, right? Where you have people like Zoroaster, the Buddha, uh possibly the Jain Tirthankaras and things like that, the early uh Greek religious codification and things to happen. Uh the Bible is formed is created around 700 BC, right? Uh and we know the Bible had nothing to do with 1000 BC or Moses and things like that.
(47:15) These are all stories collected around 700 BC by a king called Hezekiah. We know exactly who wrote the Bible. It's a king called Hezekiah uh in about 700 BC-ish. This is you're talking about the Old Testament of the Bible. >> The Old Testament. Like a lot of people who've not familiar with the Bible assume that the Bible starts with the story of Jesus Christ, but that's the New Testament.
(47:37) >> That's the New Testament. The Old Testament, which is the Torah, which is what the Jews believe in. They don't touch the New Testament. >> even Islam believes in it. Yes. The Islam believes in the Quran plus so so Jews believe only in the Torah, which is the Old Testament. Uh Christians believe in the Torah plus the New Testament, which is the story of Jesus.
(47:59) Muslims believe in the Torah plus the New Testament plus the Quran. And and their holy days are Friday, Saturday, Sunday. For the Muslim, it's Friday. For the Jew, the original one was the Saturday, the Shabbat. And for the Christians, they wanted Sunday to be the holy day, so it became Sunday. And that is why in Italian Sunday is called Sabato.
(48:24) Like Shabbat. Yeah. Which is the Jewish Yeah. Mhm. Wow. They also originated in the same geographical region. >> Yeah. I want to talk a little bit about the Old Testament because I was obsessed with the Old Testament as a kid. >> Yeah. Uh I don't know that I feel like there's magic in those stories. It really enters your heart as a kid and when I look at it from an adult lens, you're saying that they were stories that were accumulated by King Hezekiah. Hezekiah.
(48:52) And I believe that the God that they refer to in the Old Testament uh is the same God that's referred to in Christianity. Uh is the almighty referred to in Islam and is the almighty referred to in Judaism. >> Yes. It was called Yahweh. >> Yeah. But the so a true Jew will never say Yahweh because the words are considered too sacred.
(49:17) They refer to him as God. Elahi. From where the Muslims get Allah. Mhm. Right? Now, remember till Hezekiah's time the Jews are polytheists. Multiple gods. >> Yes. Jehovah had a wife. She was worshipped. Uh we know she had a wife. I mean, there's lots of archaeological evidence of this. Uh and there was this general set of Levantine gods who the Phoenicians, the uh Israelis, and all of them worshipped.
(49:52) Uh in fact, if you take this timeline of Solomon and David 1000 BC to be true, they were 100% I can guarantee they were not monotheists. They were polytheists worshipping many, many, many, many gods. Hezekiah decides all of a sudden, and he is not the first monotheist. The first monotheist experiment actually happens 700 years prior to Hezekiah in Egypt by this guy called Akhenaten, whose wife is Nefertiti, the very beautiful bust in the Berlin Museum.
(50:27) Now, what happens under Akhenaten was Egypt, as we know, was polytheist. There was Ra, there was Osiris, there was Isis, and all these people. He initially, under the co-regency with his father, turns it henotheist. Henotheist is we worship all the gods, but there is one major god above all others. And that becomes, uh, Aten, which is the disk of the sun.
(50:54) When his father dies, he makes it monotheist. He bans the worship of all the other gods. It's punishable by death. And you can only worship this one god called Aten, which is the disk of the sun. So, the memory of that experiment already existed. Judaism was not the first experiment. It was the first successful experiment of monotheism.
(51:16) But, it is historically attested that 700 years prior to this, there was an experiment in Egypt which may or may not have influenced the, uh, the Israeli experiment. So, uh, uh, it's Abraham, where Abraham comes from. Abraham is the father of all the, uh, uh, uh, Judeo-Christian Arabic tribes. Abraham is is referred as coming from Ur of the Chaldees, Ur Chaldu.
(51:48) 1000 BC, there were no Chaldeans. We know the Chaldeans ruled Ur only about 700 BC. So, you know, there are such obvious pointers to when the Bible was written. Who it was written by. What the political implications of writing the Bible were and why it was done. And you can also trace very clearly the pork taboo from there.
(52:18) It's a very similar process to the Indian beef taboo. Right? Now, the beef taboo in India develops sometime around 400 AD. It's not a BC thing, it's very much an AD thing. Why? Because there's deurbanization happening. Uh you know, the late the deurbanization of late antiquity, which starts around 400 AD depending on Rome or where you are.
(52:44) Some places like China never deurbanized, but India did, Rome did, the Middle East did. The Byzantines did not, but you see deurbanization happen and feudalism coming in. What is deurbanization? Cities stop making economic sense. They're extracting so much Cities are very creative productive centers, but they extract huge amounts of resources from the neighborhood.
(53:08) Wheat, rice, uh food, uh metals, fuel, everything. At some point when trade networks and things break down, the cost of maintaining a city becomes too much. It doesn't justify its existence, and so people start going back into the uh countryside. Cities Rome went from a city of 1 million people to a city of about 30,000 people within the space of a few hundred years.
(53:37) The same thing happens across North India. The Gupta Empire, cities stop ceased to exist. I mean few cities exist here and there, they will always exist, but mostly it then becomes a country of villages. De-urbanization, what ends up happening is the cow's value goes up immensely. You don't have different people who are able to supply you with milk, butter, yogurt, uh uh uh and you know, in India the cow dung was extremely important as a fuel.
(54:08) It's much more ecologically friendly. It's also a very useful building material. Now, building material, if you remember how bricks were made, was straw had to be chopped, it had to be crushed with your feet, and then it had to be mixed into mud because it creates that sort of fiber net, like modern composites are these fibers meshed together so to give it strength.
(54:30) That is how bricks are made. Now, the cow has already done that for you. It's picked up grass and leaves, it's chewed it, and so you it's dung already is fiber. So, it's already So, you mix it into mud. You've saved a huge amount of human labor. The cow is also providing labor in your fields, it's your source of protein, it's your source of through uh milk and well, fermented milk, yogurt, and paneer.
(55:00) Uh it is your source of fat through butter and uh ghee that you distill from it. Butter goes rancid very fast, ghee can last for years. Extremely valuable. It has so many uses. In a de-urbanized society where you're not getting different things from different places and so you can afford to kill a cow, you can no longer afford to kill the cow.
(55:25) You live in a village, you are your own supplier of oil, you are your own supplier of protein, you are your own supplier of building material, you are your own supplier of uh fuel. And you know, if you dry cow dung it becomes an automatic fuel pellet right there. The cow becomes so valuable. You just can't kill it. It becomes sacred for you.
(55:49) It becomes that expensive. Purely a phenomenon of de-urbanization. The pork taboo starts sometime during the early Iron Ages in the prior to the 700s in Israel because there is a difference between the plains where the Philistines live. What is today south of Tel Aviv, what's actually Gaza today. Gaza and north north of Gaza to Tel Aviv.
(56:14) And the mountains where Jerusalem is. Where the modern day predecessors of the Israelis live. And what's the thing? Cities have ceased to exist. We can't afford to have pigs because pigs are a single use commodity. You can't drink pig's milk. Pig's poop can't be used as fuel. It can't be used as building material.
(56:38) A pig is a single use commodity. It makes absolutely no It is a waste of resources to grow pigs up in the Judean Hills after you've de-urbanized. So they come up with the story that it's dirty. It's a dirty animal. You shouldn't eat it. Why? Because it's taking up too much resources for just one product, food.
(57:02) And that is how the pork taboo comes in. I wonder how non-veg even evolved as a thing. Look, we're naturally non-veg, huh? Vegetarianism evolved out. We have always You look at our earliest ancestors. All the evidence, every single humanoid primate species that came before us, including every single early human, all the evidence is of extraordinary levels of meat eating.
(57:32) All over the world. All over the world, without exception. Vegetarianism is an intellectual evolution. It is not natural. For human beings. But that's how it works. Do you think that's where the world is going? Do you think that's where humankind is going? I can never become a vegetarian because I love my meat too much, but do I think it is a kinder, more sustainable, more human not we've established that humans aren't nice creatures.
(58:02) It's It's probably better to be an animal than it is to be a human being. But let's just say it's a kinder thing to be a vegetarian. Mhm. I I can't be a vegetarian, but I admire them. Mhm. Till the time they start shoving their beliefs down your throat. Uh but do I think it's a superior way of life? Yes. I think the moment lab-grown meats become Yeah.
(58:26) common >> I think lab-grown meats are where we need to go because the sheer cruelty of the animal slaughter process is probably something we need to avoid. Yeah. Because we're doing a historical conversation here. I'm assuming that when we were just hunter-gatherers, it was about eating all different kinds of food, mushrooms, fruits, vegetables.
(58:48) >> Anything you got. Mhm. Because you didn't know where your next meal was coming from. Now, the issue with a lot of fruits and mushrooms is they especially mushrooms tend to be poisonous. So, you need to know what you're eating. Uh as a rule, brightly colored anything was poison. And obviously, they hunted certain animals and eventually realized some of those wild animals can be domesticated and bred for the sake of meat. Once they knew.
(59:14) That's how non-veg probably began in like a mainstream manner. Well, I mean, non-veg was always mainstream because we were hunter-gatherers. But the domestication of cows, of generally of foodstuffs, chickens, goats, sheep, and cows, and pigs. These are the five big ones which everybody domesticates other than fish which are still hunted technically if you look at it.
(59:36) Um And we're still hunter-gatherers in that sense, especially pescetarians. >> Wow. Yeah. It It develops to satisfy the need to continue with the traditions of your past because we are made for hunting. We have canines. We have 3D vision. So, ranging which is only used for killing. Had we been uh vegetarians, we would have 270° vision like deers or cows so that they can see a wide field of view and see when a predator is coming to attack us. Mhm.
(1:00:14) Good point to talk about cannibalism as well. Hell yeah. Look, cannibalism is my thing. Cannibalism intertwined with the human story. Now, think about it. Our closest relatives are chimpanzees. Have you seen the Jane Goodall documentaries? I know they're from the 1980s, but have you seen them? I think every Everybody should watch those initial Jane Goodall documentaries she made in Africa.
(1:00:40) Chronic cannibalism. Uh over territory With chimpanzees? >> Chimpanzees. They will kill their neighbor's child and eat them over territory, over small disputes, and things like that. You look at human species, Neanderthals, Australopithecus, Ramapithecus, there is not one human species where evidence of cannibalism hasn't been found.
(1:01:13) Maybe the Denisovans because they're a modern discovery. Uh Neanderthal proximate. There is not one single human species where cannibalism hasn't been found. And imagine a period where the total humans on earth were just 100,000. For 10 or 12 people to have been found, that's an extraordinarily high percentage of cannibalism happening.
(1:01:37) I mean, look, you're stuck in a time where you can't catch a monkey or a fish or a deer. There's a human being who's easy to kill right there. You want to kill and eat if you have to survive. People don't realize how brutal those times were. Resource scarcity, starvation, you kill what's around and eat it.
(1:02:02) It's been the most common thing about humans for the last million years of our existence. Uh second only to eating other animals. But ahead of eating vegetables and fruits. >> [snorts] >> Wow. Yeah. But then, what ends up happening is we slowly we develop the mind power to realize it's probably not very good for societies to be eating their own.
(1:02:37) We slowly start outgrowing it. We get to the point where it obtains a mystical quality. You're not meant to do it all the time the moment you get hungry. You're meant to do it only when it's the gods call for it. And that slowly transitions into human sacrifice. This is the Stone Age we're talking about.
(1:03:02) This is still very much the Stone Age. Mhm. A human sacrifice transition, I think we see quite clearly only in the Bronze Age. As in? They they stop doing human sacrifice. >> No, they start doing human sacrifice. It Cannibalism goes down massively. It almost disappears. And the killing of a fellow human acquires a full-on mystical religious symbolism, and it goes from cannibalism to human sacrifice.
(1:03:30) And that's the Bronze Age transition. It's fairly standard across every civilization. If there was a Stone Age civilization, it is fairly safe to assume there'll be a lot of archaeologists and historians getting pissed off at me for saying this. Uh but because, you know, you don't assume unless you find proof of.
(1:03:55) But then I'd say, why would you think somebody's peaceful? Because you know those ages weren't peaceful. It is safe to assume that all Stone Age people were cannibals. Uh the threshold for cannibalism varied, but they were all cannibals. Uh avoid. If you see If you come across a Stone Age population, if you're exploring somewhere in South America, in the Amazon, somewhere, or you discover some lost civilization in Antarctica someday, I would suggest you run in the other direction.
(1:04:26) Don't try to make first contact. Do you think there could be civilization in Antarctica? No, right? But um this is, you know, I have a huge issue with Joe Rogan and uh what's the gentleman's name? >> Graham? Graham Hancock. Uh on that. Mhm. I'm not averse to the idea of a civilization prior to the 11, 12,000 year period. It's just that it would have never been as advanced as they claim, and if it did, you would definitely have archaeological proof of it.
(1:05:00) And what they offer as archaeological proof is not archaeological proof. Uh let's go back to that story of the Americas which we opened up. Cuz that's what led to all these tangents. And we'll talk about your trips to Papua New Guinea and all that. Back to the Americas and native American culture. >> [sighs] >> We're talking about for the sake of assumption around that 12,000 BC mark where the water levels changed.
(1:05:36) Okay, we covered kind of the story of Asia up till the Iron Age etc. Now we're back to America. We're talking about how the Stone Age got stretched until Columbus discovered the Americas. Now, for whatever reason when the Vikings came to North America, they did not impart technology to the Native American populations.
(1:06:00) And so it's the Stone Age throughout. We know there is evidence in northern Canada of copper working, but that is copper. It is rare, it is isolated, it does not spread. Stone is much more easily available. It's It's widespread. And copper doesn't offer you any great advantages over stone. Right? If it breaks, you can at most melt it again and reform it as opposed to a stone which can't be put back together again.
(1:06:31) But the whole of America till 500 years back remains a Stone Age society. Now, what historians told us was that you cannot have a civilization without literacy and without moving into bronze. The Americas prove all of that wrong. Which is why for me, you know, something that Graham Hancock dwells on which is Gobekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe in Turkey.
(1:06:58) The story you hear is we we now realize that the temple came before the city. Bro, have you seen What do you think the Americas were? The temples came before the cities. And the cities came before learning and literacy. Right? That evidence has always been there. Karahan Tepe and Gobekli Tepe are the clearest examples that the Stone Ages can produce civilization.
(1:07:29) Which is the greatest miracles of it are in the Americas. The Olmecs, the Chimu, the Chavin de Huantar in the south, the Moche in the south. Um and it it it Remember, it's always these centers of civilization. So, you know, in the Old World how it's always been China, India, Iraq, Egypt and Greece. Even in the Americas, it's these two standard places.
(1:07:58) Mexico, a big chunk of Mexico from Mexico City to the Yucatan Peninsula, and the Peruvian coast. Now, I don't know why, but those are the ones which keep repeatedly producing great empires and great civilizations. Just to set context here. Um basically, when early humans crossed over to the Americas, they probably spread over America very quickly.
(1:08:23) Uh but perhaps at that stage, they were mostly hunter-gatherers. >> Yes. I remember reading this in Sapiens, I think. Um Yuval Noah Harari said that uh definitely hunter-gatherers probably had a spiritual sense of the world in terms of There was a lot of contemplation about where we came from, why we are here.
(1:08:46) I don't know I would go that far. But there was a question about cause and effect. Why are we here? Why? Mhm. Rain fell. Why did that rain fall? So, you invent a rain god Mhm. because of whom the rain fell. Why did thunder happen? It is because there is a thunder god. That thunder, that lightning came and killed my uh sister or mother.
(1:09:13) It was because why did the thunder god choose for my sister to be hit by the bolt of lightning? What did she do? And so the concept of sin emerges. That That's just how the human mind works. You're looking for uh cause and effect. Cause and effect. >> Uh which is also the root of the Vedas. You know, the The Vedas is an inquiry into why the universe and I exist.
(1:09:33) >> Mhm. That's perhaps what led to the Stone Age human being creating those temples after a lot of contemplation. >> and lot of contemplation, being sedentary in the same area, and saying, "I need to build something greater than myself, longer than myself, to something which I believe is controlling everything around me.
(1:10:02) " It's a process of bribery. Do you You know how you feel a calmer vibe in this room? Yeah. It's because conversations like the reflective conversations happen here. I meditate here. People have meditated with me here. So this is how the concept of a sacred space comes about. >> Mhm. I got a brilliant idea sitting here. There is something special about the place.
(1:10:25) Therefore, let's turn it into a temple. While they could have been hunter-gatherers, they probably had these little spots which they kept going back to sing. Which is where sacred spaces and then temples come from. And then you're saying cities developed around the temple. >> Around the temple.
(1:10:40) And then that led to the concept of education. >> Exactly. Okay. Now let's go on. Now, we need to remember in America there were not many writing systems. The Olmecs possibly had some kind of a writing system. Who are the Olmecs? >> A civilization in Mexico. There are all these So in the same series, there's this belief that they came from Africa.
(1:11:00) Why? Because they've got African-style lips and noses and things like that. It's been disproven, of course. And the only people to develop a proper writing system were the Maya. And they had hieroglyphs. It's very surprising that the same technique it was available to all the civilizations around them, but they never adopted writing.
(1:11:22) They never felt the need to adopt writing. Even the Incas developed something close to writing called the quipu, which was an accounting system. They developed accounting before writing. Because it was such a huge It literally from north to south it stretched about 2,000 km. So, they had to account for the taxes and who's paying me what taxes and things.
(1:11:47) So, in wool, they would weave an accounting story. So, imagine even accounting comes before writing in some civilizations. So, you know, the oldest civiliza- the you know, there's this saying that the oldest profession in the world is a prostitute. Well, the oldest profession in the world might actually be an accountant. Okay. Coming back to what you said about civilization in the Americas being centered around Mexico and the Peruvian coast. Yeah.
(1:12:15) So, effectively the rest of the Americas were a bunch of tribes. A bunch of tribes which did create civilizations of their own every now and then. So, one of them is in modern-day Missouri called Cahokia. Missouri? Missou- not Missouri in the Himalayas. The state of Missouri. Missou- okay. >> Or as Americans would say Missoura.
(1:12:37) Missoura. Missoura. Mississippi Missoura. Uh so, uh Missoura, uh there's these ruins called Cahokia. It's big, huge earthen pyramids. It's just packed earth on top of each other in a hut on top of it. But a city of almost 30,000 people. Uh so they did create these cities. There are the Anasazi, sorry, we should call them ancestral Puebloans.
(1:13:05) Anasazi is the current Native Indian word for those people in New Mexico. Uh which means ancient enemy. They identify them as their enemies of the enemies of their ancestors. Their direct ancestors. Um extremely violent. Uh in Cahokia for example, you see evidence of lots of human sacrifices, torture sacrifices.
(1:13:29) One of the biggest pits had people whose legs had been whipped so many times that the bones had started showing and the flesh had come off. You know, whipping the feet is one of the most painful things you can do to somebody. Caning the feet. That had been done and they'd been killed in a slow nasty way. Um the Anasazi, the way we discovered human sacrifices was actually quite curious.
(1:13:53) These it's in the middle of the desert now and these explorers came across something that they thought was protein and started eating it. It turned out to be coprolites. You know what coprolites are? They are fossilized human Yeah, it's fossilized human and when they analyze those coprolites, they start getting sick after eating them but uh because they thought it was like rock sugar candy.
(1:14:17) It looks like rock sugar candy. >> God. I'm sorry I've grossed all of you out but um anyway, so when they examined them, they found that those coprolites contained human protein. It's very clear evidence that they were eating human beings. Mhm. So cannibalism and torture killing was very very common. You have this site called Crow Creek in northern in the northern United States around 1300s AD.
(1:14:50) Uh what would be the Middle Ages in the Old World. Where a village of a few hundred people were attacked and killed. Some were eaten. Uh they all were scalped. Everyone. Women, men, children, everyone. What is scalping? Scalping is a trophy-taking thing where you take something sharp and you cut this area. Almost the exact area for a Jewish kippah or a Muslim prayer cap.
(1:15:24) You take that and you display it as a trophy that of how many people you've killed. Were people scalped alive? Of course, they were scalped alive. Scalping alive was a great honor. And um many of much of it was done post-death. Of course, if you did not survive, uh you were scalped after death. But, a lot there is a lot of evidence of people surviving scalping, in fact.
(1:15:52) And living with that. Yeah. My god. Okay. And you know, if we start getting into Aztec and Moche sacrifices, you'll understand they're not very nice people at all. What's the context here? Because I remember we spoke about how um hunter-gatherers at some point decided to build temples because of their own sense of philosophy.
(1:16:20) Uh temples most likely led to the formation of cities. Cities led to education being more widespread. And perhaps cities were at war with each other, as well. We know they were for certain. Mhm. Uh the Mesopotamian city-states, which were the earliest creations, were at war with each other. The um uh uh uh Levantine city-states, what is today the uh Syrian, Lebanese, and uh Israeli coast, where brutal wars with each other.
(1:16:54) Uh Egypt for a long time was fighting itself. It was probably the first country to unify into a national identity as such. Uh which is why Egypt was able to, you know, build all those miraculous things that we see, which you know, people can't believe human beings built them. That's aliens came and built them and whatever nonsense you've heard.
(1:17:16) Um And this is also a time when there is massive quantities of human sacrifice. The earliest Egyptian tombs have very clear evidence of hundreds of people being sacrificed for the early pharaohs. Right? Uh we know this because we've excavated it. We've seen it. Uh the uh royal tombs of Mesopotamia, uh whole uh all the palace servers used to go in, they were given poison to drink, and they were buried alive with their ruler.
(1:17:48) You find incredible gold and lapis lazuli treasures, and along with them you find humans being sacrificed. In China in the Bronze Age, the Shang Dynasty, massive human sacrifices, thousands of people being sacrificed for the death of a ruler. Right? So, it's a very common pattern, which you then see in the Americas.
(1:18:08) Why the Americas are different is because we you know, literally 500 years before now, 1400 or 1500s, we go there, we find this sort of time capsule that has been preserved from antiquity, which is still doing human sacrifices and things like that, which we suddenly find very horrifying, right? In the Mesoamerican world, it is the gods need to be appeased for rain, for a good harvest, or whatever.
(1:18:40) So, they did different sacrifices to different kinds of god. For the war god, Huitzilopochtli, you hold somebody down like this, slit open the chest, pull out the heart. The priest takes a bite of the heart, and then he throws the rest of it into the sacrificial fire. Okay. There are different sacrifices.
(1:19:04) There is Xipe Totec, who is the uh uh agricultural god. Now, remember in Central America, they practice slash and burn agriculture. So, at the end of the harvest season, you burn the fields. They are uh uh you sow new seeds, and new crops are fertilized by the ash, and new crops arise, corn usually. So, sacrifice to Xipe Totec involved marrying off a couple to symbolize fertilization.
(1:19:31) The couple would then be thrown into a fire. Before they died, they were pulled out of the fire, and the skin would be removed while they were still alive, and then they'd be thrown back into the fire. Why? Because it's just like corn. You burn the corn field, the corn grows again, you dehusk it, you eat it, and then what's left, you burn it again, and it shows regeneration.
(1:19:54) For the rain god, it was child sacrifice. And the children were tortured throughout the process till they were sacrificed. To make them cry more, their fingernails would be plucked out and things like that. Why? Because the more the child cries, the more rain you'll have the next year. Incidentally, human sacrifices were conducted in India for a very long time.
(1:20:15) They still are in some places. Um if you walk into the Madras Museum, the Egmore Museum, uh there is in fact a very, very strange contraption out there, which is apparently from the tribes of Odisha. Which is a piece of wood like this and a stake put into a hole here like so and that sacrifice it's a described in great detail on the plaque out there whoever had to be sacrificed was put out there this stake would be rotated so that the fellows legs and things were crushed while he was still alive he or she I don't know
(1:20:57) and finally when they were apparently revived a few times to endure more of their feet being crushed and crushed in very brutal nasty mangy ways and once it was deemed enough they were then hacked into little pieces and this was just a few hundred years back so 2 300 years back in fact so you know in India we've had very similar things to things happening out there in China human sacrifices continued right up to the Qing Dynasty which is the last dynasty before the Republic of China gets proclaimed the Yuan emperors the Ming emperors and
(1:21:39) the Qing emperors three dynasties in succession from 1200 to 1300 from 1300 to 1600 and then from 1600 to 1900 at the Temple of Heaven which is the round Temple one of the four temples marking the cardinal points of Beijing used to sacrifice human beings fine it was not a torture sacrifice but it was but they did other things like lynching you know lynching the word is the death of a thousand cuts parts of you are slowly sliced off but that's to punish criminals that wasn't part of the human sacrifice the human
(1:22:14) sacrifice was very straight decapitation now in the Americas every civilization without exception practiced human sacrifice which Which means that every Stone Age human culture, as much as we'd like to think we were very different, practiced this and we now have evidence of this including in Europe. In fact, chronic we have more evidence of more people being killed at a single site in Europe than anywhere in the Americas.
(1:22:46) It's called the Hexen Death Pit. And this is from about 5,000 years back. Where is In Germany. Southern Germany. Where around one village, we don't know what the significance was, a thousand bodies have been found which were eaten in different ways. Some were literally spit-roasted whole like a suckling pig, roasted, eaten.
(1:23:22) There's signs of teeth marks, uh butchery marks in these people. So, imagine had you been there in Germany 5,000 years back, it's not autobahns and Mercedes, you'd have probably ended up on the dining table with a apple in your mouth like Uh, you said 5,000 years ago. Yeah. So, it was So, understand, we are very, very violent.
(1:23:44) We are disposed towards torture. Uh, you know, the Mayas for example in the Yucatan, so we're talking about 1,300 km south of Mexico City, but still Mexico. People don't realize how big Mexico is. Uh, they had the Star Wars where lots of city-states attacking each other. Calakmul attacks Tikal which attacks Naranjo and things like that.
(1:24:09) I think it was about 630 AD where the Tikal-Naranjo war the ruler of Naranjo was captured. He was tortured to death and he was eaten. And all of this was extremely common. I mean, even today you have Aghoris who eat uh people at cremation grounds in India. Um different philosophies, you're coming from different places.
(1:24:37) But it's all coming from the same place essentially. Uh you know, in Bengal, we've got this story called Kapala Kundala. It's a beautiful story. Classical Bengali literature. About Kapalikas who used to go offering sacrifices human heads to Kali. Right? Um I don't know why it disturbs people because you have to deal with these things as they are.
(1:25:03) You can't live in an imagined past. You know, you were recently telling me about um someone you had come across on your adventures uh who was jailed for killing their nephew and niece. Yeah. For the sake of human sacrifice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is in Orissa. >> in Orissa in Bolangir. Uh this fellow, he had uh taken his niece and nephew into the forest, 4-year-old niece and 5-year-old nephew, and he had sacrificed them to the goddess in the forest.
(1:25:34) Now is a great point to bring in Papua New Guinea. Yes. And the conversation we had yesterday. Scariest, I think, along with Afghanistan, that's the scariest god damn trip I've ever been on. I'd love for you to uh give some context on what Papua New Guinea is. Mhm. Um and maybe also mention that Rockefeller grandson's story. Huh.
(1:25:59) I think that's a very nice entry point for the modern-day audience. Right. So, I didn't actually know about Rockefeller the Rockefeller boy till I got to Papua New Guinea. Um I just went there because I was living and working in a place called Port Douglas, which is Far north Queensland. And the I already had my grandmas my dive masters license.
(1:26:25) And I want to do all these fun dives around Papua New Guinea, right? I went there as a complete idiot. And once I landed there I made lots of friends with helicopter pilots and and they like bro, you know, there's like head hunting tribes and cannibal tribes and things like that. Most of it's unexplored and I'm like holy where have I landed up? This is like so cool.
(1:26:44) So it's basically a large island split between Indonesia and the the Indonesian side is called it used to be called Irian Jaya, but now it's called West Papua. And the eastern part we used to be an Australian colony. Right? It has a straight line that divides them. Yeah, almost exact straight line. And all colonial borders are like that, it in this case it doesn't matter because it's such heavy dense forest.
(1:27:13) You just can't go there. Now Papua New Guinea is very surprisingly it's one of the food super powers of earth. Food? Apparently about 40 to 50% of all the food stuffs we know today trace their origin back to Papua New Guinea. Really? Yeah, apparently so. Like fruits and Fruits and things like that apparently, right? But it is so because it's a mountain.
(1:27:39) It's one big mountain very difficult to navigate dense rain forest. Huge amount of linguistic diversity because they came there they've been there for the last 30 40,000 years. So within 5 to 6 kilometers they'll be a totally different tribe with a totally different language. We haven't even classified the language families, but they're very very different because they've been isolated from each other for 30 40,000 years.
(1:28:11) The concept of a language family probably doesn't even apply out there. And this I discovered when I went there, which is they still practice cannibalism. And the moment I heard that cannibalism is my great love, I guess. Um, we should start a society, you know. I should identify myself as Hindu Aztec. And uh, make human sacrifices great again.
(1:28:35) Make cannibalism great again. Maca and Masa. Uh, yeah. Anyway, so um, I had to go. And I found that all the guided tours were taking you to staged events. Because some of these tribes that contact has been made, they realized it's a cash opportunity where they can pretend to do certain things and stupid foreigners come and watch them and go, "Oh my god, I've seen this." And blah blah blah. No.
(1:29:06) My friend was a helicopter pilot with a logging industry. So, he used to actually go fairly deep inside and make contact with people who had very, very rudimentary or frequently no contact. Um, so he took me to this tribe. And every time we we went to three separate tribes. Every time we went to one of those tribes, the helicopter's rotor was kept on.
(1:29:34) Because and this is where you understand how important language is. They are very, very primitive people. They go from, "Oh, you're a new guest. Welcome. You can marry my daughter or my wife instantly." Um, and marry is I'm being polite. They want you to Um, and if you say no, you're immediately enemy. They're ready to kill you in an instant.
(1:30:01) But why do they even want that? It's their way of showing honor to a guest who's come. And if not you've turned down honor that I'm showing you and I'm guessing and we're going to kill you. You're an enemy. It's complete black or white. So, you know, when we were talking about how thoughts evolved from the Stone Age to more sophisticated language, action, and philosophy in the Bronze Age to even more sophisticated in the Iron Age and then the Gunpowder Age and then the modern digital age and things.
(1:30:33) You know, the first dictionary of the English language only has 500 words in it. So, it was a very crude way of expressing yourself. You couldn't express philosophical depth or intellectual depth in those days because the language was so vocabulary was so limited. And here you actually see it in action because there is no shade of gray here.
(1:30:54) It is all friend or enemy eat or be eaten. And it was on one of these trips we saw a guy with kuru. Kuru is laughing sickness. The fellow's going to die. How does laughing sickness happen? Well, you eat the brains of a human being. It can only be transmitted by eating the brains of a human being. And because this tribe was suitably aggressive, they had not been regularly contacted.
(1:31:22) We know that this wasn't cash making Apparently, a lot of people have gone and seen cash making scams of people pretending to have kuru. It's apparently a big thing in Papua New Guinea now. But this wasn't because these were guys who were getting They were challenging us with spears. And when they saw my friend the helicopter pilot, they were kind of whatever but we never we never left.
(1:31:48) One of the rules that very strict rule he had was you never go beyond 100 m of the helicopter. I never went beyond about 20 30 m. I was much fitter than I am now. Uh but still I didn't have the stamina to run and like that, right? So, it was uh you are always ready to run. Uh which again shows you how primitive humans were extraordinarily violent.
(1:32:12) And that is the only time I've seen evidence of cannibalism. Now, what kind of cannibalism it was, where you capture the enemy and eat them, or in their case, their ancestors, they eat their ancestors' brains. So, if a person dies in the house, they are consumed. The brains are especially, and then the remains are put outside to show that you've owned uh For us, we have property deeds when we buy a property.
(1:32:41) They are an illiterate society. So, for you to display all your ancestors and to have consumed them, shows the line of your ancestors and your right to the land. It's a property marker. Right? And that's when I heard about this Rockefeller kid who'd gone off on an expedition out there and was never found again, presumably killed and eaten by one of these first contact tribes.
(1:33:06) This is 1959, roughly. Roughly, yeah. Late '50s. >> Late '50s. And I've I've read in detail about this case, and there are apparently three versions. One is that his boat got shipwrecked, and then he washed up on a beach and he woke up to like the tribals. Then there's another version where he actually goes out searching.
(1:33:26) And apparently, the third version is where some of those tribesmen um were trying to protest against the white, I think, Dutch occupants or something in Papua New Guinea. There was some European Now, now here's the thing. There's the version I've heard is nobody knows what happened, because they went and nothing's been found ever since.
(1:33:48) So, there are all these theories. Uh he might have even died an actual death, you don't know. Maybe the boat uh fell off a large uh waterfall or some like that and couldn't or got a disease or something but nobody returned from that voyage. So you never know. I mean, they may have been eaten, they may not have been eaten, they may just have been killed or they might just have just died.
(1:34:10) One of the most interesting Wikipedia pages. Is it? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Okay. >> Where it ends with uh I think an account of one of the tribesmen showcasing a bow and uh saying that hey, this is made through that Rockefeller kid's bones. Holy crap. Okay, yeah, I know. It was 1961. Look, I I would be very suspicious of that because you know this thinking that a white person came and made out of the bow.
(1:34:39) From what I've heard these days Papua New Guinea has become so commercialized that there's lots of these BS uh fake cannibalism and things like that that they do for tourists. What's the vibe of going to Papua New Guinea? Super. First of all, the diving is amazing because see the continental shelf drops off right there. So you see large pelagic life and things like that.
(1:35:01) So between Lombok, Irian Jaya and Papua New Guinea the diving is spectacular. Dangerous? Uh yeah, it can be dangerous. Um if you're a good diver, not really. The sharks are the danger. Um again, you uh you know, I would much rather be in the water with a shark than with a crocodile. I if I see a crocodile, get the hell out.
(1:35:23) Uh if a shark, I'll see a bull shark, I'll get the hell out. But other sharks, great whites or oceanic white tips and blue sharks, I can stay in the water with you. You can read the language pretty much. Really? Yeah, you can read the language. >> Have you been in the water with like a great white or >> I've not with a great I've been in a cage with a great white, which is a very artificial it's like going to a zoo, right? Uh but I've been in the water with a bull shark, with a tiger shark, with a blue shark.
(1:35:50) Um and it's quite normal. You know when they're giving you signs to get out. Like you know, their bodies will bunch up. That's aggression behavior. Mhm. Uh in those days while I was doing my shark dives, you know, now they actually encourage you to interact with bull sharks and tiger sharks because if you they've got these amp lots of dots here called the ampullae of Lorenzini.
(1:36:19) It's these gel-filled sacs which is they use for electric radars, essentially. They pick up electric signals. They can range, see if it's in distress, see if it's bleeding, or whatever, and go for it. If you rub it like a dog, have you noticed if you scratch a dog, they'll roll over because this full sensory overload is like ah kind of thing.
(1:36:37) You can literally do that. Dude, sharks literally roll over like dogs. Mhm. So, I'm going to the Maldives this year to do it with tiger sharks. >> Oh, wow. Fun. Yeah, fun. If I come back alive, I'll tell you about it. Um Nobody goes to that island because apparently it's not a tourist island, so you can't serve alcohol, and I don't go there for the alcohol.
(1:36:56) I go there for the experiences. But, um they do it with tiger sharks. And in those days it wasn't, so you had to stay well away. You observed, and you got out. So, uh there are two three, and the other man-eater shark that I've seen is in Lombok, which was the hammerhead, and that was hammerhead mating season. Lombok is the island after Irian Jaya, Papua New Guinea.
(1:37:22) And it's where two currents meet. There's a full-on ballet of sharks. There were literally thousands of hammerheads doing their mating dance. They go in one direction, and then they swim the other direction. And I was very surprised because in Australia, if it's shark mating season, you do not get into the water.
(1:37:40) Uh because tiger sharks uh it's when the corals are spawning, and you know, corals are essentially ejaculating into the water. So you think it's cloudy water, it's actually coral And the water becomes cloudy. And that is the perfect situation for a tiger or a bull shark to attack you. Oh, man.
(1:38:05) So you do not get into and it they are aggressive during mating season. So you do not get into the water then. Um yeah. But that was Papua New Guinea and my I mean I've seen evidence of cannibalism in archaeological remains. But living cannibalism, I think that's the closest I've come to. Did you interact with any of the tribes people? As much as you can, you know, like the interactions were like no more than 15 20 minutes.
(1:38:31) It It It was just too dangerous to go into a village or something unless you'd come in significant numbers. Cuz they're unpredictable. Very unpredictable. And you felt that while talking to them? >> that. You absolutely felt that. You would immediately get challenged with spears and things like that. There were only three of us.
(1:38:50) It was a Robinson helicopter, right? So maximum four five people can sit there, but there were three of us. Three people you don't have any kind of safety in numbers, right? And uh it's you just you sense it's threatening and if you go inside the village, you don't know what will give them offense and you will not come back out alive.
(1:39:13) They might just decide you're also a witch. You've cast a spell on them and decide to eat you. Hm. Yeah. Which, you know, talking about food super powers and cannibalism, the other great food super power which enriched our diet immensely was the Americas. You know, corn, chilies, uh chocolate, vanilla, all come from the Americas.
(1:39:36) Tomato and potato. What would Indian food be without tomato, potato, and chili? Can you think of Indian food without potato, chili? Can you think of a childhood without chocolate? And yet you know, we the first recipe for all these three things, tomato, chili, and chocolate is an Aztec recipe for sacrificed human thighs.
(1:40:00) So, next time you put chilies in your food or tomatoes in your food or you eat chocolate, remember the very first recipe for it was a guy getting sacrificed in his thighs stewed and eaten. Like you know, chicken thighs are the tastiest part of a chicken, right? I guess it's the same for humans. Humans.
(1:40:19) There's actually a modern version of that called mole poblano guajolote. It's uh smoked turkey legs and thighs with a chili chocolate sauce that's almost black brown in color. Uh I guess that must have been the origin point of it. What do you think human meat tastes like? I don't think it tastes very pleasant. I think we've settled down on eating just goats, sheep, chicken, fish, pigs, and cows because those are the only tasty and I mean the hundreds of animals around we could have technically started eating.
(1:40:53) We domesticated the dogs, but we don't eat dogs. Well, some people eat dogs, but mostly we don't. Why? Because they're not tasty meats. I think these are the only I've been to Carnivore in Africa, Kenya, and eaten all kinds of weird which was inedible. Like? Uh emu meat, ostrich meat. It's all crap.
(1:41:17) It's not like chicken? No. Nowhere like chicken. You know what? This thing everything tastes like if you don't like the taste of something, it tastes if you don't know what the taste is, it tastes like chicken. No, it does not taste like chicken. Like in Australia, we've eaten crocodile and it's like fishy pork.
(1:41:33) It's fatty, but kind of fishy. They're not nice meats. We don't eat these meats for a reason. Mhm. The whole of the world only eats five, six different kinds of meats for a reason. Even though they've domesticated more and they've domesticated donkeys, we don't eat donkeys. Uh unless it's we've domesticated horses, we don't eat horses.
(1:41:52) It's a very niche kind of a meat which is very rarely eaten. So, we don't we don't. Let's go back to the historical timeline. Yeah, yeah. >> Let's actually go back to the larger historical timeline that we began this conversation with. Honestly, this whole conversation was about the brutality of humankind uh whilst also talking about the timeline of recent human history. Yeah.
(1:42:18) So, we spoke about Stone Age transitioning to the Copper Age transitioning to the Bronze Age transitioning to the Iron Age. >> Yeah. What came after that? Ah. Or and or and or. I'm sorry, I'm interrupting. >> So, the Iron Age then gets split into all the modern ages, right? First, there's the gunpowder age. And the gunpowder age basically brings this huge change in military, the way things are fought.
(1:42:45) Which leads to European expansion because and it has a lot to do with Christianity because Christianity bells are crucial to Christianity. Bells? >> Bells, church bells. There's not a church on earth that doesn't have a bell. And the bell teaches you how to make these big metal tubes. Which is the genesis of the cannon.
(1:43:11) Oh, damn. And because Europe was so good at making bells, their metallurgy, they were the first to master the metallurgy of cannons, and their cannons always remained better than the rest of the world because their church bells were so advanced. That's why they took over the world.
(1:43:27) That's pretty much one of the reasons why they took over the world. One of the reasons. One. Uh it's was also a lack of human beings. Uh, so they industrialized. You don't have human beings to work your coal, you don't have human beings to work your farms and things. You then seek technological solutions to it. So, they're predisposed towards technology and they had bell technology which made them militarily very powerful.
(1:43:52) So then, you know, the initial cannons, if you see them, they look like church bells. Mhm. Mhm. >> Right? Very strong. They can contain a blast and shoot one thing out of just one side, which is a cannon. How was gunpowder created? I mean Well, the Chinese created it. They used it for fireworks.
(1:44:14) They definitely used it for some kind of rockets. We know that from the uh Mongol invasions of Japan because there are Japanese paintings that show us preliminary rockets of some kind, well, grenades of some kind. So, they definitely used it for military purposes. Uh, the first thing we know in the West is about the mid-1200s, 1250s, or things.
(1:44:36) Uh, there was the first micro-strategic defeat of the Mongols at the Battle of Ain Jalut uh, where the Mongols were defeated by the Sultan of Egypt and his deputy uh, the Sultan was called Qutuz. His deputy who killed him on the way back after defeating the Mongols and took become the next Sultan. So, the Turks are uh, a kratocracy, which is might is right.
(1:45:08) If you kill the next Sultan, you become the Sultan. Have you seen that Vin Diesel movie, what's it called? A alien movie? Where he's a alien, he kills the king and he becomes the new king. So, if you kill the king, you become the new king. >> Got you. That's how their society functions or functioned. Um, and he was called Qutbuddin Baybars Banduqdari.
(1:45:30) Banduqdari, the one with the gun. So, we think he had a gun. In Europe, it's the Battle of Crécy in the 1300s, part of the 100 Years' War between the English and the French. Which actually lasted for 126 years. Where the first guns are known to have been used. Battle of Crécy was the first French nobleman that we know who was killed by a gun.
(1:45:54) It spreads very, very quickly. Europe is the one that leads that revolution. Church bells becoming guns, becoming very, very sophisticated. So, it becomes a gunpowder revolution. They're militarily very powerful. The Ottomans keep up with them. So, there's a balance because they also capture, they have a lot of Christian colonies in Europe who know how to make bells and therefore who know how to make guns.
(1:46:21) Let's rewind a little bit. The first possible cannon was likely inspired by something created in China. It was used for fireworks. >> Possibly. Possibly. Um in Kingdom of Heaven again, we're mentioning that. You know, they show a they show a battle where there's a siege of a city. Yes, Jerusalem. Jerusalem, yeah.
(1:46:43) And By the way, Jerusalem looks nothing like that. If you go see the walls of Jerusalem, you're like, dude, they're like 20 ft high. You think they're like 100 ft high in that movie, they're like No. They show those catapults with those flaming uh Yeah, whatever. But those were pitch. That's uh uh it's a flammable material.
(1:47:02) It is not gunpowder. Do you do you think this is actually the first inspiration behind Well, look, there's there's always been knowledge of flammable incendiary devices. The Byzantines had this thing called Greek fire. Which was made of naphtha. You know, naphthalene balls that you put to prevent moths coming into your um clothes and things like that.
(1:47:23) They had these naphtha. We think it was naphtha. We still don't know the exact formula. And they used to use it in naval battles and throw it. And the thing was, if you tried to extinguish it with fire with water, it would react more and burn even more. So, you couldn't actually put it out. If you got hit by it, you were dead.
(1:47:42) Mhm. You couldn't extinguish it with fire uh with water. Uh so, I think it's more a take on of that because there were all kinds of animal fats and human fats that we used uh tar and things like that that were made into balls in the hope that it set something on fire. Perhaps flaming arrows were the first guns.
(1:48:01) >> But, but they're not guns. So, gun is very specific. It is the application of chemical energy. Mhm. Not fire. It is not pyrolytics. It is the application of chemical energy to the war-fighting process. And it's very important. I'll tell you why. If your car gets stuck in a pothole, you'll need 10 15 people to push it out of that pothole.
(1:48:29) But, if you get another car, as long as you don't mind your fenders being dented, and you push it just one car, one guy sitting at the wheel can push that car out. Or the recovery truck. It's just one guy putting the hook, removing it out. Chemical energy brings about levels of energy much, much greater. So, a cannon or a gun is the application of chemical energy to the war process.
(1:48:59) So, these other things, Greek fire, naphtha like in Kingdom of Heaven, they are not guns of any kind. A gun is very specifically an explosion happening, and the sheer energy generated because of that chemical energy is so great. It's going to be able to break any human made thing, period. Which is why forts then change and evolve completely in the gunpowder age.
(1:49:27) Now, it takes another 6-700 years for the chemical energy process to be applied to manufacturing. And that then becomes the next stage, which is the industrial revolution. The gunpowder revolution and then 5-6-700 years later. I mean, if you want to believe that the gunpowder I see even though we know gunpowder usage from the 1200s, the gunpowder age really begins in the 1400s.
(1:49:56) And then the industrial age begins in the late 1700s. So, what? 4-5-6-5-6-7 300 years later, chemical energy gets applied to the manufacturing process, which becomes your industrial revolution. Okay, I have a couple of tangential questions. Um the first question is a very simple one in terms of this progression from Stone Age to Copper to Bronze to Iron.
(1:50:23) Do you think human beings became more brutal or less brutal? >> [sighs and gasps] >> They became no different. But the institutions they developed increasingly prevented I would say prevented reduced large-scale violence, and I'll tell you why. If there are there are five of us in this room right now, let's say all of us hate each other.
(1:50:56) We all want to kill each other, and in the end at least four of us might die till one person. You're the fittest of the lot, so you'll kill the rest of the four of us, and you'll be the last guy standing. So, we've had 80% fatality in this room. Now, you decide to become an empire in the Bronze Age. You have to kill him.
(1:51:18) The remaining three of us get really scared and we're like, "Yes, my lord. I bow to you, my lord." And then I work for you. You're the king. Now, the fatality has just been 20%. It's come down massively. You've created a state. Now, the four of us can go around terrorizing all the other people into joining our kingdom and become an empire, which means the fight between all of us reduces massively.
(1:51:45) Now, the problem is you find more efficient ways to kill. Your cruelty does not come down, but the percentages come down much, much, much, much more. The stronger the state gets in sheer percentage terms. So, you know, a Stone Age society will have fatality insane fatality rates of like 30, 40, sometimes even 60, 70%.
(1:52:12) Even at its worst in World War II, it was less than 1% of the population getting killed. Less than 1%. So, you know, you may get more brutal, more people will die in absolute terms, but in percentage terms, it reduces massively. You become I won't say you become less violent. You stay as violent as you are, but fatality reduces massively because you've created institutions to channelize and limit those fatalities.
(1:52:43) This is what leads itself to parliament, the judiciary. All these things come out of >> These are all institutions to control the worst aspects of human behavior. This is what kanun, law is. This is This is exactly what it is. Right? And that is why you need laws. And now I'm an atheist, but I support religion.
(1:53:08) I'm not a French atheist who's anti-religion. Because maybe I don't need religion to keep me a moral person who does not kill, but post-religious Europe and America are such scary places where you're doing child genital mutilation, giving puberty blockers, and things like that. That religion has great value. Mhm. Just because you are a moral person that doesn't need religion doesn't mean everybody's a moral person who can do without religion.
(1:53:39) It turns people into animals again. Mhm. So, I think religion is one of the greatest inventions of mankind. Maybe it doesn't apply to me, but it applies to 99.99% of the other people. Yeah. You know, generally I I meet a lot of religious people through the show, but generally the religious people who appear on the podcast, I talk to people from all walks of life.
(1:54:02) The religious ones, I feel, objectively speaking, are some of the nicest people. It depends because religion is one kind of power. You can use it for good. It by itself it's neutral. You know, by a knife by itself is completely neutral. It depends on what you use it for. If you're using it to slice up the apple and feed people, it's good.
(1:54:26) Uh if you're using it the knife is neutral. Okay? Uh it's like that. Religious people, if they're entirely focused on giving spiritual succor to people, fantastic. Very often the power you accumulate doing that has and will be and continues to be used for absolute evil. Absolutely. Mhm. I mean, I shouldn't use the word evil because, you know, it's such a highly subjective term like we discussed in our last podcast.
(1:54:59) Okay. I've got to ask you that second tangential question before we continue talking about uh the gunpowder agent the industrial age. I've read briefly about these kings who came out of North Africa and West Africa. There's this one king who was supposed to be the richest person in history. Mansa Musa. Mansa Musa.
(1:55:23) Another chapter of history not taught to us. And here we are discussing this evolution of humankind from bronze to iron. What's Africa's story? And I know that's a very vague, very wide question because you can't Can I give you a very politically incorrect answer to this? Because you know I don't pull my punches.
(1:55:45) Zero contribution really. To this? It's been mostly outside of evolution and the movement outside of Africa 40,000 years back. It has been almost entirely irrelevant to human development. Because it remained very, very backward. It never integrated north of the Sahara belt. Even Mansa Musa. I've actually been to Timbuktu.
(1:56:11) Where is that? In the middle of Mali of the Malian desert. Dude, it's a It's pretty. I mean, yes, but if you're telling me this was the great Mali Empire and things like that. It was not an empire in any sense of the modern word. The man had a lot of gold. It shows you how unconcerned he was about his own people that he went when he went through Cairo.
(1:56:40) He was just distributing gold. Had no idea of the value of gold. For me, that's a classic tinpot crazy idiot mean tyrant who then depresses the price of gold in medieval Egypt and the Middle East for the next 5-6 years. And just a few hundred kilometers to his south, there were the Togo, the Benin, Songhai, and all those empires which were doing massive human sacrifices and cannibalism and things like that.
(1:57:09) Right? So, um a lot of people I mean, we are taught this because you know, Indian history syllabuses are so anti-colonial and we're taught about the Malian empire and the empire of Songhai and you actually go there. Have you noticed I don't talk about it much because Great Zimbabwe. Okay, some people came together and built a 30-ft wall in the middle of nowhere with 10-15 huts inside.
(1:57:38) So what? So what? Like 4-5,000 km to the north in Egypt, they were doing millions and millions of metric tons stacked up on each other, right? So, Africa is a very It has always been extremely backward. Uh the Africans are the source of their own problems. Uh colonialism exacerbated it in some cases.
(1:58:10) There were truly horrible instances of colonialism like uh King Leopold of Belgium and the Congo. Um and there were instances where it was very m- it was probably a lot less than what they were doing to each other. For example, what Shaka Zulu did to his own people and other people. So, you know, it's um Africa sub-Saharan Africa does not feature highly on any historical knowledge per se or lessons to be learnt.
(1:58:43) I also question if history has been erased from Africa. What if we We know what we don't know? In Africa's case that's quite impossible and I'll tell you why. For some great Wakanda-like civilization to have arisen there. Uh the technological and archaeological footprint would have been felt because they were never out of contact with the rest of Europe and Asia.
(1:59:14) Right? Uh the Arab slave trade, the uh Indian Ocean slave trade was far worse than the Atlantic slave trade. It accounted for a lot more people. And it was mostly run by the Arabs. Uh they went deep into Africa. They found nothing. Uh you find all we we have archaeological remains in Sub-Saharan Africa going back thousands of years which are very crude and rudimentary.
(1:59:40) Right? So this notion that King Solomon's mines are somewhere in Africa and they're a great civilization or they're basically these these Wakanda fantasies, you know. Uh stupidest Marvel movie. Is it Marvel or the other one? Marvel. Yeah, that that they're all the same thing to me. Um dangerous delusional fantasies never existed. Never existed.
(2:00:04) Again, very wide question. It's an unfair question, but what is the state of Africa today? Because you've traveled How How many places have you have you been to in Africa? So North and South Africa combined, I guess. Um Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Libya when I was a kid, but um Kenya, Ethiopia, uh Djibouti. Wow. Very strange.
(2:00:29) It was the plane got stranded there for 24 hours and so we went out and we didn't even need visas and things like that. Very strange. Um Kenya, Tanzania, uh Namibia, South Africa, Nigeria. Yeah. So um and Mali. Um A little we think we might have crossed into Chad as well. We don't know, but we think we we did, but I don't count it as uh having crossed over.
(2:00:59) But, very very violent place. That's how you'd describe the continent? Extremely violent. Uh other than nature and wildlife, I did not uh find anything that piqued my curiosity anthropologically or historically. Oh, South Africa as well, yeah. Um even in South Africa, I find it an extremely boring society because it's such a heavily propagandized society.
(2:01:38) There is the correct version of apartheid and what and African history that's taught, and you can't deviate from it, and that's it. Not that there's any other version of two apartheid other than it was a horrible system, but you know it was a horrible system, you go and see it was a horrible system, and what you read, what you see is no different from what you have read.
(2:02:01) And of course, chronic crime and rapes. I mean, not that you see rapes, but you do see crimes. Um nasty place, horrible food. Um Nigeria has interesting food. Nigeria, Kenya, uh Tanzania, I mean, it may not suit the Indian palate, but I find their food quite interesting at times. Uh I It's It's quite Indian that way.
(2:02:22) They use Ethiopia has a very sophisticated cuisine on the other hand, right? They use the same spices we do, but they use it so differently. It's probably one of the most sophisticated cuisines. So, Ethiopia, I enjoyed thoroughly. Uh Ethiopia anthropologically even was very exciting to go to. Um and um Kenya, Tanzania, I just found it intensely boring outside of the safaris.
(2:02:50) Right? Um There is so much low-level systemic violence. It doesn't even register anymore. Low-level Low-level systemic violence. Which kills a lot more people. You mean like we discussed. Like a worse version of corruption in the system. And a lot of mob violence going around killing people because the police aren't very effective.
(2:03:19) Um so the deterrence value isn't there. >> [snorts] >> South Africa has some beautiful nature, but it's nothing compared to Tanzania and Kenya. I mean that entire area is just much more interesting. I think one of the places I want to really discover anthropologically speaking has been Rwanda. Not for the gorillas.
(2:03:42) You know, they charge $5,000 now to go see the gorillas. But to see the after effects of the genocide that happened. How does a society recover from things like that? How are racial relations between the Hutus and the Tutsis after that? That's what really excites me that I want to go see out there. And Madagascar. Madagascar and Zanzibar.
(2:04:00) These are the two places three places that I need to go to. And the other places I've been to in Africa Seychelles and Mauritius which are like they're beautiful. Lovely people. Great food, great people, amazing nature. But not anthropologically that interesting. I like freaky places. I think Africa just wasn't freaky enough for me.
(2:04:26) Um it was just boring. Were you scared at any point during your Africa travels? No, not really. As opposed to say Afghanistan or Papua New Guinea where I was scared. Um I was never scared in Africa. Uh surprisingly, in spite of the violence, you don't They they restrict the violence to themselves. It's almost like if you're a foreigner, you're exempt from that violence.
(2:04:55) Very strangely. Why? I don't know why, except in South Africa, maybe, where I was a bit scared. Uh you know, as a rule, when you're getting into taxis and if you're going driving between Durban or Cape Town or Pretoria or something like that, uh you will not lower your window, you will not stop on the road.
(2:05:13) Even if you see an accident, you're not going to stop. Uh because they'll just come and shoot you. Carjack. Um you do feel uh huge sense of insecurity in South African cities. Yeah, it is a bit scary that way. The rest of Africa, you're kind of insulated from it. Because see, in South Africa, Indians are part of Africa. Whites are a part of Africa.
(2:05:36) Therefore, they can be violent with you. Uh Kenya, Tanzania, less so, because even though Indians are a part of Tanzania, Kenya, uh you're not I don't know why. It May- maybe my assessment is wrong, but I didn't feel threatened. Coming back to the context of this podcast. Nothing to say in terms of Africa's role over the last 2,000 years.
(2:06:03) Literally, they've had no impact on human civilization per se. Mm except in terms of the slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, and their migration to the Americas. And the role that African Americans have played in history. Very significant roles in human rights, science, discovery, everything. Uh no. Uh in Africa, out of Africa, there has been literally nothing.
(2:06:35) You know, we've got Africans in India called the Siddhis. Mhm. Who come from some place around Ethiopia, Eritrea, that region. Um do you know anybody prominent out there who's played a role in Indian history? Nothing. Um so, architecturally, culturally, historically, it's literally in the last two two more 5,000 years, nothing nothing coming out of Africa.
(2:07:03) Uh the Americas have produced a lot more. Uh the Native American civilizations have produced a lot more than Africa has. Same with Australia. You know, Australia, there is an out of Australia migration theory because uh Australia was settled in the same wave that our Andaman Islands got settled. So, Stone Age people going in boats.
(2:07:25) They actually regressed. So, if you go to Tasmania, they forgot they knew boats 60,000 years back and went all the way up to Tasmania. But then they forgot how to make boats. So, they actually regressed. And even though it was an island that probably Southeast Asian and South Asian empires very easily got to and probably did get there.
(2:07:50) I think there's some evidence of copper coins being found out there. No civilization found it worth their while exploring that place and really nothing's come out of there. And um yeah, and that's about it. Mhm. We've really not spoken about Australia or Africa throughout the course of Because their contributions to our understanding of anthropology have been negligent.
(2:08:15) >> What is anthropology? Well, it's a study of human beings as individuals and collectives. There are immutable rules, which is that groups of human beings. Anthropology and sociology are very similar, right? Anthropology is how a human behaves. Sociology is how a bunch of humans behave.
(2:08:32) It's effectively what we've done for the last 4 hours, right? >> Basically, yeah. Explore the human behavioral patterns from a very brutal lens. >> From a very brutal lens because violence is what made us who we are. There's one book I'd highly recommend everybody reads. It's called Guns, what what are they good for? Or war, what is it good for? You know, it's the take on the What's it Was it the Guns N' Roses What are you good for? Absolutely nothing. No.
(2:08:59) Um Yeah, it's war, what is it good for? And it war made us war, violence, and killing each other have been the greatest force of good in mankind. Everything that is good about mankind, mercy, compassion, human rights, uh women's liberation, equality, um technology, it has all come out of war. It is our worst instincts that have led to our best instincts.
(2:09:29) >> Mhm. And the greater the war, the greater the balance of good has been. Wow. Would you say World War II is the greatest war that mankind has seen? >> No. No? The Europeans want you to believe it is, but I think the Stone Age because of the sheer fatalities and things like that would have been far, far worse.
(2:09:48) In terms of percentage of human >> Percentages and the sheer number of cultures that would have just been wiped out without us even knowing about it. Yeah, this is something I think of a lot because I was discussing Zoroastrianism as compared to Hinduism with a Zoroastrian scholar, priest on the show. And I also think of like the Persian Empire very often. Yes.
(2:10:12) Um you know, for a lot of people who my age, we grew up watching 300 and that was your first exposure to the Persian Empire. >> worst exposure to the Persian Empire because the Persian Empire was such a sophisticated advanced empire. You know, they gave the world the idea of human rights. It's a cylinder of Cyrus, Kurush of Anshan, who uh initially made human rights, right? Uh as Middle Eastern empires went, they were the first Middle Eastern empire amongst the Egyptians, Assyrians, Mesopotamians, whatever to tone down the
(2:10:49) level of Middle Eastern brutality. And bring a certain level of compassion, tolerance, and humanity out there, right? They They were most likely Zoroastrian. Oh, they were 100% Zoroastrian. They were the purest of the Zoroastrians because it was the earliest stage of Zoroastrianism, right? Uh Zoroaster actually came from modern-day Afghanistan from a place called Balkh, which I've been to.
(2:11:12) Uh and uh Alexander's wife, Roxane, also came from there. Um it's from the exact same place. Now, the thing about Zoroaster is he he was not a monotheist. He created a poly- a henotheist religion, which then becomes it remains henotheist right up to the Sassanid period, which is the Muslim the Arab conquest of Persia.
(2:11:39) And then, you know, there is this all polytheists have this need. They somehow think that monotheism is superior. We've been brainwashed into believing that because monotheism comes after polytheism, it is a superior philosophical evolution. It is not. It is not. Absolutely, it is not. It never has been. And the Zoroastrians especially feel this need to pass themselves off as monotheists, which they are not.
(2:12:08) Uh you go to the uh ruins of Persepolis. And opposite that are the Sassanid necropolis of the Naqsh-e where, you know, um um Well, it's the Achaemenids. So, Cyrus, Xerxes uh not Cyrus, but Xerxes, Darius, they're all uh what is it remaining of their bodies are in the Oh, really? Yeah. Are still preserved? >> Yeah.
(2:12:35) Uh Cyrus is uh Cyrus' tomb is in Pasargadae, which was the original capital before Persepolis. Not Which country is this? >> It's all Iran. It's all near Shiraz in Iran, Fars province, Farsi, Farsi, Persia, etc. Uh so, you go there and it is they're very, very clearly polytheistic, henotheistic. Uh and the Sassanids, who are just before the Muslim uh they're the dynasty dynasty that was destroyed by the Muslim invasions, uh are also very, very clearly henotheistic because in that very famous freeze of Shapur uh capturing the Roman
(2:13:12) emperor Valerian. He was the only Roman emperor ever captured in battle. And there's that very famous statue of him holding Shapur uh Shapur holding uh um Valerian by the hand. There is a statue that there is a carving of Ishtar just next to it. It's somewhere on my Twitter timeline. I put a photo of me in front of it.
(2:13:37) Um um Ishtar, the goddess, blessing Shapur for this miraculous feat. So, it it was never They will insist they're monotheistic. I am factually tell you they are not. >> Where I'm getting at with even bringing up the Persian empire and Zoroaster in the first place is um I definitely believe that there have been countless precursor religions, which are completely wiped out from our understanding of 100%.
(2:14:03) One of them which evolved in Persia was called Manichaeism. Manichaeism. And we don't know about it because it got completely wiped out. Hm. The Zoroastrians wiped it out in fact. Right? So, there was Manichaeism which got wiped out. Uh there have been several religions across history that have been wiped out without a trace. We don't know them.
(2:14:27) Uh I look at it as a natural evolution. Maybe they would have added great cultural complexity had they continued into modern times. This conversation, I think my personal realization has been that all the good that we see around us today, law, administration, uh social work, women's rights, uh children's rights, the world perhaps moving towards being more empathetic is all an outcome of a very very violent past.
(2:14:59) >> Yes. It is yin and yang classic. You know, the origin of one lies in the other. And this is my problem with history, the way it's taught. History does not want you to learn what nasty people we actually are. But till you confront how nasty you are, how do you overcome it? Till you diagnose the problem, how do you find the solution to the problem? And so, you know, it's one of those things where you have to get into the blood, the gore, the violence, the nastiness, re-examine everything you've taken for granted,
(2:15:39) the belief that there is no human sacrifice today, the belief that there is no symbolic cannibalism today, uh in the world's largest religion incidentally. Uh till you examine those fundamentals, you're not going to keep improving yourselves. Mhm. And you know, the parallel track to that is capitalism.
(2:16:02) Capitalism always wasn't a good thing. But communists still believe that you can scientifically modify human beings out of greed and whatever. Capitalism today has become British. Capitalism was not capitalism. It was something called mercantilism. Which Americans don't seem to understand. They think because they're the successor of the British Empire, therefore the British Empire was good and the British were capitalists.
(2:16:23) No, the British were mercantilists. They were nasty. America is good and capitalist. Capitalism itself has evolved so much. It has accepted human greed. It has gotten into the absolute rudimentary forms of human greed. The basis of human greed instincts. It accepts it for what it is. It doesn't sugarcoat it. It doesn't put lipstick on it.
(2:16:47) And because it accepts it for what it is, you have turned the West into extremely rich countries. Till you examine your demons, you won't know how to overcome it. This is how history should be taught in schools and colleges. It might scare off a lot of people, you know. Yeah, I don't think too many people are going to click on these podcasts as compared to like a celebrity interview.
(2:17:15) But uh in my eyes anyone who stuck around till this point is genuinely chasing self-improvement. That's why they chase history first. Hopefully. Abhijit Iyer Mitra, thank you once again. I bow down to you, good sir. You bow down to me, the great wise [laughter] Mitra. Hope to see you soon and hope to cover the industrial age in the next few episodes. Thank you.
(2:17:36) Thank you. >> [music] [music] [music] >> Woo!